largesse. In the Dit d’Aristote, he translates a passage
from the epic Alexandreis by Walter of Châtillon; in
Sainte Elysabel, he abridges a Latin vita; in his miracle
of the Sacristain et la femme au chevalier, he expands
an exemplum from the early 13th-century Sermones
vulgares of the preacher Jacques de Vitry. Rutebeuf’s
lives of exemplary penitents combine French and Latin
sources in the narrative Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne and
the Miracle de Théophile, which dramatizes versions
by Gautier de Coinci and Fulbert of Chartres. He even
translates and glosses lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses
in his allegorical Voie de paradis.
Rutebeuf’s clerical training not only led him to rich
literary sources, it also determined his subjects and his
style. Rutebeuf’s moral poems contribute to the eccle-
siastical effort, inspired by the Fourth Lateran Council
(1215), to instruct laypeople in religious doctrine: his
Voie de paradis is an allegorical catechism of confes-
sion; three works, the Etat, Vie, and Plaies du monde,
adapt the conventional estates satire of Latin preachers
and moralists for a lay public. In contrast with the self-
refl ective mode of contemporary courtly lyric and moral
verse, Rutebeuf’s poetry often seeks to turn its hearers
toward the outer world of history painted in dramatic
moral colors.
Commissioned by supporters of the crusade policies
of Louis IX and the pope, Rutebeuf’s eleven crusade
poems incorporate estates satire and rhetorical tech-
niques of moral persuasion from the didactic tradition to
rouse public opinion in favor of increasingly unpopular
crusades against Charles of Anjou’s Christian rival for
the Sicilian throne (1265) and against the Muslims in
Tunis (1270). As a professional pamphleteer, Rutebeuf
does not express personal opinions in his poems. He
advocates the differing views of the two causes he served
in order to sway public opinion and encourage partisans
to action; he is an ardent supporter of papal policies
in his crusade verse, a fi ery Gallican in his defense of
university autonomy.
In his fourteen poems supporting the secular univer-
sity masters against their Franciscan and Dominican
rivals and the pope, Rutebeuf again recasts the motifs
of didactic poetry to new, polemical ends. Dream al-
legories, battles of vices and virtues, animal satires,
complaints attributed to the church personifi ed—all the
resources of the Latin and French satirical tradition are
brought to bear on partisan concerns. Knowledge of his-
torical circumstances is essential to the understanding of
Rutebeuf’s topical poems: the proliferation of mendicant
orders in Paris (Ordres de Paris, Chanson des ordres,
Des béguines); the struggle between mendicants and
secular clergy for parish privileges and university chairs
(Discorde de l’université et des Jacobins, Des règles,
Dit de sainte Église, Bataille des vices et des vertus,
Des Jacobins); the writings of William of Saint-Amour,
banished leader of the university masters (Dit and Com-
plainte de Guillaume). Out of this factional literature
rises a new allegorical fi gure, Hypocrisy, which comes
to overshadow earlier concern with pride and avarice
and dominate moral literature of the late 13th and 14th
centuries. Personifi ed in Rutebeuf’s Du Pharisien and
Dit d’Hypocrisie, hypocrisy is central to Jean de Meun’s
character False Seeming in the Roman de la Rose as well
as in late animal satires, such as Renart le contrefait and
the Livres de Fauvel.
Polemical, pious, or entertaining in topic and nonlyric
in form, Rutebeuf’s poems have a style and shape that
owe little to prevailing courtly modes. His characteristic
form is the fi rst-person nonmusical dit, a rambling, open
form, most often cast in octosyllabic couplets or tercets,
that accommodates all the topical themes of contem-
porary history that found little place in courtly song,
romance, or epic. In spite of their rhetorical embroidery
and rich rhymes, Rutebeuf’s poems give an overall im-
pression of artless simplicity and directness. His verses
are engaging and amusing: enlivened with frequent
irony, animated with proverbs, touched with realistic
details. Lively, colloquial direct discourse and dialogue
characterize both Rutebeuf’s poems and the tableaux of
his Miracle de Théophile. Often shaped as complaintes,
Rutebeuf’s dits pass easily from one subject to another
via apostrophes and exclamations that are united more
by appeal to emotion than by rigorous logic.
The fi gure of the poet himself, however, is the ele-
ment that unifi es Rutebeuf’s works. Identifi ed by a
signature pun as Rustebeuf qui rudement cevre (“Rute-
beuf who works crudely”), the persona of the poet is
protagonist in many of his moral, political, and comic
pieces: “Rutebeuf” is the pilgrim in the allegorical Voie
de paradis; he is the character who goes to Rome in a
dream vision to hear news of the election of Pope Urban
IV (Dit d’Hypocrisie, 1261). It is in his own name that
Rutebeuf accuses church prelates of caring less for the
Crusades than for “good wine, good meat, and that the
pepper be strong” (Complainte d’Outremer, ll. 94–95).
It is he who witnesses the chaste speech of Alphonse
of Poitiers in his eulogy and who is called to judge the
comic debate between Charlot and the barber.
Characterization of his poetic persona is most viv-
idly developed in Rutebeuf’s best-known works, his
ten poems of personal misfortune. His poetic “I” is
based on the conventional character type of the poor
fool that fi gures in medieval request verse by Goliards
and minstrels and later in the poetry of Eustache De-
schamps and François Villon. Picturesquely personal
rather than autobiographical in content, his poems of
misfortune dramatize an exaggerated, grotesque self,
deserted by friends, grimacing with cold and want, and
martyred by marriage and a weakness for gambling. In
the plaintive or ironic tones of the Dit d’Aristote, theRUTEBEUF