weeks, he had completed not only the Mystère de saint Martin, comprising more than
10,000 lines of verse, but also a comic morality play, the Aveugle et le boiteux, and a
farce, the Meunier de qui le diable emporte l’âme en enfer. The mystery play was written
to edify the people with scenes from the holy and devout life of their patron saint. To this
end, there are sermons, miracles, and conversions, as well as scenes set in Heaven and
Hell. The play is also a rich tapestry of daily life, showing people of all sorts and
conditions engaged in their daily tasks. La Vigne portrays this milieu from a variety of
stylistic perspectives. He sympathetically treats family difficulties and explores the
psychology of suffering; he satirizes the abuses of the powerful, the faults of the clergy,
and the venality of the merchant class; he depicts the bombast of braggart soldiers and the
antics of drunken messengers. All these strands are woven together in a seamless
dramatic action in which the playwright deftly alternates affective and comic scenes for
maximum effect.
Toward the end of the century, La Vigne collected a number of his early works in the
Vergier d’honneur. In 1504, he brought suit against Michel Le Noir, a Parisian printer, to
stop an unauthorized edition of this work; the Parlement de Paris issued the injunction.
Before the death of Charles VIII in 1498, La Vigne had been appointed secretary to the
queen, Anne of Brittany. He remained in this capacity until her death in 1514. His later
works included epitaphs for his patrons and other panegyric poems. He wrote two other
plays, the Sotise a huit personnages, attacking the abuses of his day, and the Moralité du
nouveau monde against the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction, as well as political
poems. In the Louenge des roys de France, for example, he supported Louis XII in his
quarrel with the pope. Francis I in the year of his accession (1515) named La Vigne his
historiographer and charged him with writing the history of his reign. Since only a few
pages of the chronicle were completed, La Vigne is thought to have died shortly after.
André Duplat
[See also: GRANDS RHÉTORIQUEURS; HISTORIOGRAPHY; MORALITY
PLAYS]
La Vigne, André de. Le mystère de saint Martin, 1496, ed. André Duplat. Geneva: Droz, 1979.
——. Le voyage de Naples, ed. Anna Slerca. Milan: Pubblicazioni della Università Cattolica del
Sacro Cuore, 1981.
Brown, Cynthia Jane. The Shaping of History and Poetry in Late Medieval France: Propaganda
and Artistic Expression in the Works of the Rhétoriqueurs. Birmingham: Summa, 1985.
Duplat, André. “La Moralité de l’aveugle et du boiteuxd’ Andrieu de la Vigne: étude littéraire et
édition.” Travaux et de littérature 21 (1983):41–79.
LAI, NARRATIVE
. In addition to the twelve lais by Marie de France, over twenty Old French texts, the
majority of which are anonymous, can be classed as lais: Amours, Aristote, Conseil, Cor,
Desire, Doon, Espervier, Espine, Graelent, Guingamor, Haveloc, Ignaure, Lecheor,
Mantel, Melion, Ombre, Nabaret, Narcisus, Oiselet, Piramus et Thisbé, Trot, Tydorel,
Tyolet, Vair Palefroi. Problems of classification exist, as the term lai is found with
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