experience, and a sketch of late-medieval France as he knew it. This is a world of people
living by their wits and not hampered by scruples: entertainers, prostitutes, counterfeiters,
tavern keepers and tavern haunters, jailers and moat cleaners, peddlers, beggars, dissolute
monks—Villon’s poetry opens the door upon a teeming world, lacking in grace or
nobility but intensely alive. Most vital of all are the poet’s own self and experience, given
expression that transcends his own time and milieu so as to be at once personal and
universal.
Villon’s works have been preserved in a number of manuscripts and fragments, and in
a printed edition of 1489. These early sources vary in completeness, from the Lais, the
Testament, and numerous independent pieces, down to two or three ballades; they differ
also in degree of reliability. The manuscript copies, the incunabulum, and also the many
16th-century printings of his works attest to a moderate readership over the course of
about a century. Villon then, like most medieval writers, underwent an eclipse, with one
edition at the end of the 1600s and three in the 1700s. The years from 1832 onward have
seen an increasing flow of editions, translations, historical notes, and interpretive essays;
and the stream shows no sign of drying up. Villon continues to be subject to much critical
scrutiny, some of it closer to creative writing than to explication of the texts, but much of
it responsible and serious. We can now read Villon’s often difficult and allusive verses
with a fair approximation to his own meaning.
Barbara N.Sargent-Baur
[See also: ALEXIS, GUILLAUME; BAUDE, HENRI; CHARLES D’ORLÉANS]
Villon, François. Complete Poems, ed. and trans. Barbara N. Sargent-Baur. Toronto: Toronto
University Press, 1994.
——. Le lais Villon et les poèmes variés, ed. Jean Rychner and Albert Henry. 2 vols. Geneva:
Droz, 1977.
——. Le Testament Villon, ed. Jean Rychner and Albert Henry. 2 vols. Geneva: Droz, 1974–85.
——. François Villon: Œuvres, trans. André Lanly. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1969.
——. François Villon: ballades en jargon, trans. André Lanly. Paris: Champion, 1979.
——. The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell. New York: New American Library,
1965.
Burger, André. Lexique complet de la langue de Villon. 2nd ed. Geneva: Droz, 1974.
Champion, Pierre. François Villon: sa vie et son temps. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1934.
Fox, John Howard. The Poetry of Villon. London:Nelson, 1962.
LeGentil, Pierre. Villon. Paris: Hatier, 1967.
Peckham, Robert D. François Villon:A Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990.
Sargent-Baur, Barbara N. Brothers of Dragons: Job dolens and François Villon. New York:
Garland, 1990.
Siciliano, Italo. François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du moyen âge. Paris: Nizet, 1934.
Sturm, Rudolf. François Villon, bibliographie et matériaux littéraires (1489–1988). Munich: Saur,
1990.
Vitz, Evelyn Birge. The Crossroad of Intentions: A Study of Symbolic Expressions in the Poetry of
François Villon. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
Ziwès, Armand, and Anne de Bercy. Le jargon de maître François Villon interpréré. 2nd ed. 2
vols. Paris: Puget, 1960.
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