Paix de Rutebeuf, and De Brichemer, the poet reminds
his patrons of the virtue of largesse and prompt payment.
The Repentance Rutebeuf gives a solemn, subjective
resonance to the conventional poetry of remorse found
in his saints’ lives and miracles. Furthermore, in his
Griesche d’hiver, Griesche d’été and Dit des ribauds
de Grève, Rutebeuf shows the reader a social world
excluded from courtly song, romance, and epic, that of
a homeless urban proletariat, stung by white snowfl akes
in winter and by black fl ies in summer.
Appreciatively collected by contemporaries, Rute-
beuf’s poetry was forgotten after his time. But in his
works we discover a poetic voice that dramatizes and
particularizes the subjective lyric while it speaks with
satirical wit and ethical fervor about concerns of the
urban world of medieval France.
See also Adam de la Halle; Deschamps, Eustache;
Fulbert of Chartres
Further Reading
Rutebeuf. Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, ed. Edmond Faral and
Julia Bastin. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1959.
——. Œuvres complètes, ed. and trans. Michel Zink. 2 vols.
Paris: Bordas, 1989–90.
Cerquiglini, Jacqueline. ‘“Le clerc et le louche’: Sociology of an
Esthetic.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 479–91.
Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old
French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1987, pp. 213–19.
Regalado, Nancy Freeman. Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study
in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
Rousse, Michel. “Le mariage Rutebeuf et la fête des fous.” Moyen
âge 88 (1982): 435–49.
Zink, Michel. “Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-
Century French Poetry.” Poetics Today 5 (1984): 611–27.
——. “La subjectivité littéraire autour du siècle de saint Louis.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985, pp. 47–74.
Nancy F. RegaladoRUTEBEUF