Greenblatt points out that the satirist’s ostentatious rectitude“may be itself a
kind of pose taken in response to the dictates of power”:Renaissance Self-
Fashioning, 135. For a later poet confronted with the demands of patronage,
where plain style rather than plain speaking is at issue, see Stanley Fish,
“Authors-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same,” Representations 7
( 1984 ), 26 – 58. Fradenburg suggests that some instances of the“advice to
princes”tradition, along with other texts in which the sovereign becomes the
recipient of“plain speech,”provide an instance of“the power of communitas
to mystify status.”SeeCity, Marriage, Tournament, 289 note 22.
24. Jacqueline Cerquiglini,“‘Le Clerc et le louche’: Sociology of an Esthetic,”
Poetics Today 5 ( 1984 ), 479 – 91.
25. Martin le Franc,Le Champion des Dames, Part I, ed. Arthur Piaget (Lausanne,
1968 ), 276 , 281 – 84 , 289 – 90.
26. Jean de la Mote,Li Regret Guillaume comte de Hainaut: poème inédit du xive
siècle, par Jehan de la Mote, ed. Auguste Scheler (Louvain, 1882 ). All references
are to this edition.
27. Cerquiglini,“‘Le Clerc et le louche,’” 488.
28. Putter,“Animating Medieval Court Satire,” 69.
29. In Froissart’s“Dit douflorin,”the poet alternately harangues and cajoles a talking
coin, which puts its owner’s losses down to the money he has spent on writing
materials. This, the“florin”reassures him, has been money well spent, for“fait en
avés mainte hystore / Dont il sera encor memore / De vous ens ou temps à venir, /
Et ferés les gens souvenir / De vo sens et de vos doctrines”[“with it you have
written many histories through which you’ll still be remembered in times to
come, and you will make people remember your wisdom and learning”].Oeuvres
de Froissart: Poésies, ed. Auguste Scheler, 3 vols. (Brussels, 1870 – 72 ),ii, 199 – 207.
30. Spearing,Medieval to Renaissance, 205.
31 .Rutebeuf,“La repentance Rutebeuf,” 37.
32. J. A. Burrow,Medieval Writers and their Work(Oxford, 1982 ), 40 , and“The
Poet as Petitioner,”Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 ( 1981 ), 61 – 75 ( 64 ).
33. Gedichte, no. 1 (“Lingua balbus”), st. 36 , 1 – 2.
34. Deschamps, 5 ,dccclxxiii, 11.
35. Crétin,xlv, 9 – 10 , 23 – 28.
36. For a similar strategy, compare Michault Taillevent, who, overtaken by night
in the midst of a wood, begins to meditate on the transitoriness of worldly
possessions ( 65 – 72 ) and consider how he will appear as an example to others if
he dies ( 73 – 80 ). See“La Destrousse Michault Taillevent,”in Robert Deschaux,
Un Poète bourguignon duxvesiècle, Michault Taillevent(Geneva, 1975 ), 97 – 120.
37. The stance of“auld servand”unrewarded is, as Bawcutt notes, an inevitable
commonplace; cf. Deschamps, threatened with the abolition of his rank of
huissier d’armes( 6 ,mccvi).
38. Such poems directed atfinancial institutions of the court are common in
Deschamps’s work: see, for instance, 4 ,dcclxxxv, with its refrain“Et quant
vendra le Tresorier?,”and the attacks on the“manieurs d’argent”of 5 ,mxiii,
and 7 ,mccci, and cf. B 22.
Notes to Pages 68 – 72 197