In Search of Machaut’s Poietics: Music and Rhetoric in Le Remede de Fortune

Abstract

Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Remede de Fortune has often been described as a didactic work addressed to would-be poets. This essay argues that the Remede also should be read as an implicit work of rhetorical and musical instruction. To this end, the Remede is placed in dialogue with Machaut’s more explicit account of the creative process in the Prologue , with other romans a chansons, such as Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthere d9amours , and with medieval theories of rhetoric and music, eventually arriving at a rhetorical reading of the Remede 9s large-scale structure, a didactic reading of the work9s musical interpolations, and a fresh insight into Machaut9s understanding of his own creative process.