Le poète et ses princes : les fondements d'une autocritique dans le discours des Grands Rhétoriqueurs : Jean Molinet, Pierre Gringore et Octovien de Saint-Gelais
(2010)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Thiry, Claude
- Abstract
- (en) French literature of the finishing Middle Ages lies within the framework of crisis, a crisis of the values and the signs which leads France (and additionally Burgundy) after Hundred Years' War. The literary work, as instrument of analysis of the world, is the privileged vector of that crisis context. Besides, the literature itself is in a reflexive phase: reconsidering the forms and the models inherited from their predecessors, the writers engage a reflection on writing and wonders about their role in the society. It is in such a frame that develops, in the borders of the XVth and XVIth centuries, the art of Grands Rhétoriqueurs. If these writers are known for the refinements of their writing, they are not only skillful players of words, having pushed highly the aesthetic effects of the language. They also are the heirs of writers such as Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan and, especially, Alain Chartier, who defined, in the XIVth century, the conditions of a moral and political speaking. On the models of Alain Chartier and George Chastelain, Grands Rhétoriqueurs associate with their skill of the art of language an ideal of commitment, the consciousness of a mission to be filled in the historico-political domain : through the literary work, perceived as a work of Reformation of the world and the reader, the writer appears as a guide for the prince. Nevertheless, their writing does not escape the general fit of critical reflection. The question of the validity of an alliance of the ethical and aesthetic authorities, at the origin of the scriptural project of Rhétoriqueurs, as well as the more essential question of the writer’s place with the prince are questioned, especially with writers, such as Jean Molinet, Pierre Gringore and Octovien de Saint-Gelais. These adopt, with regard to their art, an attitude which we qualified as self-criticism: an autoreflection by which are questioned the literary models and the ethical ideal to which they are associated. These writers don’t proceed to a radical and potentially destructive subversion (like it is for example the case with François Villon), but they cultivate the distance and the resemblance, or rather the distance in the resemblance to question the power of the word and the role of the writer in society and, in particular, in front of prince and Court. Such a reflection is an integral part of the process of identical assertion of the writer at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance.
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Citations
Jennequin-Leroy, M. (2010). Le poète et ses princes : les fondements d’une autocritique dans le discours des Grands Rhétoriqueurs : Jean Molinet, Pierre Gringore et Octovien de Saint-Gelais. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/148326