The French poet François Villon (1431-ca. 1463), the greatest writer of 15th-century France, was the first creative, modern French lyric poet. His work is remarkable for its rare inspiration and sincerity. François Villon, whose real name...

Although his verse gained him little or no financial success during his life, François Villon is today perhaps the best-known French poet of the Middle Ages. His works surfaced in several manuscripts shortly after his disappearance in 1463, and...

(1431–1463). Of all the lyricists of late-medieval France, Villon is the most celebrated among both scholars and general readers. Students of premodern literature inside and outside the francophone world have encountered him in his original...

Medieval 16th century · 17th century 18th century · 19th century 20th century ·...

In this excerpt, Vitz examines patterns of erotic and gustatory metaphors to establish the major contrasts in Villon's work. For Vitz, “contamination” describes the way in which metaphor seems to work by proximity in Villon's poetry, as symbolic connotations seem to seep from one line to the next.

In this essay, the author reviews Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist interpretations of the legend of Villon, arguing that such legends have been detrimental to readings of Villon's most famous poem. With comparisons to Le Roman de la Rose and the genre of hagiography, Uitti demonstrates how Villon illustrates issues of marginality and power in the context of Medieval France.

In this essay, first presented at a conference of Villon scholars in 1996, Regalado argues that instances of misquotation in Villon's work are not errors of memory, but intentional poetic devices. Regalado proposes further that the faux-errors help create the wise-fool persona of the poems' narrators.