SOURCE: “Persuasion and (Special) Pleading in Francois Villon,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 22, 1995, pp. 1-18.

In this essay, Sargent-Baur examines possible influences for Villon's rhetorical style of addressing potential benefactors, especially those Greek and Roman models Villon would have studied in school. The author considers Villon's Testament as well as several of his Poèmes variés.

“Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?” asks le povre Villon, clearly soliciting the answer No. This appeal to readers, developed in each strophe of the “Epitre a ses amis”¹ and driven home four times by the refrain, is perhaps Villon's most concentrated composition in the persuasive mode; yet it differs only in degree from much of his other verse. Indeed, when he was not addressing requests to specific individuals or to a group more or less limited, although defined, he aimed at a more numerous, amorphous, and distant audience: those readers who...