(fl. 1248–85). The Parisian Rutebeuf composed works in a greater variety of genres than any other medieval poet. Known from a dozen manuscripts, his fifty-five extant pieces illustrate the range of medieval urban poetry. Rutebeuf composed in every vernacular genre except those especially cultivated in the provincial courts of 13th-century France: chivalric epics, romances, and songs of courtly love. At a time when manuscript compilations grouped lyric, dramatic, and narrative pieces separately, Rutebeuf, like his contemporary Adam de la Halle, imposed such a vivid and coherent poetic identity on all his compositions that they were gathered as a corpus in three contemporary compilations. Unlike the vagabond Goliards or jongleurs who traveled from castle to court, Rutebeuf remained in Paris, where he wrote to please many patrons—the royal family, the university, the higher clergy, the papal legate—and to amuse a public in city streets and taverns. While the aristocratic provincial courts were attuned to the refined art of the chanson and the idealizing fantasies of Arthurian romance, Rutebeuf’s heterogeneous urban public relished topical works that spoke to issues of the day, such as the Crusades and the proliferation of mendicant orders in Paris. Rutebeuf’s political verse follows historical events closely and presupposes familiarity with Parisian topography, personalities, and issues. The notable variety of genres and the historical content that characterize Rutebeuf s poetry are inseparable from Paris, the city that was its essential and nurturing environment, and from the colorful figure of the poet himself.
Although no document preserves any record of Rutebeuf’s life, his poems reveal much about his background, training, and relations with patrons. He may have come from the region of Champagne; his earliest polemical poem, the Dit des Cordeliers (1249), favors the rights of Franciscan monks in Troyes. Throughout his career, Rutebeuf composed eulogies of nobles from Champagne, although mostly in connection with his role as a Parisian propagandist of papal crusade policy, as in his complaintes for Count Eudes de Nevers (1266) and Count Thibaut V of Champagne (1279). Rutebeuf’s Vie de sainte Elysabel (ca. 1271) was commissioned for Isabelle, daughter of King Louis IX and wife of Thibaut V.Rutebeuf’s most prominent benefactors were members of the royal family, such as Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of Louis IX, whom he addresses in his request poem Complainte Rutebeuf and in his crusade piece Dit de Pouille (ca. 1265) and whom he eulogizes in 1271. The poet also appeals repeatedly to King Philip III the Bold to replace generous benefactors lost on the Crusades. Like the eulogies and commissioned devotional works, Rutebeuf’s political poems and appeals for largesse mark his status as a skilled professional poet and his relations with patrons in the highest ecclesiastical and aristocratic circle.
Rutebeuf composed a number of comic pieces like those described in minstrel repertoires. His Dit de l’herberie is one of several examples of a dramatic monologue by a quack who amuses an audience with rapid enumerations of coins, exotic places, stones, and herbal remedies. All of Rutebeuf’s fabliaux are known in other medieval versions: the story of the Franciscan who enrolls a girl in his monastic order (Frère Denise); the tale of the wife who pretends that her midnight rendezvous with the priest is a devotional exercise (Dame qui fist trois tours autour du moutier); the account of the bishop who gave Christian burial to a donkey who left him twenty pounds (Testament de l’âne). The theme of the obscene Pet au vilain is reused in André de la Vigne’s farce, the Meunier de qui le diable emporte l’âme en enfer (1496).
Rutebeuf also had sufficient clerical training to read Latin and know the student’s life. His Dit de l’université is a sympathetic account of a peasant boy come to study in Paris who soon squanders his hard-earned funds on pretty city girls. Though not a vulgarizer of philosophical and scientific concepts like his contemporary Jean de Meun, he draws on Latin sources for his saints’ lives, miracles, polemical poems, and requests for largesse. In the Dit d’Aristote, he translates a passage from the epic Alexandreis by Walter of Châtillon; in Sainte Elysabel, he abridges a Latin vita; in his miracle of the Sacristain et la femme au chevalier, he expands an exemplum from the early 13th-century Sermones vulgares of the preacher Jacques de Vitry. Rutebeuf’s lives of exemplary penitents combine French and Latin sources in the narrative Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne and the Miracle de Théophile, which dramatizes versions by Gautier de Coinci and Fulbert of Chartres. He even translates and glosses lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his allegorical Voie de paradis.
Rutebeuf s clerical training not only led him to rich literary sources, it also determined his subjects and his style. Rutebeuf s moral poems contribute to the ecclesiastical effort, inspired by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), to instruct laypeople in religious doctrine: his Voie de paradis is an allegorical catechism of confession; three works, the Etat, Vie, and Plaies du monde, adapt the conventional estates satire of Latin preachers and moralists for a lay public. In contrast with the self-reflective mode of contemporary courtly lyric and moral verse, Rutebeuf’s poetry often seeks to turn its hearers toward the outer world of history painted in dramatic moral colors.
Commissioned by supporters of the crusade policies of Louis IX and the pope, Rutebeuf’s eleven crusade poems incorporate estates satire and rhetorical techniques of moral persuasion from the didactic tradition to rouse public opinion in favor of increasingly unpopular crusades against Charles of Anjou’s Christian rival for the Sicilian throne (1265) and against the Muslims in Tunis (1270). As a professional pamphleteer, Rutebeuf does not express personal opinions in his poems. He advocates the differing views of the two causes he served in order to sway public opinion and encourage partisans to action; he is an ardent supporter of papal policies in his crusade verse, a fiery Gallican in his defense of university autonomy.
In his fourteen poems supporting the secular university masters against their Franciscan and Dominican rivals and the pope, Rutebeuf again recasts the motifs of didactic poetry to new, polemical ends. Dream allegories, battles of vices and virtues, animal satires, complaints attributed to the church personified—all the resources of the Latin and French satirical tradition are brought to bear on partisan concerns. Knowledge of historical circumstances is essential to the understanding of Rutebeuf s topical poems: the proliferation of mendicant orders in Paris (Ordres de Paris, Chanson des ordres, Des béguines); the struggle between mendicants and secular clergy for parish privileges and university chairs (Discorde de l’université et des Jacobins, Des règles, Dit de sainte Église, Bataille des vices et des vertus, Des Jacobins); the writings of William of Saint-Amour, banished leader of the university masters (Dit and Complainte de Guillaume). Out of this factional literature rises a new allegorical figure, Hypocrisy, which comes to overshadow earlier concern with pride and avarice and dominate moral literature of the late 13th and 14th centuries. Personified in Rutebeuf’s Du Pharisien and Dit d’Hypocrisie, hypocrisy is central to Jean de Meun’s character False Seeming in the Roman de la Rose as well as in late animal satires, such as Renart le contrefait and the Livres de Fauvel.
Polemical, pious, or entertaining in topic and nonlyric in form, Rutebeuf’s poems have a style and shape that owe little to prevailing courtly modes. His characteristic form is the first-person nonmusical dit, a rambling, open form, most often cast in octosyllabic couplets or tercets, that accommodates all the topical themes of contemporary history that found little place in courtly song, romance, or epic. In spite of their rhetorical embroidery and rich rhymes, Rutebeuf’s poems give an overall impression of artless simplicity and directness. His verses are engaging and amusing: enlivened with frequent irony, animated with proverbs, touched with realistic details. Lively, colloquial direct discourse and dialogue characterize both Rutebeuf’s poems and the tableaux of his Miracle de Théophile. Often shaped as complaintes, Rutebeuf’s dits pass easily from one subject to another via apostrophes and exclamations that are united more by appeal to emotion than by rigorous logic.
The figure of the poet himself, however, is the element that unifies Rutebeuf’s works. Identified by a signature pun as Rustebeuf qui rudement œvre (“Rutebeuf who works crudely”), the persona of the poet is protagonist in many of his moral, political, and comic pieces: “Rutebeuf’ is the pilgrim in the allegorical Voie de paradis; he is the character who goes to Rome in a dream vision to hear news of the election of Pope Urban IV (Dit d’Hypocrisie, 1261). It is in his own name that Rutebeuf accuses church prelates of caring less for the Crusades than for “good wine, good meat, and that the pepper be strong” (Complainte d’Outremer, 11. 94–95). It is he who witnesses the chaste speech of Alphonse of Poitiers in his eulogy and who is called to judge the comic debate between Charlot and the barber.
Characterization of his poetic persona is most vividly developed in Rutebeuf’s best-known works, his ten poems of personal misfortune. His poetic “I” is based on the conventional character type of the poor fool that figures in medieval request verse by Goliards and minstrels and later in the poetry of Eustache Deschamps and François Villon. Picturesquely personal rather than autobiographical in content, his poems of misfortune dramatize an exaggerated, grotesque self, deserted by friends, grimacing with cold and want, and martyred by marriage and a weakness for gambling. In the plaintive or ironic tones of the Dit d’Aristote, the Paix de Rutebeuf, and De Brichemer, the poet reminds his patrons of the virtue of largesse and prompt payment. The Repentance Rutebeuf gives a solemn subjective resonance to the conventional poetry of remorse found in his saints’ lives and miracles. Furthermore, in his Griesche d’hiver, Griesche d’été and Dit des ribauds de Grève, Rutebeuf shows the reader a social world excluded from courtly song, romance, and epic, that of a homeless urban proletariat, stung by white snowflakes in winter and by black flies in summer.
Appreciatively collected by contemporaries, Rutebeuf’s poetry was forgotten after his time. But in his works we discover a poetic voice that dramatizes and particularizes the subjective lyric while it speaks with satirical wit and ethical fervor about concerns of the urban world of medieval France.
Nancy F.Regalado
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——. Œuvres completes, ed. and trans. Michel Zink. 2 vols. Paris: Bordas, 1989–90.
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Huot, Sylvia. From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 213–19.
Regalado, Nancy Freeman. Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
Rousse, Michel. “Le mariage Rutebeuf et la fête des fous.” Moyen âge 88(1982):435–49.
Zink, Michel. ‘Time and Representation of the Self in Thirteenth-Century French Poetry.” Poetics Today 5(1984): 611–27.
——. “La subjectivité littéraire autour du siècle de saint Louis. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985, pp. 47–74.
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