SOURCE: “Villon's Legacy from Le Testament of Jean de Meun: Misquotation, Memory, and the Wisdom of Fools,” in Villon at Oxford: The Drama of the Text, Rodopi, 1999, pp. 282-311.

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.

Can a poet make a mistake? What is the meaning of Villon's poetic mistake, his misquotation in the Testament (T, 113-20)¹ from an important yet largely unexamined source, Le Testament de Jean de Meun?² This misquotation, we will see, is not just an error but a poetic secret that reveals one of the great paradoxes of the Testament: it is a poem about wisdom spoken by a fool. We will see that Villon uses...