Controlling Readers : : Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience / / Deborah L. McGrady.

• VerfasserIn: McGrady, Deborah L.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2017]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (368 p.)

Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book.In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case study to explore the impact of lay literacy on the culture of late-medieval Europe. Arguing that Machaut and his bookmakers were responding to contemporary debates surrounding literacy, McGrady first accounts for the formal invention of the lay reader in medieval art and literature, then analyses Machaut and his bookmakers' innovative use of both narrative and bibliographical devices to try to control the responses of his readers and promote intimate and sensual reading practices in place of the more common public performances of court culture. McGrady's erudite and exhaustive study is key to understanding Machaut, his works, and his influence on the history of reading in the fourteenth century and beyond.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Reading and the Laity -- Part One. Inscribed Readers: The Invention of the Lay Reader in Text and Image -- 1. Reading between the Lines: Responses to Lay Literacy in Late Medieval Manuscripts -- 2. Lay Readers in Guillaume de Machaut's Voir dit -- Part Two. Intermediary Readers and Their Shaping of Machaut's Voir dit -- 3. Instructing Readers: Metatext and the Table of Contents as Sites of Mediation in BnF, MS fr. 1584 -- 4. Illustrations and the Shape of Reading: Pictorial Programs in BnF, MS fr. 1584 and MSS fr. 22545-22546 -- 5. Layout and the Staging of Performance in BnF, MS fr. 9221 -- Part Three. Inventive Readers and the Struggle for Control -- 6. Eustache Deschamps as Machaut's Reader: Staking out Authority in the Master('s) Text -- 7. 'Nouveleté gaires ne gist': Jean Froissart's Reinvention of the Author-Reader Relationship -- 8. Reading and Salvation: The Case of Pierpont Morgan, MS M 396 -- Conclusion: The Residual Text, the Fading of the Author, and the Role of Technology -- Appendix I: Pictorial Content for the Voir Dit in MSS A, F, and Pm -- Appendix II: Pm Manuscript Alterations -- Appendix III: Illustration Key -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index