LAUSR

reading the complete manuscript only add to the pleasure of reading it. Dauphant’s study continues with an analysis of the Art de dictier, situating it in the history of artes poeticae and the ebb and flow of medieval politics and poetry. She sees in L’Art de dictier a necessary introduction to reading his poems and an invitation to admire his forms and prowess. Deschamps’s poetry in toto constitutes a mirror for princes, and the Art de dictier, written by a practicing and prolific poet, is his point of view in and on the world order. Guillaume deMachaut, Christine de Pizan, Charles d’Orléans, and others developed the point of view of the self, the moi, but Deschamps untethered that point of view from the carefully crafted, ideally situated, and amorous formes fixes. Deschamps’s poems’ authority require neither frame nor explanation but stand independently. Courtly love’s paradigms, the stylized content of the formes fixes, preclude the increasing presence of a lyric “I”whose range of experiences passes the bounds of convention. The increased importance of the written word leads to a different kind of performance— not the expressive though contrived and stylized spontaneity of the lyric poet. Dauphant offers next a chapter on Deschamps’s versification, beginning with all the forms not addressed by the poet in L’Art de dictier. She considers the lai, the rondeau, and the virelai before turning to the ballade, the exhaustive study of which consumes the balance of this volume: scansion, rhyme schemes, envois, refrains, subgenres, and more. There is a comprehensive bibliography, and this magnum opus closes with useful indexes of place names, people, associated anonymous works, and manuscripts.