Gathering the Works: The “Œuvres de Villon” and the Intergeneric Passage of the Medieval French Lyric into Single-Author Collections

Gathering the Works: The “Œuvres de Villon” and the Intergeneric Passage of the Medieval French Lyric into Single-Author Collections* Nancy Freeman Regalado A S WE GAZE at the spines of books on our shelves, no words are more familiar than The Works..., the standard title for the poetic works of a single author, published as a whole. It does not seem strange to us, therefore, to find the collective title Les Œuvres in one of the early imprints of Villon: LES Œ UVVRES DE maistre Francoys Villon, published by the Parisian bookseller Galliot Du Pré in 1532.1The term œuvres, however, was introduced into vernacular book titles late in the third decade of the sixteenth century. Its appearance is significant within the early history of the book, for it shows a shift in the status of vernacular literature. Even more important, it marks the endpoint of the historical process by which the medieval song came to be written down in the form so familiar to us today, in free-standing collections of lyric works by single authors.2 In the context of intergenres, the purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to offer an account of how the collective term œuvres came to be used, and second, to give an overview of the role that intergeneric com­ binations played in relation to three aspects of the passage of medieval French lyrics into œuvres: writing down song; development of the prac­ tice of the lyric collection; and establishment of an organizing principle of authorship that identifies “ works” however they be arranged in a book. While the term œuvres was used to refer to literary compositions before the sixteenth century, it ordinarily meant pious deeds, tasks to be done, the works of the Lord, or one’s own acts, considered from a moral perspective. This last is the meaning Villon gives the word in his Lais: “ Qu’on doit ses euvres conseillier/comme Vegece le racompte” (vv. 5-6).3The Latin term opera was occasionally used in the titles of early collective editions of classical authors, Church fathers and saints. How­ ever, I have found only two occurrences of the French word in the title of a book printed in Paris before 1529:4 Laurens de Premierfait’s transla­ tion of Les euuvres of Seneca, printed by Antoine Vérard in Paris VOL. XXXIII, NO. 4 87 L ’E sprit C réateur [1500?], and Robert Gaguin’s translation of Caesar’s Euures et brefues expositions printed by Michel le Noir in 1502.5 Œuvres first appears as a collective title for vernacular lyrics in 1529, in Galliot Du Pré’s republication of a collection by another fifteenthcentury poet, LES Œ UVVRES feu maistre Alain Chartier. The word seems to be a bookseller’s novelty updating the old-fashioned Faictz et dictz which had served as a title for single-author collections since the earliest days of vernacular printing and which Galliot himself had used in his 1526 edition of Chartier. Indeed, it is apparently Galliot who con­ tributed to making the term œuvres fashionable. He was an enterprising bookseller who found commercial opportunity in producing revised edi­ tions of the best-known authors of the fifteenth century.6 It is he who brought out a newly packaged anthology of Rhétoriqueur verse, Traictez singuliers in 1526; in 1529 he brought out not only the rebaptized edition of Chartier but also another Œuvres, a collective edition of Virgil in which he republished three earlier translations.7 Did the bookseller choose the title Œuvres to lend the prestige of classical authority to secular poets of the recent past? In 1532 Galliot published his edition of Villon’s Œ VVRES and also Les œuvres maistre Guillaume Coquillart as well as a Pathelin and Gringoire’s Le Chasteau de Labour, all in an iden­ tical small octavo format. For Galliot Du Pré, les œuvres—the poetic works of an earlier day—were a capital to be exploited advantageously. Popularized by Galliot, the title word œuvres was widely adopted over the next two decades. While all Villon editions before 1532 are called Le grant testament Villon et le petit..., all comprehensive editions of the poet after 1532 are...