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  • Foreword
  • Stephen G. Nichols

No image captures the magic of Guillaume de Machaut’s poetry and music or the qualities that made him pre-eminent in fourteenth-century Europe quite so well as the frontispiece to this issue from a Machaut manuscript. We marvel at the beauty of the elongated black notes running up and down the red lines of the polyphonic notation; appreciate the balance of five alternating red and blue initials marking song sections; and then, at the bottom, the neat calligraphy of the poems transfigured by the music above. The striking choreography of this page “plays” the stately polyphonic rhythms for the eye as well as the ear.

Then we do a double take as we note a curious anomaly: the first blue initial is upside-down. Not only is it upside down, but the rondeau of which it is the first letter—Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin (“My end is my beginning and my beginning, my end”)—is also upside-down. To read it “normally,” you have to turn the manuscript 180 degrees, at which point, instead of being the first item at the top of the left-hand column, the song becomes the last item in the right-hand column, making it, in effect, both first and last of the songs on the folio.1 But there’s more to it than that. When Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet says that this rondeau “condenses and embodies the art of the poet and of the musician,” she reminds us that we are accustomed to looking for meaning primarily in the language and form of the poem itself (69).

But here in the frontispiece image, we find that it is the manuscript page that collaborates with the song to generate meanings beyond the boundaries of the text. By writing the rondeau upside down, so that the reader must rotate the volume to read it, the scribe evokes another prominent medieval metaphor for the contingency of being, the wheel of fortune. Writing on the page from left to right and from top to bottom are conventions so fixed that we take them for granted. A major purpose of book formats—be they handwritten or printed—is to establish and maintain conventions of communication. In life as in culture, habit reinforces rules. [End Page 1]


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Fig. 1.

Paris, BnF, fr. 22546, f. 153r.

[End Page 2]

Medieval poets like Machaut and his influential precursor, Jean de Meun, execrated ontological complacency born of convention. Recognizing the latter as circular in nature—custom unreflectively guiding practice so that output conforms to expectation—they exposed the circularity of self-deluding rhetoric. Jean de Meun does so by using Fortune’s wheel to show how humans blind themselves to contingent being:

Quant seur sa roe les fet estre: lors cuident estre si haut mestre et leurs estas si fers voair qu’il n’en puissent ja mes choair;. . . . Mes la contraire et la perverse, quant de leur granz estaz les verse et les tumbe, au tor de la roe, du sommet envers an la boe . . .

When [Fortune] places [humans] high on her wheel, they think themselves great lords, and look upon their estate as so firm they could never fall . . . . But Fortune, contrary and perverse, when she hurls them down from their high estate, and they fall with the turn of the wheel from the top down into the mud . . .

(Roman de la Rose, lines 4831–34, 4863–66)

For his part, Machaut exposes convention by literally overturning its rules. His defiant act of inversion conceals immediate intelligibility in favor of asserting a higher, perfect form, the divine circle. Mauchaut’s metaphor of circularity contrasts human mutability with the paradox of the still turning center of divine stability: a form continually in motion, but ever returning to its point of origin. That’s exactly what the poem says, and what the manuscript enacts:

Ma fin est mon commencement Et mon commencement ma fin Et teneüre vraiement2 Ma fin est mon commencement. Mes tiers chans trois fois seulements Se retrograde et einsi fin. Ma fin est mon commencement Et mon commencement ma...

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