Devotional and Political Consolation in Paris, BnF, fr. 994

This essay examines a late fourteenth-century compendium that combines an abridged version of Machaut’s Confort d’amy with a disparate sampling of contemporary devotional, didactic, and political vernacular writing. Many of the texts, including Machaut’s poem, appear in the compendium in anonymous and abridged versions that erase details pertaining to a specific author or patron. The systematic process of adaptation within the manuscript favors author anonymity and a more personalized approach to abstracting meaning from texts. This essay argues that the continuity of this reading experience across the compendium’s patchwork of devotional and political contents shows a reception history for Machaut’s poetry that was driven by readership more than authorship.