ABSTRACT
Possibly the last thing that Guillaume de Machaut wrote was a literary work commonly referred to today as the “Prologue,” which survives at the beginnings of three of the manuscripts of his complete works, as well as in a handful of other sources. The Prologue's importance for our understanding of Machaut's self-fashioning as an author is well known: it stages encounters between Machaut and the personifications of Nature and Love, establishing his authority as a love poet and composer, and serving to introduce his complete works that follow. It is generically odd; although classified by modern scholars as an interpolated narrative dit because it contains both octosyllabic rhyming couplets and interpolated lyrics, it has barely any narrative at all beyond the extended rubrics for two illuminations that were clearly part of the work's essential plan. The Prologue's iteration in Machaut MS A (BnF fr. 1584) has been subject to special attention by scholars because its illuminations contain physiognomic portraits of the elderly Machaut receiving the personified Nature and Love, executed by one of the most important manuscript painters of the later fourteenth century. My chapter reads the Prologue against its puzzling codicological existence in MS A, almost certainly the codex for which it was written. I argue, in fact, that Machaut designed the Prologue with the specific gathering structure of MS A in mind so that the manuscript pages are as integral to the work as the text and illumination. Thus, while we have long known that Machaut was preoccupied with his authorial status, supervising the creation of complete works manuscripts, and self-reflexively thematising the writing process and his role as an author in his narrative works, my paper suggests something further: that the material form that his works took were pre-compositional prompts to his compositional imagination. The manuscript format, in other words, provoked the generic novelty of his multimedia works. I use these observations to reflect on the nature of the reader's experience of the Prologue in MS A, and the special status of the lyrics therein.
