ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a suggestion to the debate about how the musical stanzas might be interpreted. International developments in fifteenth-century music, and indeed even the beginnings of the musical renaissance, have often been recounted from the starting point of a famous passage on music in Le Champion des Dames by Martin Le Franc, together with later compatible statements by Johannes Tinctoris. Music has pride of place, with some stanzas, then come painting, illumination, carvers, tapestry, pleterie, chivalry and the arts of war, theology, science, literature. The poem has finally been edited in full by Robert Deschaux in five volumes, so that it is now possible to read the famous musical stanzas in context. All of the well-known musical stanzas, and the two that lead into them, are given as an appendix to this article, with a translation by Nancy Freeman Regalado incorporating suggestions by Leofranc Holford-Strevens.
