VILLON, FRANÇOIS. - A name coined (from that of his protector, the chaplain Giovanni di V.) from François de Montcorbier, called des Loges, b. in Paris around 1430 and licensed by that University as maître ès arts in 1452: considered and recognized, in modern times, as the greatest lyric poet of the French Middle Ages.
The little that is known from the documents of V.'s life refers almost solely to the accounts he had to render to justice for his hardly honorable activity as an unruly goliard, thief and brawler. On the evening of Corpus Christi, 5 June 1455, he mortally wounded with a dagger a priest with whom he had come to blows, near the Sorbonne. He fled, and managed to obtain amnesty from the King the following year; a new brief stay in Paris, toward the end of 1456, allowed him to take part in a theft of 500 écus in the Collège de Navarre, discovered two years later. Wandering through central France, he was imprisoned for other offenses at Orléans and at Meung, whence he emerged in the summer of 1461, then again in Paris for the theft at the Collège de Navarre and for a brawl with woundings, which earned him at the end of 1462 a capital sentence, commuted on appeal to ten years of banishment from the city.
Of these tempestuous vicissitudes of his there remains testimony in the not numerous poems that can be attributed to him with certainty (for a long time there were printed together with his works, but do not certainly belong to him, comic-satirical compositions of the end of the century or of the early years of the following one, such as the Franc Archier de Bagnolot, the Dialogue de Mallepaye et de Baillevent, the Repues franches). They are ballades and other brief lyrics in the forms and according to the taste of the time; the majority is found inserted in the short poem of the Testament, where, as in the briefer Lais, V., in a series of bequests, riskily recalls his own escapades and misfortunes, and pours out his most serious and sincere feelings: affection for his mother, remorse and regrets for the past ill spent, suffering, invocations to God.
Bibliography8 works
Enzo Bottasso