Chapter 6 begins in the same geographical area as chapter 5, examining the changes in music and especially in musical notation in the fourteenth century that are termed the Ars Nova. The careers of the musicians Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut - both encompassing roles in royal or noble administration, and ecclesiastical positions - contrast markedly with the lives of the thirteenth-century trouvères. New approaches to musical notation both responded to and facilitated greater rhythmic complexity in both Latin polyphony and vernacular song, and these elements were elaborated even further at the end of the century by composers of the Ars Subtilior. The technique of isorhythm offered a way for polyphonic pieces to be structured along primarily musical lines, and composers made the most of the opportunities it provided to create subtle and sophisticated forms. Against a backdrop of climate emergency and a great pandemic (the Black Death), political and religious upheaval in the form of the Hundred Years’ War and the Avignon papacy, musicians used satire and allegory to shine a critical light on their society and its leaders.

This chapter pursues a historical, methodological and theoretical agenda to interrogate the validity and value of identifying proto-novelistic writing in medieval French literature. Informed by Terence Cave’s reflections on ‘pre-liminaries’, it counters conventional positionings of the medieval period in histories of the novel in French, ensuring that it is not unduly omitted or disparaged whilst opposing unhelpfully evolutionary approaches. It first considers methodological challenges to adopting a fruitful retrospective gaze on medieval textuality, specifically problems of teleology and etymology. Focusing on the Old French roman and Middle French nouvelle as the genres most targeted as precursors in histories of the novel, it uncovers unexpected aspects of such points of comparison, especially in light of the modern novel’s and medieval romance’s shifting generic and formal histories. Selected elements of form (language, prose/verse, narrative structure, paratext) are examined to promote modern-medieval literary dialogue. A concluding case study of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century dit proposes a fresh approach to identifying what, in chronologically earlier texts, is beneficial to our thinking about the novel today, in terms of definitional boundaries, the literary representation of individual experience, and reflexivity – the ways storytelling reflects on its own modes and capacities of how to tell a tale.

French – dialects, peoples and places – shaped late medieval European literary culture. We cannot with certainty ascribe any surviving French poetry to Geoffrey Chaucer, but the poet’s existing corpus demonstrates how Chaucer read, emulated and adapted French works and how Chaucer’s French also aided his approach to Latin sources. Chaucer’s contemporaries associated his poetry with the Roman de la Rose, and this essay surveys Chaucer’s engagement with French poetry produced by Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Oton de Grandson, John Gower and Guillaume de Deguileville in relation to the widely influential Rose.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.