Guillaume de Machaut was the most important poet and musician of fourteenth-century France. He is one of the very few musicians of his age whose music is still played and studied widely today; it is also generally available in modern recordings.¹ As a poet, he had an enormous output and an even more enormous influence on his fellow poets - especially in France, of course, where those who looked to him as a model included virtually all the poets whose works have survived from the next century or so: for example, Eustache Deschamps, Charles d’Orléans, and Christine de Pisan. But...