Oton de Granson, Poems

The Savoyard knight, diplomat, and poet Oton de Granson was among the first and most successful of the late fourteenth century’s courtier poets. Well-known in both the French and English courts, he spent much of his career in service to the English king and also was likely a personal friend to poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps, with Chaucer’s “Complaint of Venus” praising Granson as the flower of French poetry. Though his contributions to medieval French lyric poetry enjoyed little recognition in his lifetime, he is partly credited with popularizing poetic forms that became popular after his death and was later celebrated alongside—and his works sometimes misattributed to—luminary poets such as Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume de Machaut, and Alain Chartier. This new edition of Granson’s works presents them in his original Middle French verse accompanied by modern English translations, a detailed scholarly introduction, and extensive explanatory and textual notes.