Guillaume Cretin (c. 1460 – 30 November 1525) was a French coterie poet who is considered to belong to the network of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs ("rhetoricians"). He is sometimes mistakenly referred to as

Guillaume Dubois Guillaume Dubois (; 6 September 1656 – 10 August 1723) was a French cardinal and statesman. Life and government Early years Dubois, the third of the four great Cardinal-Ministers ( Richelieu, Mazarin, Dubois, and Fleury), was born in Brive-l ...

, but this is a wordplay found in an epistle addressed to Jean Martin. Cretin wrote in a wide variety of literary genres, including fixed-form lyrics (''chants royaux'', ''ballades'', and ''rondeaux'') as well as narrative verse. Cretin's poetic oeuvre was edited by Kathleen Chesney in 1932.

Life

Cretin was treasurer of the

Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes The Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes is a Gothic royal chapel within the fortifications of the Château de Vincennes on the east edge of Paris, France. It was inspired by the Sainte-Chapelle, the royal chapel within the Palais de la Cité in Paris. ...

, then cantor of the Sainte-Chapelle de Paris and ordinary

almoner An almoner () is a chaplain or church officer who originally was in charge of distributing money to the deserving poor. The title ''almoner'' has to some extent fallen out of use in English, but its equivalents in other languages are often used f ...

Francis I of France Francis I (; ; 12 September 1494 – 31 March 1547) was King of France from 1515 until his death in 1547. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. He succeeded his first cousin once removed and father-in-law Louis&nbs ...

. Throughout his life, he composed numerous works for circulation at the royal court.

Works

Cretin's works include many ''chants royaux'' which were composed for the ''puys'', Northern French poetry competitions in honour of the Virgin Mary. These were praised by his contemporaries and often won awards. He was recognised as a master, notably by

Jean Lemaire de Belges Jean Lemaire de Belges (c. 1473c. 1525) was a Walloon poet, historian, and pamphleteer who, writing in French, was the last and one of the best of the school of poetic 'rhétoriqueurs' (“rhetoricians”) and the chief forerunner, both in style a ...

and

Clément Marot Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet. He was influenced by the writers of the late 15th century and paved the way for the Pléiade, and is undoubtedly the most important poet at the court of Fr ...

. He is one of the great virtuosos of 'rime équivoquée' (for example, the ''Epistre à Honorat de la Jaille'' of circa 1510). From 1515, Cretin started work on a verse chronicle of French history, the ''Grandes Chroniques de France'', which remained unfinished at the time of his death. It was commissioned in 1515 by Francis I and is preserved today in six manuscripts. Cretin's corpus also includes occasional verse. His last work, composed sometime between February and November 1525, is the ''Apparition du Mareschal sans reproche, feu Messire Jacques de Chabannes, en son vivant Mareschal de France'', a lengthy dream vision commemorating Jacques II de Chabannes de La Palice who was killed at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.

Afterlife

During his lifetime, Cretin published his poetry in manuscript format; only a small handful of his poems printed, likely without the poet's collaboration. When Cretin died in late November 1525, Parisian printers set out to gather together, arrange, and edit Cretin's works for posterity. This was the case of

Galliot Du Pré A galiot, galliot or galiote, was a small galley boat propelled by sail or oars. There are three different types of naval galiots that sailed on different seas. A ''galiote'' was a type of French flat-bottom river boat or barge and also a fla ...

, a prolific Parisian bookseller, who printed the first collected editions of Cretin's works in 1526 and 1527.

References

Delvallée, Ellen. ''Poétiques de la filiation : Clément Marot et ses maîtres: Jean Marot, Jean Lemaire et Guillaume Cretin''. Droz, 2021. Guy, Henry. ‘Un “Souverain poète français”: maitre Guillaume Cretin’. ''Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France'', vol. 10, no. 4, 1903, pp. 553–89. Nunn, Jack, 'Cretin imprimé. Le recueil des ''Traictez singuliers'' de Galliot Du Pré (1526)', ''Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes'', vol. 47, no. 1, 2024, pp. 243-264. Vaillancourt, Luc. ‘L’humanisme dissident des rhétoriqueurs : le cas de Guillaume Cretin’. ''Renaissance and Reformation'', vol. 27, no. 2, 2003, pp. 77–86.

External links

Two poems

Digital edition of Cretin's verse chronicle of French history
1460s births 1525 deaths 16th-century French poets French male poets {{France-poet-stub