SOURCE: “In Defense of Villon's Lais,” in The French Review, Vol. 72, No. 6, 1999, pp. 1000-09.

In this essay, Lacy takes exception to the standard critical practice of devaluing the Lais—seeing it as trivial or as merely an early draft for Le Testament. Lacy suggests that the habit of imagining that the first-person narrator of Villon's poems is Villon himself leads readers to overlook the more serious themes of the light-hearted earlier work.

François Villon's 1456 Lais is a pleasant, amusing, and poetically inconsequential text. That this statement accurately summarizes prevailing scholarly sentiment is beyond dispute. For example, Barbara Sargent-Baur, in her 1990 book Brothers of Dragons, largely dismissed the Lais as part of Villon's “juvenalia”; she characterized it as “competent and occasionally entertaining” but implied, if I read her correctly, that it possesses little or no enduring literary value (70).

Sargent-Baur is by no means alone in her assessment of...