SOURCE: Manley Williams, Sarah Jane. “Machaut's Self-Awareness as Author and Producer.” In Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler, pp. 189-97. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1978.

In the following essay. Manley Williams describes Machaut as a remarkably self-conscious artist, observing that the poet's awareness of his importance as an author manifested itself in his consistent efforts to arrange, safeguard, copy, and distribute his manuscripts.

About Machaut's famous contemporary, the Italian humanist, Francesco Petrarch, it has been said “we know far more about his experiences in life than we know about the experiences of any human being who had lived before his time.” (p. v)¹ Although we may not know nearly as much about the life and experiences of Guillaume de Machaut, we can be sure that more of his music has come down to us...