SOURCE: Poirion, Daniel. “The Imaginary Universe of Guillaume de Machaut.” In Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler, pp. 199-204. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1978.

In the following essay, Poirion depicts Machaut's imaginary universe as quintessentially modern, clearly abandoning the medieval tradition of theocentrism.

When Machaut began to compose his polyphonic songs, much medieval music aimed rather to intellectual than to sensual effect. Mathematical laws of the universe, with their arithmetical and geometrical figures, governed composition. Through musical rhythms human beings might participate in the metaphysical reality of the world. Musical knowledge gives the poet a magic power. This is why Orpheus is mentioned with David by Machaut in his poetic Prologue, injecting a kind of magic into an Aristotelian conception of the universe, derived from a Pythagorean myth: “those are visible miracles that Music...