SOURCE: Brownlee, Kevin. “The Poetic Œuvre of Guillaume de Machaut: The Identity of Discourse and the Discourse of Identity.” In Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler, pp. 219-31. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1978.

In the following essay, Brownlee asserts that a careful reading of Machaut's works shows how the poet transformed himself from scribe to author and imposed his authorial awareness as a new and dominant standard for writers.

To a considerable extent the modern notion of “poet,” derives from fourteenth-century developments, for it was during the fourteenth century that a new relationship between the individual who “produces” poetry and the text resulting from this activity was first adumbrated. In fact, it is only in the fourteenth century that the semantic field of the very term poëte in French is expanded to include...