1. Laurence de Looze, Pseudo-Autobiography in the Fourteenth Century: Jean Ruiz,
Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer (Gainesville, Fla., 1997).
2. This is, of course, an over-simplification of de Looze's argument, which seeks to use
contemporary autobiographical theory in conjunction with the history of practical criticism of
fourteenth-century literature to account, quite successfully, for the two possible but seemingly
mutually exclusive readings of these poems
3. This age, for the purposes of the poem, is that of an old man, or at least one who is too old for
poetry and for love; see lines 1613 ff., which are a digression on the seven ages of man.
Thirty-five is also undoubtedly an age of transition, a mezzo del cammin kind of age. The
narrator's age is given at line 794, the claim that love is for the young at line 837, and the claim
that poetry is for lovers at lines 1320-24. Citations of the poem are from Jean Froissart, Le
joli buisson de Jonece, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Geneva, 1975).
4. Jean Froissart, L'e spinette amoureuse, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Paris, 1963).
5. On this issue, and also for a nice reading of the seven ages of man as it applies to Froissart's
own life, see Michelle A. Freeman, "Froissart's Li Joli Buisson de Jonece: A Farewell to
Poetry?," in Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Madeleine
Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler (New York, 1978), pp. 235-47.
6. Because the primary evidence for dating the poem to 1373 comes from the narrator's
statement that he had the dream in that year, rather than from outside evidence, we are faced with
a problem of circular reasoning. If the narrator can be associated with the author through an
autobiographical link,
page 128
then we can use his statement about the dream's date to date the poem. On
the other hand, if the date for the poem and the dream are the same, we can legitimately construct
a link between author and narrator using an autobiographical model. The date for the poem
provides a model in miniature of the kind of problem inherent in fourteenth-century first-person
literature in general.
7. Froissart, Le joli buisson de Jonece, lines 924-35; my italics.
