A type of poem that began to appear in the late 13th c. and remained popular into the 15th. It was not a strictly defined genre. Poems identified as dits were often written in octosyllabic couplets, but other verse forms were possible. The dit could range from around one hundred to several thousand lines. It could be either narrative or expository; and, although it was never set to music, it could include lyric insertions with musical settings. The dit could address a variety of topics, including love, social and political satire, moral and spiritual matters, and eulogy.
In spite of such variety, certain traits can be associated with the dit. It is always constructed on first-person discourse. Thus the narrative dits, in which a narrator identified with the author recounts events that he or she experienced or observed, can be distinguished from the lai, narrated in the third person and often set in the distant past. Because of the importance of this first-person voice, dits are frequently transmitted along with other works by the same author, and can be associated with the rise of the single-author codex at the beginning of the 14th c. [see Authorship]. Early examples of poets whose dits were compiled and transmitted as authorial collections are Rutebeuf, Baudouin de Condé and his son Jean, and Watriquet de Couvin. Subsequently, the narrative dits of Machaut, Froissart, and Christine de Pizan were transmitted in anthology codices containing the collected works, both lyric and narrative, of those poets.
[Sylvia Huot]
