| Summary: | This chapter examines the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vogue for this genre, building on Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s essay, L’Ecriture testamentaire a la fin du moyen age. It brings a selection of these works – by Philippe de Mezieres, Pierre de Hauteville, and Francois Villon – into conversation with very recent examples of testamentary fiction: Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus, Vickie Gendreau’s Testament, and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, to consider modern inflections of the earlier wills’ characteristics. The testament situates its subject on the brink between life and death, which entails urgency and, consequently, a need to assert control in this exercise of will, and a need for witness. Interspersed amongst the poem’s narrative octaves are fixed-form lyric items. Far from being, in any straightforward sense, "the most personal and immediate poems of their age", late-medieval fictional wills display the process and the precarities of identity construction.
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