Gautier de Coincy

Many of the songs de Coincy wrote were set to popular ballads then in vogue at the royal court, or borrowed the tune of pastoral or romantic ditties.

The Miracles of Our Lady is one of the most popular works of Marianist literature from the period and it encapsulates a very particular set of Christian values, which saw in the Virgin Mary the most benevolent and humanistic aspect of salvation, intercession and mercy.

The miracles' heroes are liars, thieves, adulterers, and fornicators, footloose students, pregnant nuns, unruly and lazy clerics, and eloping monks.

In their immediate context, they were written to please de Coincy's own congregation and to present a softer form of Christianity in reaction to the hardline stance of the nearby cathedral-chapter at Beauvais, which had staged various plays savagely satirising secular pursuits as inherently wrong and damaging to one's spiritual life.

This perhaps explain why de Coincy chose to express his own more liberal, Marianist views through the same exploitation of secular forms of presentation - in his case, poems and music.