Villon’s Testament is a satirical will in which a first-person narrator, purportedly on his death bed, leaves a series of burlesque bequests, among them many specimens of Villon’s own lyric poetry, intended to punish or reward people he has known. Most critical studies of the Testament adopt one of two main approaches. One, which we might call 'life-based', assumes that a text is a record of its author’s experience, to be understood in relation to the real-world context in which it was composed. 'Life-based' studies privilege the Testament’s relationship to historical contexts, to Villon’s life - insofar as this can be delineated from the very limited documentary evidence - or to the Paris of the late 1450s and early 1460s. The other, which we might call 'art-based', assumes that a text and its meanings are products of linguistic and aesthetic conventions, and can be understood only in relation to these. 'Art-based' analysis concentrates upon the ways in which the Testament both uses and disrupts various kinds of conventions: those of the legal will, or of different poetic genres, or of proverbial language. The range of interpretations of Villon’s best-known work is hardly surprising, for particular features of the Testament seem to appeal to one or other of these types of reading. It is crucial to recognize, however, that the opposition between 'life-based' and 'art-based' approaches is a false one. The two are in no sense mutually exclusive: adherents of the former regard art as a product of experience, while adherents of the latter regard experience as constructed through art. Indeed, neither view can be upheld in pure form. No text can be a pure record of fact, as its language always bears traces of other texts, whether literary or non-literary; nor can a text consist of pure language, for it is always the product of a certain author (whether individual or collective, identifiable or anonymous) in a certain context. In the case of the Testament, different aspects of its content and form superficially elicit either 'life-based' or 'art-based' readings, but prove on closer examination to undermine any notion that the two are opposed.