When Guillaume de Machaut's Voir dit (c. 1363–5) and Jean Froissart's Prison amoureuse (c. 1371–2) document the experience of writing the very book we read; when Christine de Pizan transforms the literary process into an allegorical adventure; and when the Belle dame sans mercy (1424) codices present reader confrontation as an integral part of the text, we as readers are coaxed into a metafictional world where writing is not simply the process of telling stories but the story itself. If the principal subject matter of these late medieval texts becomes the book in process, the author figure emerges as the main protagonist and readers function as characters in their own right. As representative examples, these late medieval authors and texts signal a singular preoccupation with shaping literary production as an adventure equal in interest to the wanderings of knights and the longings of lovelorn princes.

That the term ‘metafiction’ was not coined until the late 1960s by William Gass, and then only to define self-reflective modern fiction, should not obscure the fact that the late medieval French corpus introduces many of the characteristics associated with this genre. Indeed, more recent critical inquiry, while still ignoring medieval precursors of metafiction, invites comparison with important early examples. Specifically Patricia Waugh defines metafictional texts by their intent to ‘explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction’, and Mark Currie goes further when speaking of a ‘borderline discourse’ that exists ‘between fiction and criticism, and which takes that border as its subject’.