author
Henri de Croy
A shadowy figure in early French literary history, he is chiefly remembered through a late medieval rhetoric manual once printed under his name. Modern catalogues now usually treat that work as misattributed, which makes his legacy especially intriguing.
1 Audiobook
L'art et science de rhethorique pour faire rigmes et ballades
by Henri de Croy
About the author
Henri de Croy is an obscure late medieval figure known in book history because L'art et science de rhétorique pour faire rimes et ballades was printed under his name in some early editions. Library records from the Bibliothèque nationale de France list him only very broadly as a 14th–15th century person, which suggests that firm biographical details are scarce.
Modern scholarship and major catalogues generally connect the text instead to Jean Molinet. BnF and Biblissima both note that the work was long attributed to Henri de Croy but is now usually treated as Molinet's, or as a text only sometimes attributed to Henri de Croy. For readers, that means his name survives less as a fully documented authorial life and more as part of the fascinating history of how medieval books were copied, printed, and credited.
Because the surviving evidence is so thin, it is safest to describe him as a historical name attached to an important tradition of French poetic and rhetorical writing, rather than as a well-documented author in the modern sense.