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From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain
What do stories about animals have to tell us about human beings? This book analyzes the shrewd perceptions about human life - and especially human language - that emerge from narratives in which the main figures are 'talking animals'. Its guiding question is not 'what' but 'how' animals mean. Using this question to draw a clear distinction between beast fable and beast epic, it goes on to examine the complex variations of these forms that are to be found in the literature of medieval Britain, in English, French, Latin, and Scots. The range, variety, and brilliant inventiveness of this tradition are demonstrated in chapters on the fables of Marie de France, the Speculum stultorum of Nigel of Longchamp (the comic adventures of a donkey), the debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale , Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and the tales of the Squire, Manciple and Nun's Priest, the Reynardian tale of The Fox and the Wolf, and the Moral Fabillis of Robert Henryson. English translations
provided for all quotations make the works discussed accessible to the modern reader.
provided for all quotations make the works discussed accessible to the modern reader.
- GenresMedieval
394 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
28 people want to read
About the author
Jill Mann
22 books3 followersJill Mann is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 16, 2011
Kindled for free. The author analyses the british beast literature genre, mainly in terms of discovering which aspects are beast fable (serious moralising after the fashion of Aesop) and which are beast epic (humour in the style of renart). The falsehood of speech is dictated in beast fables, but in the beast epics speech is the centre of their victories. First british beast epic is speculum stultorum, all about a donkey who wants a longer tail. First renart literature is in Chaucer. The author tells of the similarities in these genres in terms of the duplicity of speech and the implacability of nature and destiny.
(History of Aesop in Britian)
The ‘Fables of Aesop’ are familiar to everyone, and books with this title are easy to find. So it may come as something of a surprise to learn that no fables known to have been written by Aesop exist. No surviving fable collection, and no individual fables, are old enough to have been written by Aesop, who lived, if he existed at all, in the sixth century bc.3 Aesop's name is linked with fables (and sometimes he is represented as telling them) in the works of numerous ancient Greek writers (Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, to name only a few), but he may have been no more than a legendary figure.4
(history of the bestiary in Britain)
The medieval Latin bestiary ultimately derives from a Greek text known as Physiologus (‘the Naturalist’).118 Several Latin versions (designated Y, C, B) of this Greek text survive in manuscripts as old as the eighth and ninth centuries, but only in the twelfth century was an expanded form of B (now known as B-Is) expanded even further to become ‘what is now properly called the bestiary’.119 However, the text (p. 24 ) was still far from fixed, and over the next three centuries it continued to change its shape and to accumulate further accretions.
(History of Renard in Britain)
Reynard the fox is to be found all over the literature of continental Europe from the twelfth century onwards, but in England the sightings of this elusive beast are few and far between, at least before 1481, when Caxton published his English prose translation of Die Historie van Reynaert die Vos.1 Kenneth Varty's painstaking researches have uncovered some pictorial representations of incidents from the Roman de Renart (alongside many other more general images of duplicitous foxes) in English paintings and carvings.2 In literature, apart from the signs of familiarity with Reynardian material in Odo of Cheriton's fables3 and a couple of passing references in two early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman writers,4 the only witnesses to Reynard's influence are the short thirteenth-century poem The Vox and the Wolf, and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale,5 which are indebted both in substance and in style to Branches IV and II (respectively) of the Roman de Renart.
…
Jacques Le Goff has called the Roman de Renart ‘a drama, an epic of hunger’, which ‘shows us Renart, his family and his companions ceaselessly impelled by the call of their empty bellies. The driving force of almost all the branches of the cycle is omnipresent and omnipotent hunger—the motive for Renart's cunning.’14 It is bodily need, not an idealistic confrontation with danger and difficulty, that drives Renart out into the world. So, when he shrugs off the threat of danger with the thought ‘Qui chaut? tout est en avanture’ (‘Who cares? Everything is subject to chance’: 107), the word ‘aventure’ is divested of its romance connotations and returned to the everyday world of random events.
(History of Aesop in Britian)
The ‘Fables of Aesop’ are familiar to everyone, and books with this title are easy to find. So it may come as something of a surprise to learn that no fables known to have been written by Aesop exist. No surviving fable collection, and no individual fables, are old enough to have been written by Aesop, who lived, if he existed at all, in the sixth century bc.3 Aesop's name is linked with fables (and sometimes he is represented as telling them) in the works of numerous ancient Greek writers (Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, to name only a few), but he may have been no more than a legendary figure.4
(history of the bestiary in Britain)
The medieval Latin bestiary ultimately derives from a Greek text known as Physiologus (‘the Naturalist’).118 Several Latin versions (designated Y, C, B) of this Greek text survive in manuscripts as old as the eighth and ninth centuries, but only in the twelfth century was an expanded form of B (now known as B-Is) expanded even further to become ‘what is now properly called the bestiary’.119 However, the text (p. 24 ) was still far from fixed, and over the next three centuries it continued to change its shape and to accumulate further accretions.
(History of Renard in Britain)
Reynard the fox is to be found all over the literature of continental Europe from the twelfth century onwards, but in England the sightings of this elusive beast are few and far between, at least before 1481, when Caxton published his English prose translation of Die Historie van Reynaert die Vos.1 Kenneth Varty's painstaking researches have uncovered some pictorial representations of incidents from the Roman de Renart (alongside many other more general images of duplicitous foxes) in English paintings and carvings.2 In literature, apart from the signs of familiarity with Reynardian material in Odo of Cheriton's fables3 and a couple of passing references in two early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman writers,4 the only witnesses to Reynard's influence are the short thirteenth-century poem The Vox and the Wolf, and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale,5 which are indebted both in substance and in style to Branches IV and II (respectively) of the Roman de Renart.
…
Jacques Le Goff has called the Roman de Renart ‘a drama, an epic of hunger’, which ‘shows us Renart, his family and his companions ceaselessly impelled by the call of their empty bellies. The driving force of almost all the branches of the cycle is omnipresent and omnipotent hunger—the motive for Renart's cunning.’14 It is bodily need, not an idealistic confrontation with danger and difficulty, that drives Renart out into the world. So, when he shrugs off the threat of danger with the thought ‘Qui chaut? tout est en avanture’ (‘Who cares? Everything is subject to chance’: 107), the word ‘aventure’ is divested of its romance connotations and returned to the everyday world of random events.
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