Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present. - book review

Edited by Kenneth Varty. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. 57 B/W illus, xxi + 298 pp. 47.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-57181-737-9

The present collection of fifteen essays explores various aspects of the vulpine beast-epic from the mid-twelfth-century Flemish Latin Ysengrimus, via the canonical telling in the ever-expanding French Roman de Renart, to such later manifestations as Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and post-medieval retellings such as Hartmann Schopper's neo-Latin Reinike (1567), Goethe's Reineke Fuchs (1794), and even twentieth-century cartoon versions like Le polar de Renart (1973).

The editor is the doyen of "reynardians" in England and has recently updated (although not entirely replaced) his celebrated study of the fox in medieval English art, Reynard the Fox (1967), with Reynard, Reinaert, and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence (1999). His interest in fox-imagery is represented in the present volume by a useful and generously illustrated essay, co-authored with Elaine Block, entitled "Choir-Stall Carvings of Reynard and Other Foxes." In enumerating the iconographic categories of such carved foxes, the banderole inscription put in the mouth of the Fox Preacher on the bench-end now preserved at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire is misquoted here, however. It should read, Pes be here In (i.e. Peace be herein). Under "Fox Fables," we ought to have been told that the only known Sour Grapes representation on an English misericord (at Faversham) is a twentieth-century carving, and the suggested Sick Lion misericord in Gloucester Cathedral (Figure 8.19) seems not entirely convincing to me. It should also be borne in mind that twelve of the fifty-eight misericords at Gloucester are modern, carved in 1873 when the choir was restored.

The brief entry under "Foxes and Fool" notes that at Montbenoit Abbey in France, "there is a misericord carving showing a man with a basket on his back out of which several foxes peer. A fool carrying his marotte follows the man. The significance of the scene escapes us." In fact--apart from the intrinsic unlikeliness of several foxes fitting into a back-basket--there is reason to believe, from similar carvings noted elsewhere in France by Elaine Block, that the animals, whose correct identification is critical for the interpretation of the scene, are rats not foxes, as I have recently shown in my The Secret Middle Ages (2002). The carving depends on a contemporary pun also illustrated in manuscripts of the Dits pour faire tapisserie of Henri Baude, in which the bearer of false reports, the rapporteur in late medieval French, is depicted as a rats-porteur, rat-porter, or--in the best attempt at Englishing the pun that I've been able to come up with--a tail-bearer!

We first hear of Reynard in the guise of Renart le goupil, in which the word for "fox," regularly descending from Vulgar Latin vulpecula, is the contemporary Middle French term for the species, and Renart is the Germanic personal-name Reginhard (modern Reinhard). As Varty notes in his Introduction to the book, there could be no better testimony to the popularity of the Roman de Renart in France, and hence its wider influence on French culture, than the fact that the personal name of its hero became the standard name for the animal.

In the spirit of the series title Cultural Diversities and Intersections, of which the present volume is the first, several essays chart the "geopolitical" use made of the story by authors down the ages, from the late twelfth-century Alsatian Heinrich der Glichezaere (Jean-Marc PastrY), via "The Political Import of Goethe's Reineke Fuchs" (Roger H. Stephenson), to the use of "The Flemish Reynaert as an Ideological Weapon" (Rik van Daele) in the inter-war and post-war years. Reynard has arguably been the tool of satirists from his conception, and this satiric function is examined in the medieval Ysengrimus (Jill Mann) and, for the modern era, in "Paul Weber's Satirical Use of Reineke in Cartoon Form" (Kenneth Varty).

In the thirteenth essay, Varty and Jean Dufournet chart the general decline in interest in the text in the post-medieval era until nineteenth-century scholars and subsequent popularisers once again brought the Roman to a wider audience. Varty himself chronicles the later fortunes of the text in England in "From Caxton to the Present" and also of one particularly popular constituent episode in "The Fox and the Wolf in the Well: the Metamorphoses of a Comic Motif." Elina Suomela-Harma reminds us that the beast-epic is not the only repository of popular vulpine motifs and quarries the oral tradition, especially as represented in Flemish, in "The Fox and the Hare: An Odd Couple." There is inevitably something of a miscellaneous feel to this sort of volume--and I have not been able to mention all the individual contributors here--but it undoubtedly fulfils the editor's stated aim "to give some telling examples of the metamorphoses of the Beast Epic fox as he travelled through time and space entertaining people ... and of his involvement in some of the basic problems and issues men and women have faced in many different kinds of society." As such, it is to be recommended to all who would gain a proper appreciation of the significance of this key text for the history of Western European culture as a whole.