He has caught Chantecler by shamming friendship. If the Reynard on the supporters is disguising himself as a sick man, the Reynard of the central scenes is a trickster too. Ran Colle oure dogge, and Talbot and Gerland, But only replace the goose with a cockerel, and these images would make an admirable illustration to the late medieval French verse tale, ‘Reynard and Chantecler’, popularised in English by Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest: They are more easily reconcilable with scientific observation than the bestiary depiction of the fox, copied on some misericords, in which he shams death in order to attract birds so that he can eat them. We should not dismiss the “natural” scenes too summarily. ![]() The natural fox and the anthropomorphic fox have an equal share in the iconography. On the opposite side, an ailing fox (or perhaps, given what we know of the vulpine disposition, a fox who is shamming illness) is being tucked neatly into bed by yet another ape, who is perhaps himself a parody of a medieval doctor. On the supporters of one of the misericords, another fox is depicted being ridden hell-for-leather by an ape. We might be prepared to view these bucolic scenes as nothing more than another illustration of the rural seasonal cycle - similar to the months’ labours scenes so common on misericords and in manuscript illuminations - were it not for their context. In the second, the fox has run to his earth, and now pokes his nose defiantly out of the hole, as a man and his hounds converge upon him. ![]() A gaggle of other geese look on disconcertedly. In the first, a fox lopes in the foreground, a goose slung casually over his shoulder, whilst a woman emerges from a distant house, brandishing a broken household implement either a distaff or a broom. All rights reserved.At Beverley Minster, a foundation of secular canons in Yorkshire, two of the misericords, carved by members of a firm from Ripon in 1520, seem on first glance to be the result of natural observation. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Varty, Reynard the Fox (1967) The History of Reynard the Fox, tr. Arnold's translation (1860) of Goethe's Reinecke Fuchs, a paraphrase of an older High German version, and William Rose's Epic of the Beast (1924). Caxton translated from a Flemish version his Historie of Reynart the Foxe (1481). The French, who contributed most to the original story, produced Le Roman de Renart (c.1175–1250). Professional minstrels and poets soon found these tales good entertainment and made them popular with the upper and middle classes. An episode at once outstanding and typical is the funeral of Reynard, with the pious laments of his late enemies and his devastating resurrection from the grave. Most of the stories reflect in biting satire the peasant's criticism and contempt for the upper classes and the clergy. ![]() The summons of Reynard by King Noble (the Lion) to answer accusations by Isengrim the Wolf and other animals forms the nucleus and starting point of the loosely connected tales. The type probably originated in a German-speaking section of what is now Alsace-Lorraine, whence it passed into France, the Low Countries, and Germany. They are found chiefly in Latin, French, Low German, Dutch, High German, and English. ![]() Reynard the Fox rĕ´nərd, rā´närd, the supreme trickster and celebrated hero of the medieval beast epics, works predominantly in verse which became increasingly popular after c.1150.
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