From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (review)

In the field of beast epic studies, Jill Mann needs little introduction, having already given us her magisterial edition of Nivard's Ysengrimus. Her new monograph appears as a long-awaited sequel to that project, and certainly does not disappoint. This wide-ranging and richly contextualized series of commentaries explores medieval receptions of classical fables and their reworkings, both in Latin and the vernacular, weaving particular interpretations into a weighty and nuanced exploration of these vignettes in relation to medieval philosophical reflection and scholarly inquiry. Encompassing a span from early to late, south to north, the works examined range from Marie de France to Robert Henryson, via stopping points such as The Vox and the Wolf and Chaucer, with chapters offering a range of illuminating backward glances to key sources and antecedents from the fables of Romulus to the Roman de Renart. The uses of fable are a central theme throughout, these small poems about often small animals begetting long sequels, the fabular mouse (not to mention fox, ass, wolf, nightingale, or sheep)—to invert Horace's simile—more often than not bequeathing a mountain to the world, this seemingly lapidary work further built up with wry nods to authorities such as Cato, Isidore of Seville, and more besides.

The great strength of this massively erudite study lies in its careful weighing of perspectives and influences, especially when dealing with genres such as the fable, where worlds of difference can emerge between versions depending on exactly how a particular tale is told, where every word put into an animal's mouth is opened up by that use to the interrogation of a probing wit that draws on millennia-deep archives to weave its argumentative and referential genealogies. Mann's chapter on Marie de France's "ysopets," for example, takes perspicacious issue with Hans Robert Jauss's view of the collection as thoroughly imbued with feudal values. Especially interesting is the manner in which her reading of the fables and narrative lais associated with Marie teases out the considerable differences between them but at the same time refuses to overstate their significance. Rather like Pangur Bán chasing down mice, Mann's reading homes in on the juicy prey that is the term cunseil, overlooked in Jauss's account, but whose varying senses and associations with a larger lexical field emerge as central to a "mistrust of words" central to the fable (see pp. 81-95), emphasizing that it is in animal fictions that the problem of human meaning is most clearly foregrounded.

The fable may be a short-form genre, but Mann's careful unpacking of the complexities and subtleties of different retellings offers key insights into the relation of literary beasts and birds to the oppositions and issues they both touch on and interrogate in such disarmingly pithy guise. The ventriloquist relation between author, language, and speaking animal looms large here not only in terms of the problems attendant on culture's translation of beastly doings into human words but also the interplay either between cultures and languages or within multilingual readership contexts. As is apparent from the title, Mann's specific focus is on the complex patterns of contact and borrowing, as well as the contextual specificities evident in beast literature surviving from Britain. In this tapestry of influence and appropriation, Mann teases out the interactions of Aesopic and Reynardian traditions, illuminating the precise detail of how authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer drew upon and manipulated materials drawn from a variety of sources. Chauntecleer's evocation of a panoply of references, including Insular sources such as the Speculum Stultorum, constitutes a formidably gallus (or "cocky," for those not familiar with the Scots term) cultural display punctured by what is finally revealed as the bathetic kernel of his textual and argumentative strategies: a determined refusal to take the laxatives that might make his sleep more restful (p. 256). Subjecting the gags in the Old French Roman de Renart's...