The purpose of Jill Mann’s new book From Aesop to Reynard is, she writes, “to ask, not what animals mean, but how animals mean—that is, in what way literary structures imply different ways for the animal to be made significant for the human” (1, italics in original). She continues: “the beast literature of medieval Britain is an ideal terrain within which to explore this question.” The beast literature of medieval Britain does indeed offer a varied assortment of treatments of beasts in fable and epic in several languages—Latin, Middle English, Middle Scots, and Anglo-Norman French—and with Continental influences, all of which make the English traditions, as Mann says, ideal for studying the nature of medieval beast literature.
Mann’s book opens with an introduction that orients the reader to the sources for the beast fable and epic in medieval England and Europe and a connected chapter called “How Animals Mean” (1–27 and 28–52), in which she looks at how beasts function in these two medieval genres. Though the two genres are often conflated, Mann shows that this is a mistake: each of them has specific characteristics that determine how the animal characters are presented. The beast fable is the older of the two genres, and its history can be traced not only from classical literature, but also from Oriental beast fables as well. The medieval beast fable, like its classical models, is a short narrative focusing on a single episode, and often has a specific moral appended to the story. The beast epic, as the name implies, is much longer than the fable, and as Mann writes, “[i]f the beast fable is sparing of words, the beast epic is prodigal of them” (44). The beast epic is also, according to Mann, “a mere upstart.” “Its earliest representative,” she continues, “is the eleventh-century Ecbasis captivi…but it achieves its most impressive and influential form in the Ysengrimus,” which is a Latin epic poem of the mid-twelfth century (17-18). As Mann suggests, “The Ysengrimus had an enormous influence on vernacular literature” (19), and probably its most important influence was on the creation of the Roman de Renart, which appears only slightly later in the twelfth century but shares characters and episodes with Ysengrimus. The earliest Reynard stories are in French, but rather than a single connected narrative, as in Ysengrimus, the French poems present “a series of isolated episodes, mostly relatively short, and mostly concerning the fox’s irrepressible attempts to hoodwink not only the wolf but also other animals” (19). And, unlike the beast fable, the beast epic does not moralize.
After the careful orientation supplied for the reader in the first two chapters, Mann moves to the core of the book: a series of close readings of specific medieval authors and their fables or epics. The first of these chapters looks at the Anglo-Norman French fables by Marie de France; the second at the Latin beast epic, Speculum stultorum, by Nigel of Longchamps; the third at the English debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale; the fourth at Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls; the fifth at Caxton’s The History of Reynard the Fox; and the sixth and final reading is of Robert Henryson’s collection of “epicized Fables,” Morall Fabillis. In Henryson’s fables, she writes, “the two strands of the medieval beast literature tradition that I have been tracing so far—the Aesopic and the Reynardian—are at last thoroughly combined and shaped into a new kind of fable” (262).
From Aesop to Reynard is an outstanding contribution to the study of both the fable and the beast epic. Although Mann focuses on English authors, she is careful to set these writers in their European context, and thus scholars of the beast fable and epic in other medieval European languages will want to read this book as well. It is a finely written and presented study that will stand for some time as the guide to medieval English beast literature.
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[Review length: 656 words • Review posted on March 9, 2011]