Paul Wackers’s Introducing the Medieval Fox, the latest addition to the University of Wales Press Medieval Animals series, invites readers on a deep dive into the history of one specific medieval fox: Reynard, the trickster. This approach to introducing the medieval fox is grounded in Wacker’s expertise in medieval literature and prior scholarship on Reynard stories. After the introduction, which lays out a short sketch of natural and cultural foxes (particularly Reynard) and then discusses the incongruity of medieval texts and images, the book is divided into three chapters which each focus on the cultural fox in a milieu: religion, scholarship, and literature.

The chapter “The Fox and Medieval Religion” begins with a review of the biblical passages mentioning foxes and some of the medieval exegeses on those texts. In these biblical interpretations, fox behaviors such as living in dens are likened to heretics who work in hidden ways. Hagiography tends to treat foxes differently--here they symbolize handling of mischief rather than spiritual danger. The final third of the chapter discusses the delightful parodies of foxes as religious figures (monks, bishops, preachers, and pilgrims) in manuscript marginalia and literature. Here the Reynard stories take center stage. This section tells us more about how authors, scribes, and artists thought about those religious figures than really what they thought about foxes.

The next chapter, “The Fox and Medieval Scholarship,” starts off by discussing bestiaries and scholarly works that catalog nature. The bestiary and encyclopedic texts in this chapter introduce some of the most common adjectives applied to medieval foxes: deceitful, sly, crafty, clever, gluttonous, and cruel. A common story in these texts was that the fox would feign death in order to catch prey. Because the dividing line between medieval religion and scholarship is very fuzzy--after all, medieval scholarship is clearly produced within a religious context and the examples Wackers discusses of the bestiaries and their moral lessons are intimately related to exegesis--it is unclear why the bestiary discussion was not placed together with the biblical interpretations in the previous chapter. The chapter structure implies that bestiaries and encyclopedias are somehow more secular than exegesis texts, but the discussions of the fox appear to be extremely similar. Hunting manuals appear in the last third of this chapter. Classifying them as “scholarship” is certainly a stretch, but these types of texts do give insights both into practical hunting techniques and the assumed behaviors of foxes. Wackers makes the point that descriptions of fox hunting in works like Les livres du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio include not only practical descriptions but also allegorical interpretations, demonstrating their closeness to bestiaries and other natural history works.

The final chapter is the longest and deals with the Reynard stories in medieval literature. The Reynard stories have their roots in fables, some of which portray the fox as a positive role model (such as the vixen who saves her cubs from an eagle) and others which vilify the fox (such as the fox who gives the crane food on a flat plate that it cannot eat from). The development of the Reynard literature as a medieval bestseller is nicely summarized in this chapter. There are many plot teasers demonstrating Reynard’s constant quest for food and his entanglement in quests for justice in noble society. Reynard’s misdeeds recorded in some of the stories, including a rape of the she-wolf Hersent and assassination of a king, are serious and dark, while other tales such as the tricking the wolf into a water well bucket are intended to amuse the reader with comedy bordering on slapstick. Wackers concludes from this great variety of literary tales that Reynard’s “most important weapon is his words” (116), but these can never be trusted.

A final postscript notes that the medieval fox stories of Reynard still have cultural resonance throughout Europe, but especially in the Low Countries. Things have not, however, stayed exactly the same: while foxes are still associated with cunning and trickery, they are not linked to evil intent as they were often in the Middle Ages. The fox is still an elusive character, difficult to pin down.

Wackers has done a fine job bringing Reynard’s stories to the fore in this book, yet one cannot help but feel that Introducing the Medieval Fox is shortchanging the history of foxes in the Middle Ages. Wackers stayed comfortably within his knowledge base in writing this book, sticking to the Reynard stories, rather than reaching out into other types of sources. As a result, the fox as an animal is relegated to the background. This book would have gained tremendously by going much further into the natural science literature to discuss biological traits of foxes, such as denning and food preferences, right at the beginning of the book because these are relevant for the cultural interpretations of the animal. The book also could have done much more with archeological evidence for foxes, including surviving furs from places like Birka, Sweden, and legal sources such as monastic charters which record the right to hunt foxes. To do this would have required more reading outside of literary scholarship and potentially an engagement with primary sources like charters beyond the literary canon. Without this wider source base, Wackers’s book becomes a great introduction to a medieval fox (Reynard), but hardly tothe medieval fox.

Overall, the book is an easy and fast read, as these introductions to medieval animals are intended. It could have been better organized--the awkward division of chapters into the source types tended to necessitate annoying “see page” parenthetical references in the introduction and first chapter--but it was still informative and enjoyable.