«If you allow me, / I will tell you without lies / the life of Renart the fox, / who is the author of so many deceptions, / and who has deceived so many men, / both by cunning and by force: / there is no one he cannot deceive.» This is how the medieval writer presents his hero in one of the stories included in this anthology, which continues on other branches the trunk of the first Romance of Renart the fox published in this series; four of Renart's adventures are reproduced here, branches 24, 12, 7 and 17 according to the classical numbering, from his coming into the world, a parody of the biblical Genesis, to his burlesque and tripled death, therefore fake, as befits a transgressive hero such as ours. And transgression characterizes these stories more than others, because here religion is mocked, its rites, its institutions and genres of discourse: the mass, confessions, funerals; but the target is also the hypocritical religious and the black and white monks whose conduct is satirically depicted by Renart. The theme of the world upside down, the often deliberately obscene language, the constant affirmation of a character, the fox, who seems to embody all the disvalues ??of feudal society, including individualism and exasperated materialism of which he is the unwitting standard-bearer, set the tone for these adventures; the apparatus of notes has been deliberately reduced almost entirely, so that the reader first of all rediscovers the pleasure of knowing these medieval texts, for the first time faithfully translated into Italian from the originals in old French. - [Publisher]

Language: Italian

ISBN: 978-88-6274-390-7