The Renart is, admittedly, a slightly eccentric member of my corpus. Its characters are not humans but anthropomorphic animals; its tone is wickedly comic, and it is not normally considered a cycle. Indeed, the text is made up of a long series of chapters (or ‘branches’), each centred on one trick played by the eponymous fox hero, to get food or to escape justice.The narrator of one branch gives us a sense of the work’s structure when he announces that he will tell ‘une branche et .i. sol gabet’ [one branch and just one trick]. Each branch is like an episode of a cartoon: at the end, we are back where we started. Thus the Renart is characteristically circular: hunger reawakens, and is then sated; Renart is brought to justice, and then gets away. [Author]

Language: English

DOI: 10.1515/9781846158063-009