Introduction

Summary

Rarely can a medieval work have resonated with the mood of the present as uncannily as do these three satires. Acerbic, raging and finally apocalyptic, these poems from the second half of the thirteenth century express a vision of the world and its descent into corruption and disaster which mirrors our own state of rampant alarm. At the time of writing this translation, we have government heads in multiple nations trying to circumvent democratic process, dangerously undermining parliamentary and congressional standards and procedures: democracy is under threat worldwide. Deception reigns. Misinformation, otherwise known as falsehood, otherwise known as lying, is a pandemic flourishing at the same time as a much-mutating global virus. There is wealth, ever more stratospheric, being channelled into the hands of tiny numbers while poverty is ever more widespread and acute. War crimes and destruction on a monstrous scale are being inflicted over great swathes of Ukraine; massive China and the United States are glaring at each other over Taiwan; the danger of conflagration is real. And when it comes to conflagration, firefighters worldwide are battling wildfires generated by a climate crisis which governments are barely addressing. Ice-caps melt; sea levels rise; environmental collapse and the extinction of our species appears to be a more than plausible prospect. A sense of impending apocalypse deepens.

And that is what we have in these three satires centred on the Fox: the poet Rutebeuf's Renart le Bestourné (‘Reynard Transformed’), the anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart (‘Reynard Crowned’) and Renart le Nouvel (‘The New Reynard’) by the probably pseudonymous ‘Jacquemart Gielée’.

Characterising people as animals – and depicting beasts as acting like people – is hardly novel (or entirely unsound when humans are of course apes), so there was nothing outlandish when, for instance, in 2022, with British Prime Minister Johnson under threat of being ousted in the wake of his lying to Parliament, his supporters launched a campaign to ‘Save Big Dog’. In the same year the Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo satirised the fall of Robert Mugabe in Glory, a novel inspired by Orwell's Animal Farm and set in the animal kingdom of Jidada, where after a forty-year rule the “Old Horse” is ousted in a coup along with his despised wife, a donkey named Marvellous.