But Reynard has something more powerful still: the rhetorical skill that allows him to be the author of his own story. From easy victims like the bear, Reynard moves on to slightly more challenging opponents like the cat and then to the assembled court, ruled over by the lion, who, as king, has at his disposal the full violence of the state. Each time, however, he escapes through the imaginative exercise of rhetorically shaped narrative. He plays for extremely high stakes, which get higher each time, with more opponents and more evidence clearly stacked up against him. On the contrary, the fascination of watching Reynard at work is to see him move into ever more dangerous situations, and to escape each time. Reynard’s progress from outlaw to royal counsellor is by no means smooth. His enemy, Ysengrimus the wolf, by contrast, starts off as the king’s trusty messenger, and ends up as the humiliated and physically damaged victim in court. The arc of Caxton’s brilliantly coherent narrative is very clear: Reynard starts off as an outlaw to the court and ends up as the king’s most prized counsellor. This may explain why Reynard is so funny it allows us to laugh at the pretensions of the ethical, by observing the operations of ethical sympathy so closely. He is something more interesting: a character who subverts ethics, for instance by provoking such sentiments as pity, but exploiting them to wholly unethical (pitiless) ends. This is not to say that Reynard is simply amoral, as is his rival Ysengrimus the wolf. In the process, we learn how easily desire can rule the imagination. Reynard, by contrast, challenges the notion that we can ever see beyond our own desire, through a central figure whose all-powerful imagination serves nothing but his own relentless self-interest. Aristotelian ethics requires imaginative recognition of pleasure, pain and desire in the other-a recognition that is itself dependent on identifying one’s own pleasure, pain and desire with the experience of someone else. Like earlier medieval animal fables, Reynard contributes to the tradition of narrativized ethics, but in a way that threatens to undo that tradition altogether, by giving a very different meaning to Aristotle’s claim that man is a political animal. These stories ultimately inspired many more adaptions in other Western European languages for the next 250 years and beyond, including William Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox (1481). The so-called “branches” of the Roman de Renart are short narrative sequences in French, composed probably between the 1170s and the middle of the thirteenth century. The continuous narrative characteristic of the Reynard material begins, however, with the The Escape of the Captive (or Ecbasis Captivi, mid-eleventh century) and is greatly developed in the Ysengrimus (1148-49)-an important source for the earliest branches of the French Roman de Renart. The Reynardian stories derive from the much older Aesopian tradition: one of its central stories, the tale of the sick lion, in which the fox tricks the wolf, appears in Aesop. We learn a fundamental truth from these stories: both animals and humans are predatory and self-interested, and will, if necessary, exercise cunning in order to serve their own ends. He exposes the arrogance of the greedy, but even more damagingly the hypocrisy of the “civilized” order. He escapes through brilliant narrative control and intimate, intuitive knowledge of his enemies’ weaknesses. No matter how tight the corner into which Reynard has been backed, we know he will escape. Beast epic presents narratives of dark but vital humor that repeat the same narrative with many variations: its rhetorically brilliant fox Reynard outwits all comers by manipulating their bottomless greed. Beast epic, by contrast, is a group of interconnected narratives, set in the court of the lion its single (anti-)hero is Reynard the Fox. do not over eat do not overreach save up for the hard times justice can be rough and ready, so keep clear of the predators). Such stories were used to teach schoolboys both Latin and some common-sense morality into the bargain (e.g. mice, lambs, cocks, foxes, birds, wolves, lions, and frogs). They are small narratives in which animals act and speak, with even smaller morals tacked on at the end of the little stories. Animal fables claim Aesop as their source. Medieval literature abounds in stories about animals, of which there are two main, easily distinguished, varieties: animal fables and beast epic.
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