From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain

Mann (English, University of Notre Dame, emerita) takes a look at animals as topics in British literature in Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English. These range from fables in the manner of Aesop to the work of Robert Henryson in Early Modern England. Mann makes it clear that there are many forms of beast stories: fable, epic, exempla and bestiaries. They are mostly didactic in nature, although some of the most popular contain a healthy amount of social satire. Mann begins with the fables of Marie de France. She continues with Longchamp's Mirror of Fools that will have an echo in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles and in the popular twelfth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. She also follows the irrepressible fox, Reynard, as he migrates into English literature. All the works are discussed in their literary and social context. An appendix gives theories for the identity of Marie de France; others include translations of texts. Researchers will appreciate the two indices, one by the name of the fable and the other a general index. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jill Mann took her B.A. from St Anne's College, Oxford, and her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. After a year teaching at the University of Kent at Canterbury, she took up a Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, where she later became Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. In 1999 she resigned from Cambridge in order to take up an endowed chair at the University of Notre Dame, where she remained until her retirement in 2004. She is the author of Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) and Feminizing Chaucer (2002), and has edited The Canterbury Tales (in the original Middle English) for Penguin Classics (2005). Her long-standing interest in medieval beast literature bore fruit in her dual-language edition of the Latin beast epic Ysengrimus (1987). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.