RENART, ROMAN DE
. The twenty-six “branches” of the Roman de Renart were composed by some twenty
authors of varying talent between ca. 1174 and 1250. This episodic narrative in
octosyllabic verse has come down to us in thirteen major manuscripts. Ceaselessly
modified by oral and written transmission, it is a fluid work that reflects the constant
interaction of language, imagination, and reality—so much so that its component parts
are difficult to date with precision. It is possible to identify three principal collections,
differing in organization, content, and length. To designate the parts of each collection,
the term branche is used. Each episode grows from the main Renardian trunk like the
branch of a tree, and one can sense here a bit of mischievous fun, for until its use in the
Renart, the comparison had been found in religious and moral literature to designate the
good qualities flowing from a cardinal virtue or the vices from a mortal sin.
The earliest branches (II and Va; ca. 1175) show the trickster Renart the fox impelled
by an all-devouring hunger, both physical and sexual, triumphing over such opponents as
Tibert the cat, Chantecler the rooster, and Tiecelin the crow. They also narrate Renart’s
rape of the she-wolf Hersent, the cause of the enmity between Renart and Isengrin the
wolf. Branches I and la recount the consequences of these actions, whereby Renart is
summoned to judgment at the court of Noble the lion. Branch IV (ca. 1177) tells the
delightful tale of Renart and Isengrin in the well. Other early branches, composed 1180–
90, develop the themes of these first branches into a lighthearted parody of contemporary
society. Seven branches composed between 1190 and 1205 round out the beast epic;
similar in spirit but introducing new episodes, they present a full picture of contemporary
peasant society. A series of ten later branches (1205–50) is inferior in inspiration, full of
contradictions, and tending toward heavy-handed satire.
Renart is the man-beast of unbridled violence and sexuality; like the bear and the wolf,
he symbolizes the destructive forces at work in creation; he incarnates the primitive
forces of nature, which, goaded by voracious physical and sexual appetites, violate and
mutilate both animals and men. Beyond these mythemes, one finds, in the movement
from orality to textuality, a folktale structure, as in the episodes with Tibert the cat. But
the cultured clerics who first wrote down these tales, only a few of whom—Pierre de
Saint-Cloud, Richard de Lison, the Priest of La Croix-en-Brie—we know by name, have
also drawn from French and Latin literary sources (Aesop’s fables in prose and verse,
Ecbasis captivi, and especially Ysengrimus). Renart has close ties to the Tristan material,
which likewise uses division into branches and whose hero, also a trickster, is in the same
triangular relationship with Iseut and his uncle Mark as Renart is with Hersent and his
uncle Isengrin. In Branch XIII, the animals search for Renart in the castle in a scene
reminiscent of Chrétien’s Yvain; in other branches, they go on pilgrimage to the hen
Pinte’s tomb as they do to Muldumarec’s in Marie de France’s Yonec; and the fox and
the wolf wage war on one another like the feudal barons of the chansons de geste; Branch
IX ends in an apocalypse of the chivalric world reminiscent of the Mort Artu.
The Encyclopedia 1495