num_pages: 576
description: The twelfth-century Latin beast epic Ysengrimus is one of the great comic masterpieces of the Middle Ages. This long poem composed in what is today Belgium recounts the relentless persecution of the wolf Ysengrimus by his archenemy Reynard the fox in the course of which the wolf is beaten to a pulp flayed (twice) mutilated and finally eaten alive by sixty-six pigs. The cartoon-like violence of the narrative is not motivated by a gratuitous delight in cruelty but by a specific satiric aim: the wolf represents the hybrid ecclesiastic who is both abbot and bishop whose greed is comparable to the wolfs. The details of the narrative are carefully crafted to make the wolfs punishment fit the abbot-bishops crime creating a topsy-turvy world in which the predator becomes prey. In the elaborate rhetorical fantasies that accompany the narrative the wolfs tortures are represented as honors (for example his flaying is mockingly represented as an episcopal consecration). This poem gave rise to a whole body of narratives beginning with the earliest branches of the Romance of Renard and extending into most of the European vernaculars so influential that the name Renard eventually became the standard word for fox in French.
language: English
title: Ysengrimus
publisher: Harvard University Press