page_title: Roman de Fauvel
section_title: Surviving copies
hierarchical_section_title: Roman de Fauvel / Text / Surviving copies
caption_attribution_description: Página do Roman de Fauvel
context_page_description: The Roman de Fauvel is a 14th-century French allegorical verse romance of satirical bent, generally attributed to Gervais du Bus, a clerk at the French royal chancery. The original narrative of 3,280 octosyllabics is divided into two books, dated to 1310 and 1314 respectively, during the reigns of Philip IV and Louis X. In 1316–7 Chaillou de Pesstain produced a greatly expanded version.
  The romance features Fauvel, a fallow-colored horse who rises to prominence in the French royal court, and through him satirizes the self-serving hedonism and hypocrisy of men, and the excesses of the ruling estates, both secular and ecclesiastical. The antihero's name can be broken down to mean "false veil", and also forms an acrostic F-A-V-V-E-L with the letters standing for the human vices: Flattery, Avarice, Vileness, Variability, Envy, and Laxity. The romance also gave birth to the English expression "curry fauvel", the obsolete original form of "curry favor". The work is reminiscent of a similar tract in the 13th-century Roman de la Rose, though owes more to the animal fabliaux of Reynard the Fox.
context_section_description: The manuscript survives that contains Chaillou's expanded version in his own hand (Paris, BN fr. 146), and this is the earliest copy of Fauvel to survive. The dozen or so other extant manuscripts are of the non-interpolated form, and these continued to be copied into the fifteenth century. Chaillou's deluxe manuscript is illustrated with 78 miniatures, and inserts 169 musical pieces, woven into a complex mise-en-page.
caption: Opening page (fol. 1r) from manuscript of Fauvel, BN fr. 146.
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