Ysengrimus

Synopsis

Ysengrimus is a Latin beast epic and mock-epic, a cycle of anthropomorphic fables written in or near Ghent in 1148 or 1149. Its title character is Isengrim the Wolf, a greedy and gullible monk, who is repeatedly deceived, humiliated and finally destroyed by the trickster fox Reynard (Latin Reinardus). Running to 6,574 lines of elegiac couplets, it is the most extensive medieval beast poem in Latin and the first work in any language to give the fox and the wolf the names by which they became known across Europe. The poem is a ferocious satire of the monastic and clerical world of its day, in which the wolf embodies the worldly, avaricious "monk-bishop" and his sufferings are ironically staged as ecclesiastical honours. It is celebrated for its learned, difficult and highly rhetorical Latin and notorious for its extravagant scatological, sexual and violent comedy. Although long comparatively neglected because of the difficulty of its language, it is now regarded as one of the outstanding comic works of the Middle Ages, and it gave rise to the vernacular Reynard cycle, including the Old French Roman de Renart, the Middle Dutch Van den vos Reynaerde and, ultimately, William Caxton's English Reynard.

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Book

Release date

January 1, 1148

Genres

epic poem, beast epic

Cover: Wikimedia Commons · Avianus · Public domain · Source