1/3/2024 0 Comments Reynard fox latin manuscript![]() The new reading offered in this contribution reveals how Dante chose the most embarrassing and deleterious New Testament loci possible regarding the supposed founder of the Roman Church, where less incriminating passages were indeed available. The most damaging and deconstructive part of Dante’s attack is his delineation of Peter’s psychological type. Here Dante demystifies the doctrines of the two keys and the two swords by both revisiting their New Testament sources and denouncing the specific uses made of them by the decretalists in their deviously concocted anti-syllogisms supporting the pontifical presumption to be endowed with plenitudo potestatis. The deconstructio contained in Dante’s Monarchia, book three, of so-called Petrine primacy was one such attempt, which the present contribution endeavours to analyse. In the early fourteenth century, particularly after the promulgation of the Unam sanctam, many and varied were the calls for a clearer separation between spiritual power and temporal power. 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. ![]() In the elaborate rhetorical fantasies that accompany the narrative, the wolf’s tortures are represented as honors (for example, his flaying is mockingly represented as an episcopal consecration). ![]() The details of the narrative are carefully crafted to make the wolf’s punishment fit the abbot-bishop’s crime, creating a topsy-turvy world in which the predator becomes prey. 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 wolf’s. ![]() 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 twelfth-century Latin beast epic Ysengrimus is one of the great comic masterpieces of the Middle Ages. ![]()
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