Includes a transcription of the Renart le Bestorné by Rutebeuf, along with a prose English translation and commentary.

Naturally enough, many unsolved questions concerning the thirteenth-century omnium-gatherum, traditionally known as the poems of “Rutebeuf,” cannot be satisfactorily treated in a single article. The present study is therefore limited to the one poem, Renart le Bestorné, which, in fewer than eight hundred words, seems to shed as much light as any other separate text on Rutebeuf’s role as the leading columnist-poet of his day. It is, of course, needless to insist again on the importance of the Rutebeuf repertory on religious institutions, state politics, the University of Paris, and the last few crusades. So far as the general Rutebeuf problem is concerned, this study will only summarize a few tentative hypotheses to be defended or modified in the light of further researches. Professor Alfred Foulet has called Renart le Bestorné the most compact, the most vigorous, and also the most obscure poem now attributed to Rutebeuf. It is consequently desirable to reedit and translate the text, as a preliminary basis for discussion of a new interpretation of the author’s special purpose. The three manuscripts which preserve Renart le Bestorné are all in the fonds français of the Bibliothèque Nationale: 837 (A) [Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 837], 1593 (B) [Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1593], 1635 (C) [Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1635]. The critical edition which follows is based on C, as in Jubinal; but, at the same time, it should be added that the version in B is interpolated in a fifteenth-century handwriting which appears elsewhere neither in B nor in any other copy of Rutebeuf. - [Author]

Language: English