{"id":571,"date":"2022-07-17T20:40:52","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T03:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/?p=571"},"modified":"2022-07-17T20:40:54","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T03:40:54","slug":"bestiaire-damour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/571","title":{"rendered":"Bestiaire d&#8217;amour"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The <em>Bestiaire d&#8217;amour<\/em> or Bestiary of Love is not a traditional bestiary. It has bestiary animals doing bestiary things, but it has a much different purpose. Where the traditional bestiary is a tool for teaching Christian morality, the <em>Bestiaire<\/em> is a desperate attempt by the author, Richard de Fournival, to win the love of a lady. It is a peculiar concept, radical for its time: A merging of a religious text with courtly love literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/prisources\/psdetail1132.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/prisources\/psdetail1132.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Richard de Fournival<\/a> was a thirteenth century French writer, poet, songwriter, surgeon and Catholic church cleric. He was also, in modern terms, a misogynistic jerk. In any court today the lady would have no problem getting a restraining order against him. We don&#8217;t know who the lady was, but she wrote a spirited Response to Richard&#8217;s <em>Bestiaire<\/em> in which she made her distaste for his advances very plain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are around 24 manuscripts currently known which contain the <em>Bestiaire<\/em>; four of them also contain the lady&#8217;s Response. The text is in one of the dialects of Old French, in prose, though Richard did produce a version in verse. Most of the manuscripts are illustrated, and manuscript images have been loaded for three of them so far:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/manuscripts\/manu4605.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/manuscripts\/manu4605.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, fr. 00412<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/manuscripts\/manu103958.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/manuscripts\/manu103958.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, fr. 12469<\/a><\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/manuscripts\/manu2533.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/manuscripts\/manu2533.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 308<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a new and fairly long article on <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/prisources\/psdetail1132.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/prisources\/psdetail1132.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Richard de Fournival<\/a> and his <em>Bestiaire<\/em> in the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"\/primarysrc.htm\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/primarysrc.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Encyclopedia<\/a>, with samples of the text from some of the manuscripts and excerpts from an English translation of both the <em>Bestiaire<\/em> and the Response. There is also a surprisingly large bibliography; lots of people have written about the <em>Bestiaire<\/em>, often from a feminist viewpoint. The Bestiary Family French page has also been updated with a list or the <em>Bestiaire<\/em> manuscripts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This update is almost entirely about Richard, the <em>Bestiaire<\/em>, the lady and the Response. There are a few changes in other areas, and several corrections here and there, but little other unrelated new content. Finding and entering all of the data for this update was a big, time-consuming job, and I am now very tired of Richard, so I won&#8217;t be adding much more about him for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The next update will be mainly structural and functionality changes to the site itself; there are several areas I am not yet satisfied with. Of course I will probably sneak in some new content along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Bestiaire d&#8217;amour or Bestiary of Love is not a traditional bestiary. It has bestiary animals doing bestiary things, but it has a much different purpose. Where the traditional bestiary is a tool for teaching Christian morality, the Bestiaire is a desperate attempt by the author, Richard de Fournival, to win the love of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatsnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}