King, Reynard has done me so much wrong that even if all the cloth woven in Ghent were parchment, it wouldn’t be enough to write it all down!” They are serious charges made by one baron against another, culminating in a rhetorical climax, “Mr. According to Isengrim, the fox had urinated on his children and, worse still, assaulted his wife. King Noble’s court has only just begun to hear the first grave accusations made by Isengrim the wolf against Reynard. Here, dear to Flemish hearts, is a short scene with the little dog Cortois. According to the charismatic priest, poet, teacher and public intellectual Anton van Wilderode (1918-1998), the Reynard story was actually a “mirror of the Flemish soul”, a heroic epic about the ordinary man who must stand up to the elite and those in power. In Flanders, far more than in the Netherlands, one grows up with Reynard. In it, Van Oostrom shows how it was that the world’s most famous fox became so embedded in Flanders’ collective memory. We present an excerpt adapted from De Reynaert. Living with a masterpiece), in which he also ties the animal epic to his own career in Middle Dutch literature. Why has this story remained so popular for centuries? And how have so many textual researchers set about getting their teeth into the fox’s adventures? That is what medievalist Frits van Oostrom examines in his book De Reynaert. No other Middle Dutch text has meant so much to so many as Van den Vos Reynaerde (variously retold in English as Of Reynaert the Fox, Reynard the Fox and The History of Reynard the Fox, etc.), a dramatic literary cycle about the relationship between the individual and society, written by the otherwise unknown author Willem.
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