Reynard the Fox

Simpson, James, Edith E. Newman

"Reynard the Fox employs a dark and outrageous sense of humor to puncture the hypocritical authority figures of the 'civilized' order, as the rhetorically brilliant fox outwits all comers by manipulating their bottomless greed. As James Simpson, one of the world's leading scholars of medieval literature, notes in his introduction, with translations in every major European language and twenty-three separate editions between 1481 and 1700 in England alone, the Reynard tales were ubiquitous. However, despite its immense popularity at the time, this brains-over-brawn parable largely disappeared. Now, for the first time in over a century, the fifteenth-century version of Reynard the Fox re-emerges in this rollicking translation"--Amazon.com.