Force de parole: Shaping Courtliness in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours, Copied in Metz about 1312 (Oxford, Bodl. MS Douce 308)

Summary

Nule forche de parole ne me puet vers vous riens valoir.

Richard de Fournival, Bestiaire d'amours

It is a pleasure to offer Matilda Bruckner this article on Richard de Fournival's delightful Bestiaire d'amours, to honor our forty-year friendship, and to reflect her own interest in animal/human connections expressed in her “Of Men and Beasts in Bisclavret” (1991), continued with her piece on “Beasts” for the 2005 Boston College exhibit Secular/Sacred, and most recently made manifest in the series of events that she organized at Boston College in the fall of 2011 under the rubric, “Animals and the Medieval Imagination.”

Courtliness

Courtliness is a style defined initially in the latter part of the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century by literary works and associated social practices and performances (the rise of heraldry and tournaments, the production of illustrated manuscripts of vernacular literature). It emerges first in particular aristocratic milieux such as the royal court of Anglo-Norman England, the aristocratic courts of Occitania, Champagne, and Flanders, and then spreads to Paris and France (as well as Italy, Spain, Germany, and Crusader kingdoms to the East) – spectacularly in thirteenth-century Arras – and eventually also to wealthy cities such as Metz in Lorraine, an independent Francophone city within the German Empire during the later Middle Ages.