The Roman de Renart is a crossroads work where multiple influences intersect. It stretches its roots towards a complex ancestry and it uses diverse elements that come from both Aesopian fables and later texts, such as the Latin translations of the Alexandrian Physiologos or the Ysengrimus of the Flemish monk Nivard. Among all these ancestors of the French animal epic of the 12th century, one text caught our attention: the anonymous Ecbasis cuiusam captivi per tropologiam. This poem of leonine hexameters had everything to please us because the many critics who have commented on it over the past one hundred and fifty years have regularly assigned it Lorraine origins and, more precisely, Toulouse.

Language: French