Gilded psalters dense with painted marginalia. Thick cream wrinkling in a bowl. Honey running from a newly-uncapped comb. Hot cakes sizzling on the griddle. Tangles of bramble, nettle and briar. Eel traps woven in bright green willow. Dusty white roads lined with poplars and perfumed by wildflowers. Guildhalls and windmills and brown-sailed herring fleets. Walled gardens, daisied orchards and wide salt marshes. Waferers and washerwomen and workers in the fields. Courtiers in fur-tipped taffetas and tiretains. Warehouses stacked with bales of raw wool, quays with baskets of fresh-caught fish, and cellars with barrels of the best red wine. Luxuriating in the writer’s words and unstopping the reader’s imagination …
To spend time with Reynard The Fox by Anne Louise Avery is to revel in all these things, and so much more. If you’ve ever thought of the mediæval world as narrow or insular, Reynard will expand your understanding. If you’ve ever thought of the mediæval age as one of unquestioning feudal obeisance, Reynard will open your eyes. Centred upon Flanders, the story rejoices in the reach and grasp of mediæval culture and consciousness, from Avalon to Arabia.
The trees were full hazy with new leaves and the ground with sweet-smelling herbs and flowers. All the birds were singing, singing from coiled nest, from branch, from fence, from river reed and from convent spire; songs which sang of fierce life and the kindly warmth of the sun, of journeys made and of journeys yet to come.
This is a folk tale for grownups, about an anthropomorphic animal world where pageantry and punishment go hand-in-hand and the mood spins like a turned trencher. Political satire and physical retribution are administered with equally sharp-toothed severity, even ferity. Its landscape is one of heath and forest, highways and waterways, gabled towns and mighty stone castles. Its language is as rich and sweet as its confections — onomatopoeic, synaesthetic. It is a summer book of hawthorn blossom and hay-making and a book to be read all year round.
With the art of a born storyteller and the skill of a talented researcher, Anne Louise Avery has crafted and polished the original fable (first produced in English by William Caxton) chased it round with whimsical details, and embellished it with footnotes that are as delightful as they are informative.
I am utterly befoxed.
Reynard the Fox by Anne Louise Avery is published by the Bodleian Library.
2021-22 was an unkind year, and the gift copy I received that Christmas sat unread, despite my longing. It is finally time… and I could not be happier at the opportunity to fall under Old Fox’s spell as the world and I come back to life. xx