"Based on William Caxton's bestselling 1481 English translation of the Middle Dutch, this edition is an imaginative retelling of the Reynard story, expanded with new interpretations and innovative language and characterizations"--Publisher marketing.

A collection of eighteen fables as told by Jean de La Fontaine, including "The Tortoise Who Ran a Race with the Hare" and "The Grapes Hang High for Reynard the Fox."

Bringing together material in English, French, and Latin,this book analyzes the shrewd perceptions about human life and language that emerge from beast narratives. Works discussed include the Speculum stultorum of Nigel of Longchamp, The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, The Fox and the Wolf, and the Moral Fabillis of Robert Henryson.

"A collection of folktales at their absolute best" (Elizabeth Bird, SLJ.com) about a legendary scoundrel, brought to new life through Renate Raecke's lively retelling and Jonas Lauströer's expressive illustrations. Reynard the Fox has been a staple trickster character of European literature since at least the Middle Ages. The tales of his schemes have been told many times, and he always manages to win readers' sympathies. Reynard is a rascal, a ne'er-do-well. While we may suffer from his pranks, at the same time we smile at the shrewd thinking through which he escapes hopeless situations. In this expertly retold version, the classic tales of Reynard's exploits find a new life. They speak to us now as much as ever, for who among us doesn't know a Reynard-like figure in our lives?

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

A collection of animal fables told by the Greek slave Aesop.