The Bestiary of Love of Richard de Fournival
In the mid 13th century a canon of Amiens turned the bestiary into a love letter: Richard de Fournival, memory and the animals of the lover.
Can a bestiary speak of love instead of salvation? In the mid thirteenth century Richard de Fournival, chancellor of the cathedral chapter of Amiens, answered yes and proved it with a surprising work, the Bestiaire d’amours. Written in French prose, the text presents itself as a long letter to a lady: the author uses the ‘natures’ of animals, inherited from the Physiologus tradition, not to illustrate theological truths but to describe his own state as a lover and persuade the woman to return his love.
A cleric between science and poetry
Richard was born in 1201 and was the son of Roger de Fournival, physician to King Philip Augustus. He was a churchman, but also a poet in the langue d’oïl, the author of love songs and of writings on science. He is also remembered for the Biblionomia, the ordered catalogue of an ideal library, or perhaps of his real book collection, which reveals very broad interests, from philosophy to medicine and astronomy. He died around 1260.
This profile helps us understand the Bestiaire d’amours. Its author knew the Latin bestiaries and the culture of the schools well, but he was writing for a courtly audience, used to the poetry of the trouvères and to the subtleties of courtly love. The result is a hybrid text, which keeps the form of the bestiary, with its natures and interpretations, but radically changes its addressee and purpose.
Painting and speech, the two doors of memory
The prologue is a small theory of knowledge. God, says Richard, has given man memory, and memory is reached through two doors, sight and hearing. Painting corresponds to sight, speech to hearing. That is why the book unites text and images: whoever looks at the pictures and reads the words can make present what is far away, just as the lover would like to be present in the memory of his beloved.
The idea, much admired by modern scholars, explains why manuscripts of the Bestiaire d’amours are almost always illustrated. The miniatures are not ornament, but an integral part of the argument. In the finest manuscripts each chapter opens with the figure of the animal, which the reader meets even before the text, just as the theory set out in the prologue required. Image and word work together to imprint the amorous argument on the memory.
The lover’s animals
The examples are cleverly chosen. The wolf, according to an ancient belief, takes away the voice of the man it sees first; so the lover, seen by the lady before he could speak to her, has lost his speech. The cricket sings until it forgets to feed and dies singing; the swan sings most sweetly near death. The unicorn, captured only by the scent of a virgin, becomes the image of the lover overcome by the sweetness of the woman he loves.
The game had a curious sequel. A Response to the Bestiary, by an anonymous author and written from the lady’s point of view, takes up the same animals to reverse their meaning: the natures of the beasts become arguments for prudence, with which the woman defends herself against flattery and warns against the suitor’s deceptions.
Richard de Fournival’s work shows how widespread the language of the bestiaries was in thirteenth-century culture. If a cleric could use it for an amorous skirmish, readers of both sexes must have known its figures by heart. The bestiary had become a common repertory of images, able to serve the sermon as well as poetry.