The Earliest Branches of the Roman de Renart

The Roman de Renart is one of the most intriguing and influential literary works from the French Middle Ages. Unlike conventional texts with a single author, it is a compilation of numerous semi-independent stories which, it is believed, were composed by numerous authors over a 50-year period beginning in the 1170s. In this volume Lodge and Varty have brought together the half-dozen or so stories, which have traditionally been thought to have been composed first and to have provided the stimulus to further composition in the Renart genre. The text is well-known, but the originality of this edition lies firstly in the fact that the manuscript used has not been edited before, and secondly in the wealth of explanatory material provided: an introduction (containing a linguistic analysis, a citation in extenso of sources and analogues, and a comprehensive bibliography) and a detailed critical apparatus (containing extensive notes exploring the numerous linguistic and philological problems posed by the text, and a complete glossary of the forms occurring in it).