Intertextual and intersonic resonance in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d'amour: Combining perspectives from literary studies and musicology

The Bestiaire d'amour by Richard de Fournival (1201-1259/60) is many kinds of text at once: its title seems to situate it within the bestiary tradition; but its plot belongs to the conventions of lyric poetry. Yet the Bestiaire is prose, a fact that is self-consciously discussed by the narrator, who claims to have lost his ability to compose and to sing love-lyrics and who is sending a prose letter as a last-ditch attempt to win the lady who has so far resisted his advances. While the textual traditions of lyric poetry and animal allegory are juxtaposed and made to resonate with each other, close attention to the Bestiaire d'amour reveals a text in which other discourses are also encoded, suggested in hints and by allusion, so that ideas from music theory, Aristotelian psychology, and Latin poetry are also at play. Most importantly, the present article demonstrates that song and singing are central to the various subtexts of the work and seeks to counter previous under-emphasis on the importance of the musical and the sonic. In doing so, it shows the Bestiaire d’amour to be a subtle meditation on the experience of intertextuality in a literary culture that is both oral and written.