Richard De Fournival
Richard De Fournival was a notable figure from Amiens, France, born on October 10, 1201. He was the son of a physician to King Philip II and had a half-brother who became the Bishop of Amiens. De Fournival held various ecclesiastical positions, including canon and chaplain, while also being authorized to practice medicine as a surgeon. He contributed to the literary world as a trovère, composing poetry and music in the northern dialect of France, with twenty of his poems and six melodies still surviving today.
His literary works include the innovative Biblionomia, a catalog of the Amiens library presented as an allegorical garden representing different branches of knowledge, and the erotic Latin poem De Vetula, which reflects a journey from love to the advocacy of Christian values. However, he is perhaps best recognized for Le Bestiaire d'amour, a work combining the bestiary tradition with courtly love literature, using both real and mythical animals to symbolize various types of lovers. While the text includes elements of misogyny typical of its time, it is also notable for including a response from an anonymous woman that challenges these views. De Fournival's writings exemplify key medieval literary traditions, blending moral allegory with themes of love.
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Richard De Fournival
Poet
- Born: October 10, 1201
- Birthplace: Amiens, France
- Died: March 1, 1259
- Place of death: France
Biography
Richard De Fournival was born in Amiens, France, on October 10, 1201. His father was a doctor who was the personal physician of King Philip II. Both he and his half-brother served in the Church. His half-brother Arnoul held the office of Bishop of Amiens. De Fournival served as canon, deacon, and chaplain of Nôtre Dame d’Amiens; canon of Rouen; and personal chaplain to Cardinal Robert de Sommercote. He was also authorized to practice medicine and received permission from Pope Innocent IV to work as a surgeon.
De Fournival was both a poet and a composer of music. Twenty of his poems and six of his melodies survive today. He composed his poems in the dialect of northern France and thus is classified as a trouvère. Trouvères were poets in the north of France who wrote poetry in the style of the Provençal troubadours, but in the northern dialects rather than in Provençal. In addition to his poems and musical compositions, De Fournival also wrote Biblionomia, which was a catalogue of the library at Amiens and also an allegorical portrait of the various branches of learning. The allegory portrayed nonreligious literature and knowledge in the form of an elaborately constructed garden with separate sections for the different categories.
De Fournival was an innovator and experimenter with literary genres. He was the author of an erotic poem in Latin titled De Vetula. The work is introduced as having been found in the tomb of the Roman poet Ovid and thus written by Ovid. It recounts the poet’s journey from practicing the art of love to rejection of the concept to advocating Christian doctrine. De Fournival is probably best known for his prose work Le Bestiaire d’amour, in which he combined the tradition of the bestiary and the courtly tradition of treatises on love derived from Ovid’s Ars amatoria (Art of Love).
Bestiairies were an extremely popular form of moralizing Christian literature during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. These works were collections of stories about both real and imaginary animals which illustrated human characteristics, both vices and virtues. In his Le Bestiaire d’amour, De Fournival used animals both mythical and real to illustrate different types of lovers. Thus while the work uses the symbolism and the form of the bestiary, its content is that of profane courtly literature. The work, as with many other writings of the period, contains a considerable amount of misogynistic material. In one edition, it is followed by La Réponse de la dame, which is a reply from an anonymous woman and refutes much of the misogyny. Fournival’s Le Bestiaire d’amour offers the reader an excellent example of two important medieval literary traditions: the beast story and the courtly art of love.