From Beak to Quill

This chapter explores Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour (ca. 1250). It shows that Richard de Fournival maintains his predecessors' association of troubadour lyric with the avian but decouples it from its association with songbirds. In the Bestiaire, the troubadours are quoted in the passage on the hoopoe—a bird not thought of as a songster in medieval typologies. This decoupling of the bond between troubadour and avian song is indicative of a broader delyricization of Occitan lyric in the Bestiaire. If, as the previous three chapters demonstrate, troubadour song was elsewhere hyperlyricized—treated as a sonic event rather than a semantic one—in the Bestiaire, the troubadours are instead inserted into a writerly genealogy, and their poetry transformed into prose.