Reynard the Fox

James Simpson's translation of the late-middle-English version restores Reynard as part of a tradition that extends to Animal Farm. With all new illustrations, "Reynard the Fox is the animal fable's version of Homer's Odyssey" (Stephen Greenblatt).

“"When I read Reynard the Fox for the first time...I instantly knew that Reynard could be enjoyed by everyone over a certain age: the literary pleasures of this work are instantly accessible to all lovers of great narrative...We are all political animals who need to survive, whatever we do. And all of us like laughing. And all of us are fascinated by animals, not least because we are ourselves animals who need to pretend otherwise."”

"The medieval story of the crafty trickster is brought alive in a new translation." -- The Tablet

James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Tyrant, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story that Created Us, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the 2011 National Book Award and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize); Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for both Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England and The Swerve, the Sapegno Prize, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Arcadia—Accademia Letteraria Italiana.

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