Satire
The popularity enjoyed by the Roman de Renart and the Anglo-Norman version of the Riote du Monde (Z. f. rom. Phil. viii. 275-289) in England is proof enough that the French spirit of satire was keenly appreciated. The clergy and the fair sex presented the most attractive target for the shots of the satirists. However, an Englishman raised his voice in favour of the ladies in a poem entitled La Bonté des dames (Meyer, Rom. xv. 315-339), and Nicole Bozon, after having represented "Pride" as a feminine being whom he supposes to be the daughter of Lucifer, and after having fiercely attacked the women of his day in the Char d'Orgueil (Rom. xiii. 516), also composed a Bounté des femmes (P. Meyer, op. cit. 33) in which he covers them with praise, commending their courtesy, their humility, their openness and the care with which they bring up their children. A few pieces of political satire show us French and English exchanging amenities on their mutual shortcomings. The Roman des Français, by André de Coutances, was written on the continent, and cannot be quoted as Anglo-Norman although it was composed before 1204 (cf. Gaston Paris: Trois versions rimées de l'évangile de Nicodème, Soc. Anc. Textes, 1885), it is a very spirited reply to French authors who had attacked the English.
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Famous quotes containing the word satire:
“What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for the ages has signified cunning, intimating that the state is a trick?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they willthe very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)