(d 1260). French trouvère poet and composer. Son of a doctor to King Philippe Auguste of France, and himself a doctor, he became a canon of Notre Dame and in 1246 chancellor. His 18 monophonic songs are remarkable for their variety of structure and subtle musical treatment. He is also of importance for his involvement in the early motet.

Fournival, Richard de (b. 1201). Canon and chancellor of Amiens and canon of Rouen, author of both Latin and vernacular texts. In 1246 he was granted the right to practise as a surgeon. Highly educated, he assembled a remarkable library—described in his Biblionomia—which passed eventually to the library of the Sorbonne.

Fournival's vernacular works include a corpus of songs in the trouvère style and the prose Bestiaire d'amours (mid-13th c.), in which the traditional bestiary material is adapted to become an allegory of erotic love. The material, a blend of conventional didacticism and lyrical subjectivity, is handled with both humour and erudition; the text, richly illustrated, survives in numerous manuscripts. Three other prose treatises on love, the Consaus d'amours, Commens d'amours, and Poissanche d'amours, are of doubtful attribution. Two independent verse redactions of the Bestiaire are known, one of which—surviving only in fragmentary from—may be the work of Fournival himself. The Bestiaire also inspired a continuation in which the lover wins his lady's affections, and an anonymous prose response in the voice of the woman to whom it is addressed, the Response au bestiaire.

[Sylvia Huot]

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