Roman de Fauvel

The romance features Fauvel, a fallow-colored horse who rises to prominence in the French royal court, and through him satirizes the self-serving hedonism and hypocrisy of men, and the excesses of the ruling estates, both secular and ecclesiastical.

The antihero's name can be broken down to mean "false veil", and also forms an acrostic F-A-V-V-E-L with the letters standing for the human vices: Flattery, Avarice, Vileness, Variability (Fickleness), Envy, and Laxity.

The work is reminiscent of a similar tract in the 13th-century Roman de la Rose, though owes more to the animal fabliaux of Reynard the Fox.

146) is a splendid work of art with illuminations by the painter known as the maître de Fauvel [fr], as well as being of considerable musicological interest due to interpolations of 169 pieces of music, which span the gamut of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century genres and textures.

Fauvel though he is a horse no longer resides in a stable, but is set up in a grand house (the royal palace in fact)[8] by the grace of Dame Fortune, the goddess of Fate.

Fauvel agrees, and the wedding takes place, with such guests present as Flirtation, Adultery, Carnal Lust, and Venus, in a technique similar to that of the Morality plays of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Finally, Dame Fortune reveals that Fauvel's role in the world is to give birth to more iniquitous rulers like himself, and to be a harbinger of the Antichrist.

[3][13] In 1316–7 Chaillou de Pe[s]stain (a still unidentified member of a family of bureaucrats)[14] augmented this text with an additional 3000 verses spanning both books (1800 lines of which are spent on Fauvel's wedding).

While these pieces were once thought of as arbitrarily selected repertory for textual "accompaniment",[19][20][21] recent scholarship (such as "Fauvel Studies" and Dillon's "Music-Making")[22] has tended to focus on the ingenious intertextual/glossing role(s) played by musical notation – both visual and aural – in augmenting and diversifying the (political) themes of Gervais' admonitio.

[23] Amongst other curious discoveries are the inclusion of numerous "false" chants (Rankin) interspersed between actual liturgical material, perhaps a direct musical play on the deceptive qualities of its equine trickster.

[21] Modern performance projects, live and recorded, based on the BN 146 manuscript of the "Roman de Fauvel", involving text, music, and at times staging or semi-staging, have been created by the Studio der Fruehen Musik, the Clemencic Consort, and The Boston Camerata, among others.