Robert Gobin, Les Loups Ravissans

Robert Gobin's prosimetrum, Les Loups ravissans, reports an Acteur's dream vision of New Year's Eve 1505, in which Saincte Doctrine, as a saintly shepherdess representing "nostre mere Saincte Eglise" refutes Archilupus, leader of a band of ravenous wolves, "qui est le dyable d'enfer, et nostre Ennemy". First published in Paris by the renowned libraire Anthoine Verard, the text is called a "doctrinal moral", and it is framed as a grammar manual modeled on Alexander de Villa Dei's Doctrinale. In it, Archilupus, master rhetoriqueur, turns grammar into subversive lessons and scathing examples that entice his pupils by their dazzling French verse. Only Saincte Doctrine can rectify his perversions of Christian moral teaching through ponderous prose, buttressed by extensive Latin citations from religious authorities, Gobin having been a priest and canon lawyer. Archilupus is necessarily vanquished and slain at the end of the prosimetrum, and in an ensuing danse macabre, composed entirely in verse, humans who imitate the wolves are punished according to their sins, inescapably propelled by Accident and Death toward the Last Judgement. For his editio princeps of Gobin's text, Verard commissioned two sets of striking woodcuts, and almost immediately three different printers copied the danse macabre illustrations for use in their books of Hours. Crystallizing multiple strands of literary, religious, political, and artistic traditions into a vast critique of human actions and institutions in early Renaissance France, this critical edition of Gobin's Loups ravissans is accompanied by a study of the text, its illustrations, printing history, and influence.