Bicorn and Chichevache
Bicorn and Chichevache are fabulous beasts that appear prominently in European satirical literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, serving as vehicles for pointed social commentary on marriage and gender relations. These paired creatures functioned as comic inversions of one another, embodying medieval and Renaissance humor about marital dynamics and the supposed rarity of certain virtues in husbands and wives.
Bicorn is depicted as a fantastical creature—part panther, part cow, with a human-like face—whose diet consists exclusively of kind-hearted and devoted husbands. According to the satirical logic of these tales, because such exemplary husbands exist in great abundance, Bicorn enjoys plentiful nourishment and consequently appears plump, healthy, and well fed, never suffering from hunger. This robust physical condition serves as the story's ironic commentary: the creature's prosperity supposedly demonstrates that devoted, faithful, and accommodating husbands are so common as to provide an inexhaustible food supply.
Chichevache, whose name derives from the French chiche-face meaning "thin face" or "lean face," presents the opposite condition. This equally fantastical creature subsists entirely on a diet of obedient and patient wives. However, according to the misogynistic humor underlying these tales, such compliant and submissive wives are extraordinarily rare, leaving Chichevache in a perpetual state of starvation. The creature is consequently depicted as emaciated, skeletal, and desperately hungry, its gaunt appearance serving as satirical "evidence" of the supposed scarcity of dutiful wives who submit without complaint to their husbands' authority.
These paired creatures thus created a satirical framework that allowed medieval and Renaissance authors to comment humorously—if crudely—on contemporary assumptions about marriage, fidelity, obedience, and the respective virtues and vices attributed to husbands and wives. The humor worked through inversion: by claiming that patient wives were rare enough to starve Chichevache while devoted husbands were abundant enough to fatten Bicorn, the tales both reflected and mocked the gender stereotypes and marital complaints of their era. The enduring appeal of Bicorn and Chichevache in medieval and Renaissance literature demonstrates how fabulous beasts could serve not merely as exotic curiosities but as satirical instruments for social commentary, using the fantastic to illuminate—however unfairly—perceived realities of everyday domestic life.
