A Church of Fur, Feathers, and Scales: Thoughts on the Religious Nature of Bestiaries

So, once again I have mooched a paper I wrote for another class for a post on WPTL. This one is actually all about bestiaries and also includes some of the information I talked about in my presentation. So it really ought to be on ze blog. Admittedly, I'm not altogether pleased with it... I think there are some details on which I should have elaborated more but would have added considerable length to an essay that is only supposed to be five pages. Hopefully I will be able to do some more research and write another post about what I think I missed in this one.   

Enjoy! 

-mw

Among the vast collections of illuminated medieval manuscripts that have survived centuries of fire, flood, war, decay, and even the work of hungry monastery mice, it is arguable that the content and artwork of most of these manuscripts is religious. They fall into a number of sub-categories such as Gospel Books, Psalters, Books of Hours, Liturgical Manuscripts, Beatus Manuscripts, and Bibles. Lavishly decorated, carefully illuminated, and painstakingly inscribed, manuscripts were highly expensive objects made for members of society’s higher echelons: royalty, nobility, and the upper-clergy. It should come as no surprise that the written-works of medieval people, whose lives so revolved around the teachings, laws, and ritual festivals of the Roman Catholic Church, are dominated by Biblical and ecclesiastical texts. The illustrations that decorate these works, however, sometimes appear to be very secular in nature. The Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320-1340), for example, is a codex containing the Old Testament book of Psalms among other texts pertinent to observing Mass, yet this manuscript is famous for its marginalia, which display fantastic grotesques and rich depictions of every-day life in the fourteenth-century.[1]

 detail from the Luttrell Psalter- apparently the roles here are reversed. Usually women did the gleaning while men gathered sheaves. However this image is often cited as an example of the flexibility of gender roles when it came to manorial labour. Wives helped men in the field and husbands helped women at home. 

detail from the Luttrell Psalter- because hamsters and guinea pigs are so underwhelming in comparison to pet squirrels with bell-collars. 

For their religious content and seemingly non-religious imagery, medieval bestiaries, the subject of this discussion, have been called  “a hybrid case”[2]; a term I would venture is more suitable for manuscripts like the Luttrell Psalter. It is my opinion that the artwork found in bestiaries can be deemed religious in nature, as corresponding to the textual content of the book and reflecting its meaning which is inherently religious.      

Conceived of as products characteristic of thirteenth-century England, bestiaries are books of animals including birds, fishes, and beasts, both real and fantastical, that are presented much like a natural history with an image of each animal followed by a description of its behaviour.[3] What provide a unique perspective into the medieval mind are the accompanying religious moralizations of an animal’s behaviour that function like a didactic tool. But how is it a scribe living in the cold, damp, scriptoria of England’s isolated monasteries would have any idea about exotic animals from Africa and the far East, not to mention those that are completely fantastical? Indeed, he would have no notion of elephants, tigers, and crocodiles unless he read about them elsewhere. The information that we find in bestiaries is sourced from an older textual tradition of studying the natural world. Bestiaries are, in a sense, compendia of ancient and early medieval works that were widely read throughout the late medieval period. An English bestiary may include texts from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, Hugh of Foilloy’s Aviarium, and Gerald of Wales’ Topography of Ireland. Every bestiary, however, relied on a widely distributed source known as the Physiologus, a text thought to have been composed circa second to fourth-century AD in Alexandria.[4] Physiologus is inherently Christian and is the source upon which scribes drew the moral lessons that are attached to the nature of a number of animals found in bestiaries, though not all. For example, according to Physiologus, when the lion detects the scent of hunters pursuing him he sweeps away his tracks behind him with his tail just as Christ, the lion of the tribe of Judah, “hid the tracks of his love in heaven” until he descended into the Virgin’s womb and came into the world as man incarnate.[5]

The textual content of bestiaries may be thus identified as having both secular and religious elements in that it describes the natures of animals and then applies those characteristics to Biblical and moral allegory.

Whether Physiologus’ observations of the natural world were true (and often they lean more to the sensational and fantastic) did not matter so long as the handiwork of God on earth was being expounded upon and revealed through such observations. To a medieval person, the natural realm and all its elements of mystery, wonder, and danger was but an earthly reflection of the celestial, immortal realms; heaven and hell. God as creator of the universe was manifest in all worldly happenings, yet the devil also had a hand in earthly matters, and in bestiaries the natures of the fiercest creatures are attributed to him. For this reason, theologians and clergymen writing on the subject of medieval aesthetics discouraged artists from rendering their subjects in too realistic a style for fear of idolatry, but also to avoid the kind of hubris that might drive man to believe he can improve upon God’s own artifice. In his De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine of Hippo warned against imitating nature too closely lest one should incur the wrath of the True Creator:
“Suppose a painter should depict in colours that rival nature’s…and that another painter should put his hand over it, as if to improve by his superior skill the painting already completed; surely the first artist would feel deeply insulted, and his indignation justly roused.” [6]

St. Augustine’s words give a sense of the reverence and desire medieval people had to uphold the sanctity of nature’s beauty as evidence of God’s power and authority.  The moralizations found in bestiaries correspond to what is a medieval version of what might typically be found in a naturalist’s guide to various species of animals in order to provide a reason for natural phenomena that had not yet been explained by modern zoology. Granted, many of these summaries of animal behaviour are more amusingly dubious than informative. But when the reader of a bestiary is lead to wonder why the fox rolls itself in red earth and feigns death in order to seize and devour the carrion birds that fly down to perch on it, he is told that the fox has the trickery of the devil “who appears to be dead to all living things until he has them by the throat and punishes them.”[7]

Biblical proverbs about animals also lend content from which moral examples can be drawn. MS Bodley 764 says of the dog that its nature is such that it returns to its vomit and eats it again, and signifies those that fall into sin again after they have confessed. This is nearly identical to Proverbs 26:11, “As a dog returns to his vomit so a fool repeats his folly.” In this case the natural phenomenon described is in fact true (albeit disgusting) and is being interpreted in religious terms, such as the medieval person may have been inclined to interpret any occurrence in the world around him or her.  Thus the descriptions of the natures of beasts and their appended religious explanations are part in parcel and should not be viewed as separate entities of thought. For the same reasons, neither should their illustrations be discussed in separate terms.

Although the painters of bestiaries chose to depict a lion sweeping away his tracks rather than an image of Christ, or a fox covered in red dirt with a bird caught in its jaws rather than the devil, such paintings should not be deemed secular in nature since they were created for the purpose of illustrating immanently religious textual content for perhaps a consciously religious outcome, by obviously religious people. There is evidence that suggests bestiaries were transcribed and illuminated by the Cistercian and Augustinian monastic orders to be used for the moral education of members in the monastic community.[8] Scholars have also found that patristic exegesis is commonly deployed in both vernacular sermons and bestiaries.[9] Interestingly, elaborate allegory in sermons to better engage the congregation is said to have been distinctly the fashion in England just as bestiaries, which, as we have seen are highly allegorical, are considered typical of England. The images of the beasts themselves, as parabolic representations trying to communicate a moral behind an animal’s behaviour, perhaps were seen as a way of edifying the religious experience of their beholder but also as being intriguing and new to eyes that were so used to gazing upon Marian imagery, and that of Christ and the Cross. Nevertheless, as images of the natural world and all that was considered God’s creation; indeed, most bestiaries are prefaced with a section relating Genesis and Adam’s naming of the animals, the illuminations found in bestiaries do not so much attest to secular or scientific learning as they evince a desire to understand the world as wholly pervaded by the handiwork of God.

It may be misleading to think of bestiaries and manuscripts like the Luttrell Psalter in similar terms as manuscripts whose contents and functions are two-fold. The Luttrell Psalter is famed for its odd, fantastical marginalia that surround a typical religious text many aristocrats and members of the upper-clergy would have had among their personal possessions. A grotesque on a page of the Luttrell Psalter is often a non sequitur to the text of page on which it is painted and it does seem this manuscript is a "hybrid case" as a bearer of both secular and religious matter. The same cannot be said of the illuminations found in bestiaries. By looking at how the body of text devoted to explaining the behavioural and moral characteristics of an animal is laid out, and how it corresponds to illustration of that animal, we can see that the image acts as a visual representation of the text to both amuse and enlighten the reader. If the text of a bestiary can be said to serve a religious purpose, then the picture elucidating what is happening in the text should also be considered religious, or at least not entirely secular. Although the viewer of a bestiary would not have been humbled by an image of the crucifix, a chi rho page, or a saint’s likeness, earthly beasts and the wildernesses in which they dwelled were just as much a testament to the masterful skill and mystery of God as an enthroned Madonna or a haloed apostle.                           





       

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[1] Janet Backhouse, “Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter.” University of Toronto Press (2000): 12.

[2] Debra Hassig uses this term in her article, “Beauty in the Beasts: A Study of Medieval Aesthetics.” Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (1991): 138.

[3] Richard Barber. “Bestiary: MS Bodley 764.” The Boydell Press, Woodbridge (1999): 7-9.

[4] Ibid, 12.

[5] Ibid, 24.

[6] Augustine of Hippo. “On Christian Doctrine,” Aeterna Press (2014): 83.

[7] Barber, 65.

[8] J. Morson, “The English Cistercians and the Bestiary,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39 (1956): 146-170.

[9] A.C. Henderson, “Medieval Beasts and Modern Cages: The Making of Meaning in Fables and Bestiaries,” PMLA Vol. 97 (1982): 40-49.  

corpora

Once again, this is a somewhat irrelevant post to my professed intention to focus on bestiaries... but I just finished writing a wee assignment for my Art History class that discusses depictions of the human form in classical and medieval art. ARTH 120 is a first year course and this was a small assignment so it is by no means a fourth-year level examination of the subject.

But I put in the time to write it and thought I might as well slap it on WPTL. 

For the sake of drawing a sharper contrast between ancient and medieval art, the most appropriate period to examine in antiquity is the fifth-century B.C. At this time in particular, the philosophical, political, and the artistic spheres of the ancient western world were inundated with new ideas that are very much manifest in various forms of artwork, especially sculpture. The Greeks of course are famous for the polis (civitas in Latin), or the city-state that was not ruled by one autonomous authority or governing body but by the citizens; hence the popular assertion that the Greeks founded the modern democratic system of government. These political developments combined with the philosophical teachings of Socrates and Plato, and the famous ancient Delphic maxim “Know Thyself”, all imply that the ancients cultivated a greater understanding of the man as individual. Art and sculpture, in turn, was moving in a different direction from its archaic motifs that often depicted the gods whose features were frozen in stolid, un-human stances. The human form became the new subject of an artistic movement centred on idealism. Mortal man was soon rendered in impeccable detail that is still breathtaking today but often betrays what is anatomically possible for the human body. The prowess of humanity was extolled in pieces such as Warrior from Riace the intricate details of which show the artist’s desire to create a stark, life-like image of the corporeal epitome of man.  

 ~ dat ass

The curving axis of the statue’s features create an asymmetrical balance know as ‘contrapposto’ that properly emulates natural human posture.  If the warrior was a real man, however, the curvature of his spine is so deeply imbedded in his back that he would be unable to stand. Similarly, Myron’s Discobolis is an example of the desire to capture natural movement and notably in this case, the bodily movements of the virile gymnasium athlete.

Once again, the musculature here is exaggerated even though it would be physically impossible in real life for one to flex all of the muscles Myron has chiselled into the marble. Such was the extent Greek and Roman artists were willing to go to in order to demonstrate physical perfection in their work. This praise of the human form is also a reaction to the military successes of the Greeks during the Persian wars which influenced the cultural shift from a people that relied on the clemency of the gods, to a people reassured and confident in their own will and might. This confidence in humanity so evident in classical art provides an utter contrast to the treatment of the human figure in the art of the medieval era.              

The medieval person, regardless of status or rank, was born and raised in a time where God and moreover, the Church, were not to be doubted or questioned. Recalcitrance against the institution of the Church was seldom ventured, with the exception of a few belligerent kings who earned papal indictment and/or excommunication for their audacity. The head of state and secular representative of God on earth was a divinely appointed monarch. The social and economic facets of society functioned in what modern historians have deemed the “feudal state” or “feudalism” and by nature lumped people into socially constructed collectives leaving them little room to obtain any sense of individualism. The salience of Christianity’s role in the life of medieval people is uncontested. Literary, historical, and artistic primary sources attest to the power of the Roman Catholic Church during this period where high mortality rates dictated that the purpose of life on earth was to prepare the soul for heaven. The human body, then, was merely a vessel to carry the soul until it succumbed to plague, disease, malnourishment, child- bearing, or warfare. The human form in artwork and sculpture was necessary to portray Biblical images but was used as an auxiliary device serving a greater purpose. Such are those figures in the scenes depicted on the doors of Hildesheim Cathedral.

 NB: For those of us who are perhaps unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve, she is grasping the forbidden fruit and offering it to Adam.... not her boob....
That comes later in manuscripts where we get images of Mary spraying people with her breast-milk because it will heal them or something....?!



























Bronze figurines of people found in the Book of Genesis and the New Testament Gospels are cast

with such character in their gestures and expressions that we can imagine they would have effectively

communicated the stories to a widely illiterate laity population. Aesthetically, the figures are rather

crude and ungainly, devoid of any vestige of the formerly strove for proportions and idealism of

classical art. It is even difficult to ascertain the nakedness of Adam and Eve because detail is so

stunted. The piece, however, was not commissioned to exemplify humanity, but to glorify God and

bolster the Church’s reputation. Piety and the spiritual transcended the material, but man, innately

sinful, was subject to the carnal lusts of the human body that was but a temporary cell to house the

eternal soul until life on earth came to an end. The human body was by no means something to be

celebrated, but was seen as a fomenting man's corrupt nature.


This brief discussion of the human figure as portrayed in the art of two vastly different periods has called to question one of the conclusions people often draw when they see the contrasts between medieval and Greek and Roman sculpture. As the successor of the Classical age, which reached an apex of political, philosophical, and cultural enlightenment, the early medieval period has earned the term “The Dark Ages.” Historians deemed it a time when learning ceased, tyrants ruled, and all knowledge of technique and beauty seemed to be forgotten.  Scholars of the Northumbrian and Carolingian Renaissances have refuted this unjust claim on the status of culture in the medieval period, which was indeed flowering with learning. This study has gone to show that it was in fact a shift in worldview; the medieval occupation with spirituality and notion of humanity as a collective, that was responsible for a marked change in the human form as it appears in works of art.   

kykvendi

I have yet to write a post that pertains to the reason for which I created this blog (although I've had a long-harboured desire to start one, albeit one devoted to my passion for food, sharing recipes, talking about chocolate a lot etc.). That reason being to study medieval bestiaries! ... in the context of digital humanities which I'm still not sure about but willing to eventually try!

I have never conducted research, nor read up on bestiaries much at all, until choosing to make them my focus for this course. I don't suppose my interest in bestiaries stems from anything more peculiar than what any human being would find intriguing about them. The more illuminated a manuscript is- the more decoration and imagery it contains, is all the more a wonderful an object to behold. Because bestiaries are moral as well as visual tools, most of them bear drawings of the creatures discussed in the text. As inveterately curious beings, we humans have always desired and sought to understand the world around us, including the myriads of creatures who dwell in every ecosystem on earth. I have always been an animal lover and when I was wee(er) I planned on becoming a veterinarian when I grew up! That was until science and math became a plague o'er my existence. But I was (am) the little girl who picked up the tiny broken bodies of birds that got drunk off the fall-fermented berries on our trees and flew into the sky that tragically did not continue through our living room window-pane...  and buried them with all the funerary rites our backyard afforded amidst my own pained ululations. I used to dig up worms, catch frogs and snakes, give them a cute name and then proceed to mercilessly chase my little sister (she is not as fond of the supra dictus) around the yard with them.  When I was five or six my Dad started taking me horseback riding at the Marten's ranch outside of town, and either stupidity, audacity, or naiveté would inspire me to crawl under the corral gate when he wasn't looking and toddle right into the centre of a gathering circle of geldings. I would rub their velvety noses with my little doting hands and giggle when they tried to eat my hair. I have a useless talent for recognizing obscure breeds of dogs and may jump and point in the excitement of spotting an 'irish setter' or a 'lakeland terrier'. Everyone always said I had an odd, disney princessque 'way with animals' and it's true, like many people, I love animals and I believe somehow, they can sense our emotions. It's the only reason I have for why I wasn't trampled by horses in true Svanhildr fashion. Humankind can and has learned a lot from animals or at least has used them didactically- a process that began before antiquity, was carried on into the Middle Ages and very much exists in modern and post-modern culture. This is a notable feature of bestiaries, which provide their audience not only with a description of the nature of an animal (as it was then understood), but moreover with how and what this creature tells us about good and bad which, to medieval folks, was heaven and hell, salvation and sin, ThePopeGod and Devil. But providing actual pictures of the creatures was imperative to the function of bestiaries as a didactic tool. The author of The Aberdeen Bestiary writes that he paints the pictures of the beasts "to improve the minds of ordinary people, in such a way that their soul will at least perceive physically things which it has difficulty in grasping mentally; that what they have difficulty comprehending with their ears, they will perceive with their eyes." This quotation also sounds curiously similar to the purpose assigned to the stain glass windows of medieval minsters and cathedrals all over Europe and Britain...

So what is it about animals that makes them apt subjects for teaching us about morality? Why does Aesop use a lion and a mouse to show that clemency does not go without reward or that one should "treat others as you would have them treat you"? How does Beatrix Potter's "Tale of Benjamin Bunny" teach children to heed their parent's word?

Thoughts?

       

Alphabet Soup

For the final year of my undergraduate degree in Classical, Medieval, Renaissance Studies I am working on a thesis project which is a required course for honours students of this degree. My topic of interest is the lives and ongoings of English country-folk in the Middle Ages as they happened in established manor communities which scholars primarily examine via records that we would recognize as minutes called manor court rolls. These records provide by no means a colourful, detailed view into the lives of medieval peasants- the "unwashed masses", the nebulous et cetera, the 90% comprising the rest of England's medieval population after the upper classes of nobility and royalty- but they have left traceable hints and narrow rabbit-trails for us to follow.

Right now I am working on transcribing some of these documents; court rolls from Wakefield manor in fourteenth-century Yorkshire. I have discovered that trying to read the dirty, smudged, faded medieval latin ink-scrawls of English chancery-hand written by a man who lived in 1346 is comparable to self-flagellation of the brain. I have also discovered that I LOVE IT. 

One of the most pestilential qualities of manor court rolls is that many of the legal terms deployed are obsolete, and therefore demand glossary consultation. They are highly abbreviated, which therefore demands a more specialized knowledge of standardized chancery hand abbreviations. Familiarity with the hand of the scribe is also an issue which involves muffled cursing and swelling incredulity at how the *$%&! this smudge of ink could possible say 'ideo'... 

It occurred to me that these abbreviations, which are a language to be learned in and of themselves, are not unlike our modern acronyms that we use when we are texting or sending quick emails. Granted these are highly informal and I would say their usage serves the ignoble purpose of bastardizing the English language and the gradual deterioration of grammatical understanding in our youth...but I digress....  I remember when I was in high school, before every child over the age of six had a cell phone such as it seems nowadays, MSN messenger was all the rage. Brb was "be right back" (after I make myself some macaroni and cheese or grab a spoon and the jar of nutella). G2g was "got to go" (because my parents told me to get off the computer UGH they just don't understand me and treat me like such a child *rolls eyes dramatically*). Among others were lol, lmfao, ttyl, rofl and our grandparents would look at us and express the same confusion I express when trying to confirm whether "tra. sa." really means traxit sanguinem. 

A few weeks ago, I just had one of these moments with my Grandma Alice, who is interested and quite good at keeping up with social media and makes regular use of her iPhone and iPad. I had confused her, however, in some of our textual correspondences by ending my missives with '<3 '. 

When I finally explained to her what it meant and the picture that it makes, she was very amused and now regularly uses it to end her notes to me! 

Similarly, when I am hastily taking down notes for a lecture and haven't the time to wind over the curvatures of the word "with", I will happily use the medieval scribe's cum denoted by 'c' with a single stroke above it. 

Confiteor

Anybody who knows me well is aware that I am somewhat recalcitrant towards the sundry, ever-quickening, expanding technological trends that permeate the daily lives of we who were born to grow and age through this period of time called "post-modernity."
I myself am aware that as a person who uses technology for her own convenience, pleasure, and ease of labours that would seem herculean without its devices, I am a hypocrite to assert I do not like technology and the idea of its inevitable advancement.

I must confess I have given this blog its name with this recalcitrance in mind. If I am, indeed, to use this space towards the study of medieval bestiaries and perhaps their context within digital humanities, I thought it clever to come up with a title that included both these aspects. I consulted the text of MS Bodley 764, a thirteenth-century English bestiary, and in the section devoted to discussing lions found this statement:

"Their courage is in their breast, their strength in their head. They fear the noise of wheels, but fire frightens them even more."

According to the medieval (who is in fact working from ancient texts), the king of the animal kingdom, the most courageous and strongest of beasts, an exemplary representative of the natural world, is terrified by the two most primitive forms of technology. Mythology tells us the gods refused to share fire (a symbol of enlightenment, advancement etc.) with humankind and that rogue Prometheus suffered an excruciating punishment for his stunt with the fennel-stalk that restored the flame to humankind. The inventing of the wheel forever has a place in colloquial figures of speech as the first form of technology which was also apparently very difficult to obtain, according to the nature of our expression. I for one am also daunted by the prospect of needing to harness HTML, TEI, and other acronyms that I am told wield inexplicable power in order to seriously pursue the humanities.
I would much rather leave these digital flames in the hands of the digital gods and insist the only wheels I employ be those of faithful Rimbert (my bike), whose basket I shall fill with books.

Eala!
me miserum!


So now you know why my blog bears its peculiar name and why any semblance of a wrinkle now on my forehead may deepen into corrugations as this course progresses. Perhaps my outward appearance will soon betray the little old woman who lives inside me.