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- because hamsters and guinea pigs are so underwhelming in comparison to pet squirrels with bell-collars.
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]
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]
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.
[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.
[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.
There has been talk at the Medieval Codes Project about the idea of creating Medieval Bestiaries for kids. It's my newest million dollar idea. $$$
ReplyDelete