Reading Literary Animals

Medieval to Modern

Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, Jane Spencer, Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, Jane Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351603911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria e natura

Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.

Part I

Testing Metaphor

1 Entities in the World

Intertextuality in Medieval Bestiaries and Fables

Carolynn Van Dyke

And in the Song of Songs, “Catch us the little foxes that spoil the vineyards” … And David in Psalm 62 said, “They shall be prey for foxes” … Physiologus, therefore, spoke wisely of the fox.

Physiologus

Always the fox will remain the fox.

The History of Reynard the Fox

Medieval literature is not known for verisimilitude or originality. The early medieval beast book excerpted in my first epigraph presents not a depiction of foxes but biblical references to them, and that text was emulated by hundreds of others over five centuries. Fables, another important animal genre, relate and recycle stories from “Romulus” or “Aesop.” And the narratives in bestiaries and fables, usually unrealistic in themselves, are accompanied by reiterated doctrinal or moral applications to human behavior. If “intertextuality” names the recognition that “there is always language before and around the text,” as Roland Barthes writes (30), the animal literature of the Middle Ages is undeniably intertextual.

Indeed, its intertextuality is especially conspicuous. The intertextual connections of modern texts can be implicit and unmarked, masked by the convention of independent authorial agency. In contrast, the producers of medieval beast books defer often and openly to sources and authorities—particularly to that supreme pre-text, the Christian Bible. Modern readers might be excused for thinking that such deference constitutes the textual inbreeding described by Catherine Belsey, a condition in which texts “signify by means of their relationship to each other rather than to entities in the world … reflect[ing] the order inscribed in particular discourses, not the nature of the world” (43).

But her advisedly polemical formulation acknowledges its complement: that readers sometimes believe that literary discourse refers beyond itself to “entities in the world.” That is especially likely when the discourse in question centers on entities “animated (animare) by life and moved by spirit” (Isidore 247; 12.1). In what follows, I will argue that openings to “the world of nature” (to invert Belsey‘s phrase) complicate and even subvert the exegetical, metaphoric, and analogical conventions of medieval bestiaries and fables. As Reynard declares at the end of Caxton’s History, accumulated refiguration does not entirely denature the fox.

Physiologus: Framing the Bestiary

Scholars agree that medieval bestiaries were produced predominantly in England, in Latin, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Beyond those matters, consensus is elusive. Counts of surviving bestiary manuscripts range from 50 to over 120 (Baxter 226; Clark 93), and estimates of the total number produced vary commensurately (Baxter 226; Buringh 504). One scholar believes bestiaries to have been “extraordinarily popular”; another refers to “moderate, not outstanding success” (McCulloch 44; Clark 93). More fundamentally, commentators hold different assumptions about what counts as a bestiary (Clark 10). To permit meaningful comparison and analysis, leading bestiary scholars limit the term to those medieval beast books demonstrably related “[b]y lineage, form, text, and images … to the Latin Physiologus”—that is, to a “Christian animal book … written most likely in the second century at Alexandria” and known to the Latin West by the fourth century (Clark 104 and 8; similarly Baxter 29 and George and Yapp 5). But scholars differ about the relationships among Physiologus manuscripts and about the degree to which bestiaries reflect those manuscripts (Clark 9nn.16 and 18; George and Yapp 6). Thus it may be surprising that we continue to discuss “the Physiologus” and “the bestiary” in the singular. Even Ron Baxter, who criticizes the notion of “a discursive unity called ‘The Bestiary’” (22), treats bestiary texts collectively more often than individually.

In defense of that practice, I submit that Physiologus manuscripts signal their collective intertextuality by retaining a uniform structure and citing a common ancestor. That is especially true of the most influential strands of Physiologus, known as the Y and B versions (Carmody, Physiologus … B and “Physiologus … Y”). Segments or “chapters,” one for each beast, consist of scriptural references, a description or natura, and Christianizing explications or moralizations. More notable is their frequent citation of a single eponymous source. Many animal descriptions relate what “Physiologus dixit de eo (says about it),” and many chapters end with some variant of “Physiologus, therefore, speaks well.”¹ Thus the same name—“which might be translated as ‘Natural Philosopher’ or, less succinctly, ‘he who speaks of nature’” (Clark 8)—designates both the original author and each successive recension of his work. We might imagine an endless series of self-replications.²

Of course, manuscripts are necessarily unique, and some variations in what “Physiologus says” are of more than philological interest. In particular, a given animal may be rendered somewhat differently in the two main versions. The ibis is always called “unclean,” following Leviticus 11.17, but manuscripts in Physiologus B include a plausible explanation: the bird cannot swim and thus feeds on decaying backwash near the shore (Carmody, Physiologus … B 27; compare Carmody, “Physiologus … Y” 114–115). Regarding another creature, the B compilers specify what has become the best known source of the siren’s deadly power, the seductive sweetness of its song.³ For its part, Physiologus Y includes a sociological detail absent in B: it compares the duplex onocentaurus (ass–centaur, from Is. 34.14) to wicked negotiatores (merchants or bankers) (Carmody, “Physiologus … Y” 114).

Such differences appear only to readers with access to more than one Physiologus text, but they rest on a feature fundamental to all versions: inventiveness in the scriptural exegesis and moralizations. Even biblically trained readers must sometimes have been surprised at the prolific scriptural references—five or six citations in the short fox chapter, for instance, and a dozen or more connections in the B version between biblical verses and the features and colors of the dove.⁴ Apparent to all readers would have been the ingenious analogies for animals not named in the Bible. Opening the phoenix chapter, the authors of both Physiologus versions paraphrase John 10.18: “I have the power to lay down my life, and I have the power to take it up again”—a succinct prolepsis of the upcoming narrative (Carmody, “Physiologus … Y” 108). In one of several chapters devoted to stones, the scriptural connection is equally apt but initially startling. Following Pliny, Physiologus Y writes that a sindicus (Indian-stone) will absorb the “foulness” from a man with dropsy and then discharge foul water several hours later. “The stone,” the author declares, “is our lord Jesus Christ,” who descended because we were “dropsical” with the “devil’s waters” in our hearts. The author follows with “and he himself bore our infirmities,” a paraphrase of Matthew 8.17 (Carmody, “Physiologus … Y”, 122). At least for a modern reader, the number and ingenuity of such allegorizations overshadows their biblical and moral lessons.

Some scholars regard such variations as incidental to fundamental exegetical patterns. For Baxter, in particular, the sequence of Physiologus chapters suggests “a structured treatise on virtue and vice” (xiii, 37, and 89), and within chapters, “the first, or literal, section … tends to include passages from the Old Testament while the second, or moralizing, section relies on the New” (Baxter 33). But there are abundant exceptions to both proposed patterns.⁵ Old and New Testament citations intermix even in the “literal” description of the lion, which opens Physiologus (Carmody, “Physiologus … Y” 103). And many Physiologus beasts might be labeled both virtuous and vicious. The unclean ibis of the B branch later merges with other winged creatures presented as exemplary because they fly by making the sign of the cross. The fox, initially identified as the Devil and Herod, is given an attribute of a natural creature: unlike Christ, it has a den (Carmody, Physiologus … B 27–30; Matt. 8.20, Luke 9.58). Notably, Physiologus acknowledges such inconsistency and generalizes it. “But perhaps you say that because the caladrius is unclean according to the law [Deut. 14.18],” writes the Y compiler,

how can it represent the person of the Savior? The serpent is unclean, yet … is said to be rather wise [in John 3.14]; similarly with respect to the lion, and many others. And the creatures are twofold, praiseworthy and blameworthy.

(Carmody, “Physiologus … Y” 106; also, Carmody, Physiologus … B 16).

The inconsistency is itself significant. Variably allegorized, the ibis and fox are independent of any single textual representation but rich in interpretive potential. Collectively, the animals signify primarily that the material world holds unlimited meaning. Taking warrant from Romans 1.20—“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that he has made”—early Church Fathers including Augustine of Hippo spoke of a book of nature whose revelations parallel those of scripture (Kay 475–476). In a commentary on that verse, the twelfth-century monastic Hugh of Saint Victor outlines an “ascending order of knowledge,” in which the three aspects of earthly creatures—their “immensity” (“multitude and magnitude”), their “beauty” (“placement, motion, species, and quality perceived by the senses”), and their “usefulness” (“pleasing, apt, convenient, and necessary”)—lead upward to the “invisible power, wisdom, and mercy (or goodness)” of God (Migne 176: 811C–811D; Rorem 63). But then, adds Hugh, “following or imitating God’s own order of creating, ‘we proceed returning [downward] first from the wisdom of God to the rational creature, then from the rational creature to the corporeal creature’” (Migne 176: 835A; Rorem 64). Revelation arises from and returns to the singulae creaturae—the particular creatures—in their multiplicity and variety (Migne 176: 814B). Physiologus leads readers on a congruent path: from the “unclean,” shallow-feeding ibis, upward to a spiritual understanding of shallowness and depth, then back to the bird’s posture in flight. It is an overdetermined bird, heavily textually mediated, but the interpretations presuppose its extratextual reality. The intertextual discourse of “Physiologus” is directed and shaped by reference to “entities in the world.”

Bestiary Metaphorics: Ways of Seeing the Partridge

Physiologus was expanded in overlapping stages whose relationships have been variously categorized (Baxter 25–27, 84–99, and 127–128; Clark 9–13). The “mature” Latin bestiaries of the twelfth century, generally classified as “Second-family,” contain more than twice as many chapters as the longest Physiologus (Clark 9–11; McCulloch 34). The added material comes primarily from three sources with different aims and principles: largely unmoralized animal descriptions in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, a seventh-century Christian encyclopedia; an earlier non-Christian encyclopedia by Julius Caius Solinus, itself based on Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis; and “Saint Ambrose’s [fourth-century] Hexameron, an exegetical account of the things of Creation” (Clark 9).⁶ Clark’s admirable documentation reveals an ad hoc intermixture of borrowings, suggesting a “clip and paste” procedure (Clark 40). The result is, on the one hand, an increasingly derivative text, consisting largely of quotations from ancient and patristic sources. On the other hand, each addition confirms the importance of knowing about animalia—collectively or individually, real or (less often) imagined.

The nature of that knowledge has been subject to dispute. Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp claim that much bestiary information about beasts and birds is accurate; they argue that “it can hardly be said that these later [Second and Third family] English bestiaries could have had any other function than to teach natural history” (28 and 8). Few other scholars have found their evidence for accuracy persuasive, but George and Yapp rest their case also on differences from Physiologus noted by others: reduction in scriptural quotations (6), the addition of “European and domestic animals” to the exotic beasts that dominate in Ph...