The Mediaeval Kangaroo

In place of actual content, I have written a bestiary entry for a kangaroo, as it could have been understood had mediaeval Europe been aware of it.

This is for the class on the mediaeval bestiary that I am teaching to a bunch of year 10 students tomorrow - I will give them this description, without telling them the animal, and have them draw it. The results should go some way to explaining why the crocodile in bestiaries variously resembles a dog, a fish, a large bird and a snake.  And the point is also, of course, that the bestiary entry is really about the meaning of the animal, not (what we would consider) the animal itself.  A large part of the aim of this lesson is to teach them about allegory as a basic tool of mediaeval thought.

They are a very good group - they guessed today what animal 'vellum' was made from based on the name, argued about whether Henry VIII was a Protestant or a Catholic, volunteered the printing press as a possible date/event to mark the end of the Middle Ages then (as a group) came up with good reasons as to why that might be so significant a cultural shift (then one pointed out that we're in the middle of a similar revolution at the moment, re. internet and digital information, completely pre-empting me!), asked spontaneously about several myths of the Middle Ages (how real was King Arthur, did they think the world was flat) and managed to volunteer all of the languages spoken in mediaeval England without prompting.  And when you have the answers "Middle English?" "No, OLD English." "French!"  "No, they spoke French in France," and "Latin", it is very satisfying to be able to say "you are all absolutely correct, here's why".

Kangaroo follows.

Of course, there ought to be a few fanciful etymologies for the name, but firstly that would give it away, and secondly I think even Isidore would be stretched to come up with a Greek+Latin derivation for a word that derives from an English misinterpretation of an Aboriginal phrase.


This creature has the face of a sheep and the ears and fur of a rabbit.  Its tail is still like a log, and it is stiff so that the animal can stand upon it.


Its back is hunched like a hill, and it has hands like a child's, but black.


Its eyelashes are long and thick like a camel's, to keep out sand and dust.   When it is hot, it licks itself like a cat.


The ape gives birth to two children at once, and it loves one while it hates the other; but this creature has always one child older than the other, and loves both equally.  For it feeds each according to its needs, giving the elder one kind of milk from one teat, even while it feeds the younger another milk from a second teat. By this we understand that each man should be taught the Word of God according to his capacity to understand them.  He who is young and innocent is best taught with simple fables and allegories of beasts, but he who knows more of the Lord and can better understand his ways may be nourished on the words of the Fathers of the Church.


When this creature bends its head to eat, it stands upon four legs, and, its head being low to the ground, can see nothing about it, for its eyes are covered by the grasses.  But when it stands tall it can see for many miles, and no predator may take it by surprise.  Thus the devil creeps upon those who bury their heads in gluttony and desire, but those who stand tall and see clearly he cannot surprise.

Three Species of Allegorical Fox

From time to time in mediaeval (and not only mediaeval) art and literature, animals drop by - mostly symbolic ones. By their character and generally understood perceptions of them, they stand in for something or other, often glossed by context. Butterflies and chameleons, whom I discussed a few posts back, are two of the rarer creatures in this little occasional zoo, so their meaning is rather sparse and one-sided. If they were in a dictionary, they'd only have one entry. Creatures like lions, boars, deer and foxes, on the other hand, are more familiar and more common, and often have a range of (sometimes contradictory) meanings. If they were in a dictionary, they would take up a whole column with different definitions.

Or, to hop abruptly to a different metaphor[1]: there is only one species of butterfly, and it is closely related to the chameleon - probably in the same genus. But there are many different species of fox within the vulpes genus. Here are three encountered in my reading today, from just one text[2]:

Vulpes astuta carnivora, or the Sly Devouring Fox, is a subtle threat in that he rarely shows his true self, but desires only to soothe his prey with an innocuous face before bolting it down. If thwarted, may resort to sarcasm:

Ther be nowe oo maner of pepill [a kind of people] that be gret desyuerres [deceivers], [like] as these grete loordes the which taketh giftes and seruices of thoo that hatth neede of theire helpe and euer taketh and euer promisseth and atte the laste they haue but federis [feathers] and woordis, as the foxe seide to the larke. (167, 'Off Disceite')

Cheated out of a satisfying meal, this species may accuse his erstwhile victim of resorting to his own tricks, possibly unaware of his hypocrisy.

Vulpes astuta arguta, or the Clever-tongued Fox, belongs to the same sub-species as the last, but is better known for his smooth tongue and his ability to convince his victim to act in a way detrimental to their own interests. He may then take advantage of the deception to devour his prey, as does V. a. carnivora, or he may seek to deprive them of some other benefit or possession:

Alsoo ther be some strong disseyueres ... [who] maketh to beleve that the swan is blacke[3] and the crowe white, as the foxe didde the ravyn whom he sawe hoolde a peece of chese in his beeke. "Oo birde"[4], seide hee, "what thowe art feire and white. If thowe kowdest [could] synge, thow sholdest passe [surpass] alle birdes." And than he [the raven] reioyssed [rejoiced] hym and openyed the beeke to synge. And the cheese felle fro hym, and the foxe cawght it anon. This is of Ysopeis fablis [Aesop's fables], but the example is noo fable, that siche foxes and siche flatererris [flatterers] berith aweye grete rentes and gret giftes and ... lacketh but oo thyng, as Seneque [Seneca] seith, that is to seye, on to seye trouthe. (167, 'Off Disceite')

Vulpes lasciva dissumulata, also known as the Lusty Brush-tail. A rarer species, of which only the females are seen. Definitely not to be trusted, and motivated primarily by lust for sensual pleasure. These conceal their evil nature not with their words, but with an exceptionally large and luxuriously furred tail. If the tail is pried aside, however, their filthy, stinking underbelly and privy parts may be discerned:

[Flatterers] ascuseth [excuse] and couerith the synnes of theyme that theye wil flatere. And therfore in scripture theye be called tailles, for theye couere the harlotrye [not solely sexual] of the synnes of riche men for some temporel availe. Wherfore theye be likenyd to the tayle of a shee foxe [she-fox] ... for theire deceit and theire trecherie. (197, 'Off Flaterynge')

It seems that I'll have to keep an eye out for more foxes in order to flesh out the species tree! Reynard in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of course, borrows from all these traditions, including the coward, the vermin-in-the-hunting-field and the (literally!) uncovered deceiver, of which we have no representative today. But sadly, he is too much of a hybrid to be properly classified.


[1] It's not mixing if the first one never recurs! Juxtaposed metaphors?

[2] The mirroure of the worlde: a Middle English translation of Le miroir du monde, ed. Robert R. Raymo et al. for the Bodlein Library, Medieval Academy Books 106 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). It's very similar to The Book of Vices and Virtues - enough so that either the French source of one must have been copying the other, or they were both indebted to one common source. Mirroure, however, lacks the butterfly metaphor.

[3] Apparently the author had never visited Australia.

[4] Inverted commas inserted by yours truly, to make the direct speech easier to decipher for anyone less familiar with Middle English.

The unseen butterfly; or, Thoughts on the space between the literal and the allegorical

This is a reflection written for the end of our Mediaeval Body course. It takes for granted a certain definition of 'the mediaeval body', and refers implicitly and explicitly to the class readings over the course of the semester. Consequently, there's no explanation of these references in the course of the essay, and, except for direct quotes (and a reference to The Book of Vices and Virtues, which wasn't on the reading list), nothing is footnoted. To make this more comprehensible for a blog post, I've added a separate set of footnotes, explaining the references. The numbered footnotes are in the original reflection; the lettered ones are just for this post.

The reflection is a response to a quote from Michael Camille: "In this period long before the Cartesian split between mind and body there was much more of a continuum between the two. The body was the receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition. All knowledge, even that of the divine, had to be channelled through the body."

The Unseen Butterfly

The Book of Vices and Virtues describes the liar as “a butre-flye, þat lyueþ by þe aier and haþ no þing in hire guttes but wynd, and at euery colour þat sche seþ sche chaungeþ hire owne”.¹ It is not an isolated image: Lorens d’Orleans’ carefully explicated catalogue of the seven deadly sins is full of references to sinners not merely as animalistic, but almost literally as animals. The lines between what is literal and observable in the world and the allegorical understanding of the literal can be seen to shift and blur in the late mediæval period, sited most strongly on the symbolic interpretation of the body. Camille’s understanding of the body as “receptor and receptable of sensation and crucial in the process of cognition” and of the consequent necessity of channelling “all knowledge, even that of the divine”² through the body is particularly relevant here. The most potent and challenging ideas in the mediæval world, as well as ideas trivial and comic, could be expressed and understood most powerfully – most viscerally – when located on the physical body. Over and over, mediæval writings demonstrate the need to literalise the abstract, in particular to experience it through the body in order to make it understood, to own it or perhaps even to control it.

The observation of real butterflies has little place in Lorens d’Orleans’ allegorical depiction. Such a metaphor today would draw scepticism, because we hold the image of a literal butterfly as a separate naturalistic definition in our minds, and expect a good metaphor to mimic it. There is an echo of appropriateness in the fact that butterflies come in a variety of colours and will instinctively seek out perches against which their particular array will camouflage; but they will not change colour themselves, and neither Lorens nor his audience can possibly have seen them do so. The accepted fact of changing colour, then, was an attribute not of the observable butterfly, but one that belonged to the communal imagination. Lorens’ butterfly is an almost purely allegorical creature, appropriate to the liar because she³ feeds on air – on words – and has no power “in hire guttes” but that same air, her body mutating of necessity to suit her changing circumstances. Other animals to which he compares sinners – pigs, hyenas, mermaids – are described in similar terms. The mundane, exotic and fantastic are all colourful symbols rather than worldly creatures, creatures that inhabit the bestiary rather than pigsty or hedgerow. Lorens’ animals are not products of the literal. His pigs do not behave like mundane pigs, but recall the Gadarene swine “in tokenynge þat glotouns þat leden here lif in glotonye as swyn, þe deuel haþ power to entre wiþ-ynne hem and drenche hem in þe see, þat is to seye in helle”.⁴ They are memorable, repulsive, even amusing reminders of the effect of sin on the sinner. Conversely, the phrasing in which the traits of the animal are applied to the sinner is strikingly literal: almost invariably a metaphor, not a simile. The effect of this is to reinforce the message of inhumanity and degradation that results from each sin described, no less true for being allegorical and unobservable in the real world. The mirroring of the bestial state of mind in the bodies of the sinners thus becomes a way of observing the ‘real’ truth about sinners.

Gerald of Wales^a provides a more literal depiction of bestial human bodies. Claiming true physicality for his werewolves, ox-men, man-women, deformed children and other monsters, he repeatedly invokes his own observations as authority. Insisting on preserving the littera of his account of Ireland’s people, he nevertheless engages with the allegorical when he attributes all these deformities to the moral deficiencies of the Irish.⁵ Similarly, his accounts of individual creatures, though often sympathetic, lend themselves easily to moral allegory reminiscent of Lorens’ depiction of humans reduced by their actions to the level of beasts. He himself glosses his account of the woman who had “bestial intercourse” with a goat, for example, to say that the woman proved herself “more a beast in accepting him than he did in acting”.⁶ The real Irish thus become, via Gerald’s pen, a people whose (supposed) primitive morals and essential foreignness make them fascinating but subhuman, the monsters that live among them simultaneously result, punishment and symbol of their moral state. If Mittman^b is correct, Gerald’s History and Topography of Ireland is, on the one hand, an attempt to externalise and explore his own hybridity, and on the other to recast himself as a member of society by defining an ‘other’ far more monstrous and alien than himself. Accounting for his ambivalent attitude towards the creatures he describes, this suggests that the act of writing was for Gerald both a means to understanding his own mixed-race body and his place in the world, and to use images of the deformed body and mind to manipulate his readers’ understanding of what true otherness meant.

To turn from the sub-human to the divine: the cult of Sainte Foy^c, like that of many another saint, was primarily a practical one. Her physical presence in Conques served to answer the everyday needs of their bodies – assistance with pregnancy, healing or freedom of prisoners. The concern of her flock for their own bodies is matched by the concern they project onto the saint for her ‘body’ - the anthropomorphic jewelled reliquary containing her mortal remains. Bernard of Angers narrates stories of the man who refused to worship her image, and the girl who refused to stand up as it was carried by, together with the punishment inflicted on them by the saint “as if [they] had shown disrespect for the holy martyr herself”.⁷ Bernard’s narration of the village’s direct and practical tales is coloured by his theological education, and his anxiety to demonstrate that the cult conforms with accepted church standards. Close identification of the saint with her ‘body’ is a crucial element in defending Conques from the charge of idolatry: the image is not worshipped as an idol, but for the martyr it represents. The physical form of the statue, though valuable, is understood by the devout to be less important than what it contains and symbolises. While the literal, observable statue is for the villagers a means to access the saint and comprehend her sanctity, it also has the potential to be a distraction. Bernard eliminates this possibility by (literally) incorporating it, isolating it within the story of a man who made that mistake. The fool who wished the statue would shatter in order that he might snatch the fallen jewels becomes an example of wrongful understanding of the relationship between the observable and the mysterious. He is justly punished, bodily humiliated for concentrating on the physical body to the exclusion of the spiritual.

Mediæval attitudes towards death also show a complex interchange between literal and allegorical understandings of the body. Death as a literal experience was never far away from the susceptible body, nor was it distant as a metaphorical realm. According to Camille, “the body was not thought to be truly dead, its spirit separated from the body, until a year after burial. Only when all the flesh had left it and it was nothing, nobody, was it ‘Death’”. The body itself thus bridges an uneasy gap between life and non-existence, a gap which could be transgressed in other ways: the intercession of dead saints for the living via the physical remains of their bodies (such as Sainte Foy), the categorisation of lepers and the religious as ‘dead’ to the world, or stories in which people could walk from the ordinary world into the realm of the dead with their own fleshly feet. The metaphorical death of the leper, priest or nun was enacted on the living body to bring the symbolic as close as possible to the literal. A new monk, for example, was required to close himself for three days in a cloister as Christ did in his tomb, before joining his brothers in his new ‘life’.⁹ More dramatically, a leper’s seclusion office includes hearing mass under a black cloth “after the manner of a dead man, although by the Grace of God he yet lives in body and spirit”, and having a spadeful of earth cast on each foot by the presiding priest in a symbolic burial.¹⁰ All wore clothes physically denoting the special status of their body.¹¹ Similarly, Owein’s journey to Purgatory^d does not appear to be unnatural or impossible. The trials are difficult – many men have died attempting them – but not beyond the strength of a truly virtuous Christian who can keep his mind on his divine guide. Like the pilgrim Dante, he walks from this world into the next in his own body, insisting like Dante on the literal truth of the allegorical journey. Believing the story of either descent requires the capacity to subordinate the observed state of reality to the allegorical, but the potential for a literal interpretation strengthens the emotional effect of the story. Everyday humans do not typically stroll into Purgatory and back; but the possibility of such a literal crossing (even if fantastic) makes death seem perhaps a little more controllable, more understandable.

Owein also confronts the apparent paradox that all the souls he sees are fully incorporated, experiencing horrible torments visited on bodies which they ought no longer possess. This is hardly unexpected, however. Torments inflicted on some incorporeal spirit are difficult to comprehend and carry no power, and would therefore lose any relevance as an allegory. The mediæval spirit, moreover, cannot be satisfactorily separated from the body. Even at the moment of death, the moment of that very separation, it is often depicted wafting from the physical mouth in the shape of a miniature copy of the body it is departing. If the soul is the self, and the self is located in the body, soul and body are inextricable. Any torments visited on the soul must be therefore comprehended through the suffering of that body, even in Purgatory or Hell, with all its leaking fluids, piteous moans and susceptibility to pain and damage. The power of such an allegory can be seen in the accounts of holy women like Christina Mirabilis^e who underwent (or were said to undergo) these pains literally during life, enacting or experiencing in their own bodies in life what they understood to be a literal reality awaiting those bodies in death.

Here, of course, the distinctions between the allegorical and the literal blur into little more than a personal judgement call; as they must, given their overlapping nature. To a culture that believes in the physical reality of Hell, of divine intervention, of the Host changing imperceptibly but literally into flesh, the narrower tag of “observable” is nonsense. But the distinction is important, even if it serves only to demonstrate the relative unimportance of the observable in the mediæval Christian world, a world overlaid with symbolism and ordered by an invisible power. Allegory and physical reality were interdependent: literalisms in allegory served to explain what one could observe literally in the world or in one’s self. What is a real butterfly to that? There were, indeed, truths considered literal that were too mysterious to be appropriate for human observation. Paradise is one: Owein is prevented from entering the final gate because he is not ready. Transubstantiation is another, as Aquinas so painstakingly explains: though Christ is literally there, “since the way [he] exists in this sacrament totally transcends nature, his body can be seen only by God’s own mind and the blessed in heaven with whom he shares the vision. Men can know it in this life only by faith”.¹² And orthodox priests seem to have been horrified at the twelfth-century depiction of the Trinity appearing to Abraham with three heads^f – despite the fact that the metaphor it embodied was one the church itself insisted was literal.

It would be a difficult and ultimately fruitless task to try to determine just how literally any of these metaphors was believed. The answer, no doubt, would vary from person to person, culture to culture and generation to generation. Did the discrepancy between Lorens’ butterfly and the butterfly on the twig really bother anyone? Did people eye priests over sceptically and mutter mutinously that anyone could see they weren’t actually dead? Aquinas’ care to explain the exact mechanics of transubstantiation, and Bernard of Anger’s defensiveness about the possibility of worship being transferred from idea to idol, suggest that the boundaries between observation and allegory could be and sometimes were problematic. However, the beauty of allegory is that it allows – indeed, requires – belief and understanding of the world on multiple levels at once. In an era fascinated with self-exploration, the observable butterfly is of limited interest; but the allegorical butterfly provides an opportunity to explore the relationship of the physical human body to the world, and vice versa. The continuum between mind and body allowed things that were real purely in the mind – the imaginary, the allegorical, the divine – to be translated and understood through the medium of the body, in order to return them more real to the imagination. There is therefore no absolute neat division between the literal and the imagined: both frequently spilled out into the space between them in which meaning could be explored. If the three-headed Trinity had the capacity to shock the conservative with its literal embodiment of a spiritual metaphor, the fact that it existed at all shows that the space between the two extremes was at once fruitful and fascinating to the mediæval mind.

1 The book of vices and virtues: a fourteenth century English translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d'Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, Early English Text Society OS 217 (London: Oxford UP, 1942), 60

2 Michael Camille, ‘The image and the self: unwriting late medieval bodies,’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, eds. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 1994), 94.

3 Considering the treacherous mutability of the feminine body in mediæval thought, the gendering of the butterfly as feminine may well be deliberate. As the French “papillon” is masculine, the use of “elle” or “sche” is unlikely to be an accident of grammar.

4 Vices and Virtues, 47.

5 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 181.

6 Gerald of Wales, Topography, 75.

7 The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP), 79.

8 Camille, ‘The image and the self’, 84-85.

9 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (New York: Cornell UP), 58.

10 Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and his Northern Heirs (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), 123.

11 Lorens d’Orleans extends the metaphor from the body of the priest to that of the sinner when he speaks of backbiting, saying that those who slander “þe goode holy men of religioun” who are “dede as in þis world” are themselves transformed into “þe felle and wikkede best þat men clepeþ heyene, þat goþ and delueþ vp dede bodies of folke and eteþ hem” (Vices and Virtues, 59).

12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (London: Eyre and Spotswood, 1989), 578.

a Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Gerald of Wales writes of his travels in Ireland, telling of the strange ways of Ireland. Cocks crow at a different time, snakes are not poisonous, children are often deformed or weak, there are werewolves and other odd creatures, etc. He is particularly (and sympathetically) interested in the monstrous hybrids he met there – several creatures, half human and half beast, which are all the results of humans copulating with animals, because the Irish are so degenerate. He himself is half Welsh, and his mixed blood seems to have led to discrimination against him during his lifetime.

b Mittman, Asa Simon, “The Other close at hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West’”, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages,(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 97-112. Mittman speculates that Gerald’s own hybridity led him to attempt to assert his essential similarity with the English by providing through his writing an example of a race far more alien than himself.

c The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1995). Bernard of Angers is the author of several of the documents in the Book, particularly the miracle tales in which he, a theologically educated man and a convert to the cult of Sainte Foy, tries rather defensively to justify the worship of the rich jewelled golden statue that contains her relics by recounting stories of the miracles that Sainte Foy has delivered to the community of her worshippers in the town of Conques – including punishing anyone who doesn’t treat her reliquary with due respect.

d ”The Knight Owein’s Journey through St Patrick’s Purgatory”, ed. John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion 1000-1500: A Reader (Ontario: Broadview, 1997).

e ”The Life of Christina the Astonishing”, ed. E. Spearing, Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Christina the Astonishing really is. After leading a quiet life as a virtuous shepherdess, she dies, then subverts expectations by flying out of the coffin at her funeral and perching on the rafters of the church. After this she refuses to be normal. She regularly flits about, perches on roofs and in trees, can’t abide the smell of humans, flees into the wilderness, is chained up by her despairing family and miraculously escapes, curls herself up into a ball of flesh regardless of trifles such as bones and sinews, and feeds herself on her own milk. She also takes up throwing herself into burning ovens, drowning herself, hanging herself and inflicting lots of painful tortures on her body, all of which heal instantly, though she screams in pain. The narrator tells us that she does this because God has promised her that her pain in this life will alleviate that of souls burning in Purgatory, and allow them to ascend to heaven faster.

f A twelfth-century image of the Trinity appearing to Abraham, depicted as an enthroned angel with three heads. Reproduced in Camille, “The image and the self”, 73.

I eat the air, promise-crammed.

I think I shall have to start reading mediaeval bestiaries.

Here is a beautiful little metaphor that I somehow managed to miss when I did my post on the sins of the voice:

Þe deuel sheweþ hym in þis world in many wise [ways] and liknesse[s] and takeþ hym liknesse [takes on shapes] for to deceyue and bigile wiþ men. And right so doþ þe liyere [liar], and þerfore he fareþ as a butre-flye, þat lyueþ bi [ie, on] þe aier and haþ no þing in hire guttes [her belly] but wynd, and at euery colour þat sche seþ [sees] sche chaungeþ hire owne.[1]

Leaving aside for this post the symbolic application of this to the liar - though the combination of adaptibility and frailty it implies for someone who has to live only on "wynd" fascinates me - I love what this tells us about the mediaeval understanding of a butterfly.

Firstly, she's feminine. This can't be an accident of grammatical gender - it's deliberate on the part of the translator, certainly, given the change from the masculine pronoun for the sinner to the feminine for the butterfly he resembles. And unless the original Middle French had a different noun for butterfly, Lorens would have used the masculine "papillon", so if he also referred to the butterfly as "elle" the usage would have been even more striking. But whether the femininity is the idea of the English translator, of Lorens, of the bestiary he may have consulted or simply a widely spread notion of the insect's nature, it is unflatteringly appropriate. Women were commonly perceived as less stable, less reliable, and of course most had very little physical power and thus had to rely on words. Even their bodies were considered to be less stable than a man's - ever heard of a condition called "wandering womb"? And most women, particularly in the upper classes, did have to change her colours to suit her new situation, because on marrying - often quite young - they woudl be sent forth into a different community, sometimes far from home, even in a different country, and be expected to settle into it and manage whatever wifely duties were appropriate to her situation.

Does this make her a liar? Politic, maybe...

Secondly - and thirdly, since these lump together nicely - butterflies a) eat air and b) change their colour to camouflage. Obviously, neither of these are scientifically accurate, but Lorens isn't really trying to provide an accurate picture of a butterfly here. The butterfly one might see over the hedgerows - which he can't have seen change its colours, because individual butterflies don't - is not the creature under discussion. This butterfly is the allegorical butterfly of the bestiaries, interesting primarily for the reflection it casts on the human spirit under consideration.

But of course, this distinction is too sharp, and implies that people held two separate ideas of "butterfly" in their head. I don't think this is true - I think it's more a case of an ability to subordinate the observable to the symbolic, to not mind or consider significant any differences one might notice in the real butterfly to the allegorical. Even without the aid of allegory, we can today largely consider the koala a soft and cuddly creature who exists mostly for cuddling tourists, and if we do hear those very loud screams and grunts they make in the night, just roll over and mutter "bloody koalas!" before going back to sleep, the socially prevalent image intact.

I have wandered off topic, I think. The connection I meant to make is with this:

King Claudius: How fares* our cousin Hamlet?
Hamlet: Excellent, i'faith, of the chameleon's dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed.** [2]

Hamlet's puns usually require some glossing - certainly he confuses Claudius here - and so I shall add the footnotes the Norton edition provides here:

* How does; Hamlet's response puns on "fare" as food and drink.
** The chameleon was supposed to live on air. Hamlet puns on 'heir', referring to Claudius' insubstantial promise of the succession.

So the chameleon also eats the air. And, of course, the chameleon actually does change colour (though not to camouflage). The allegorical significances of the two animals could have quite an overlap, then; though butterflies, being light and airy and winged, are a more intuitive metaphor for changeability. Might the idea of the butterfly's changing colours be derived from confusion with the chameleon? It could have risen independently, of course - many species of butterfly can be distinguished by little but colour, and most will instinctively seek out resting places against which they will camouflage[3]. My instinct would be to suspect that the ideas may have risen independently, but became strengthened and solidified by occasional association.

Sadly, two quotes aren't enough to unravel a cultural history of allegorical significance for either animal. Clearly research is in order!


[1] The book of vices and virtues: a fourteenth century English translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d'Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, Early English Text Society OS 217 (London: Oxford UP, 1942), 60.
[2] Hamlet, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et. al. (London: Norton, 1997), 3.2.84-86.
[3] Even in species where colour varies significantly between individuals - each individual knows where to land to hide itself. And without a mirror!

Save the unicorn!

Just a short post, as I'm sick and tired and not really eager to engage the cerebellum...

Wandering through the blogsphere, I encountered David Badke's post on unicorn capture at his bestiary blog. It contains several manuscript images, all after a pattern: virgin with the unicorn in her lap, man or men slaughtering the helpless beast. Finally, he questions,

And what are we to make of the maiden’s betrayal of the trusting unicorn? Well, we can’t be sure she was in on the trick; maybe she didn’t know the true intent of the hunters. In some illustrations, the maiden seems upset at the killing.

The girl in the image included at this point is indeed reaching out her hand towards the killer in some sort of gesture, perhaps of supplication. It's hard to tell - she also has the unicorn's horn trapped under her arm, effectively preventing it from moving. But on looking back, all the girls (save one) in the images are gesturing.

There are other similarities: like many other similar manuscript illustrations, there seems to be a pattern. In all but one image, the girl and unicorn are on the left side of the painting. The girl always gestures with the hand farthest from the 'camera' - ie, her left hand, except in the one reversed image. Her other hand is on the unicorn, usually on its horn, and in most of the pictures she could be read as restraining the unicorn. In some, the gestures seem to be encouragement to the hunters; in some, reproach or shock, perhaps. The figure of the maiden in this series of images, then, can be seen as expressing a kind of ambivalence to the death of the unicorn: complicit (to varying degrees) in its capture, she may also prefer not to see it actually slaughtered.

There is one striking exception, in the image from Harley MS 4751. Here, the maiden's arms are wrapped firmly around the unicorn, her right hand at the nape of its neck, her left pinning its forelegs to its chest, while she turns her head to smile at the hunters. More than complicit, she is taking an active role in betraying and restraining the unicorn to prevent it from resisting its slaughter. In fact, the way she clasps it to her body is almost sexual, but of course we all know that sexualised women are evil and treacherous, so that's not surprising. If we are to read the unicorn as a Christ analogue, this falls in with some of the more dramatic depictions of either the torments before the crucifixion, or the betrayal of Judas (an embrace for a kiss?).

Anyway. The reason for this post was to add another exception, in the other direction: an image in which the girl was apparently just enjoying a peaceful cuddle with her unicorn when along came a knight with a great big spear to attack it. Again, the girl is to the left and her left hand is the one held out to the knight, but in this instance I think her aversion to the unicorn's death is much clearer. And interestingly, this is the only one in which the unicorn is free. She is not holding it - her hand rests on its head in what can only be a friendly or affectionate gesture, not a restraining one - and its head is turned around so that the long horn is levelled at the knight's chest. Uselessly, of course, as his spear is already in its side, but it's not quite the passively suffering or cruelly betrayed Christ anymore.

Ormesby Psalter, Bodleian MS Douce 366

The Seventh Deadly Sin: Þe Synne of Mouþ

And so we come (somewhat tardily) to the last sin - the fragile vestige of an excuse for me doing this sequence, as it is tangentially relevant to an essay I'm working on. It is not called gluttony, but "the sin of the mouth". Proper and improper uses of the mouth were an ongoing topic of discussion at this time. It was the point of exchange between the body and the outside world, and so constantly ambivalent. Food and drink entered by it, nourishing the body but presenting the temptation of gluttony and instigating the fleshly processes of digestion[1]. At death the human soul left the body via the mouth; devils could enter by it to possess the body; and of course the spirit of God entered physically in the form of the host at communion[2]. AThe mouth also had the duty of speech, which could range from blasphemy, damaging slander or lies, to strategy, peace-speaking, theological learning, teaching others or singing the praises of God[3].

With this in mind, it isn't so surprising if Lorens felt the need to address all the categories of sin that belong to the mouth, and should elide them under the seventh that we call gluttony now. He explains (in translation), "The seventh head of the beast is the sin of mouth. And because the mouth has two offices, whereof one serves for the swallowing of meat and drink, and the other to speech, therefore it is principally divided in two; that is to say, in the sin of gluttony, that is in food and drink, and in the sin of wicked tongue, that is to speak folly." (46)

I will quote more than usual today, with the excuse of essay relevance, and because he has so many beautifully sarcastic analogies:

First will we speak of the sin of gluttony, for that is a default and an evil that pleases the devil wonderous much and much displeases God, for through that sin hath the devil great power in man and woman, as clerks read in the gospel that God gave leave to the devils to go into swine, and when they were within the swine, they made them all run into the sea headlong and drown themselves. [This was] a token that gluttons that lead their life in gluttony as swine, the devil hath power to enter within them and drench them in the sea, that is to say in hell, and to make them to eat so much that they burst, and to drink so much that they drown....

This is the fisher of hell that fishes and takes the fish by the mouth and by the throat[3]. This vice displeases much God, for a glutton does great shame to God when he makes his god of a sackful of dung, that is to fill his belly, that he loves more than God and doubts, and therefore he serves it all of its asking.

God bids him fast; his belly bids him fast not, 'but eat thy food all in ease, and sit to your meal long enough, and thou shalt eat better and more'.

God bids him rise early; his belly bids him lie still, for he is too full to rise so early. 'I may sleep, for church is [at] noon hour; it will wait for me'.

And when he does rise, he begins his prayers and says "Ah, lord God, what shall we eat today? Where shall we find anything that is enough?"

And after these matins, then come the laudes: "Ah, lord God, we drank good wine yester-eve and ate good food."

Then shall he begin to weep for his sins, and say, "Alas, I am almost dead: the wine was too strong yester-eve; my head acheth."

This man has an evil god. This god and this vice brings a man to shame, for first he begins to be a tavern-goer and an ale-goer, and next he is a dice-player, and next he sells his heritage and all that he hath, and after that he becometh a harlot and a thief, and so cometh he to be hanged. (46-48)

There are five branches of gluttony:

Eating early or late. Eating early is a sin, for "it is a foul þing for a man of good age þat may not abide tyme of day to ete" (48). Late hours are just as bad, for it is associated with going to bed late and rising late and wasting the whole day: "þei wasteþ tyme and turneþ vp-so-doun, for of þe nyght þei makeþ day" (49). Teenagers beware.

Eating and drinking too much.

Eating too hastily.

Eating too richly.

Being a gourmet. That is, "to delyte in queynte and deynteuous metes [foods]" (52). I'm afraid our family is damned.

Following this comes a denunciation of the tavern, which is the schoolhouse of the devil. In this, the inverse of the holy church, the devil reverses the miracles of God:

In holy church is God wont to do miracles and show his virtues: [he makes] the blind to see, the crippled to walk right, madmen to come into their right wits, dumb men to speak, deaf men to hear. But the devil doth the contrary of all this in the tavern. For when a glutton goes to the tavern he walks right enough, and when he comes out then all this is lost, for he has no wit nor reason nor understanding. These are the miracles that the devil doth (53-54).

Next come sins of the tongue, which may be divided into ten branches: "ydel, auauntyng [boasting], losengerie [flattery], bakbityng, lesynges [lying], forswerynges, stryuynges, grucchynges, rebellynges, blasphemye" (55).

Idle words cause the speaker to lose their time by spending it in folly, the good that they ought to be doing instead, and the treasure of their heart. Idle words are not, in fact, idle, but dear and full of harm. There are five kinds of idle words:
- Gabbling like a water mill.
- Bearing worrying news (Gandalf Stormcrow, anyone?).
- Exaggeration "wher-yn is moche vayn glorie" (56) (it was THIS BIG).
- Dirty jokes.
- Sarcasm. Methinks Lorens is occasionally guilty of this one himself. Though, reading closer, sarcasm is only bad if it is made "vpon goode men". Presumably one can be as sarcastic about sinners as necessary.

Avaunting, which comes in five kinds:
- Boasting about past deeds.
- Boasting of what one owns.
- "Surquidrye", which of course appeared under pride as well. Here it is defined as the sin of he "þat bosteþ and seiþ, 'I wole do so and so, and I wole venge wronges; I wole ... do meruailes [wonders]'" (57).
- Disparagement.
- False humility. Here falls Gawain.

Losyngerie, or flattery, which again divides into five:
- Indiscriminate praise (Chaucer the Pilgrim in the General Prologue?).
- Praise of children.
- Untruthful praise.
- Servile complaisance.
- Glossing over the faults of others.

Backbiting. Interestingly, to take a brief diversion into the realm of the monstrous, flatterers are likened to mermaids ("There is a thing that shows itself in the sea or other waters that men call meremaidens, that have the body of a woman and tail of a fish, and they sing so pleasingly that they have power to bring men who hear them into sleep, such as shipmen... and when they have brought a man to sleep, they slay him and devour him" (58-59)), and backbiters are compared to sirens ("There is a kind of adder that is called siren and that runs faster than any horse[5]... and she is so venomous that nothing may save a man that she envenoms").
- Lying to lay blame on others.
- Exaggerating the misdeeds of others.
- Devaluing the good deeds of others.
- Detraction. These sinners "ben like þe scorpioun þat makeþ good semblaunt as wiþ his visage [shows a fair face], and enuenymeþ wiþ his tail" (60). I think Lorens had never seen a scorpion's face. They're about as attractive as spiders'.
- Depicting the entire person in a bad light.

Lying.
- White lies, to help other people, which are the least culpable branch.
- Lies to please other people - this includes minstrels and story-tellers.
- Harmful lies.

Forswearing.
- Swearing "wiþ grete hete" (61)
- Swearing "lightly, þat is for nought and wiþ-out resoun" (61).
- Swearing by habit.
- Swearing foolishly.
- Breaking an oath.

Strife.
- Striving against others.
- Chiding.
- Despising.
- Speaking evil of others.
- Reproving.
- Threatening.
- Stirring discord.

Grudging, the recourse of "he þat dar not chide" (64).
- Grudging against man.
- Grudging against God.

Rebellion, "þat is to be rebel", as Lorens helpfull explains (66).
- Rebellion against advice.
- Against God's commandments.
- Against reproof.
- Against teaching.

Blasphemy, which is "as seynt Austeyn [Augustine] seiþ, whan a man bileueþ or seiþ of God þing þat a man scholde not bileue ne holde ne seye, or whan a man ne bileueþ nought þat he scholde holde" (67 - yes, the double negative is permissible in Middle English grammar). It comes in many kinds, such as when people blaspheme without thinking and use God's name in vain, or when witches and necromancers use it for their spells, or a man blasphemes from wrath and spite. Blasphemy is seldom forgiven.

Here endeth the seven deadly sins and all their branches, and whoever will study well in this book, it will profit him, and he may learn to reckon all manner of sins and to shrive himself well, for there is no man who may shrive himself well nor keep himself from sin if he knows them not. Now shall he that readeth attentively in this book look to see if he be guilty of any of these sins, and if he be guilty, repent him and shrive him and keep him to the best of his power from any other that he is not yet guilty of, and beseach meekly of Jesus Christ that he keep him from all those and any others; and so may he keep us all, amen. (68)

And may we remember never to praise our children, or speculate on the stock market, especially in its current state, or to engage in carnal acts with a common woman.


[1] Many saints, particularly female ones, were supposed to have done without food for days, months or years at a time, being nourished entirely by either the Eucharist or the Holy Spirit. Or occasionally her own miraculous milk, in the case of Christina the Astonishing, but she's hardly representative. Just... well... astonishing. This equation of holiness or purity with abstaining from food was mirrored, of course, in the more usual routine of fasting on certain days or at certain times. People in holy orders - halfway between saints and ordinary humans, you might say - had more restricted diets (many orders of monks were largely vegetarian) and were required to fast more often.

[2] Caciola, Nancy. “Mystics, Demoniacs, and the Physiology of Spirit Possession in Medieval Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2. 42 (2000): 262-306. I would cite the pages specifically, but I don't have it by me. The whole article is worth a read, though. Sadly does not contain any reproductions of mediaeval pictures of the moment of death, with the soul in the form of a little bird, human, or wafty flame-shaped thing leaving the mouth of the newly deceased - I shall try to find an example tomorrow and cite that here.

[3] It's possible to trace a very forceful debate about the proper use of the mouth throughout Dante's Commedia, particularly the Inferno. For a discussion of the symbolism of the boar's mouth in mediaeval literature as it pertains to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, see Thiébaux, Marcelle, “The Mouth of the Boar as Symbol”, Romance Philology, 22 (1969): 281-99. She examines how the boar's mouth is a symbol of damage and destruction (or even just thoughtless, spiteful talk like Kay's), and is particularly often used as a metaphor for the slanderer who gives away the secret of a pair of lovers and thus brings about destruction and calamity.

[4] What does this say about contemporary fishing techniques? Or is it simply a baited hook in the mouth, then a stick through the gills (throat) once the fish is caught?

[5] Incidentally, the fastest land snake is the African Black Mamba, but it only reaches the speed of a running human. Unfortunately, it combines this with being the only land snake who'd prefer to attack and chase you rather than escape, given the chance, so running is both a good idea and largely futile. And people think Australia's fauna is scary...

Unless otherwise specified, all quotes are from The book of vices and virtues: a fourteenth century English translation of the Somme le roi of Lorens d'Orleans. Ed. W. Nelson Francis. Early English Text Society OS 217. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.