One of the more vexing questions in
medieval animal symbology – and one barely addressed in our
readings for the week – is the tension between universal values (in
Western Europe, primarily but not solely Catholic Christianity) and
local cultures (delineated on a variety of ethnolinguistic and
political bases.) Symbolic discourse allowed the latter to prosecute
varying degrees of distinction from or assimilation with the former
through the use of multivalent symbols. Part of our difficulty in
interpreting these representational exchanges is determining the
extent to which both the
general and particular readings might operate upon a specific image
at the moment of production
or reception. These
readings are complicated by a huge diversity of contextual factors –
literacy, medium, ecology. We
should not, for instance,
necessarily assume a clean
relationship between the symbolic lions of authors who knew such
creatures only from Bibles and bestiaries, and those of writers such
as al-Isfahani (in reference to Saladin, mentioned on Cuffel, 214),
for whom lions were a significant feature of the
local fauna. By the same
token, we should not let our
modern empirical bias lead us to
assume that the former were more susceptible to rigid and formulaic
interpretations than the latter.
One
ubiquitous source of medieval animal system was heraldry, which may
have begun with the totemic beasts of the Germanic and Asiatic tribes
who invaded the dying Roman empire but by the High Middle Ages had
blossomed into a pictorial language encoding history, lineage, and
moral quality. As a test case of symbology, heraldry is particularly
useful, with its vast menagerie of beasts, real and imagined,
standing in for
clearly defined sociopolitical entities (noble families, towns,
nations, religious orders, etc.).
Devilish
dragons and serpents were frequent heraldic devices – often, as
Samantha Riches notes in our readings for Thursday (“Encountering
the Monstrous,” 98) as emblems recalling a historic combat between
a knightly ancestor and a savage beast, but not always. Y Ddraig
Goch, Wales' red dragon, whose pedigree goes back at least to the
ninth century, is rather explicitly identified as an emblem of
the Welsh (rather than as an
enemy conquered by them).
Boars
and pigs, however derided
they may have been in Cuffel's intrareligious polemics, were
incredibly popular choices,
linked to bravery and fertility. Sows with piglets – the
visual basis for the incredibly demeaning Judensau
trope – were
rare but not unknown. They
survive on the town blazons of Morcote in Switzerland and Albano
Laziale in Italy, in both cases representing “abundance and
fertility.” Morcote's town website even claims that the sow and
piglets were the emblem of a religious order, the Antoniani Friars.
In
some cases, it is impossible to distinguish reality from insult. A
heraldic legend dating back to at least the thirteenth century claims
that upon converting to Christianity, the fifth-century Frankish king
Clovis relinquished his former shield, which sported three black
toads. Does this reflect a genuine tradition of ancient French toad
reverence? Or were “three black toads” the sort of stereotypical
– even caricatured - symbol that a medieval Christian thought might
appeal to a godless pagan? Taking the tale even further, some
ingenious, if fanciful, commentators have speculated that herein lies
the origin of various amphibian insults that the English apply to the
French.
Names are another site of contested symbolic meaning. Modern English
naming practice has shed many of its old beastly terms in favor of
Hebrew-derived theophorics, though it was once rich with them –
Eadwulf (fortune-wolf), Eoforhild (battle-boar), Osborn (god-bear).
(One does have the impression that most Anglo-Saxon names consisted
of a combination of two
nouns that the parents considered cool). Actually, one of the only
survivals of these Germanic creature names is “Rudolph” – which
of course has its own animal associations in English now. It and its
Saxon cognate Hrodulf mean “fame-wolf.” And
in a direct repudiation of the notion of universal symbolism, even
within Western Europe, a
cross-cultural look at names does
not reveal a clear typology
of positively and negatively associated creatures. Most animals that
became commonplace indicators
of evil or witchcraft – pigs, goats, rabbits, canines
– have, in one language or another, made for popular and desirable
names. “Son of a bitch” makes canine ancestry an insult; yet that
is nearly the exact meaning of Mac Con, the honorary epithet of an
ancient Irish king. And
naming could also move fluidly between signifier and signified –
Thibert began as a common Germanic name, became so deeply associated
with the cat in the Roman de Renard
that it was virtually synonymous with “cat” (as “Renard became
fully synonymous with
“fox,” replacing the Old French goupil
almost entirely), still remained an acceptable personal name, and yet
could be freely punned on with insulting feline allusions (as
Mercutio does in Romeo and Juliet).
Given
this plethora of associations attending any one creature in any one
cultural context, we might ask whether animal symbols were too
overdetermined to have meaning outside of any specific instance of
use (such as Sara Lipton identifies for her heretical cats in “Jews,
heretics, and the sign of the cat in the Bible moralisée”).
Yet it seems that naming,
heraldry, and moralistic interpretations could and did come together.
Perhaps the best example is William Colyngbourne's famous 15th
century rhyme: “The cat,
the rat, and Lovell our dog / rule all England under a hog” (quoted
in Gray, 196). The “cat” and “rat” are puns on the first
syllables of William Catesby and Richard Ratcliffe's last names; a
silver dog was the heraldic emblem of Lord Lovell; and the “hog”
is a derisive reference to King Richard III's white boar badge.
Catesby and Ratcliffe, we might assume, were born with names rather
than destinies, and the silver dog and white boar were symbols chosen
and worn with great pride by Lovell, Richard, and their supporters.
Yet the rhyme requires a double vision, understanding the positive
identifications of these animals while attaching to them the moral
censure of a different symbolic system, in which they are vermin and
foul beasts, and the natural
order has been so perverted that a gross pig rules “all England.”
At least in this instance, different interpretations of beasts not
only could bleed together but needed to do so for meaning to be
constructed. It is perhaps this model, rather than more reductive
approaches, that offers the most productive prism for understanding
the creatures of reverence and insult in the diverse collective of
medieval Europe.
-SLasman
Something that is worth mentioning in this discussion of insult and reverence is how long of a time frames this discussion. Even if all the symbolic meaning of the animals haven't changed, even your post discusses about 500 years of European history. For the Anglo-Saxons, the wolf can be a sign of strength in battle, and hence a term of some reverence, while in 13th century France the wolf is driven out and regarded by humans as a pest (such as the reactions to Isengrim in the Reynard stories or with the description of the hanged and skinned wolf as a warning in the discussion of animal trials). This idea of time becomes even more important since heraldry was only introduced in the High Middle Ages (we know this since nobody in the Bayeux tapestry has no coats of arms). This in no way rejects the complications and information that heraldry can give us, but simply is a caveat when comparing information from across the medieval period.
ReplyDeleteAlso Anglo-Saxon names are really complicated because the names often depict some kind of virtue or positive quality from the beast (wolves for example sometimes symbolized ferocity in battle, so Eadwuld was hopefully a warrior who fortune would give chances for to prove his might in war). However, the wolf was also referred to as a scavenger in many Anglo-Saxon poems, making even that time period extremely complex when discussing the nature of animal imagery. Perhaps sometimes it was just two words that sounded good together, though. As our discussion on monsters proved, sometimes there is no deeper meaning than what appears on the surface.
~AFB
"Yet the rhyme requires a double vision, understanding the positive identifications of these animals while attaching to them the moral censure of a different symbolic system, in which they are vermin and foul beasts, and the natural order has been so perverted that a gross pig rules “all England.”" I think you have hit here on something important about the way insults work: so often, they invoke descriptions or symbolism which in other contexts would be praise. They work because they show the "underside" of the praise so as to undercut it. A man who is described as strong as an ox is derided as ox-like in his stupidity, a woman who is elegant as a cat is compared to a cat in her sexual habits, and so forth. The whole point is that animal symbols can be invoked both positively and negatively, depending on the perspective of the speaker and the one being described. To be compared to a beast (e.g. a sheep, a dog, a wolf, a cat, a boar) is not of itself insulting or complimentary, it is in the purpose of the comparison. RLFB
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