Evil Non-Men and Some Very Dangerous Newts

  

 For the natural science theorists in the late Middle Ages, Aristotle's word was law - and advancing interpretations that were too novel required some very careful side-stepping and sliding around in order to make it seem like there were no conflicts with the theoretical standard. The Resl's "Philosophical Beliefs" chapter references this complication quite explicitly, most memorably in the case of Jean de Jandun and Albertus Magnus's suggestion that some degree of imagination and fantasy exist in all animals - and it wasn't that Aristotle's denied this in his description of bees and ants in De Anima but rather that the translator must simply have gotten it wrong.
     For this reason, among a host of others, it behooves us to take a closer look at pre-Medieval natural science commentators. These men, who lived their lives in the wake of the sack of Rome and before the full onset of the Dark Ages, interpreted the hierarchy of beasts in Christian Neo-Platonist terms - often in the best cases with Aristotle as a non-infallible commentator and source. Of these, perhaps Boethius is one of the most well-established early Aristotelians and most ultimately influential authors (as is noted in the Resl, it was his early Latin translations of Aristotle's logical corpus that eventually found their way into the Medieval mind). In his Consolation of Philosophy, he makes this powerful remark about the moral symbolism of animals and the construction of the tripartite soul:

Animal Utility in the Salic Law

The Salic Law (or the Law of the Salian Franks)¹ was written and revised multiple times between ca. 500 and 798 by a number of different people and groups from both Frankish and Roman perspectives. It is an extremely complicated source for historians for a number of reasons. It is impossible to say exactly how it was perceived by the people who created it, much less how or even whether it was used by them. It is impossible to tell exactly what it means in some parts because it is impossible to tell what was meant by some of the words used in it, most notably the Malberg glosses but also some of the Latin terms. It is also impossible to tell exactly how severe the monetary punishments it prescribed were since we do not have an adequate sense of the economy of the time or the exact value of the fines either objectively or in relation to the wealth of the average Frank. Given these and other issues it should be used carefully, especially when attempting to draw conclusions about Frankish society. However, the law can be examined internally in order to reveal its own sometimes fractured logic and used tentatively to draw conclusions about the ways in which its creators organized their world. Whatever its dangers it remains an excellent source dealing with animals in northern Europe during its time period. I would like to briefly suggest some of the main conclusions about the use of animals that can be drawn from it.