Foxiness of a Fox...Lionness of a Lion

I forgot which class it was but someone brought up the point that medieval people didn't just use animal symbolism to emphasize negative qualities of a person but also used "dignified" animals as someone's counterpart in the natural world.

In a passage from The Prince, Machiavelli writes that "[t]o have as a teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting." (XVIII) He goes on to encourage princes to participate in their beastly nature because it is out of necessity. Of all the animals, "he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves." Machiavelli takes two predatory animals, combines their qualities to create a set of desirable traits for a prince.

I thought I'd post this because I saw a few themes we discussed in class floating around in this passage. First, Machiavelli doesn't tell his reader (Lorenzo d'Medici) to refrain from being the animal, but says that it is required of him (as a ruler) to become the animal when necessity arises. He emphasizes this by drawing from the qualities from two animals. The fox represents cunning while the lion symbolizes ferocity. These two animals are then juxtaposed with the wolf, which represents chaos, calamity, and disorder in this context. He advises the young prince, simply being a lion will not help defend oneself from wolves, "the one who has known best how to use the fox has come out the best." This pitting of the fox against the wolf (and vice versa) reminded me of Renard the Fox. Although in class, I don't think we quite knew whether to classify Renard as good or bad but Machiavelli would praise the cunning, deceit, and boldness of Renard. This animosity between the fox and the wolf appears in Machiavelli's work-though I doubt that he was writing with the tales in mind.

Some cute pictures I stumbled upon...










Ysengrin ensnared by Renard's trap.










Ysengrin weeping..












AND I just love the expression on Renard's face.

Aesop’s Fables translated and transmitted in Middle Ages

I was curiously looking around to find more medieval art to post and kept coming up with medieval manuscripts, the colorful pages illuminated around the text to show a story in and of itself unfolding. Somehow I found myself with translations of Aesop’s Fables. There is a picture of Aesop himself writing his book in German 15th century hat (see below). This leads me to the current discussion – what did medieval people think of Aesop’s fables? From what we know about animals in the middle ages and their use in symbolism, teaching tools, hunting, food, daily life, religious significance, and more I began to really think about this question. Of course I first turn to Wikipedia, there contains a list of the numerous languages that the fables were translated into throughout time, barely a language or region of Europe is missing and there is also a following in India believe it or not.[1]

Renard and speech

As I wrote below, I have trouble approaching the Renard cycle looking for a "moral" to the story, or "good" and "bad" characters worthy of our praise or rebuke. This is a text where the winners cannot easily be distinguished from the losers. Instead of trying to extract a lesson from the story that may not even exist, one alternative way to approach the cycle is to look for a theme that may appear in the text in a variety of forms, not with moral justification or judgement, but simply as exempla of a phenomenon at work. With this strategy in mind, the topic of speech leaps out to me as a very important factor throughout the stories, one that receives multiple treatments as the text progresses.

While it is true that the physical, one might say slapstick, humor of the cycle has its part, much of the action and humor is driven by the character's dialogue. This, of course, is already placed in the absurdist context of predators and prey "negotiating" with each other for dominance by the skill of their tongues, rather than the strength and speed of their bodies. In no place does Bruin the bear or Ysengrin the wolf "win" because of their superior strength—the one exception I can think of is Renard himself, who seems to be rather quick on his feet and capable of outrunning the angry hordes who set out for his head. If question of physical strength is, in this system, a relatively moot point, I find it interesting that Noble the lion is king; is there a subtext that problematizes the very basis for his legitimacy at work?

Whatever the case, most of the tricks, plots, and deceits revolve around who is able to speak and guide the interpretation of a set of events. Take the affair between Renard, Hersent, and Ysengrin. Renard is able to "seduce," or at least persuade, Hersent into sleeping with him through his words—and not just words about himself, but through his manipulation of reported speech! He is able to create a reality in which their affair is perfectly justified. When Hersent's infidelity is discovered by Ysengrin, her only way out, as the narrator himself admits, is to "give him the answer he required" (II.1191). She is successful in this: Ysengrin is speechless ("Ysengrin doesn't know what to say," 1205), effectively neutralizing his ability to say what really happened, to be the articulator of the truth. In the second encounter between Renard and Hersent, the power of words is pitted against the testimony of an eyewitness, usually considered incontrovertible. In a case where visual evidence should be all that is required, Renard is able to cast doubt on its reliability: "Not everyone, my lord, agrees; / The way you see it is just not right" (1328-29). Ysengrin, understandably, retorts, "Do you think that I have lost my sight? / That I haven't any eyes in my head? / How on earth could I be mislead" (1330-32). With his clever explanation, Renard is able to get away and put the onus of guilt upon Hersent, who is only able to diffuse her husband's anger when she herself is able to speak at the beginning of Branch Va (l. 284). Right before this scene, Renard says something rather interesting to Hersent: "You said I liked to boast. / And I won't have you made a liar! / To tell the truth is my desire" (1290-92). This kind of verbal alchemy, to turn speech into truth, seems to be the real weapon of war in these tales.

The episode between Renard and Chanteclere is an interesting reversal of this fixation on speech. Renard is able to trick Chanteclere by telling him how much he wants to hear his voice; Chanteclere is later able to free himself by goading Renard into taunting his pursuers. Both deceits are carried out through the act of opening the mouth to speak, which may be why Renard muses at the end, "May he, for shame, never raise his head … he babbles when he should keep still" (II.446-8). Chanteclere's inability to properly interpret his dream, and his refusal to listen to his wife Peinte's justified words of caution, show that the ability to discern the valid interpretations from the misleading is not just an art form; it is a fundamental skill for ensuring one's survival in this world.

Animals as humans

In interpreting the decision to write stories with anthropomorphic animals, a common reason given is that of political necessity—the classic Aesop argument. As Phaedrus explains (and here I'm quoting from Ziolkowski, thanks for the reference CR!), "the slave, being liable to punishment for any offence, since he dared not say outright what he wished to say, projected his personal sentiments into fables and eluded censure under the guise of jesting with made-up stories" (Ziolkowski, 7). Ziolkowsi points to many medieval authors whose one-to-one identification of animals with specific social groups is perfectly clear, among them Odo of Cheriton, Marie de France, and Berechiah Ha-Nakdan (ibid., 9). If we imagine these writers living in an environment in which criticizing the nobility and the clergy could land you in a lot of trouble, the animals-as-metaphor argument would seem reasonable enough and offer a good basis analyzing and interpreting the Reynard stories.

I do not deny that such an interpretive strategy is very useful. It should be noted, however, that one did not need to resort to animal stand-ins to criticize the elite. Take the clergy, for example: the feud between the Friar and Summoner in the Canterbury Tales witnesses the direct condemnation of all number of religious figures, from the swindling mendicant to the corrupt archdeacons: "Pardee, ye may well know by the name / That of a somonour may no good be sayd" (Friar's Prologue, ll. 1280-81); "This Frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, / And God it woot, that it is little wonder; / Freres and fends been but lyte asunder" (Summoner's Prologue, ll. 1672-74). In Canto 19 of the Inferno, Dante comes across Pope Boniface VIII, stuffed head-first into the ground, and takes the opportunity to rebuke him: "You have made gold and silver your god; and what difference is there between you and the idol-worshipper, except that he prays to one, and you to a hundred?" (ll. 112-115). Perhaps the most forceful example I can think of can be found in Petrarch's writings, where, in his "Invective against a man of high rank," (i.e., a clergyman), he says:

Grown fat, you spur along, unaware how obscene your corpulence is amid Christ's thin and wasted flock, or how disgusting your bloated nausea is amid the great hunger of Christ's paupers. For if you don't know it, it is in their tears and sweat that you have dipped the bread that swells you, breeding diseases and death in your soul." (Petrarca, 205)

As we can see, one did not have to resort to animal fables to criticize a powerful elite in the Middle Ages; it was a tool among various tools at their disposal, and as an ultimately absurdist project, the animal bodies of the Renard cycle offer interpretive latencies that cannot be accomplished with a more direct form of satire. I agree with the general discussion that we should not stop at reading Renard as an animals-as-humans metaphor. Although the metaphor works in a lot of places, even with my own observation that the animals, as nobility, are all "kin" to one another and thus are mutually obligated to their fellows just as much as they plot behind each other's backs, we would lose a lot if we try to argue that the text is "about" so-and-so group of people. If we start assigning names and classes to the various animals, we have to then determine who stands for what, who is the good guy, and worst of all, what are we supposed to learn from it. As we have seen, the metaphor undermines itself even as it appears as a viable structure upon which to build an interpretation—just as we have convinced ourselves that Tibert and Renard are really noblemen at parley, a bunch of humans burst onto the scene, revealing that Tibert is nothing more than a cat. The shifting and unreliable narratability of the Renard cycle may, in its very structure, touch on the theme of interpretation and its many, many pitfalls, which I'll continue on in my next post.

References:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., c1987.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Edited and Translated by Robert M. Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996-.

Petrarca, Francesco. Invectives. Edited and Translated by David Marsh. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Renard the Fox. Trans. Patricia Terry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983, 1992.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.