Context and Complexity: Cats, Pigs, and Jews in Art and Literature

            Throughout the quarter, we have constantly been told and been saying that what we know or believe about medieval animals is much more complex than what one author or interpretation offers. At times, this response seems almost automatic – if an explanation doesn’t explain everything or contradicts another argument, then the disagreement is reconciled by a simple, “It’s really more complicated than that.” Even Prof. Fulton Brown today commented on how quickly we concluded that the use of animals for insult and disgust was a complex situation. I hope to make it apparent that “complexity” needs to be more than an automatic response to differing arguments; complexity must be discussed in the context of the scenario or argument presented. It is context and specificity that lead to and enhance complexity. I propose to make this point by discussing the arguments made by Alexandra Cuffel in “Sign of the Beast: Animal Metaphors as Maledictions of Resistance and Opposition” and in Sara Lipton’s “Jews, heretics, and the sign of the cat in the Bible moralisée.”

            In her chapter “Sign of the Beast,” Cuffel proposes that medieval Christians, Jews, and Muslims all used similar visual vocabulary when talking about each other, such as lions for Christians or donkeys for Jews. More importantly, when one group was negatively targeted in the guise of an animal (Jews and donkeys, for instance), some authors subverted the attack by playing up the positive qualities of animal assigned to their group while pointing out the negative qualities of animals the attacker identified with.[1] However, a potential point of criticism arises from Cuffel’s tendency to make sweeping conclusions about all Christians or Jews or Muslims based on the mass of evidence she has gathered. For example, Cuffel cites a bestiary that states the following: “Sows signify sinners, the unclean, and heretics,”[2] which she uses to equate Jews with pigs. It is problematic that her source does not explicitly list Jews in addition to sinners, the unclean, or heretics. She does later admit, “Muslims are not mentioned in the bestiary texts, although Christian hearers and readers could have substituted ‘Muslim’ for ‘heretic’ and made an indirect association with certain animals in that way.” This implies that the same substitution could be made for Jews, which is perhaps the route her train of thought took. But regardless of the semantic structure of her argument, the fact remains that Cuffel takes specific instances, such as pigs associated with sinfulness and heresy, and generalizes them, implying that pigs are always symbols of heretics and Jews. 

            What Cuffel should have done, and what Lipton does do, is focus on the specific context in which statements are made. Lipton’s article discusses a specific type of text, the bible moralisée, and specific images of cats and Jews within extant manuscripts of that text. She proposes that the image of humans kissing the anus of cats arises as a criticism of the teaching of Aristotle using Jewish commentaries in early 13^th century Paris.[3] Lipton does not make some broad claim, like any time a cat appears in medieval art it carries an association with heresy and Judaism, as Cuffel seems to do. She is careful to confine the feline-Jewish relation to the bible moralisée, and even goes so far as to connect the contents of the manuscripts to the political and academic situation that they were likely created in. She analyzes these images in a very specific context, and keeps her analysis only in that context.

            We can see why Lipton’s form of analysis is preferable to Cuffel’s when we consider other texts about medieval cats. Malcolm Jones, in “Cats and Cat-skinning in Late Medieval Art and Life,” discusses the use of cats for cheap fur, a topic he was led to by a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But in seeking to identify the man shown with a cat-skin in the painting, (which he names a “pedlar”[4]), Jones does not even consider that the man must represent some sort of Jew-hunter, because he has a cat skin and cats are symbols of Jews, so the man must have symbolically killed a Jew. Nor does Barbara Newman, in her cruel joke of an article “The Catte’s Tale” propose that a Barking abbess possessed a cat as the result of some sort of hidden philo-Semitism. Why do neither Jones nor Newman make such claims? Because given the context of the image or the alleged poem, those claims would be ludicrous. They could have taken Cuffel’s approach and culled any evidence that would have supported such ridiculous hypothetical claims, but instead, they restrained their argument to a tightly-defined context of time and place of creation.

            I may just be harping on the need to be aware of context when stating that medieval views are ambiguous or complex, because in our class discussions no one proposes such laughable arguments as I have just proposed. We are implicitly aware of the need to remain within the context of time, place, and argument, but as we begin to write papers, it is important to be explicitly aware of it. Perhaps I am just concerned about my own argumentative writing. I admit, I was guilty of being sucked into Cuffel’s way of thinking when reading her article. She asserts that rabbits and hares were associated with Judaism, which I was tempted to use to counter Stoker and Stoker’s claim that rabbits were souls in need of salvation.[5] If rabbits were a symbol of Judaism, then the pillow mounds they use as evidence are actually somehow homes for Jews, rather than wandering Christian souls. This whole line of thinking was related to my paper topic, but admittedly, I neglected to consider that Stoker and Stoker made their argument with specific evidence in a specific context of how rabbits were viewed. “It’s more complex than that;” rabbits could be (and probably were) both representatives of lost souls and the Jewish people, just as pigs and cats were more than just stand-ins for Jews. Accepting complexity only works when recognizing different contexts.  

RAE

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[1] Cuffel, 205-209.

[2] Ibid., 226.

[3] Lipton, 373-377.

[4] Jones, 110.

[5] Stoker and Stoker, 270.

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.