Humanimal

The question arose in class on Thursday, why are we even discussing the so-called ‘medieval animal trials’? While there is certainly evidence that some very odd trials were conducted, we can say little conclusively given the very limited nature of that evidence; namely, just about everything we know of animal trials is based on and structured by the research of one man at the turn of the twentieth century, E.P. Evans. This presents a number of problems, that of trusting a single conveyor for all of this information aside. Our idea about where and when the trials were conducted is biased by where Evans concentrated his research.  It is questionable whether the two types of trials described and exemplified in Evans’ research, the trying of individual domesticated animals through criminal court systems and that of vermin in ecclesiastical courts, are indeed variations of the same phenomenon. What’s more, as Beirnes makes a point of saying, Evans’ research and the presentation of his findings was motivated by contemporary concerns for animal rights and penal reform (41). That said, by no means do I think these concerns of Evans should disqualify his legacy, but they do help to situate it.

Taking Evans’ data as it is, though, the question is begged of why animal trials are even spoken of as a medieval phenomenon. While it does seem to begin to occur with some frequency in the 13^th century, the record is thin, and the heyday for animal trials, in fact, were the 15^th, 16^th, and 17^th centuries. On this count, we seem to be discussing an early modern phenomenon rather than a medieval one—if such a distinction means anything at all. Furthermore, the culmination of this “medieval” phenomenon, as represented in the records we have, coincides with the burgeoning of the very enlightenment ways of thinking that one would think would militate against it.

I want to see if, for a moment, we can put generalizations about all of Europe and the Middle Ages aside and think about the facts as best we have them of these animal trials, and see, based on what we know of the practices, what we can say. To restrict this exercise even more, I’ll only consider criminal trials of animals, the particular cases of which I think we can more readily believe to be instantiations of the same phenomenon. Ok, really, my aim is to defend Enders’ article, “Homicidal Pigs and the Antisemitic Imagination.” I was rather surprised by the wholesale dismissal of Enders’ argument in class, which I find, even forfeiting her more ‘precarious’ claims (which, honestly, I don’t feel compelled to do), to be more than plausible.

For one, I do not think we can deny that the trial of a sow is a humanizing process. As many of our readings pointed out, the courts went to great lengths to give individual animals going through the judicial system the same treatment as human beings. Questions of will and guilt aside, the trial of a violent animal involved the ascription of human qualities to the animal on trial (209). The law punishes transgressions, but its domain being the human, it cannot punish an animal for being an animal—which wouldn’t appear to be a transgression anyhow. Nor, though, can it punish an animal for being somewhat human (on the face of it, this would be an improvement), lest the order of the world be quite upset. The law takes care of criminals; only humans are criminals. Thus the whole process of making animals on trial human enough such that they can be condemned for their inhumanity, for their animality. Notice that it is a very human barbarity which is recast and naturalized in the animal as it is put on par with the human criminal.

The connection between the humanization of animals on trial and the animalization of humans appears too obvious to me to ignore. Are they anything but two sides of the same coin? What was it that human criminals were punished for but the transgression of the boundary between human and animal? This is the very sophistry Enders talks about by which “humanity” is defined and nourished (204).

Another thing: a couple of the readings raised the question of whom the trials and executions of animals were conducted for. Did people think that other animals could gain some kind of moral instruction from witnessing the execution of one of their peers? Probably not, but here’s what we can say with confidence: the trials and executions of individual animals were conducted and watched by human beings. Who do you think was affected by and internalized the spectacular production of humanity and inhumanity and its violent consummation?

Now the big question in regard to Enders’ argument: the connection between homicidal pigs and the antisemitic imagination. If humanity is defined, precariously, by its opposition to animality, marked off by the dividing line between these categories, then what of the people who are unwelcome in the human community? Is it at all a stretch (as seemed to be implied in class) that Jews would be identified with the animal (as evidence shows they were) and that there would be some sort of connection between the trials and execution of humanized animals and the public attitudes toward animalized humans (as the striking parallels indicate)? I want to join Ender in pushing against a focus on the “symbolic importance” (Cohen 75) of animal trials, a focus which can obscure the very real effects of violent public ritual. That said, we should also keep in mind that the same ritual can have different effects and meanings for different members of a community. There is a camp in anthropology that views rituals as arguments made in the public sphere. Though they may be condoned by authority, tradition, or majority, by the nature of their being arguments, they leave room for both agreement and disagreement.
        I have more to say on this, but I just want to end by re-iterating a point I was trying to make in class. The claim was brought up, and it was also in one of the readings, that it is inappropriate to think of animal trials as animal cruelty because the animals received due process of law and were in all respects treated as humans—indeed, we can think of this treatment as quite charitably kind. I could hardly disagree more. A cruelty/kindness model so far from saturates the possibilities of treatment as to be useless. We would not say, ‘oh, at least that Christian fellow and his Jewish lover got due process of law before being completely degraded and burned alive’ (Enders 223). I struggle to see the resemblance between institutionalized cruelty, incorporation into a system which is biased against you, and kindness.

-JS

Were animals considered to be morally responsible?

     In class, I suggested that perhaps, to understand medieval animal trials, one had to distinguish two types of guilt as applied to the animal defendants. The first type only concerns whether the accused in fact performed the deed in question, while the second type concerns whether the accused has a moral responsibility for doing that deed. I'm sure we all agree that an animal can be guilty in the first sense, but that the second sense is rather murkier. My thought was that maybe medieval courts distinguished between these two types of guilt—that they tried some or all animals with the end of determining their guilt in the first sense, while tacitly acknowledging that the second sense was less applicable to beastly defendants.

     In this model of law, a convicted animal would be punished not in retribution for its moral failing, but because it was a member of society, and the preservation of societal order required that disruptors of that order be punished. (Note that I do not at all mean the "upsetting of social hierarchy" proposed in our reading, merely violation of the common peace.) Since the end of class, however, I have had doubts about whether my aforesaid hypothesis is actually any good. It would go some way toward reconciling the trials of animals with the thinkers who objected to the idea of animals' being able to commit crimes, yet there are various cases where such a model would not seem to fit.

     There is the case of the sow whose piglets were spared "on account of their youth and their mother's bad example." Surely these can only be considered mitigating factors in that they mean the piglets could not have known better; they hardly affect whether or not the piglets ate of the child. Similarly in modern life, we are lenient to human offenders for their youth, but we would never think of refusing to replace a lightbulb because it burned out soon after we bought it. The piglets, then, must in some way be considered more like the juvenile offenders than like the lightbulb.

     And again, there is the case of the man who had intimate relations with a she-ass. If merely the commission of the act were sufficient for conviction, the trial would have been a foregone conclusion. Yet, as witnesses testified to the jennet's good character, she was spared—again on grounds of moral responsiblity, not of mundane facts.

     A new hypothesis which I think might cover all of these cases is as follows: perhaps the medieval idea was simply that, for every evil deed done, someone must be held morally responsible. Not every participant in the deed, but at least one. This would account for the immunity from prosecution of oxen and horses, since as we saw their owner is the one punished by the beasts' confiscation and auction. The owner, then, bears the moral responsibility. Pigs, probably for some of the reasons we discussed in class, were considered more independent agents—it was thus that they were so frequently held guilty on their own, and their owners not punished. In the case of the piglets, the sow was the one to bear the moral responsibility for the deed to which she had led them. (One may wonder what would have happened in court had the piglets done the deed on their own.)

     I'm a bit happier with this hypothesis than with the last one, but it still doesn't account very well for the treatment of wild animals or the ecclesiastical actions against vermin. I wonder if any of you have thoughts in those directions?

—Luke Bretscher

Why are a Fox and Wolf feuding?

In class, we tried to examine the degree to which the characters in Reynard the Fox represented any degree of symbolism or morality, as well as analyzing if these characters were more human than animal, or animal than human. I think both of these could boil down into a greater question: why a wolf and fox in the first place? In trying to answer that question, I went back to the Bestiary we examined, as well as the work of Albert the Great, to see what I could find about wolves and foxes, in order to compare them to the principle characters we see in the text.  While nothing I found change my perception of the characters behaviors, it is an interesting way of interpreting how people may have viewed the animals naturally, and how they would have imprinted their beliefs onto the characters.

            I first went to the Wisconsin Bestiary we reviewed at the beginning of the character. Within that text, neither the fox nor the wolf were held to be virtuous. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to the bestiary, both possess characteristics of the Devil in their nature. The displays his devilish nature in the devious manner in which he will sometimes hunt. According to the Bestiary, the fox, when it has trouble finding food, will “rolls himself in red mud so that he looks as if he were stained with blood.” After that, “he throws himself on the ground and holds his breath, so that he positively does not seem to breathe.” Through this method, the fox makes himself to look dead, and thus tricks birds into thinking it is safe to sit next to him. The fox then “gobbles them up.”[1]

            This behavior in the fox is said to be in the same nature as the Devil. The Bestiary details the devils analogous behavior, saying “With all those who are living according to the flesh he feigns himself to be dead until he gets them in his gullet and punishes them.

            The wolf too is devilish in nature, according to the Bestiary. From the Bestiary, “The devil bears similitude of a wolf: he who is always looking over the human race with his evil eye, and darkly prowling round the sheepfolds of the faithful so that he may afflict and ruin their souls.” Further, the Bestiary explained that the very nature of how the wolf moves and looks gives it properties not unlike the devil. The wolf cannot look backward, and is always moving forward, in which “signifies that this same Satan was at first forward among the angels of light and was only made an apostate by the Hindward way.”[2]

            Personally, I am less inclined to say the text as itself is filled with allegory and teaching tools, and I rather feel much of what happened in Renard for entertainment purposes. But these descriptions of the wolf and fox would give a hint as to why these animals were chosen, as opposed to, say, two rival birds or two rival cats. If we believe that these were perceptions that were widely shared (which is hard to say), it would explain why these animals were perhaps chosen. For animals who are in constant conflict, it would make sense that there is a bit of the devil in them. Certainly the holy dove or angelic doe would be poorer choices.

            ­In order to further examine the choice of these two animals, I went to Albertus, to see what in the nature of these animals may have been reasons for their selection.  I was looking for evidence of the fox as a trickster or and the wolf as aggressive and vengeful (the latter of which showing itself moreso in the Pilgrimage story arc). Examining Albertus’s account of the fox would suggest that the fox had a reputation which would lend itself well to playing a trickster in this novel. As Albertus wrote, [The fox] is full of tricks and when a dog is following it, [the fox] leads its tail through the mouth of the dog and leads it to and fro and thus sometimes eludes it.”[3] This, in conjunction with the Bestiary’s account of the deceptive hunting practices of the fox, may give a decent explanation why the fox was chosen. Not only is it a bit devilish, but it was perceived to be a trickster. If our unknown author of Renard the Fox came up with the “trickster” angle before choosing the animal, and if these perceptions of the Fox were common, it would help explain why the fox was chosen.

What of Ysengrimus? Albertus wrote that Wolves are “rapacious beast, and hankering for gore.”[4] This would certainly apply to the wolves behavior in the pilgrimage. There wasn’t quite as much on the wolf that was directly applicable to the rivalry that happened between the fox and the wolf, but this does at least point to the aggression of the animal and, thus, its propensity to engage in the kind of feud that occurred between the two.

            Within the text, we see animals behaving in the way they do in nature, according to Albertus and the bestiary. We also see the animals are reflective of their worst traits, or at least what were perceived to be traits shared with the devil. While we didn’t see Renard feign death, we did see him attempting to trick birds into coming close enough to eat. While I’m still not convinced that the characters are acting as strong allegories for any particular thing, I do think the Bestiary and Albertus both give some clues as to why an author may have picked these characters.

-    -    Jeramee

P.S. For those, like me, who were further curious about Renard’s ….physical encounter with Hersent, I was able to find the following:

“The male fox has a bony penis and it copulates lying on its side, embracing the female who is also lying on her side.[5]”

“Wolves are known for their rapacity, and for this reason we call prostitutes wolves, because they devastate the possessions of their lovers.[6]”

 “Wolves only copulate on twelve days in the whole year.”[7][8]

I’m not entirely sure if any of these quotes explain what happened, but….maybe?

P.P.S.

Also, did someone say talking foxes?

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[1] Bestiary 54

[2] Bestiary 59

[3] Albertus 1541

[4] Bestiary 56

[5] Albertus 1542

[6] Bestiary 56

[7] Bestiary 61

[8] Albertus 1518

Dove as symbol

The Sign of the Dove is ostensibly about a dove. It is about a bird, its coloration, its sigh and its nature. By analyzing The Sign of the Dove in more depth, however, it becomes clear that this text and image pairing is not solely a bird. Rather, it is about the sign. The sign, this sign of the dove, was a way to use metaphor to extract meaning out of a text and an image. Its purpose: to indicate the spiritual nature of what’s signified. Metaphor is the medium through which this spiritual world is visible. The Sign of the Dove was used, not to be looked at, but to be looked through to the invisible, to the conceptual and the spiritual. To illuminate the theological and determine that life of sublimity.

While this image could illuminate another world, it could also be used to collect knowledge about a place, a world. The Sign of the Dove was part of a larger book—a book on many types of birds and their significance. This book, like many texts and images we have analyzed in this course, is a bestiary. It is an encyclopedia. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I believe that these complications with the express purpose of collecting knowledge about the outside world were very powerful tools. Encyclopedias, bestiaries, indicate that the author is trying to learn. They are trying to master some part of the physical environment. Cataloging is a first step to having power over something. By cataloging these animals, the authors of these bestiaries were attempting to gain partial control over the animals contained therein. It can be imagined to be a respite from the great fear of the unknown. 

The Sign of the Dove seems to be something else, also. Not only was this other, spiritual world something that could be used to understand complex topics—sin and love were two we touched on—but the self. As we went on to discuss at the end of class, the Sign of the Dove indicates the occurrence of an intricate psychology. By looking at this text and image, one could understand themselves better through the aide of looking at a particular creature. Again, we see here that people were attempting to understand themselves and the world around them—to gain a grasp of the world through cataloging language and, as evidenced here, through metaphor.

This world within a world signification indicates, to me, something broader about how animals were used in the Middle Ages. Throughout this course, we have been asking the question what are animals for? What is their relationship to humans? Perhaps we can use the Sign of the Dove to flesh out our understanding of that relationship. The use of metaphor in the interpretation of the Sign of the Dove could be akin to the use of animals in the interpretation of the world. That is to say, people used metaphor to interpret an image of a dove to extract meaning out of the world around them. Within this comparison, animals can take the place of metaphor, here. To people in the Middle Ages, and perhaps to people now, animals can be used to extract some meaning out of the world around them. Animals can be, and are, symbols. They are symbols used to get at some larger meaning, to analyze the way in which humans themselves navigate the world around them.

We see this animal as symbol or signifier just as we saw dove as signifier in the three ways outlined above. First, as first and foremost a symbol. As we have seen before, animals were not only economically useful, but also served as signifiers. Here, though, the broader meaning that animals help humans to understand the spiritual world, the natural world, what is real and what is not. Animals could serve as approximations of what could seem to be ungraspable to the intellect. Next, as a way of knowledge collection. To learn about animals is a way to learn about the world. Animals live in the woods, and the woods can symbolize the great unknown. By learning about small pieces of what lies in that great unknown, the fright that accompanies that great void can be lessened. Finally, as ways to understand people themselves. They also attained class distinctions, were described in ways similar to humans. They were extensions of humans. By giving animals certain characteristics, they could be used to help humans understand more about their own world, their human world.

Many could give a counterargument. In class, we asked some very good questions—why not just get a real bird? Why interpret both the picture and text instead? What does this illustration do that a flesh and blood animal does not? I will elaborate on these questions to provide a counterargument. If we cannot just use a bird as a symbol in interpreting The Sign of the Dove to examine the spiritual world and get closer to God, how can we use flesh and blood animals to extract meaning out of the world of humans? Aren’t flesh and blood animals not enough to use as a symbol, or an interpretive device?

I believe that animals are enough to analyze the human world. Metaphor is just different enough from matter of fact speech, just as animals are just different enough from humans such that they can be utilized as an interpretive device. I am trying to argue that animals can be used to make sense of the human world just as metaphor can be used to make sense of the spiritual world in the Sign of the Dove. In the former case, the thing being analyzed, the human world, is broad enough such that animals as interpretive devices makes sense. Not just animals as pictures and text, but as animals. In the ways humans use animals to understand their world, it works. As we have seen, humans have used animals as flesh and blood, when they keep them as pets, or use them to fight, as textual representations, as when they are described in bestiaries and representations of the hunt, and as painted pictures, as in many of the unrealistic groupings of animals we looked at last week.

So, animals are not perceived as just flesh and blood. They are multifaceted, can be represented in many ways, and in this way, animals can be used to interpret the human world. They can be used to grasp something larger about humans that would not be achievable without these animals. They are ultimately very valuable, just as the Sign of the Dove is valuable, in that they help humans see beyond their visible, graspable world into the invisible, the ungraspable. The human nature of the world is graspable through the study of animals.

--B. Alderete Baca

The Animal Mirror

          The meditation of the dove with all its layers of significance and signs was practiced to develop perspective. By contemplating the dove and its properties, a human can find the traces of God in His own creation, and the human can perceive beyond the visible qualities of life to the invisible and sublime. Interpreting creation through animals allows the human to interpret creation through himself, for the dove is a mirror to the human. Hugh of Fouilloy outlines the three kinds of doves in Scripture and how they each exemplify a unique method to cease from sin. To follow the dove of Noah, you much cease from sin. To follow the dove of David, you must do battle against sin. To follow the dove of Jesus Christ, you must seek salvation.[1] The meditation of the dove will lead to instruction and then action for the human who practices contemplation.

            The dove is a mirror to the human who searches for the invisible trace of God in nature and for instruction for devout life. The human can identify with the dove, can take on its characteristics in order to sincerely practice their love for God. The dove can also become a mirror for the Church and the community. “The silvered dove is the Church,” and its physical shape holds the source of spirituality.[2]

            This was the atmosphere of the medieval world. As Dutton writes, “…the early Middle Ages seemed awash with divine power.”[3] Doves and other kinds of birds, beasts, and even the smallest insects were both manifestations of God’s creation and agents of His will. But animal metaphors were also used for courtly life, and instead of careful contemplation of nature, human would identify themselves and others through stock characteristics and behaviors of animals.

            Dutton implies that Charlemagne’s own court was a mock menagerie in which his courtiers and companions carried animal nicknames and communicated in animal code.[4] Charlemagne himself was referred to as the lion because of the animal’s role as king of beasts.[5] This association was determined by the nature and characteristics of the animals in the same way Hugh determined the signs of the dove by its properties. However, when the animal mirror is applied to the superficial personality of an individual as opposed to trace of God left in a creature from its creation, does the metaphor hold its significance?

            Charlemagne identified with the lion as a king, but he also knew himself to be the king of humans and beasts. He played his kingly role by collecting exotic animals in his forests to show the extent of his control over the natural world.[6] Significantly, he collected a variety of birds of paradise such as peacocks, doves, and swans, and their presence in his menagerie were not ornamental. As a lion, as a king, Charlemagne needed to display his control over a harmonious and civilized paradise that housed birds and beasts. Using the characteristics of the animals, Charlemagne could metaphorically and literary mirror his superiority. But does the recognition of animal properties within the self translate to the same kind of immersive introspective Hugh of Fouilloy was trying to stimulate through his dove?

            In some ways I am quick to say no to my own question. It seems silly that Charlemagne’s political strategy involving animal metaphors and peacocks could be made similar to the deeply spiritual meditation conducted by Hugh’s dove. Yet, as Dutton reminds his readers, the Middle Ages were deeply spiritual and deeply animal. In a longer format I would tease out Charlemagne’s identification with animals, especially the lion and the birds of paradise in his garden. Dutton wants to suggest that the king’s plan for his animals was also meant to associate him with Adam as he collected the creatures in Eden and gave them names.[7] Perhaps this is the entrance to the comparison between the dove and the courtly menagerie.

            What persists, though, is the emphasis on the qualities of the animal that will lead to the central, invisible qualities of its creation. Medieval humans, I will argue, were not insistent on the animal’s appearance or physical accuracy. Although Hugh does spend a lot of time discussing the dove’s colors and form, his descriptions are not accurate for a realistic bird found in wildlife, even if Hugh does claim to have seen a golden dove. I believe the medieval observer was most aware of an animal’s behavior as it compared to his own. In this way he could more easily construct a metaphorical comparison and determine its place in the divine plan. As Ohly details in his article, the purpose of the looking at the dove for Hugh and others was to transcend the visible qualities and to perceive its invisible characteristics: “It leads from the foundations of the sense structure to its vault, from the earthly to the heavenly. Its essence is not foreshortening, but extension to the sublime. It does not relativize by means of an earthly view but is directed to the absolute and makes what has been created transparent vis-à-vis the eternal.”[8] According to this interpretation, the people of the medieval age care more about interpreting the invisible nature of the animal than analyzing its physical properties. While the properties of an animal are important to obtain perspective, the goal is to mirror the dove’s behavior as a vessel of God’s creation and support to Scripture.

            Therefore, the strange depictions of animals in medieval artwork, even those animals that were available for direct observation, have one version of explanation. I argue that medieval artists were too busy trying to capture the introspective trace of God to feel the need to paint realistically or accurately. They were creating images of the animals according to their nature, not always according to how they looked in nature.

K. Beach

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[1] Hugh 121

[2] Hugh 123

[3] Dutton 50

[4] Dutton 47

[5] Dutton 43

[6] Dutton 54

[7] Dutton 56

[8] Ohly 71

"Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries"

Following our discussion on naturalism and art and in anticipation of our discussion on aviaries, a fun little link: http://the-toast.net/2015/04/01/two-medieval-monks-invent-bestiaries/#jagBx6M1mwCLwZB4.01

RAE

The Art Historian's Dilemma and Thoughts on Marignalia

In Flores’ piece “The Mirror of Nature Distorted,” the argument is advanced that there was a shift in the depictions of animals in medieval art that corresponded to the changing intellectual attitudes of the time. Medieval artists, it is claimed, were influenced more or less by both the “allegorical” and “scientific” attitudes (Flores 4). As Flores tells it, by the early modern period, allegory, symbolism, and instruction had given way to a secular, scientific naturalism. The subtitle of Flores’ paper is “The Medieval Artist’s Dilemma in Depicting Animals,” but the dilemma may belong more to the art historian than it did to the artist. Following our class discussion on Thursday, while a general shift in the style of representation of animals throughout the Middle Ages is clear, the model Flores provides obscures as well as explains—though a “realistic” aesthetic may have become dominant, this in no way translates to the extinction of allegorical representation. In particular, I would like to push back against the location of the motivation of this shift in a “new aesthetic principle” (Flores 10).           

“Art is an imitation of nature. Works of art are successful to the extent that they achieve a likeness of nature” (Flores 10). These are the words of St. Thomas Aquinas that Flores tells us are a sort of motto for the naturalistic form of representation. While I do not doubt that this standard is relevant for the elephant sketches of Matthew Paris and illustrations in hunting manuals, it is not at all clear to me that this standard was anything novel. To claim that the images which accompanied the Physiologus were not intended to achieve a likeness of nature, as Flores implies, is inappropriate. Crucial is the definition of “nature.” It might be more fruitful to take St. Thomas Aquinas’ words as a timeless standard for art. Thus, as we witness changes in the likenesses on display in art, the question becomes, how did conceptions and perceptions of nature change?

Evidently, what Flores and Resl mean by “naturalistic” is a resemblance to the world as it comes to us through our eyes. That Matthew Paris’ drawings of the elephant at the Tower of London are naturalistic is to say that, relative to other drawings, they better resemble what a real-world elephant looks like. Is it right to say that, for having seen one in person, Matthew Paris better captured the nature of the elephant than those who had drawn before him? But where is the dragon in his sketch? Or the small elephant lifting the fallen elephant with its trunk? Taking Aquinas’ standard as a new aesthetic principle implies that the artists’ who did not have access to the actual animals they drew could not imitate the nature of the animal. I have a sense that I may have set myself a little bit of a trap though. It may be important to distinguish between the natural animal and the nature of the animal. Anyhow, I suspect that medieval scholars and artists would not readily agree that the legend of the elephant and its symbolic, religious meanings were apart from the nature of the elephant. Thus I take issue with Flores’ claim that “[i]n examining depictions of animals during the Middle Ages, it becomes apparent that an artist’s ability to reproduce nature is not necessarily the overriding consideration in his creation of a work of art” (5). While this may simply be relocating the allegorical/scientific distinction, I think it is important to ask, in evaluating an animal image, what conception of nature or what facet of the nature of the animal is being reproduced?

            I want to shift gears here and ramble briefly about a different aspect of the depictions of animals in medieval art: the enjoyment, both of the artist and the audience. Animals are good to think, and they are also good to draw and good to look at it. Resl acknowledges that the care and enthusiasm manifest in animal depictions in religious contexts goes beyond what was required by the moral and religious messages that the animals were intended to, could have been intended to, communicate (199). Both Resl and Janson too, in his discussion of apes in marginalia, recognize the simultaneous futility and irrelevance of the question of meaning for many instances of animals in medieval art. While it certainly varies and I am sure that many of the tropes, in marginalia in particular, started off playing off of particular set of meanings, it seems not implausible that much of marginalia may be the elaborate doodling of highly skilled artists situated in a particular tradition and thus inheritors of a particular repertoire of motifs.

            As somebody pointed out in class, the apes and rabbits and other animals in marginal art are nearly always situated in a crawling floral or leafy pattern. If I may speculate, I have a little hypothesis regarding the role of marginalia. Writing has long been a powerful symbol of artifice and civilization, and the beautiful penmanship of medieval scribes was a particular peak. The orderly lines of text on the page of a manuscript are an embodiment of the human. The margins of the manuscript seem to serve as a sort of buffer zone, a liminal space between the human and the nonhuman. Hence the ordered naturalness of the vines and flowers, but also the confusion and upside-down-ness of apes absorbed in reading and giving shaves.

-J.S.