I wasn’t at my computer this week. However, I have published a page entitled Beast literature. It contains a list of most of the posts I have written on Beast fables, but not the fables themselves. These are listed on a separate page.
Missing is a post about the various naturalists whose descriptions were used to tell about animals. Herodotus was the first to describe animals, but most fabulists and naturalists used a book entitled the Physiologusto obtain the information they required.
I will post this short note and will return to my normal activities as soon as I feel better.
Physiologus, Adam nomme les animaux (Adam names the animals) Cambrai, vers 1270-1275 Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 711, fol. 17 (Photo credit:BnF) (click)
The Fable
One particular collection of fables, the Ysopet-Avionnet, was used in the schools of medieval France and continued to be published for centuries (see “The Cock and the Pearl,” La Fontaine cont’d). The word “Ysopet,”[1] was a diminutive for “a collection of fables by Ésope,” or Æsop. The term Ysopet, or Isopet, was first used to describe a collection of 102 fables by Marie de France (late 12th century), written in Anglo-Normanin octosyllabic couplets. As for the word Avionnet, it was derived fromAvianus(c. 400 CE), the name of a Latinwriter of fableswhose fables belong to theBabrius(Greek) tradition and “identified as a pagan.” (SeeAvianus, Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia). The goal of fabulists was the Horatian “to inform or delight.” Horace advocated a mixture of both: information and pleasure.
Beast Literature and Christianity
Medieval Bestiaries
the Moral
legendary or mythical animals
St. Augustine
Bestiaries differ from fables in that they contain a Christian moral/ allegory, but like fables, they are a form of instruction. The fox is the devil, and the lamb, Christ, etc. However, Bestiaries closely resemble fables because both genres feature animals and are more or less a form of teaching. The presence of animals sets a distance between the reader and the teaching provided by a fable or a bestiary. The moral is instructive in both genres, but not directly. The animal functions as a buffer.
Moreover, as we have seen, the attributes of animals were defined by “universal popular consent.” Such was particularly the case with Medieval Bestiaries. Animals dwelling in fables and Bestiaires are neither zoological animals, nor humans in disguise. They are allegorical and most are zoomorphic, especially Christian Medieval Bestiaires. (See The Medieval Bestiary, David Badke, ed.)
Interestingly, Medieval Bestiaries feature a large number of legendary or mythical animals. The better-known are the Unicorn, the Dragon, the Griffin and the Phoenix, but Christian Medieval Bestiaries featured several other fantastical beasts, now mostly forgotten. It would be my opinion that Christianity had its prerogatives and that the relatively new Church needed several animals to exemplify human and sinful conduct.
Moreover, many Natural Historians were Christians. At any rate, the Bonnacon shown below was not exactly real and its manners were questionable.
Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º, Folio 10r
“A beast like a bull, that uses its dung as a weapon.” (F 10r)(Photo credit:The Medieval Bestiary)
This kind of truth is what I have grown to describe as “poetical” truth (my term).
Bestiaires d’amour
However, some Medieval Bestiaries were love Bestiaries and were therefore associated with courtly love and the very popular Roman de la Rose. The Roman de la Rose, authored by Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1200 – c. 1240) and Jean the Meun(g) (c. 1240 – c. 1305), was allegorical:
“At various times in the poem, the “Rose” of the title is seen as the name of the lady, and as a symbol of female sexuality in general. Likewise, the other characters’ names function both as regular names and as abstractions illustrating the various factors that are involved in a love affair.” (See Roman de la Rose, Wikipedia.)
In my last post, I featured a lion belonging to a Bestiaire d’amour. It was breathing life into dead offspring. This is what a lady was to do to revive a man after lovemaking, or “petite mort.” Petite mort is an orgasm. The symbolism attached to Beasts dwelling in Love Bestiaries (Bestiaires d’amour) was, therefore, less Christian than the symbolism of animals inhabiting other Bestiaries. The most famous Love Bestiary is Richard de Fournival‘s (1201 – ?1260).
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1951, Folio 18r (Richard de Fournival)
“‘le lyon [above] qui fait revivre ses lyonciaus’ – The lion revives its dead cubs. In the Bestiaire d’amour the man says that in the same way the woman can revive him from his love-death.” (fol. 18r)(Photo credit: BnF)
The courtly love traditional therefore incorporated animal lore, just as it included the lyrical poems of troubadours, trouvères, the Minnesingers, and lyric poets associated with movements such as trobadorismo or trovarismo. By the way, there were women troubadours: the Trobairitz.
Jan M. Ziolkowski writes that “beasts override genre.”[2] He does so on page 1 of his Introduction to Talking Animals). Professor Ziolkowski is perfectly right. In Medieval Bestiaries, beasts were mostly the same from genre to genre: fables, Medieval Bestiaries and the satirical Roman de Renart. Beasts even override paganism and Christianity as well as the Old and the New Testaments. After all, Christmas replaced the pagan Roman Saturnalia. There had to be a feast on the day of the longest night.
To return to “beast literature” (Ziolkowski, p. 1), “The Dog and its Reflection” is included in the Æsopic corpus (Perry Index 133)[3] and is also a fable told in Kalīlah wa Dimnah, and, according to one source, it is included in Le Livre des Lumières or Les Fables de Pilpay, philosophe indien, ou la conduite des rois (a 1698 edition [1644]), Æsop was a Levantin, i.e. from the Levant. With respect to fables, West meets East.
Kalīlah wa Dimnah is an Arabic rendition, by Persian scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa’, of the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Jean de La Fontaine, the author of Le Chien qui lâche sa proie pour l’ombre (1.VI.17), read fables by Pilpay. Yet, the Christian Medieval Bestiary tells that dogs leave the prey they have caught for a prey they may not catch. It may be a mere shadow.
When I was assigned a course on best literature, I divided my material in the following the following genres, roughly speaking:
fables (Æsop and retellers),
beast epics (Reynard the Fox and fabliaux),
the Medieval Bestiaries (The Ashmole Bestiary, etc.),
and Natural Histories (The Physiologus, etc.), yet to be listed.
However, I had to mention mythological beasts, lycanthropes, and also discussed children’s literature. Kenneth Grahame created a “reluctant dragon,” and the use of a toad as the protagonist of The Wind in the Willows made for an upside-down-world, a mundus inversus.
Moreover Æsop, who lived in Greece, was a “Levantin.” There is an Eastern tradition to Æsop’s fables even though, according to some sources, there never lived an Æsop. I was on sabbatical writing a book on Molière when I was assigned a course on Beast literature. I could not refuse to teach it. I therefore joined the International Reynard Society and gave a paper at the forthcoming meeting of the Society, in Hull, England.
A Dutch colleague steered me in the right direction, but the course nevertheless ended my career as a teacher. Would that I could have changed the course into animals in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye and Madame de Villeneuve’s La Belle et la Bête, but someone else was teaching a course on fairy tales. Beast literature includes fairy tales.
(Photo credit: Philip Mendoza, Illustrations, Posters)
The Wind in the Willows
(see the video at the bottom of this post)
It would appear that animals are indeed everywhere. We find mythological, mythical, zoomorphic and theriomorphic animals in the most ancient texts. In this regard, India seems our main source.
But so is the Bible, where we find archangels, good angels and bad angels: the Devil himself! As well, the Bible also warns that we must not trust appearances. In Matthew 7:15, we read:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Literature is home to an extraordinary number of ravenous wolves. In La Fontaine’s fables, we have a wolf who eats a lamb, “Le Loup et l’Agneau.” In fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood loses her grandmother to a wolf.
And, as strange as it may seem, literature is also home to the zoomorphic and theriomorphic (deified beasts) animals featured in mythologies, but reappearing along with new fantastic beasts in medieval Bestiaries, including Richard de Fournival‘s Bestiaire d’amour.
Finally, literature is home to more or less recent high fantasy works featuring fantastic beasts:
J. R. R. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) is the author of The Hobbit, 1937, the high fantasy The Lord of the Rings trilogy, written between 1954 to October 1955, and the mythopoeic Silmarillion, published posthumously, in 1977, by Tolkien’s son Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay. Tolkien taught English literature at Oxford and, among other works, he drew his inspiration from Beowulf for what he called his legendarium.
C. S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien, is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia,written between 1949 and 1954. Narnia is a fictional place, a realm. Previously, Lewis had published a collection of letters entitled The Screwtape Letters, 1942. Earlier still, Lewis had written his three-volume science-fiction Out of the Silent Planet, a trilogy written between 1938 and 1945 and inhabited by strange figures. C. S. Lewis created Hrossa, Séroni, Pfifltriggi, new creatures who live in outer space, but his cosmology includes angels and archangels.
In these books, new lands are created as well as new beasts, but these works also feature beasts borrowed from antiquity and various medieval bestiaries. The books I have mentioned were immensely successful, which shows the importance of fantasy in the human mind. We need imaginary worlds, worlds like the pays de Tendre, worlds with maps and topsy-turvy worlds.
Topsy-Turvy Worlds
What I would like to emphasize is this blog is the topsy-turvy world of beast literature and the comic text. In Reynard the Fox, not only do animals talk, but they are an aristocracy. Humans are mere peasants.
As for the theriomorphic,[i] creatures of mythologies, as I mentioned above, they are deified beasts attesting that Beast Literature is indeed an the “upside-down” world, as Jill Mann mentions with respect to Reynard the Fox.[ii] We also have underworlds. In Greek mythology, we have an Underworld, whence one cannot escape, as Cerberus guards its entrance. Tolkien created a “middle-earth” and C. S. Lewis, worlds in outer space. The Judeo-Christian hell is also an underground world. Moreover, how ironic it is that Richard de Fournival should use animals in praise of women.
However my favourite underworld can be found in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The Mole and the Rat get lost in the woods during a snow storm. They see a mat and beyond the mat a door which leads to the Badger’s underground residence. After dinner, the Mole the Rat, the Otter, who arrives later, and Badger, their host, sit by the fire and the Badger praises his underground world where he is sheltered from both the cold and the heat:
The Badger simply beamed on him. ‘That’s exactly what I say,’ he replied. ‘There’s no security, or peace and tranquillity, except underground. And then, if your ideas get larger and you want to expand–why, a dig and a scrape, and there you are! If you feel your house is a bit too big, you stop up a hole or two, and there you are again! No builders, no tradesmen, no remarks passed on you by fellows looking over your wall, and, above all, no WEATHER.[iii]
Mole and Rat meet the horned god Pan
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”
The Wind in the Willows
(Photo credit: The Guardian)
______________________________[i] “The animal form as a representation of the divine…”
Kurt Moritz Artur Goldammer, “religious symbolism and iconography.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 26 Aug. 2013.
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497416/religious-symbolism>.
[ii] Jill Mann, “The Satiric Fiction of the Ysengrimus,” in Kenneth Varty, editor, Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), p. 11.
[iii]The Wind in the Willows is the Project Gutenberg [EBook # 289]
In 1513,[1] fifteen years before Castiglione published his Cortegiano (1528), Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469-1527), published The Prince(Il Principe), first entitled De Principatibus. Both Castiglione and Machiavelli wrote exceptionally influential works. The Prince is in fact compulsory reading for students of political science. Moreover, both writers were familiar with the works of Græco-Roman antiquity. Machiavelli is also the author of the more substantial Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy.
Francesco Maria I della Rovere (22 March 1490 – 20 October 1538), the adopted heir of Guidobaldo de Montefeltro (January 17, 1472 – April 10, 1508), Elisabetta’s impotent husband, lost control of the dukedom of Urbino to the Medici. However, the Medici also lost control of the dukedom. It was returned to the Montefeltro family. These were embattled families.
As for Lorenzo II, Machiavelli’s student and briefly a Medici Duke of Urbino, he died of the plague in 1519, one year fafter his marriage to Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne and a few weeks after the birth of his daughter Caterina who would marry Henry II, the King of France where she became Catherine de Médicis, Queen consort, and incited her son Charles IX to order the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572). Lorenzo II’s wife, Madeleine, also died in 1519.
Although Machiavelli’s Il Principe was dedicated to a Duke of Urbino, it could be viewed as the dark side of Il libro del cortegiano. Il Cortegiano describes a courtier whose manners we associate with medieval courtly love and the gallant behaviour of the men who were habitués, regulars, in the salons of seventeenth-century France. But there is nothing gallant about Machiavelli’s prince. Il Principe is the description of the ruthless ways in which a prince, preferably a new prince, attains and retains power.
—ooo—
In fact, if any book influenced Machiavelli, it may be Reynard the Fox, beast literature’s foremost trickster. In Chapter XVII of The Prince, Machiavelli writes that it is best to be loved than to be despised, but in Chapter XVIII, he speaks of faithlessness and instructs the prince to be ruthless and “employ” the fox.
Of this [faithlessness] endless modern examples could be given, showing how many treaties and engagements have been made void and of no effect through the faithlessness of princes; and he who has know best how to employ the fox has succeeded best.
Machiavelli builds a degree of ambiguity as to whether his ThePrince should own a lion and a fox, because of the attributes literature has bestowed upon these animals, or be like the lion and particular the fox. But all ambiguity is dispelled when Machiavelli refers to the zoomorphic Centaur, half human and half beast, and writes that “it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable.”
—ooo—
One may therefore look upon ThePrince as the depiction of a profoundly corrupt world. However, it may be more prudent to consider this enormously influential work as both descriptive and prescriptive. Although Machiavelli teaches the now proverbial “the end justifies the means,” the end being ‘righteous’ power, the Centaur is half human. The human half does not however redeem the bestial half, but Machiavelli’s advice to the prince is the fruit of experience. Men are not entirely good, hence the need for the prince to be ‘beastial’ and as crafty as the fox.
If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but beacause they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them.
Machiavelli knew about rulers. In 1498, he was appointed secretary and second chancellor to the Florentine Republic. In the fifteenth century, such an appointment would have been prestigious. Humanists were revered. However, in the sixteenth century, humanism had started to lose its prestige. According to Jacob Burckchardt, like Florentine historians at the beginning of the sixteenth century, humanists “wrote Italian not only because they could not vie with the Ciceronian elegance of the philologists but because, like Machiavelli, they could only record in a living tongue the living results of their own immediate observation.”[2]
Machiavelli had gleaned his information as a diplomat. He had travelled to the court of Louis XII of France and to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. He had also accompanied Pope Julius II on this first campaign of conquest. Powerful families ruled city-states and could be ruthless. The most important of these families was the Medici family who ruled Florence and justified any action perpetrated in gaining and retaining power. “His The Prince and his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (both published posthumously) codified the actual practices of Renaissance diplomacy for the next 100 years.”[3]
—ooo—
As for the world in which we live in, it has seen a Nixon, impeached because of corrupt actions. But former President Nixon was not altogether bad and he would not have killed. The world has also seen Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. And we know about Hitler. History rewrites itself as though humans had no memory.
A member of our team, blog writers, wrote me a kind note in which he wondered where I gathered my information.
I sent him a reply, but feel I should also tell others.
As a former university teacher, I have had to research all kinds of topics and have always enveavoured to give my students information concerning the background to what we were learning. The concept of honnête homme didn’t simply pop up. There had to be a history and I knew that in the case of seventeenth-century French literature, it helps to see what was happening in Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance (rebirth), etc.
In other words, I am simply sharing information that may otherwise require lengthy research. It has been difficult for me to leave the classroom, so I have made a classroom for myself.
Britannica has asked me to provide information, but I have done so only once. I am now preparing a book on Molière using my PhD thesis (the pharmakos [the scapegoat] in Molière’s comedies). I would have done so earlier, but obstacles were put in my way. Life can be cruel and colleagues, selfish. During my last sabbatical leave, I had to prepare two new courses, one of which was on Beast Literature.
Beast Literature is a fascinating subject, but I was devoting that sabbatical to publishing my book. Publishing my book will now be difficult because I lack the financial resources to buy new books on the subject. Moreover, I no longer live near a campus. I will have to use my ingenuity.
There is another obstacle. It stems from a health problem: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. On bad days, it affects my ability to concentrate and I may foreget how to spell a word I know well. However, I always reread my blogs to make sure all I have written is accurate. I have kept the texts of my lectures, which helps. Whenever I could, I would give my students a copy of these texts.
As for my book on Molière, I will make sure the manuscript is read by a person who can stop typos and repetitions.
In other words, I am simply sharing and I hope the information I share can be helpful to someone else. I want to live in a world where people have a sense of community, and that is done one blog at a time.
My blogs are not always easy to prepare because I want them to be concise. People tend not to read long texts. They have other things to do.