Category: Special Series

Posted on

Medieval Golden Goose Fables: Eggs, Greed, and Demanding Too Much

Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XV 2, f. 25v.

In the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs (Perry Index 87), the titular bird is killed by her foolish owner. This fable warns against seeking great, immediate gain over more modest, long-term gain—particularly when doing the former destroys a valuable, otherwise sustainable resource. The first extant version of this fable is that of Avianus, ca. 400 CE; earlier versions may have featured a hen rather than a goose, as fable scholar Francisco Rodríguez Adrados has argued on metrical grounds.1 But in Avianus, the creature is a goose, and so the tale was transmitted through the Middle Ages and beyond, becoming essentially proverbial.

As is the case with fable in general, medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs aim at providing a moral lesson to humans through a memorable extended metaphor. The plight of the bird who is killed in this story is not supposed to be the point. Nevertheless, below, I consider the real creatures behind the unrealistic analogy. Can we read the fable somewhat more subversively, as an admonition about the dangers of pushing animals beyond their physical limits?

British Library, Additional MS 42130 (The Luttrell Psalter), f. 166v.

Medieval and Modern Poultry

Chickens have long been kept for their eggs, at least as much as for their meat. Domestic geese, on the other hand, were valued in the Middle Ages mostly for their meat and feathers.2 Their flight feathers were used for quill pens and arrow fletching, amongst other things, while their down was used for insulation.3 When goose eggs did go on the market in the Middle Ages, though, they could be several times more expensive than hen eggs.4 Goose eggs are harder to come by; geese lay fewer eggs than chickens, and their strong pair-bonds make it infeasible to keep a flock with a very large ratio of laying females to males.5 Domestic geese nowadays might lay between 10 and 40 eggs a year, with the yield likely being somewhat lower than this in the Middle Ages;6 a medieval hen, however, might have laid as many as 100 eggs a year, or even more, “not far behind the level attained in the early twentieth century.”7

While domestic geese are still bred and raised for the resources their bodies provide, it is now predominantly chickens, “the most scientifically engineered of livestock,”8 whose eggs are the basis of an industry worth billions. A chicken bred for egg production can lay 300 eggs a year9—triple the rate of medieval chickens, or even early twenty-first century chickens. This high lay rate may be a cause for osteoporosis in the birds, exacerbated further by their inactivity when kept in “conventional” cages.10

The majority of the over 300 million “commercial laying hens” in the United States are housed in “conventional cage environments,” also known as battery farms. These birds are confined exclusively indoors, in tiers of stacked wire cages, several individuals in each cage, with eggs and waste collected via conveyor belts.11 This “convention” has only been widely implemented since the 1950s.12 Such systems were famously criticized by Ruth Harrison in an influential 1964 book, Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry,13 and since then, “factory farming” has only become further entrenched as a normative practice. In 2009, about 95% of commercial laying hens in the US were in “conventional” cages.14 That percentage has dropped to around 66% as of 2022,15 and is continuing to drop; battery cages were outlawed in the European Union in 2012, and are being outlawed in a growing number of US states, because of animal welfare concerns.

Bibliothèque Municipale de Chalon-sur-Saône, MS 14, f. 67v.

Medieval Fables of Golden Geese

Medieval versions of the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs imagine that there are firm natural limits to the bird’s production of precious gold eggs, which cannot be exceeded. “Nature had fixed this law for the magnificent bird, that she was not permitted to bear two gifts at the same time,” says Avianus’s Latin verse version (fixerat hanc volucri legem Natura superbae, / ne liceat pariter munera ferre duo, lines 3-4).16 In Avianus’s telling, the goose’s owner is portrayed as impatient and calculating—he is concerned that the “gifts” won’t last and eager to maximize profit from her body:

sed dominus, cupidum sperans vanescere votum,
non tulit exosas in sua lucra moras,
grande ratus pretium volucris de morte referre,
quae tam continuo munere dives erat. (lines 5–8)

(But the master, expecting the greedy offering to disappear, did not endure odious delays to his profits, and thought to withdraw from the death of the bird great value, who had been so continuously rich with gifts).

Upon killing the bird and finding her body devoid of treasure, he considers himself deservedly punished by the gods for his own avarice; the fable’s moral concludes:

sic qui cuncta deos uno male tempore poscunt,
iustius his etiam vota diurna negant. (lines 13–14)

(So, to those who wrongly demand from the gods everything at once, they deny even daily prayers more justly.)

A late medieval Middle English prose version of the fable, in William Caxton’s Aesop (1484), tells the story somewhat differently: the goose’s greedy owner verbally commands her to lay two eggs a day instead of one, and kills her, out of anger, when she protests that she can’t. Caxton’s moral is less pithy, but still expresses the sentiment that the man has only hurt his own interests by killing the goose.

The man of auaryce or couetousnes commaunded and bad to her/ that euery daye she shold leye two egges/ And she sayd to hym/ Certaynly/ my mayster I maye not/ wherfore the man was wrothe with her/ and slewe her/ wherfore he lost that same grete good/ of the whiche dede he was moche sorowful and wrothe/ how be it that it was not tyme to shette the stable whan the horses ben loste/ & gone/ And he is not wyse/ whiche dothe suche a thinge/ wherof he shalle repente hym afterward/ ne he also/ whiche doth his owne dommage for to auenge hym self on somme other/ For by cause that he supposeth to wynne al/ he leseth all that he hath17

(The man, out of avarice or covetousness, commanded and ordered that every day she must lay two eggs. And she said to him, “Truly, my master, I cannot,” and so the man was angry with her and killed her, and so he lost that same great benefit, of which deed he was very sad and angry. Nevertheless, it is too late to shut the stable when the horses are lost and gone, and he is not wise who does something that he will regret afterward, nor is he wise who does himself harm to avenge himself on someone else. For, because he intends to gain everything, he loses all that he has.)

Authors like Avianus and Caxton did not foresee the drastic “improvements” that domesticated birds would undergo through breeding, or the battery farms that would house them nearly immobile in tiny cages, with the aim of maximizing profit. “Today,” says Margaret E. Derry, “we use chickens in a more mechanistic way than all other farm livestock. We follow practices that are not good for the birds and do not necessarily reflect well on us, in spite of the obvious benefits of such practices” (i.e., cheap eggs for human consumption).18 The morals to the two medieval versions of The Goose with the Golden Eggs that I considered above ultimately frame the bird’s violent demise in terms of how this impacts the human killer financially; we are encouraged to view the slaughter as, above all, unwise, because the goose was profitable to her owner, rather than as an act of cruelty or injustice toward the victim. But despite these mercenary morals, the fables’ authors nevertheless presciently suggest that human greed can demand more of animals than they can provide us, and that this is destructive, to them and to us.

  1. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Brill, 2003), vol. 3, p. 113. ↩︎
  2. Philip Slavin, “Goose management and rearing in late medieval eastern England, c.1250–1400,” The Agricultural History Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (2010), p. 4. ↩︎
  3. Dale Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England, and the problem of ageing goose bones,” Acta zoologica cracoviensia, vol. 45 (2002), p. 43. ↩︎
  4. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 8. ↩︎
  5. Serjeantson, “Goose husbandry in Medieval England,” p. 41. ↩︎
  6. Slavin, “Goose management and rearing,” p. 16. ↩︎
  7. D. J. Stone, “The Consumption and Supply of Birds in Late Medieval England,” in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 154. ↩︎
  8. Margaret E. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens (University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 4. ↩︎
  9. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  10. C. C. Whitehead et al., “Osteoporosis in cage layers,” Poultry Science, vol. 79, 7 (2000), 1033–1041; A. B. Webster, “Welfare implications of avian osteoporosis,” Poultry Science, vol. 83, 2 (2004): 184–92. ↩︎
  11. United Egg Producers, “Hen Housing Diagrams,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  12. B. Yilmaz Dikmen et al., “Egg production and welfare of laying hens kept in different housing systems (conventional, enriched cage, and free range),” Poultry Science, vol. 95, 7 (2016), p. 1564. ↩︎
  13. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (Vincent Stuart Publishers, 1964). Reprinted with new commentaries 2013 by CAB International. ↩︎
  14. Sara Shields and Ian J. H. Duncan., “A Comparison of the Welfare of Hens in Battery Cages and Alternative Systems” (2009), Impacts on Farm Animals 18, WellBeing International, accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  15. United Egg Producers, “Facts & Stats,” accessed January 4, 2025. ↩︎
  16. Latin text from J. Wright Duff and A. M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II: Florus, Hadrian, Nemesianus, Reposianus, Tiberianus, Dicta Catonis, Phoenix, Avianus, Rutilius Namatianus, Others, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 732. All modern English translations in this post are my own. ↩︎
  17. Middle English text from R. T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 190. ↩︎
  18. Derry, Art and Science in Breeding, p. 9. ↩︎
Posted on

Epithets, Epistles, and Erasmus, Oh my [most serene king of Britain]!

In his treatise on the writing of letters, the De Conscribendis epistolis,[1] Dutch humanist and prolific letter-writer Desiderius Erasmus emphasizes the importance of the opening section of the letter. Going wrong here in the salutatio, the writer will, he says,“…like a poor helmsman…run aground right in the harbour.”[2]  His advice is to keep things simple, adopting the “new” Ciceronian style:

I approve the simplicity of the ancients; I only wish that we could emulate it everywhere amid the corrupt practices of our age, so that we might greet one another by the mere mention of names, as in: ‘Pliny gives his Calvus greeting!’ What could be truer or simpler? When you hear a man’s name pronounced you hear all his good qualities in a nutshell.[3]

Here and throughout his treatise, Erasmus makes a point of attacking the “corrupt practices of our age,” that is to say, medieval dictaminal practice. Erasmus’ friend and correspondent, the younger scholar Juan Luis Vives, who wrote a De Conscribendis Epistolis of his own, agrees that in medieval practice the use of epithets had spiraled out of control. Vives suggests that they should instead be employed as sparingly as possible, their use restricted to legitimate titles derived from the office of the addressee: “senator, consul, quaestor, bishop, priest, curate.”[4] He underscores the fact that a badly placed epithet might tarnish honor instead of enhancing it, suggesting that a name like Erasmus of Rotterdam carries its own distinction with no need for titles:

Other titles, originating from a debased custom, produce laughter or annoyance rather than confer distinction. Is it not more flattering to be so highly thought of that there is no need of epithets, as in the case of Guillaume Bude, Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Thomas More? In the lustre of such names expressions like “most learned in both tongues,” “consummate theologian,” “gentleman of greatest renown” are superfluous.[5]

Detail, Two Studies of the Left Hand of Erasmus of Rotterdam; Study of the Right Hand Writing. Silverpoint, black crayon and red chalk on grey-primed paper, 20.6 × 15.3 cm, Louvre, Paris. Christian Müller; Stephan Kemperdick; Maryan Ainsworth; et al, Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532, Munich: Prestel, 2006. Erasmus holds a pointed italic quill, suited to the purposes of his humanistic hand.

Erasmus ostensibly agrees, directly criticizing the customary pleonastic manner of addressing royals and nobles:

The king of the French alone is called “most Christian,” the king of Spain alone “Catholic,” the king of England “most serene,” the emperor alone “ever august,” dukes “most illustrious,” other members of the lesser nobility “illustrious,” and others “most noble.” Who introduced this superstition about titles into the world? … By the constant repetition of phrases like “most reverend lordships,” “Catholic majesties,” and “magnificent fatherhoods” we fill up a large part of a letter, and ruin the gracefulness of the Latin tongue. I pardon those who use them against their will; I do not pardon those who devise them, or who insist upon them as a serious matter.[6]

Despite this ideal, as with so many rules and regulations meant to govern the rules of prose, humanistic or otherwise, theory does not always accord with practice. Vives certainly uses flattering epithets in his own letters, despite his counsel to the contrary.[7] But although Erasmus begins by praising the “mere mention of names,” in practice his treatise goes on to linger on the salutatio for nearly a dozen sections, recommending the use of essential titles and the use of an apt—but not sycophantic—epithet (he suggests over 100 as suitable).[8]

Moreover, for the 1515 dedication to his Senecae Lucubrationes, Erasmus composes a salutation that hardly appears to follow his own advice: “To the most distinguished Father D. Thomas Ruthall,” he writes, “Bishop of Durham, Secretary of State of the Most Serene King of Britain, Erasmus of Roterdam sends greeting.[9] Though he does give himself merely his two names Erasmus Roterodamus, he is not content to give his friend Ruthall the single epithet amplissimo—he goes on to add his titles as well as those of Ruthall’s master, the “Most Serene King of Britain.” Leaving aside the elevated diction Secretarius Magnus and the choice of Britanniae instead of Angliae, Erasmus appears to fall right into the very “superstition about titles” he criticized above: calling the king of England “most serene.” As Erasmus cannot be imagined to here use epithets “against [his] will, in our charity we must conclude that he simply does not “insist upon them as a serious matter.” Indeed, we might imagine this apparent “do as I say, not as I do” as part of a game among friends. A glance at the letters of another friend of Erasmus, fellow correspondent Sir Thomas More, reveals that More uses titles only rarely in his salutations—rare exceptions include the high-flung salutation of Henry (that same most serene king of Britain) as Britanniae Galliaeque Regi and a 1506 letter addressed to Regio apud Anglos Secretario, our very own Thomas Ruthall. In the year 1506, Erasmus was staying in More’s house at Bucklersbury, and the two were engaged in the translation of Lucian’s dialogues. More’s almost overly learned letter to Ruthall offers some “first fruits” of these Greek studies. More and Erasmus engage here in a game of language and words, breaking their own rules, offering their efforts to a mutual humanist friend they knew would delight in their linguistic play.

Despite living the most fruitful parts of his adult career after the conclusion of what is generally considered the medieval period, Desiderius Erasmus never really attempted to avoid or evade the Middle Ages. Both in his return to the Classics and his agitations for a new humanistic approach to writing and scholarship, Erasmus continues to engage with medieval thinkers and medieval ways of thinking. In responding to and helping drive the dramatic shift away from the centuries-old medieval dictaminal tradition designed for the mass production of documents essential to the court of every Christian kingdom to a humanistic model grown out of the fourteenth-century Renaissance and Francesco Petrarcha’s rediscovery of the personal letters of Cicero to his friend Atticus, Erasmus engages in a humanistic game that plays off of tension with the near medieval past.

Rebecca West, PhD
Literature Core Faculty
University of Dallas

[1] Erasmus was already writing an early version of this text for his student Robert Fisher by about 1498 (Epistularum scribendarum ratio).⁠ A pirated version of his treatise was published at Oxford in 1521 by Siberch,⁠ more or less forcing Erasmus to come out with an expanded, corrected official version in 1522. The standard edition of the treatise is Charles Fantazzi, ed., “On the Writing of Letters / De Conscribendis Epistolis,” in The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, 3 and 4, by J. K. Sowards, ed., 25 (University of Toronto Press, 1985). Hereafter abbreviated as CWE 25/3.

[2] CWE 25/3:50. The ars dictaminis aimed at organizing the letter—a form largely meant for public declamation of official communications—according to standardized models following a set of rules derived from ancient Ciceronian oratory. Erasmus devotes significant portions of his treatise to the proper way to frame the opening of a letter, the portion corresponding to the salutatio and captatio benevolentiae of a letter written according to the terminology of the medieval dictaminalmodel.

[3] CWE 25/3:51

[4] Charles Fantazzi, ed., J.L. Vives: De Conscribendis Epistolis: Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Annotation, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 47.

[5] Vives: De Conscribendis Epistolis, 47.

[6] CWE 25/3:61.

[7] See the introduction to Fantazzi’s edition for the use of flattering epithets in Vives’ own corpus of letters.

[8] CWE 25/3:50-62.

[9] Amplissimo patri D. Thomae Ruthallo Episcopo Dunelmensi Serenissimi Britanniae Regis Secretario Magno Erasmus Roterodamus S. D. Text from Elizabeth Frances Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, (Princeton: University Press, 1947), letter 5.Translation from Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and Revilo P. Oliver, eds., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 3, Part II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:2–8.

Posted on

Ivo of Chartres, De nativitate

Following the liturgical calendar, the second installment in the festal homilies of Ivo of Chartres pertains to the celebration of the Nativity of Christ (De nativitate). For a short discussion of the context of this work, please see my previous post about his homily on Advent (De adventu Domini).

Emmanuel Tzanes, Christ Healing the Blind (1686). Public domain.

Stylistically, there are many similarities between Ivo’s homilies on Advent and on the Nativity. Perhaps most notable is the ongoing use of parallel structure. While a bit less noticeable than in the homily on Advent, Ivo regularly contrasts human and godly nature, the Mosaic and Christian laws, Eve and Mary, etc. Throughout, the focus in the text is the economy of salvation, that is, how the life of Christ has made possible the rewards of heaven and eternal life for his listeners.

Some passages in this homily merit further reflection. The first half of the text is dominated by a meditation on Christ as the Great Physician, based on the miracle of the healing of the man born blind in the Gospel of St. John (9:6) and further echoing, although never directly citing, a passage in the Gospel of Luke (5:31, “They that are whole, need not the physician: but they that are sick”). For Ivo, in a spiritual sense, Christ applies both homeopathic and heteropathic remedies. In order to confer health “through similar things” (“sanitatem contulit aegrotis per similia”), Christ endured and overcame the physical aspects of human life – birth, suffering, and death – in order that humanity might enjoy the spiritual counterparts of each – rebirth (in baptism), the avoidance of eternal torture, freedom from eternal death. Conversely, Christ the Physician also effected a cure through opposite means (“quibus contrariis contrarios morbos evacuaverit”): he granted freedom as a servant; he overcame pride through humility; he corrected our disobedience though his own obedience.

The second half of the text settles into a style of typological commentary very typical of Ivo’s other homilies, especially his liturgical commentaries, in which he contrasts the historical accounts in Genesis and the requirements of the Mosaic Law with their Christian and New Testament parallels. The sacrificial lamb of the original Passover is a forerunner of the true Lamb. Instead of doors being marked with the blood of the sacrifice, the foreheads of the faithful are marked with the sign of Christ’s sacrifice, i.e., the Cross. In place of the Old Testament priesthood, Christ himself is the priest who offers himself, since no other priest would be worthy to make such a sacrifice. In a similar way, Eve is contrasted with Mary: the curse of Eve, to bear children in pain, is revoked in the person of Christ’s mother, who received instead a blessing (“Benedicta tu in mulieribus”).

Ivo concludes with an emphasis on the incomplete knowledge of the divine afforded to us who are still making our pilgrimage, as it were, on earth, and exhorts us to be mindful of the salvific works of Christ as a means of easing the burden of the present life.