Category: Beast Fables

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Medieval Animal Psychology and the Mirror Self-Recognition Test

If you put a puppy or a kitten in front of a mirror for the first time, how would it react? Social media is full of videos of dogs sniffing or barking at themselves in mirrors, and cats trying to fight their own reflections. Adorable though this scenario may be, some psychologists see it as something deeper, a test of self-awareness.

Charles Darwin was once struck by an orangutan named Jenny gazing into a mirror and wondered whether she recognized herself. Over a century later, psychologist Gordon G. Gallup designed an experiment to test this, marking the faces of chimpanzees with a small amount of dye and observing their reactions when placing a full-length mirror before them.1 Although the experiment’s methodology and assumed implications have been criticized on a number of different fronts, this Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test has since been adapted to study a variety of different animals over the years. Orangutans, chimpanzees, dolphins, orcas, magpies, and ghost crabs have supposedly passed versions of the test; dogs, cats, giant pandas, baboons, and cichlids have supposedly not.

Failing the test has been taken to imply a lack of self-awareness, which could in turn have significant evolutionary and cross-species implications. As Jennie Coy explains, in order to cooperate like a human is (at least theoretically) able to, ‘an animal has to be sufficiently aware of itself: first, to place itself in relation to the environment; secondly, to perceive itself as having an effect on that environment; and, thirdly, to be aware of the other individual as separate from itself.’2 Self-awareness has controversially been even further connected to questions of intelligence and rationality, traits that have in the past been considered unique to humans and thus separating them from non-human animals. As recently as 1988, Tim Ingold noted, ‘The view that non-human animals may be regarded as self-conscious subjects with thoughts and feelings of their own is still something of a heresy in ethological and psychological circles.’3

Darwin’s observations and the MSR test came well after the Middle Ages, but there are a few medieval tales reflecting the underlying premise that certain animals are unable to recognize their own reflections. The first is a fable commonly titled ‘The Dog and Its Reflection’. Aesop’s version of the fable describes how a dog carrying a piece of meat sees its reflection in a body of water. Thinking that it is looking at a different dog with another piece of food, it opens its mouth to attack. In doing so, it drops its own food in the water, leaving it with nothing.

Aberdeen University Library, Univ. Lib. MS 24, fol. 19r.

This was an extremely popular fable, with versions of it adapted across the world and throughout the Middle Ages. The c. 1200 Aberdeen Bestiary, for instance, describes the dog losing meat upon seeing its shadow as a somewhat convoluted allegory for preachers ‘driving off the ambushes laid by the Devil’. In most renditions, the fable is used as a more straightforward moral message against greed; in some others like in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Hemings þáttr, the message is more political.4 Whatever the subtext may be, every version of the fable is based on the assumption that a dog would not be able to recognize its own reflection.

A second similarly confused animal is the tiger. Medieval animal texts like the Aberdeen Bestiary describe a somewhat cruel ploy to capture a tiger cub and escape the wrath of its mother: ‘When [the thief] sees the tigress drawing close, he throws down a glass sphere. The tigress is deceived by her own image in the glass and thinks it is her stolen cub. She abandons the chase, eager to gather up her young. […] And thus, trapped by the intensity of her sense of duty, she loses both her revenge and her child.’

Aberdeen University Library, Univ. Lib. MS 24, fol. 8r.

This case is slightly more complex. Like the fable dog, the tigress is unable to recognize its own reflection, but does at least evidently understand the reflection to be a familial member of its own species. Of course, the small size of the glass sphere contributes to this confusion, as does the ‘intensity of her sense of duty’ as a mother.

There is an unstated but strong assumption across both stories that a human being would be able to correctly parse their reflection and not succumb to the same errors as the other animals. Reflection stories about humans or half-humans from Narcissus to mermaids are usually concerned with the dangers of pride, vanity, and luxury, but this is all the price of human intelligence. As Joyce Salisbury explains, to medieval philosophers, ‘the main principle defining animals was their perceived lack of intellect, “reason.”’5 The dog and tiger bestiary stories suggest that self-awareness was also tied to human intellect and reason at this time, and, in fact, centuries before Darwin and Gallup, a medieval Mirror Self-Recognition test was already being theorized.

Ashley Castelino, DPhil
Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame

  1. Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., ‘Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition’, Science, 167.3914 (1970), pp. 86–87. ↩︎
  2. Jennie Coy, ‘Animals’ Attitudes to People’, in What is an Animal?, ed. by Tim Ingold (Routledge, 1988), pp. 77–83 (p. 80). ↩︎
  3. Introduction to What is an Animal?, ed. by Tim Ingold (Routledge, 1988), pp. 1–16 (p. 6). ↩︎
  4. Hemings þáttr, in Icelandic Sagas and Other Historical Documents Relating to the Settlements and Descents of the Northmen of the British Isles, vol. I, Orkneyinga saga and Magnus saga, with Appendices, ed. by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 347–87 (p. 366). ↩︎
  5. Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2011), p. 4. ↩︎
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The Ambiguous Medieval Bat: Fables on Treachery and Survival

In the Middle Ages, the bat was understood to occupy an unusual position amongst animals. Ancient and medieval authors were well aware that while bats have wings and fly, like birds do, they also have teeth, give birth to live young, and produce milk—none of which are avian traits. Premodern taxonomies (systems of classification for living things) differed significantly from modern ones;1 the bat in the medieval period was often spoken of as a bird with some “quadruped” characteristics.2 For example, some twelfth-century bestiaries, drawing directly from Ambrose’s Hexameron (Book 5, 24.87), say:

The bat [vespertilio], an ignoble animal, takes its name from “evening” [vespere]. Moreover, it is both flying and a quadruped, and uses its teeth, which you may not be accustomed to finding in other birds. It gives birth like quadrupeds, not as eggs, but as living young.3

Illustration of a bat from the early 13th c. Ashmole Bestiary (Bodleian Library, MS. Ashmole 1511), fol. 63r.

The bat’s liminal nature was fodder for medieval fables as well. The most popular medieval bat fable (or at least, the one extant in the greatest number of versions)4 was The Bat and the Birds (Perry Index 566). In this fable, a bat attempts to play both sides in a conflict between quadrupeds and birds, and is ultimately punished for his duplicity.

Ambiguity as Deceptive

A Latin verse version by medieval English author Alexander Neckam, who lived in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century, goes as follows:

De vespertilione et avibus
Quadrupedes et aves gererent dum bella furentes
et modo quadrupedes, nunc fugerent volucres,
versutus vespertilio se iunxit utrisque
ut, quicquid fieret, tutus untrinque foret.
Auribus et mammis se quadrupedem simulabat,
credi par alis alitibus poterat.
Hac se fraude tegens inter fera prelia tutus
fallebat stolidum cautus utrumque genus.
Ut fraus nota fuit, genus hunc abiecit utrumque
et merito placuit ut neutrum neutri.
Hac re quadrupedes et aves dum vespere pausant,
antique fraudis conscius ipse fugit.
Sic qui se fallax nunc his nunc ingerit illis,
omnibus ingratus, iure repulsus erit.5

My translation:

The Bat and the Birds
While the quadrupeds and birds were waging a furious war, and at times the quadrupeds were fleeing, at other times the birds, the cunning bat united himself to both, so that, whatever happened, he would be safe from both sides. He resembled the quadrupeds in his ears and teats, and could be taken for a bird because of his wings. So, deceptively hiding himself, safe amongst the fighting beasts, the cautious one tricked the foolish ones of both kinds. When the deceit was known, both kinds cast him out, and he deservedly was accepted by neither one nor the other. Because of this, when quadrupeds and birds rest in the evening, he, conscious of the earlier deception, flees. Thus, whichever deceitful one pushes himself onto first some, then onto others, will justly be rejected, unacceptable to all.

The bat in the fable of The Bat and the Birds values self-protection above “loyalty” to one party or another, and sits uneasily between categories. Neckam’s version construes his strategy as clever, but deceptive, and judges his ultimate status as an exile as well-deserved, and perhaps inevitable.

Illustration of the War of the Birds and the Beasts, in an 1863 edition of Croxall’s Fables of Aesop, p. 228.

While Neckam’s moral is pretty general, moralizing the conflicting groups as “some” and “others” whom one shouldn’t act fickle towards, other medieval (and modern) moralists were more direct in casting the fable in political terms. William Caxton’s Aesop (1484) proclaims:

And therfore he that wylle serue two lordes contrary one to other may not be good ne trewe/ And they whiche relynquen and leue theyr owne lordes for to seruve another straunger/ whiche is enemy to theyr lord/ ben wel worthy to be punysshed/6

(And therefore, he that will serve two lords opposed to one another cannot be good or faithful. And those who abandon and leave their own lords to serve another foreigner who is enemy to their lord are well worthy to be punished.)

Eighteenth-century churchman Samuel Croxall, meanwhile, waxed fervent about deserters and traitors to one’s country:

For any one to desert the interest of his country, and turn renegado, either out of fear, or any prospect of advantage, is so notoriously vile and low, that it is no wonder if the man, who is determined in it, is for ever ashamed to see the sun, and to show himself in the eyes of those whose cause he has betrayed.7

Illustration of a bat from a bestiary, British Library, Harley MS 3244, folio 55v.

The bat’s ambiguous nature does not jibe well with Caxton’s and Croxall’s denouncements, which compare him to someone who deserts their lord or betrays their country. Indeed, perhaps his nature, as the fables have it, does not jibe well with the genre’s broader tendency to naturalize and essentialize social categories, by using animals as metaphors for humans, as I have discussed in previous posts. Fables map species differences to human social differences, and in so doing, often portray these social differences as inherent and immutable—stark as the differences between a donkey and a lion, or a wolf and a sheep.

But, after all, which group should the bat try to belong to, in this fable? If he were to side only with the quadrupeds, the birds might deem him a traitor, and vice versa. His characteristics align him with both sides. In a sense, by allying with both sides at different points in time, he is being true to his own nature, which is ambiguous. This ambiguity can render him safer, but it can also render him more vulnerable.

Ambiguity as Adaptive

Another bat fable depicts the bat’s ambiguous characteristics as potentially adaptive in the face of danger, and indeed as something for humans to emulate. In the fable of The Bat and the Weasel (Perry Index 172), a bat is captured by a weasel and pleads for his life. The weasel insists that she cannot spare the bat, since she is the enemy of all winged creatures. Declaring that he is not a bird, but a mouse, the bat is freed.8 Then, he is caught by a second weasel, who claims to hate all mice. The bat now insists he is not a mouse, but a bat, and he is once again released. The conclusion: “The fable demonstrates that we too must not persist in the same devices, reckoning that those who adapt themselves to circumstances often escape dangers.”9

Image of a bat from Bibliothèque d’Amiens Métropole, MS. 399 folio 149r.

Together, these bat fables speak not only to the perceived ambiguity of the bat as a creature, but the perceived ambiguity of being ambiguous. Those who don’t fit into a single category can face mistrust and disapprobation, but that same liminality can also be a source of strength.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. See Susan Crane, “A Taxonomy of Creatures in the Second-Family Bestiary,” in New Medieval Literatures vol. 10, issue 1 (2008), pp. 1-48, for an insightful analysis of medieval bestiary taxonomy, for instance. ↩︎
  2. Live birth and the production of milk are of course mammal traits, not quadruped traits per se. The taxonomic category of “mammals” was introduced by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, however, and would be anachronistic here. Interestingly, Linnaeus categorized both bats and humans as primates. ↩︎
  3. Vespertilio, animal ignobile, a vespere nomen accepit. Est autem volatile idemque quadrupes, et dentibus utitur, quos in aliis avibus reperire non soleas. Parit ut quadrupedia, non ova sed pullos viventes. Latin text from Willene B. Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary (The Boydell Press, 2006), p. 182. Translations in this post are mine (unless otherwise stated). My own translation above differs little from Clark’s, but Clark notably translates ut quadrupedia as “like mammals.” ↩︎
  4. See Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, vol.3 (Brill, 2003), p. 727. ↩︎
  5. Giovanni Garbugino, ed., Alessandro Neckam, Novus Aesopus, Favolisti latini medievali, vol. 2. (Università di Genova Facoltà di Lettere, 1987), p. 56. ↩︎
  6. R. T. Lenaghan, ed., Caxton’s Aesop, Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 107. ↩︎
  7. Samuel Croxall, Fables of Aesop and Others, Translated into English, with Instructive Applications, and One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Illustrations (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863), p. 229. ↩︎
  8. There is some slippage in terminology here—the bat didn’t deny he was winged, he denied he was a bird! However, this assertion satisfies the first captor. ↩︎
  9. I have epitomized L. Radif’s Italian translation, from Greek, of the fable’s narrative; the moral is, as Radif renders it, “La favola mostra che bisogna che anche noi non persistiamo negli stessi accorgimenti, calcolando che coloro che si adeguano alle circostanze spesso sfuggono ai pericoli.” L. Radif, “Il vespertilio protagonista di una favola di Alessandro Neckam,” Favolisti latini medievali e umanistici, vol. 7 (Università di Genova Facoltà di Lettere, 1998), p. 79. ↩︎

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Song and Sustenance: The Fable of the Ant and the Cicada

Image 1: Illustration of Ant and Cicada from Tuscan bestiary, mid-15th c. Wellcome Collection, MS.132, fol. 23r.

In the well-known fable of The Ant and the Cicada1 (or cricket, or grasshopper, according to the version—the second character is always a singing insect), a hungry cicada asks an ant for food in the wintertime. The ant asks what the cicada did during the summer, and the cicada replies that she had been singing. The ant then refuses to help her, on the grounds that the cicada had been idle, when she should have been working and acquiring food for the future instead, like the ant herself had done. The moral typically advises that we avoid idleness and plan for the future.

The perspective offered by the moral may seem predictable, based on the narrative. Yet, some medieval versions of the fable suggest that the cicada, at least in her own view, was not a self-absorbed, improvident reveler—she was an uncompensated artist, who entertained others and anticipated some return for her efforts.

The fable’s morals encourage us to take the ant’s position: the cicada’s performances were not labor, and they don’t merit any material reward. As I will discuss below, certain insects’ supposed obsession with song was not always construed negatively in medieval literature; this very disregard of worldly security could also be interpreted as virtuous.

An early version of this fable is by Babrius, in Greek, from the third century; there is also a fifth-century Latin version by Avianus.2 Medieval versions can be found in several Romulus collections in Latin prose and verse,3 Marie de France’s Fables (Old French, late twelfth century), a Latin prose collection by the English bishop and sermonist John Sheppey (d. 1360), and William Caxton’s Aesop (late Middle English prose, 1483–4).

In some versions of the fable, singing seems to be a sort of solitary pastime for the cicada. For example, in John Sheppey’s version, the cicada claims that during the summer she had gone “singing and dancing through the woods, hedges and meadows” (per siluas, sepes et prata ibam, cantans et exultans).4 In Caxton’s Aesop, the cicada, asked by the ant what she has done during the summer, simply reports, “I have sung” (I haue songe).5 The ant’s callous rejoinder in these and some other versions is to the effect of, “If you sang during the summer, then dance during the winter.”6

Image 2: Illustration of cicadas from Tuscan bestiary, mid-15th c. Wellcome Collection, MS.132, fol. 4v.

However, in Marie de France’s Fables and some Romulus versions, the cicada claims she sang for other creatures, and clearly sees this as a form of labor which should be materially rewarded. Marie’s cricket replies to the ant’s inquiry as follows: “‘I sing,’ she said, ‘and so entertain the other animals, but now I don’t find anyone who wants to to repay me for it.’” (“Jeo chant,” fet il, “e si deduis / a autres bestes, mes ore ne truis / ki le me veule reguerduner,” lines 11–13).7

In the Romulus Anglicus cunctus, similarly, the cicada says, “At that time [i.e., in the summer] I was singing for those who were working, and I received no wages from them” (Ego tunc illis qui laborabant cecini, et nichil mercedis ab eis recepi).8 The ant’s dismissive response, and the morals, take the position that performing for others’ pleasure doesn’t count as work, however—material acquisition for the security of oneself and one’s family is what counts.

In every version, the morals side with the ant. John Sheppey’s version is perhaps most straightforward and harsh: “Whoever doesn’t work shouldn’t eat, and, if a worker is worthy of wages, then no wages should come to one who doesn’t work.”9 The same word, merces, which I have translated as “wages,” is used in both the Romulus Anglicus cunctus and Sheppey versions. Apparently, though the cicada clearly expected some sort of wages, she didn’t deserve them, despite all her activity.

While the ant in this fable is portrayed as fairly selfish—she is interested in providing for herself and her own household alone, and essentially refuses to give alms to a beggar—elsewhere in ancient and medieval culture ants were understood as communal animals who worked together for a common good. For example, according to Albert the Great (d. 1280), humans and ants are among those animals who “collaborate in many things in a community of affairs and sustenance, which serve the common utility.”10 The fact that the ant in The Ant and the Cicada is portrayed as possessing the foresight to gather resources ahead of time, too, is consistent with representations of ants in other medieval sources, such as in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, in which the ant is said to have “great shrewdness, for it provides for the future and prepares during the summer what it consumes in the winter.”11

Image 3: Illustration of ants collecting grain, from Northumberland Bestiary, 13th c. Getty Museum, MS. 100, fol. 23r.

The notion that a singing insect, such as a cricket, would be so consumed by the act of singing that it might fail to take care of its bodily needs and ultimately die, is also found in Pierre de Beauvais’s Bestiaire d’amour (early thirteenth century): the cricket “loves to sing so much that it loses its appetite, forgets itself in song, lets itself be caught and dies singing.”12

However, unlike in the fable of The Ant and the Cicada, this absorption isn’t read negatively in the Bestiaire, which concludes: “The cricket gives us the example of the just man who is always doing good deeds and penance, and forgets all about the things of this world and bodily pleasures, and thinks about everlasting joy and is always in prayer, and dies praying, that is that he dies singing just as does the cricket.”13

Whether the singing insect in these medieval texts is construed as a doer of good deeds who is “always in prayer,” as a solitary reveler, or as starving artist, the notion remains that its way of life is not compatible with material security. What I find compelling is that the cicada, in some versions of the fable discussed above, believes that there shouldn’t be such an incompatibility. She (naïvely, perhaps) expects to be supported by others for the music she offers them—and, it is implies, dies when she doesn’t receive this support.

While the fable doesn’t suggest that the cicada’s talents could or should be sustained within a broader interspecies community—quite the opposite—the message might change if we think a bit more in terms of natural history. After all, cicadas aren’t known for being able to construct complex nests in which grain can be stored, and ants aren’t known for musicality. Rather, each creature has a different modus vivendi and a different niche. I’d like to envision a scenario that counters the general fable trend of interspecies antagonism, in which each creature could provide in accordance with their own abilities, and receive in accordance with their own need.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Perry Index 112. ↩︎
  2. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, ed. and trans., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, Loeb Classical Library 434 (Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 734. ↩︎
  3. See Léopold Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 2 (George Olms Verlag, 1970). ↩︎
  4. Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 4, p. 435; my translation. Exsultare can literally mean to leap, which is amusingly appropriate given the speaker, but it can also mean to revel or rejoice. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “exsulto.” ↩︎
  5. R. T. Lenaghan, ed. Caxton’s Aesop: Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 133. ↩︎
  6. For example, John Sheppey: “Si in estate cantasti, in yeme salta.” ↩︎
  7. Charles Brucker, ed., Les fables: édition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, de notes et d’un glossaire (Peeters, 1998), p. 180; my translation. ↩︎
  8. Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 2, p. 624. ↩︎
  9. “Qui non laborat, non manducet et, si mercede dignus est operarius, non operantem nulla merces contingat.” Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 4, p. 435; my translation. ↩︎
  10. “conferunt multa in unum communitate negotiorum et ciborum, ex quibus communi consulitur utilitati.” Albert the Great, De animalibus libri XXVI, ed. Hermann Stadler (Aschendorff, 1916), 16 [59]. Quoted in Juhana Toivanen, “‘Like Ants in a Colony We Do Our Share’: Political Animals in Medieval Philosophy,” in State and Nature: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Christof Rapp (De Gruyter, 2021), p. 368. The translation above is Toivanen’s (p. 369). ↩︎
  11. Stephen A. Barney et al., eds. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 254. ↩︎
  12. “[I]l aime tant le canter qu’il en pert son mangier; et qu’il s’entroublit tot en chantant et s’en laise a porcachier, et muert tot en chantant.” In Le Bestiaire, version longue attribuée à Pierre de Beauvais, ed. Craig Baker (Champion, 2010), p. 159. Quoted in Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Force de parole: Shaping Courtliness in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours, Copied in Metz about 1312 (Oxford, Bodl. MS Douce 308),” in Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (Boydell  & Brewer, 2013), p. 258; translation Regalado’s. ↩︎
  13. “Par le crisnon prendons example del juste home qui adés est en bienfaits et en penanche; et met totes les choses del monde et tos delis del cors en obli, et pense pour la joie pardurable et est adés en oroison et muert tot en orrant, c’est a dire qui einsi meurt qu’il muert tot en cantant aisi comme li crisnon.” Ibid., trans. Regalado. ↩︎