Tag: Animals

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Connecting with the Public through Medieval Animals

As medievalists and scholars who spend our days reading, researching, and teaching the Middle Ages, it is easy to take for granted the vibrancy, intrigue, and importance of the period. But how can we help audiences outside the academy connect to people and cultures so distant from themselves? My own work offers me a readymade solution: animals. For several years, including in my current position as the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, I have had the privilege of speaking to many different groups of children and adults across multiple countries about the Middle Ages and its animals. It is always such a great joy to introduce them to the weird and wonderful world of medieval animal riddles and poetry, facts from bestiaries and other encyclopedias, and of course manuscript illuminations.

I usually start these talks with a series of strange animal illustrations from medieval manuscripts, asking the audience simply to guess what the animals are. A recent event for kids at the St Joe County Public Library thus began with these four pictures and more:

Manuscript illuminations from: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Parker Library, MS 053, fol. 193v (CC BY-NC 4.0); Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. gall. 16, fol. 17r; British Library, Royal MS 2 B VII, fol. 102v; Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai, Ms. 711, fol. 11v (CC BY-NC 3.0).

Then comes the reveal that all of the wildly different illustrations are meant to be the same animal: a crocodile. What follows are usually cries of incredulity and laughter over how inaccurate all the images are. They’re not all terrible, of course, and I do make it clear that I choose the silliest ones available.

The significant question, then, is why there are so many bad medieval animals out there. With animals like crocodiles, one straightforward answer is that the illustrators had never seen the creatures in real life, but were drawing them based on writings from other parts of the globe. This becomes a good opportunity to talk about the interconnectedness of the medieval world — an animal from the Nile gets written about by a bishop in Seville, whose words inspire a drawing in Peterborough. This can also lead to conversations about the nature of the writers and illustrators themselves, often monks and other holy men and women who are testament to the importance of medieval religious houses as centers of science and learning, thus challenging a popularly held stereotype about the “Dark Ages”.

With children (and their grown ups), there’s a silly drawing game I like to play to put them in the shoes of these medieval illustrators — how good can they be at drawing an animal they have never seen before? This can be done by making up an entirely new beast, but I prefer to defamiliarize an animal that the children already know, asking them to draw it one feature at a time, as with this example with information drawn from medieval accounts:

  1. The animal is reddish in colour.
  2. It has four feet and legs like those of a bull or a deer.
  3. Its body is short at the back and tall at the front so it looks like it is always sitting down.
  4. It has a long neck like a horse.
  5. It has a head like a camel.
  6. It is covered in white spots like a leopard.

By the time the kids figure out that they are drawing a giraffe, the results are usually already hilariously wonky, not far from the illustrations they were laughing at a few minutes ago!

Left: Activity sheets from the St Joe County Public Library event. Right: Manuscript illumination from British Library, Additional MS 11390, fol. 22v.

When giving these talks in the UK, often to school groups, I would generally begin with a different animal that they would be fairly familiar with, the badger. As with crocodiles, medieval illustrations of badgers could be ridiculously unrecognizable, as evident in the two images below.

Manuscript illuminations from: Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25, fol. 74v (CC BY-NC 4.0); University of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 130, fol. 85r (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Unlike crocodiles and giraffes, however, medieval Europeans should have been more familiar with badgers; literary, archaeological, and place-name evidence suggests that the animal was a common feature of the British landscape. What excuse, then, could medieval illustrators have in this case? In some instances, there was a method to their madness. According to the Third-Family Bestiary in the above Cambridge manuscript, the badger is called melo in Latin either because of its fondness for honey (mel) or because it is rotundissimo like a melon (melo). It’s safe to say that this particular illustrator was inspired by the notion of roundness.

The Cambridge illustration also to me recalls Thomas of Cantimpré, the thirteenth-century Flemish Dominican friar and preacher who in his natural encyclopedia, De natura rerum, wrote that the fatness of a badger increases when the moon waxes and diminishes when it wanes. As nocturnal animals, some badger behaviours (notably their mating patterns) are thought to be influenced by lunar cycles. Lunar influence on its rotundity may be more dubious, but did have significant practical implications. Thomas later stated that badger fat is a useful cure for fevers, which means that it was important to know when the animal would be at its fattest and most medicinally useful, and illustrations are a good way to get that lesson across. These may not be the most accurate illustrations, but they are undoubtedly memorable, which makes them extremely effective teaching and memorization tools.

This example thus becomes a good way to demonstrate to audiences beyond the academy that the so-called “Dark Ages” were really a time of curiosity, observation, experimentation, and innovation, when science and medicine were given great importance and there was a deep investment in understanding the world around us. Medieval animal texts are a testament to a love for learning and science and stories, and therefore a great way to help the public, children and adults alike, to connect with the Middle Ages.

Of course, it’s also very possible that many of these illustrators were simply bad at drawing animals and decided to lean into the absurdity of their creations. On this, I am sure we can all relate.

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

Further Reading:

For anyone interested in medieval bestiaries and animal illustrations, bestiary.ca is an invaluable resource, as is theriddleages.bham.ac.uk for anyone interested in medieval riddles. On badgers, see articles on ‘Foxes and Badgers in Anglo-Saxon Life and Landscape‘ and ‘European Badger’s Mating Activities Associated with Moon Phase‘, and Exeter Book Riddle 15.

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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. ↩︎

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The Medieval Fable of The Fisherman and the Fish

Fishing is a huge industry worldwide; every year about 1 to 2 trillion wild fish are caught, representing vastly more animal deaths than the annual slaughter of terrestrial vertebrates such as cows and chickens. Overfishing is a serious crisis. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2024, about 37% of monitored fish stocks across the globe were overfished. Additionally, a 2018 FAO report indicated that nearly 60% of fish stocks were “maximally sustainably fished,” meaning that these fish populations were being exploited to the very edge of sustainability.1 Regulations and guidelines aim to reduce “illegal, unreported and unregulated” (IUU) fishing, in order to mitigate the devastating effects of overfishing and maintain populations of these animals for future human use, but IUU fishing is still extremely widespread in practice.

Fish illustration in Der Naturen Bloeme, National Library of the Netherlands, KA 16, fol. 115r.

Below, I translate and discuss a medieval fable, that of The Fisherman and the Fish (Perry Index 18). The Fisherman and the Fish has a decidedly anti-conservationist bent. It depicts an individual fisherman who is angling (fishing with a line), seemingly for his own table rather than for recreation or profit. Though the man’s catch is given a speech, the fisherman gets the last word, saying that the more prudent thing is to kill and eat even a small fish that one has already caught, rather than to hold out for a larger one that may or may not come. Though the fable suggests we are meant to agree with the man’s judgment, I find the fish’s plea to the fisherman—one of many examples in fable where a vulnerable character begs a more powerful one for their life—quite affecting.

This version of The Fisherman and the Fish is by Avianus (ca. 400 CE); it is preceded by a Greek version by Babrius.2 I provide a Latin text of Avianus, and an English translation, below.

De piscatore et pisce
Piscator solitus praedam suspendere saeta
exigui piscis vile trahebat onus.
sed postquam superas captum perduxit ad auras
atque avido fixum vulnus ab ore tulit,
“parce, precor” supplex lacrimis ita dixit obortis;
“nam quanta ex nostro corpore dona feres?
nunc me saxosis genetrix fecunda sub antris
fudit et in propriis ludere iussit aquis.
tolle minas, tenerumque tuis sine crescere mensis:
haec tibi me rursum litoris ora dabit:
protinus immensi depastus caerula ponti
pinguior ad calamum sponte recurro tuum.”
ille nefas captum referens absolvere piscem,
difficiles queritur casibus esse vices:
“nam miserum est” inquit “praesentem amittere praedam,
stultius et rursum vota futura sequi.”3

The Fisherman and the Fish
A fisherman, who was accustomed to catch his prey hanging on a line,
drew up a little fish of paltry weight.
But after he had brought up the captive into the air above,
and a wound pierced through its hungry mouth,
the pleading fish said, “Spare me, please,” with tears springing up,
“for how much benefit will you get from my body?
Just now a fertile mother has spawned me under stony grottoes,
and told me to play in our own waters.
Remove these threats; I am young, let me grow up for your table.
This edge of the shore will give me to you again.
Soon, when I have fed on the depths of the vast sea,
I will come back fatter to your rod, of my own accord.”
The fisherman, replying that it would be a sin to set the caught fish free,
laments the hard conditions of fortune:
“It’s a shame,” he said, “to let go of the prey in hand,
and even more foolish to pursue future wishes again.”

The fish’s plea makes both an appeal to reason and an appeal to emotion. He reasons that his meager body is now of little worth as food, and that in time, once he has grown, he will make a better meal. He further suggests a sort of bargain: he will return “willingly” (sponte) to the fisherman when he is a well-grown adult.  

As for emotion, the little fish, in his abject entreaty, describes himself rather pathetically. The fish having been spawned“just now” (nunc) implies that he is very young and small indeed. Anthropomorphic touches, such as the fish’s tears, and the detail that his mother has told her children to “play” (ludere) in the waters, could prompt readers’ sympathy for the creature. The prospect of a playful “child-fish” having his life cut suddenly short is a pitiful one.

In terms of natural history, the premise of the fable—at least according to the fish’s speech—is that the fish is small (and of little worth to humans nutritionally or economically), but only because he is a very young member of a species that grows considerably larger. While the fish was spawned in “just now” (nunc), “under stony grottoes,” (sub antris saxosis), his life cycle entails feeding and growing in the sea, then returning once again to the same place, where he could perhaps be caught once more by the same fisherman. The word litoris in line 10 can mean the beach or sea shore, but it could also refer to a river bank.4 If one interprets it as the latter, the fish could be of an anadromous species (i.e., a type of fish which spends its adult life in the sea but returns to rivers or streams in order to spawn; examples of anadromous fish include salmon, sturgeon, and some smelt. Babrius’s version takes place at the sea shore). Avianus’s version of the fable doesn’t specify what kind of fish this is, only that he is currently a juvenile. Later versions deem the fish a flatfish or turbot (rombus)5 or pickerel (smaris).6

Fish illustration, British Library, Add MS 36684, fol. 27v.

Intriguingly, in a version of the fable found in the fourteenth-century Dialogus creaturarum, the little fish promises to bring the man a whole school of other piscine victims with him when he returns. In this version, the fish also persuades the man to cut off part of his tail, so that he can be identified when he comes back. The fish reneges on his promise to bring others along with him, and is killed by the man when he is caught for the second time.7

The moral of The Fisherman and the Fish runs rather contrary to the morals of some others (which is often the case in such a heterogeneous and adaptable genre). For example, in the fable of The Goose with the Golden Eggs, which I posted about a few months ago, the moral is to not be greedy and hasty, and, I argued, perhaps not to push nature past sustainable limits. In The Fisherman and the Fish, by contrast, the choice endorsed is to kill an animal as soon as the opportunity presents itself, regardless of whether this is an optimal use of natural resources (i.e., achieving “maximum yield”), because the future is unpredictable.

Fables often focus on interactions between individuals of different species, rather than commenting on species as collectives or populations (though there are exceptions, e.g., The Hares and the Frogs, The Frogs Asking for a King). The fable of The Fisherman and the Fish, too, represents a single encounter between two individuals. However, perhaps we can see this fable as a kind of microcosm of relationships between humans and wild fish. Fishing is essentially the last bastion of wild-caught food, for the majority of humanity, and, as mentioned above, we are exploiting these animals to their limits and beyond. Considering this fable versus The Goose with the Golden Eggs, this fable may speak to a harsher and more opportunistic approach to exploiting “wild” natural resources, compared to exploiting domestic animals and crops. Domestic animals and crops require the expenditure of human labor to raise or cultivate, for one thing, which may make them seem like more of an investment; perhaps, too, animal slaughter or crop harvesting is also viewed as more reliable, more under human control, than the outcome of a fishing or hunting expedition.

Though overfishing has increased significantly in the last several decades, the genesis of unsustainable practices can be found in the medieval period, argues Richard C. Hoffmann. “By the end of the Middle Ages, essential elements for present-day global fishery crises were in place in European waters…. Overexploitation, habitat destruction, selective predation on large or prestigious species, and human competition without regard for the resource were all part of medieval experience.”8 While The Fisherman and the Fish is a brief text and a small example, compared to Hoffmann’s sweeping environmental history, I think this fable can nevertheless be seen in light of medieval (and post-medieval) beliefs and practices regarding fish as natural resources.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018, p. 12. ↩︎
  2. Ben Edwin Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus: Fables, Loeb Classical Library 436 (Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 10–13. ↩︎
  3. Latin text from J. Wright Duff and A. M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 712. English translation is my own. ↩︎
  4. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “lītus.” ↩︎
  5. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “rhombus.” ↩︎
  6. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary defines smaris as “a small sea-fish of inferior quality.” Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in the mid-18th century, used smaris as the species name for a particular fish, the deep-body pickerel (Sparus smaris, now called Spicara smaris). ↩︎
  7. Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (Brill, 2003), vol. 3, p. 747. ↩︎
  8. Richard C. Hoffmann, The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 413. ↩︎