Tag: Manuscripts

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Aries Across the Ages: Bighorn Sheep, Medieval Rams, and Springtime Symbolism

Since relocating from England and returning to my hometown in Colorado somewhat unexpectedly, I’ve been spending a lot of time soaking up the sunshine by the Arkansas river, and when a bighorn sheep approached the bank to drink the other day, it was not only a sure sign of spring but also a reminder of how medieval symbolism and modern day animals create connections across time and space, even entire continents.

Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, one of seven subspecies native to North America, occupy mountainous areas in the United States and Canada. They are named for the male’s large, curved horns, a pair of which can weigh up to 30 pounds – the equivalent of the weight of all the bones in the male’s body. They are powerful, steadfast creatures with males weighing upward of 500 pounds.

Male bighorn sheet. Photo courtesy of The National Wildlife Federation Blog.

During rutting season, which runs from October to January, rams battle for dominance and breeding rights with ewes. After descending from steep, treacherous terrain to lower territory, males can be observed rearing and smashing their horns together in a violent collision, producing sounds that can be heard up to 40 miles away.   

Rams butting heads. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13 [Taymouth Hours], folio 183r.

Indeed, we are in the season of the Ram, just as the Western medieval world would have been at this time of year. The sun entered the constellation Aries, the ram, on March 20th in line with the spring, or vernal, equinox in the northern hemisphere and will remain in this astrological sign until approximately the same date in April before transitioning into Taurus, the bull.

The spring equinox marks the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator, bringing nearly equal day and night lengths and signifying the start of spring. When the sun passes through Aries, it also marks the astrological new year. As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries season symbolizes a reset after a long winter and a sense of reemergence, both in modern and medieval times.

Ram depicted in Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai, MS 711 [De Natura animalium], folio 18r.

In the medieval world, the season was perfect for pilgrimage. The characters of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of course, begin their journey to Canterbury in mid-April as described by the first several lines of the General Prologue:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, an the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne… (Chaucer 1-8).

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries… (Translation from Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website)

Sheep have maintained a strong presence in the English landscape since their domestication during the Neolithic era. Although they were not initially valued as highly as other livestock, they were integral in the early medieval period as providers of milk, wool, and manure. Their bodies were also harvested for meat, skin, fat, bones, and horns. They were hardy animals, able to thrive on rough grazing and survive during harsh winters.

A shepherd holding a lamb and tending a flock of sheep, including two rams in the foreground. Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25 [Bestiary (Third Family)], folio 58v.

They were also used for ecclesiastical purposes. The best vellum was produced from either calf or lamb skin, and regular parchment was procured from the skin of sheep and goats. Additionally, rams were some of the first animals to be sacrificed on altars in the ancient world. Isidore of Seville, in his 7th-century Etymologies, writes, “The ram [aries] is either named after the word aris, that is, after ‘Mars’ whence we call the males in a flock ‘males’ [mas, maris] – or because this animal was the first to be sacrificed on altars [ara, aris] by pagans.”

Further to the etymological origins of the word, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a “ram” simply as an adult male sheep, and the word has remained relatively unchanged since it first appearance in English during the Anglo Saxon period, wherein rams appear as sacrifices in Biblical stories, notably that of Abraham, and other Christian contexts.

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with ram behind. Morgan Library & Museum, Bible historiale MS M.322 I, fol. 032r.

The term ram, however, also appeared in the context of battle, describing both a weapon of war (later renamed the “battering ram”) and the action of ramming as with the weapon itself, just as two rams would collide in conflict. Circa 1470, Thomas Malory in Morte Darthur describes how knights “hurteled togydirs lyke too rammes,” emphasizing the brute strength and blunt impact of the men as their bodies meet in battle.

At this time of year, bighorn sheep are less interested in fighting and more focused on lambing. Females typically give birth between late April and June, during which time they find steep, secluded habitats to protect their newborn babies from predators like mountain lions, coyotes, and bears. Males, during this time, live apart from females, maintaining a hierarchy of dominance amongst themselves. The separation during the springtime season creates an apt juxtaposition of violence and renewal from an ecological perspective, as well as a personal one: the hardest part has passed, and rebirth is possible.

The sighting of a bighorn sheep in early spring — powerfully yet gracefully poised on a rocky mountainside — poignantly connects my Colorado roots with my medieval interests and my previous home in England. It also reminds me that I am on the precipice of a new life after a difficult struggle, that this season symbolizes the beauty of living after a battle.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor, Department of English

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Learning about Learned Medieval Women with Dr. Megan J. Hall

This week, we’re looking back at an earlier episode of “Meeting in the Middle Ages.” In late 2022, we chatted with Dr. Megan J. Hall, Assistant Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. We spoke with her about women’s literacy and learning in medieval England, the trials and tribulations of writing an academic article, and why impromptu bell-ringing can reveal the true value of scholarship.

Studying history can show us the bigger picture. It can help to explain why nation states behave as they do, why complex geopolitical situations emerge, and how entire landscapes have been shaped over time. But it also allows us to connect with the past on a local level. It can show us where we come from. Speaking with Dr. Hall, we were reminded several times that through historical research, people can identify with those who came before. Moments of identity like that can drastically reshape our relationship with the past. Dr. Hall’s meeting with a group of bellringers in rural England is a perfect example. During this surprise encounter, she was able to share her own work with the group and participate in a tradition of bell ringing which has centuries of history. Her work prompted one of the group to ask ‘so, could women read in the Middle Ages?’ Dr. Hall was able to correct a common misconception of women and the possibilities open to them in medieval England. Yes, some women could read! Some books were written specifically for women! This revelation changed the questioner’s view of medieval women, and was a triumphant ‘I knew we could!’ she experienced a moment of solidarity with them.

Dr. Hall’s story, as has been the case for so many of the conversations we’ve had on Meeting on the Middle Ages, is also a reminder of the privilege that medievalists have. We are able to visit museums, archives, libraries, and go beyond the public spaces. We can consult ancient materials. We don’t have to rely on facsimiles (well, sometimes we do). We can work with the original, turning it over in our hands and connecting with its creator. In doing so, we become another link in a chain that has been forged over centuries. With the Ancrenne Wisse it begins with the object’s creator, perhaps the scribe or composer of a manuscript. It binds together dozens of men and women who received the text and used it in their lives. Dr. Hall is part of that chain. And in telling her story, we all become a part of it too.

Thanks for listening. See you next time in the Middle Ages.

Will Beattie & Ben Pykare
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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Imagining the Medieval Bestiary

Medieval bestiaries, which flourished during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly in England, are compendia of brief descriptions of various animals (sometimes plants and stones are included as well), which offer moral or allegorical lessons, and are often colorfully illustrated.

Basic modern definitions often suggest a sort of binary, ontological taxonomy for the creatures in these texts: bestiaries feature “real” animals (or “actual” or “factual” ones, such as dogs, crocodiles, beavers, and elephants), but also “imaginary” ones (or “mythical,” “legendary,” or “fabulous” ones, etc., such as unicorns, phoenixes, and manticores).

Unicorn from Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24, f15r).

Bestiaries themselves don’t appear to distinguish between “real” and “imaginary” animals, in terms of the arrangement of entries or the way that creatures from these two categories are verbally described or artistically depicted;[1] the distinction is a modern and anachronistic one. Furthermore, bestiaries’ inclusion of hard-to-believe anecdotes about well-known creatures who actually do exist (e.g., the stag’s alleged habit of drowning snakes) renders the boundary between “real” and “imaginary” animals, as we might consider it, less firm in these texts. At stake in the discourse of the “real” versus the “imaginary” in bestiaries is our view of medieval thinkers.

One approach to the “imaginary” animals in bestiaries—a very old approach to interpreting mythical creatures, in fact—is rationalistic: positing that even the legends have some basis in reality, and that real animals were, through a combination of misunderstanding and literary transmission, rendered (almost) unrecognizable. Notable proponents of this view in modern times have included T. H. White (1954), and more recently, zoologists Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp (1991).

Phoenix from Ashmole Bestiary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1511, f68r).

Bestiaries, for these scholars, can be read as works of natural history, albeit flawed ones, and we should perhaps extend some generosity to their creators, in light of the limitations of their knowledge. George and Yapp characterize the bestiary as “an attempt, not wholly unsuccessful or discreditable for the time at which it was produced, to give some account of some of the more conspicuous creatures that could be seen by the reader or that occurred in legends.”[2] They suggest, for instance, that the manticore—described in bestiaries as a creature with a man’s face, a lion’s body, three rows of teeth, and a tail like a scorpion stinger—was based on the cheetah; that the unicorn could actually be an oryx; and that the half-human, half-fish siren could be a Mediterranean monk seal.

Reading bestiaries as genuine, sometimes highly faulty attempts at something comparable to modern natural history is not a popular position amongst medievalist scholars of bestiaries. However, the idea of bestiaries as failed pre-modern zoology lingers in some sources aimed at popular audiences. The entry on bestiaries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, claims that the “frequently abstruse stories” in these works “were often based on misconceptions about the facts of natural history.”

Manticore from Ashmole Bestiary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1511, f22v).

As for the ontological status of “imaginary” bestiary creatures to medieval readers, i.e., whether they believed unicorns, etc. actually existed, this is hard to ascertain, and perhaps of less interest to many scholars than the prospect of examining the messages these rich works articulate on their own terms. Still, the unsupported assertion that bestiary stories were “generally believed to be true” in the Middle Ages, as the Wikipedia page for bestiaries claims, is very much in line with widespread perceptions of the period.

It is an appealing contemporary fantasy, not so much to believe in dragons or unicorns, but to believe that people really believed in them, once—a sort of vicarious experience of enchantment, accomplished not simply by imaginatively engaging with medieval works that depict fantastic animals, but by imagining more credulous medieval readers, and perhaps even by imagining oneself in their place.

Dragon from Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24, f65v).

To take both “real” and “imaginary” bestiary creatures as the texts present them—not seeking to sieve the factual from the fabulous, not seeking an ordinary, well-known animal behind the remarkable verbal and visual depictions that bestiaries offer—allows for, amongst other things, a certain defamiliarization of the natural world we inhabit.

Playing on the fertile ambiguities of bestiary accounts is a project by The Maniculum (a podcast series which brings together medieval texts and modern gaming, co-hosted by E. C. McGregor Boyle, a PhD Candidate at Purdue University, and Zoe Franznick, an award-winning writer for Pentiment). On the Maniculum Tumblr, readers are offered “anonymized” selections from the Aberdeen Bestiary (i.e., the name of the animal being described is replaced with a nonsense-word to disguise its identity). Contributors are invited to create artwork inspired by the bestiary description itself, rather than their knowledge of what the animal is “supposed” to look like. The results are diverse; the “hyena” entry, for instance, yielded representations of creatures resembling everything from pigs to predatory snails, in a wide range of styles.

Hyena from Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24, f11v).

Bestiaries continue to fascinate and inspire, centuries after their creation. Below are some medieval bestiary facsimiles and related resources to explore:

  • The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24), written and illustrated in England ca. 1200. Digital facsimile, accompanied by commentary, and Latin transcriptions and modern English translations of each folio.
  • The Ashmole Bestiary (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1511), early 13th century, England, possibly derived from the same exemplar as the Aberdeen bestiary. Digital facsimile.
  • The Worksop Bestiary (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.81), ca. 1185, England. Digital facsimile.
  • The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages, a website on bestiaries by independent scholar David Badke. Includes indices of bestiary creatures, cross-referenced with manuscripts and relevant scholarship, as well as galleries of medieval illustrations.
  • Into the Wild: Medieval Books of Beasts, YouTube video by The Morgan Library & Museum.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] Pamela Gravestock, “Did Imaginary Animals Exist?” in The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Garland, 1999), 120.

[2] Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991), p. 1.