Tag: Medieval Literature

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“Dressing Up”: Medieval Fables, Fashion, and Social Instability

Woodcut of The Ass and the Lion Skin, from a 1479 incunabulum of Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Fables of Aesop

The tradition of dressing in costumes for Halloween is relatively recent, and regionally limited as well. Such costumes are not intended to convince anyone that they are genuine—no one is supposed to think the person dressing up is really a witch, a superhero, etc.—nor are they meant to be worn for more than an evening. No doubt much of the appeal of Halloween costumes is in how they allow us to playfully assume and express a new, temporary identity. In honor of Halloween, I’d like to consider medieval fables about animals who assume a new identity by “dressing up” as another species. These fables all attempt to promulgate the message that one’s identity cannot be changed, and that trying only leads to disaster. Read against the grain, however, such stories in fact reveal that human identity is unlike species difference—that our identities are mutable and contextual, and that this is a source of anxiety for those invested in social hierarchies.

I can think of at least four fables where an animal uses another animal’s skin (or feathers) to represent themselves as a different species. These fables include The Ass and the Lion’s Skin (Perry Index 188/358); The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (Perry Index 705); The Rook among the Peacocks (Perry Index 472); and The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (Perry Index 451). The animals’ motivations differ, but in attempting to take up their new role, they start to behave differently than before as well. In the first three fables mentioned, the disguised animal aims to represent themselves as “better” than they really are—stronger, more intimidating, more beautiful—and begins to not only look but act the part. By “dressing up” they are trying to move up as well, in a sense.

Woodcut of The Rook and the Peacock, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The donkey in The Ass and the Lion Skin runs around frightening other livestock in his lion pelt; the sheep in The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram dons the skin of his master’s deceased sheepdog and aggressively pursues the wolf who would harm his flockmates; and the rook adorns himself with peacock feathers and joins the peacocks, strutting around proudly. In The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (known in proverb form as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”), the wolf’s intentions are more sinister, as he feigns harmlessness in order to insinuate himself amongst his would-be victims, before he is slaughtered for dinner by the unwitting shepherd. The other three fables conclude with the animals being recognized for what they “really” are, and then hurt or killed as a consequence.

The morals of these medieval fables often draw comparisons between species and social position, particularly class—you shouldn’t aim at too much upward mobility, or wish for what others have, lest it backfire, with you ending up in a worse position than before. For example, the moral to late medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson’s version of The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (The Wolf and the Wether) asserts:

Heir may thow se that riches of array
Will cause pure men presumpteous for to be;
Thay think thay hald of nane, be thay als gay,
Bot counterfute ane lord in all degre.
Out of thair cais in pryde thay clym sa hie
That thay forbeir thair better in na steid
Quhill sum man tit thair heillis ouer thair heid… (lines 2595–2601)

Thairfoir I counsell men of everilk stait
To knaw thame self and quhome thay suld forbeir,
And fall not with thair better in debait,
Suppois thay be als galland in thair geir:
It settis na seruand for to vphald weir,
Nor clym sa hie quhill he fall off the ledder:
Bot think vpon the wolf and on the wedder. (lines 2609–2616)1

Here you can see that rich attire will cause poor men to be arrogant; they think they have no superior, if they are dressed as fine, but they imitate a lord in every way. Out of their condition, in pride, they climb so high that they don’t refrain anywhere from injuring their superiors, until someone tips their heels over their heads…

Therefore, I advise men of every rank to know themselves and whom they should refrain from injuring, and fall not into contention with their superior, even if they are as stylish in their dress: it suits no servant to keep up strife, nor to climb so high that he falls off the ladder: just think of the wolf and of the wether.

Woodcut of The Wolf and the Wether, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The narrator’s “counsell” did not just reflect a private opinion. From 1429/30, James I had imposed sumptuary legislation in Scotland, which limited expensive textiles such as silks and some kinds of furs to upper social strata.2 Such legislation was not exclusive to late medieval Scotland, but could be found in many regions across the world, through the eighteenth century.3 “In the case of medieval and early modern Europe,” says historian Lorraine Daston, “over a period of five hundred years (c. 1200–1800), these regulations not only failed to stamp out excess (or what might now be called conspicuous consumption), they arguably exacerbated the very ills they were meant to remedy.” In other words, not only did people not abide by these regulations, the regulations themselves could spur a sort of sartorial “arms race,” inspiring clothesmakers to come up with novel extravagances that were not yet forbidden,4 and consumers to keep up with the newest fashions.

Clothing can visually signify so many aspects of identity (such as class, gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliations), yet the details are inconstant over time and from one place to the next, and clothing can easily be taken on and off. The abovementioned fables, admonitory as they are, express unease with the instability of human social categories as expressed through clothing. Fables often map social hierarchy onto species, and in doing so, they suggest that there is something “natural,” something immutable, about these hierarchies—that a poor man and a lord are as distinct from one another as a sheep and a dog, or a rook and a peacock. But if these hierarchies were really so natural and immutable, the fables wouldn’t have cautionary morals that tell people not to “forget their place.” There would be no need for the admonition, just as there would be no impetus to create (and update) sumptuary regulations, were it not for people constantly breaking boundaries in their fashion choices.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 96–7. Modern English translations are my own. ↩︎
  2. Maria Hayward, “‘Outlandish Superfluities’: Luxury and Clothing in Scottish and English Sumptuary Law from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 97. ↩︎
  3. For a global history of sumptuary legislation, see The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack. ↩︎
  4. Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 156. ↩︎

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The Raven’s False Greeting: Animal Language and Medieval Fable

Talking animals are a ubiquitous element in fables. They do not evoke wonder from human characters within the narrative, nor seem to require any explanation; this contrasts with other sorts of stories (everything from Marie de France’s Guigemar to contemporary fantasy novels) where the appearance of a talking animal signals the beginning of some rare adventure for humans. Notably, there is, however, one fable I can think of that seems to portray an animal whose ability to talk is liminal. That is, he can utter words, yet he is not really treated as a speaker. His status seems closer to that of a “real” animal who can mimic human speech, and that is in fact key to the story.

The fable in question is ascribed to Phaedrus, the author of the first extant literary fable collection. While Phaedrus wrote in the first century, his five books of fables were the basis for much of the “Romulus” tradition in prose and verse, which flourished in the Middle Ages. The aforementioned fable is called “The Traveler and the Raven” (Viator et corvus). The tale is found in “Perotti’s Appendix,” named for the Italian humanist, Niccolò Perotti (1429–80), who transmitted it; I offer a translation of it below, with the text based on Ben Edwin Perry’s edition.[1]

Manuscript illustration, from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, of two humans and a horse harrowing a field, with two ravens hovering above them, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 171r .

Quidam per agros devium carpens iter
AVE exaudivit, et moratus paululum,
adesse ut vidit nullum, corripuit gradum.
iterum salutat idem ex occulto sonus.
voce hospitali confirmatus restitit,
ut, quisquis esset, par officium reciperet.
cum circumspectans errore haesisset diu
et perdidisset tempus aliquot milium,
ostendit sese corvus et supervolans
AVE usque ingessit. tum se lusum intelligens
“At male tibi sit” inquit, “ales pessime,
qui festinantis sic detinuisti pedes.”

A certain man, taking a byway through the fields on a journey, heard “Hello!” and lingered for a moment, but when he saw that no one was there, he hastened the pace. Again, the same sound greeted him from some hidden place. He stopped, encouraged by the hospitable voice, so that whoever it was might receive an equal courtesy. When he had remained for a long time, looking around uncertainly, and lost enough time for several miles, a raven showed himself, and flying above him, incessantly repeated “Hello!” Then, realizing he had been tricked, the man said, “Damn you, wretched bird, for delaying my feet like that when I was in a hurry.”

Why did the man perceive the raven’s “hello” as a trick? (The word lusum, in line 10, comes from ludo, to play, and can suggest mockery or deception; I translated it as “tricked.”) Why did he not take this as a genuine greeting?

It seems that the man was expecting a human speaker, and was disappointed and annoyed to find out that the salutation came from a bird instead. But species difference doesn’t, in and of itself, seem like an adequate explanation, at least in the usual fable context where all sorts of creatures talk. Nor does the explanation for the man’s reaction lie in some perceived status imbalance between the two; reciprocity is expected in greetings, after all, even between parties of unequal standing, and it isn’t mockery for an inferior to greet a superior, or vice versa.

Complicating this is the fact that real birds can imitate human speech—parrots, most famously, but also corvids, including ravens. This raven repeats the same simple word, over and over, as a trained animal might. But the man simultaneously seems to impute malice or mischief to this animal and deny him as a legitimate interlocutor. The raven is capable of toying with him (and ravens have a longstanding, cross-cultural reputation for cleverness and tricks), but he is not capable of (or worthy of?) a conversation.

Manuscript illustration of a raven, from an early 14th century manuscript of Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme, British Library, Additional MS 11390, fol. 33r.

A traditional narrative about animal language is that it doesn’t exist—that the sounds that animals make (and this leaves aside non-aural communication, through movement, scent, etc.) are fundamentally different than human speech. Nonetheless, medieval grammarians and philosophers acknowledged that, say, a dog’s bark is not meaningless, that it might convey something of his emotional state, and that humans could pick up on this.[2] Some thinkers, too, suggested that animals can communicate with their own species in their own “language.” For example, says, Roger Bacon, hens can cluck to let their young know that food is near, or to warn them of a predator.[3]

So much for “real-life” animal language. In medieval literature, though, there may also be special talking animals (or humans gifted with a special ability to understand animals, e.g., the man who can translate between species in Culhwch and Olwen, or Canacee, with her magic ring, in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”). In fables, animals’ capacity to speak is typically unremarkable, and conversations readily occur across species lines.

This fable, however, reflects none of the above scenarios. The raven doesn’t caw or croak—he says an intelligible word, in a human language, Latin. And what he says is “Ave,” a greeting. Ave is not far off from Latin avis, “bird,” although the words are etymologically unrelated; in modern Spanish and Portuguese ave means “bird”. Etymology aside, there is still the possibility of wordplay. Is the bird proclaiming what he is all along, without the man realizing it? Is that the “trick”? Was that what the bird really meant to do, or was it apt, but not necessarily done knowingly—is the raven a kind of natural sign who reiterates himself, both by appearing and by unwittingly speaking his own appearance?

In any case, the man doesn’t treat the raven’s “Ave” as a sincere speech-act from an animal who can, unsurprisingly, talk to him—he doesn’t treat it as a greeting, he treats it as a deception. (The opening moral, possibly added by Perotti, emphasizes this, declaring, “People are very often deceived by words,” Verbis saepenumero homines decipi solere).

What accounts for the man’s reaction to the raven? Fables often have talking animals, yes, but fundamentally, fables are didactic, using memorable narratives to get messages across. The raven’s real-life reputation for mischief, but above all his real-life ability to imitate speech, is what is being drawn on here. The raven in “The Traveler and the Raven” is not the genre-typical talking animal, because for him to be an actual, expected interlocutor goes against the point of the fable, which is about how words can deceive.[4] In conveying this point, “The Traveler and the Raven” both acknowledges certain animals as clever and strips a non-human character of his genre-typical linguistic capability.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] Ben Edwin Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus, Loeb Classical Library 436 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 404–6.

[2] For an analysis of the shifting conceptions of the semiotics of dogs’ barking, from Aristotle to Roger Bacon, see Umberto Eco et al., “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41.

[3] Quoted in Eco et al., “On Animal Language,” p. 36, n. 39.

[4] Fables tend to teach the “mistrust of words,” argues Jill Mann, in From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 96.

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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.