The Bear: History of a Fallen King (review)

Michel Pastoureau’s The Bear: History of a Fallen King is a fascinating cultural history, but one that seems to come up short. In part I, Pastoureau points to a lost communion between man and bear, such that “ancient peoples in the Paleolithic considered the bear a creature apart” (p. 25) and elevated the bear to become a totemic animal. Later, Greco-Roman, Celtic, and Germanic mythologies evidence a cult of the bear and provide enduring tales of metamorphoses of human into bear; of protective she-bears that nurse human infants; and of monstrous love, sometimes fertile, between a human female and a bear. Although the bear was venerated in early-medieval culture for its strength, its close resemblance to man and its allegedly insatiable sexual appetite prepared the foundation for a more violent confrontation with ecclesiastical authority. Since the theology of the Church depended on man’s uniqueness and superiority to animals, precisely because the bear so nearly resembled man, Pastoureau contends, churchmen sought to suppress rites or festivals that included the bear: Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, condemned “vile games with the bear” (p. 83); and other bishops, too, condemned festivals in which men dressed as bears or danced with them. Until the end of the Middle Ages churchmen repeated that men should not “play the bear” (p. 83), which entailed not only adopting a bear disguise but also manifesting uncontrollable sexual desire. Thus, the Church “went to war” (p. 89) against the bear, organizing hunts to nearly eliminate European bear populations. It attacked the bear’s legendary strength by depicting it in hagiographical literature as tamed and domesticated by holy men, and it demonized the bear as the embodiment of numerous vices and as the preferred form in which the devil appears. Finally, it humiliated the bear, allowing it to be captured, muzzled, chained, and led from fair to market as an object of amusement. Once the Church “dethroned” the bear as king of the beasts after 1000 AD, it replaced him with the lion—an exotic, distant animal whose symbology could be easily controlled. By the end of the twelfth century, the lion began to replace the bear on armorial bearings and in royal menageries. The bear’s diminished status is best illustrated for Pastoureau in vernacular literature: in the chansons de geste, or in French fabliaux like the Roman de Renart, in which the bear is reduced to a foolish, stupid, clumsy creature.

Although Pastoureau’s study contains abundant fabulous material from medieval bestiaries and vernacular literature to fascinate the historian, this also underscores one of its shortcomings—it ignores challenges from natural philosophy following the introduction of Aristotle’s biology. Although many Scholastic texts do repeat the fantastic claim that bears couple like humans, face to face, they challenge other mythic characteristics. For example, the natural philosopher Albert the Great (d. 1280), in his commentary De animalibus, remarks that the bear is not very lustful (parum luxurians; DA 7.3.3.157). To the myth that the she-bear gives birth to an unformed cub and then brings it to life by licking it, Albert replies “none of this is true at all.” (DA 7.3.3.159) Although Alexander Neckam (d. 1217) does accept this myth, he does not attribute it, as Pastoreaux suggests was common, to the she-bear’s unsurpassing lust but rather to the bear’s humoral complexion, which causes the cotillidones that bind the fetus to the womb to rend, resulting in premature birth. (De naturis rerum, 2.131)

Nevertheless, The Bear contains much that will inform and entertain.