Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays (review)

158 Reviews some reticence about accepting Ferster's transcultural and chronological spectrum ; the brief reference to the 1987 Iran-Contra Arms scandal and role of Presidential advisers in that enquiry is a case in point. But to the extent that American politics and political advice incorporate the idea of counsel as a universal trope, Ferster's reference to modernity does work. Ferster moves in and out of large-scale historical events and detailed literary analysis with ease, supplying an abundance of information with interpretative cohesion. These features require a split-level approach when reading the text, but they are also part of its pleasure and challenge. Helen M. Hickey Department of English University of Melbourne Flores, Nona C, ed, Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays (Garland Medieval Casebooks 13) N e w York and London, Garland, 1996; cloth; pp. xviii, 206; R R P US$44.00. Animals in the Middle Ages comprises a brief introduction; nine articles ( of them illustrated), disposed in three parts; a general index and a useful specific 'Animals and Creatures' index. The first part, 'More than an Animal', containing four contributions, examines the early uses of visual illustrations of animals for moral, spiritual, apotropaic and aesthetic-literary ends. Stephen O. Glosecki, in 'Movable Beasts: The Manifold Implications of Early Germanic Animal Imagery' (pp. 3-23) discusses perceptively the thesis that animals as symbols could move 'across a spectrum of possible implications' (p. 13), even within the same society, depending on the context, and that they are never purely ornaments. H e looks in detail at images of the boar, wolf, dragon, horse, horned man and fish, pointing out the 'multiple referents' (p. 14). Mary E. Robbins follows with 'The Truculent Toad in the Middle Ages' (pp. 25-47), in which the symbolic meanings of the toad in literature that were widely known in the Middle Ages—Aristotle's Ports of Animals, Virgil's Georgics, Pliny's Natural History, Juvenal's first satire; biblical accounts and commentaries; and contemporary works (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Caxton's Mirour, the Towneley Cycle's Lazarus pageant, Brant's Ship of Fools—are explored . Robbins does not, however, provide a simple chronological listing but draws some conclusions as she explores: for instance, that 'the image of the toad as an agent of evil is established in literary texts by the twelfth century' (p. 29). Her study is particularly valuable in its attention to the toad's role in the numerous descriptions of purgatory and hell in homiletic literature, and in its discussion of the toad's connections with the Seven Deadly Sins. This is well-documented, with carefully chosen illustrations. Reviews 159 Joyce E. Salisbury examines the animal fables of Marie de France and Odo of Cheriton to illustrate the argument implicit in hertitle,'Human Animals of the Medieval Fables' (pp. 49-65), that these works 'use animals to discuss human society' (p. 49) and further, that they 'reveal h o w images of animals in the exemplar literature imposed a value on real animals' (p. 49). Marie, argues Salisbury, used the fable animals to portray twelfth-century secular court society, O d o to mirror the ecclesiastical world, both thereby expressing a conservative view of society that contrasted with the earlier use of fable by the lower classestocriticise the social order. There is much of use to the literary scholar in this essay, but also a tendency to generalise: such a statement as, for instance, 'In medieval society it was noble to be a predator' perhaps needs more support that it is given here, since several conclusions depend upon it. David A. Sprunger studies an aspect of the inversus mundi topos in 'Parodic Animal Physicians from the Margins of Medieval Manuscripts' (pp. 67-81). He notes that the antagonism towards doctors and their medicines in the Middle Ages was reflected in the frequent portrayal of physicians in the act of diagnosis—taking the pulse, or carrying aflaskof urine (as in the Ellesmere M S portrait), and wearing distinctive and rich clothing—and how these features are transferred to animal actors for 'human parody7 (p. 72). Part Two, 'Another Look at the Physiologus', begins with Lesley Kordecki...