The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality

Notes

139 notes Introduction The first epigraph is from Bacon (1620, 3:370); the second is from Linzey (1995, 4); the third is from Fudge (2002a). 1. Works such as Peter Abelard’s Questiones naturales summarized such animal-oriented and animal-exemplified science. 2. “The interest which wild and domestic creatures had for men of the later twelfth century, the keeping of pets, including exotic species such as apes and parrots, kept by jongleurs, and in baronial halls, as well as the courts of princes, also of the power of animals, in their capacity as symbols, to evoke the most varied , and often seemingly irrelevant, associations . . . lea[ds] both back to folklore and fable and forward to the romances of chivalry” (Klingender 1971, 353). 3. An example is French manuscripts such as those produced in workshops such as those of the artist Jean Pucelle. Animals also feature frequently in the lavish illustrations of Jean de Berry’s Très belles heures. The thirteenth-century Bestiaire d’amour, penned by Richard de Fournival, introduced animals into the realm of courtly love discussions. 4. This approach is continued, but also significantly reworked, in seventeenth-century devotional literature. 5. The German moralist Johann Agricola wrote in 1528 that “Our Lord wishes people to conform to rule in external matters no less than in their thoughts. . . . If this is not done we shall become no better than beasts and irrational animals” (Hale 1994, 421). 6. “The distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ animals was at bottom religious rather than zoological, and had ancient roots . . . in the Judeo-Christian account of the creation and of man’s fall from grace which . . . served to explain the state of war in nature. In the primal paradise garden, the newly created animals lived in a state of respectful unity with Adam and Eve. . . . Paintings of Eden by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters such as Rubens and Jan Brueghel represented this state. . . . However, the lions, tiger, wolves, hyenas and bears which had once gamboled harmlessly in Eden were destined to become part of God’s curse on disobedient humanity . . . the beginning of a moral divide” (Donald 2007, 161). 140 n o t e s t o P A G e s 4 – 6 7. For instance, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas and Michel de Montaigne, embroiled in the horrific French Wars of Religion, related to animals in different ways to evoke what was being destroyed, what was being lost, what was passing away, in terms of man’s relationship to the natural world and the animals within it, but also in reference to hostilities between humans. 8. “In the wake of the political and religious upheavals of the Reformation era that called into question other forms of authority, the ‘old’ no longer had the security of meaning it had formerly enjoyed. The fragmentation of Christendom and the erosion of traditional social rights and political privileges created a world within Europe that seemed potentially as strange and unpredictable as the New World. The seventeenth-century natural philosopher, creator of the new encyclopedia , searched for new models to explain a perplexing, increasingly expansive, and pluralistic universe” (Findlen 1994, 71). 9. Although this study does not engage in depth with her ideas, a certain theoretical indebtedness to the groundbreaking work of Donna Haraway must be acknowledged up front. It is to be hoped that her influence will be read, as it were, en filigrane in the ensuing pages. 10. Interestingly, a current belief about horses as “spirit guides,” intuitively able to elicit what is hidden within us, spurring us to overcome past fears and abuse—constitutes a thorough reversal of the Cartesian model. 11. Not all of Descartes’s contemporaries agreed with this view. La Fontaine, in his “Discours à Madame de la Sablière” and in many of his fables, strove to discredit it: his “ascription of thought and speech to animals in fables ran counter to the mechanistic theory of animal existence proposed by Descartes” (Donald 2007, 115). This raises the question of the perception of animals’ possession of moral agency in this era. Animals were put on trial for their misbehavior in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, so clearly at least the rudiments of such a concept existed (Cohen 1986, 6–37; I am grateful to my colleague Walter Simons, chair of the Dartmouth College History Department, for this reference). 12. In Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment (1976), Linzey observes that until the nineteenth century man did not envision animals...