The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality

Introduction

1 IntRodUCtIon Animals and Authority The bee . . . gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. . . . Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy: for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers . . . and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding, altered and digested. —Francis Bacon, Novum organum Writing about other species . . . has traditionally consoled us by suggesting that “they” are very like us, rather than the other way round. The other way round has always been a problem because it could only be described in human language. . . . The animal kingdom has long been a device for our own self-reflection. —Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology Work has emerged in the humanities that is challenging the hegemonic position of the human. . . . This work comes under the heading of “animal studies” and its focus . . . tak[es] in not only how humans have lived with animals throughout history, but also how we use animals to think and create. —Erica Fudge, “Just a Plaything for Your Pet Cat?” Anima Mundi Animals have decorated heraldic shields, populated the pages of medieval manuscripts, woven themselves into tapestries, featured as ornamentation on baroque pottery, been formed into the fanciful deformations called gargoyles, farmed our fields, symbolized human weaknesses, lusts, and desires, and insinuated themselves into our 2 t H e w I s d o M o F A n I M A l s hearts. Throughout Western civilization, animals have been our companions, our correctives, and our ciphers as humanity has represented and dealt with issues of authority, cultural strife, and the understanding of ourselves as theological, moral, and social beings. I propose to trace two threads of thought that consistently reappear in early modern texts: how animals are used as a means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of existence, and how animals can be subjects in their own right with their own minds. Prior to the Renaissance, narratives often featured animals as symbols of human emotions. The Middle Ages catalogued miscellaneous details and stories about real and imagined animals in bestiaries . Here animals figured the limitrophe: the frontiers of things known and unknown, what could be known and what could not be known. The Middle Ages manifested what has been called a “late-antique medley of Christian allegory and pseudo-science” for its understanding of nature and of animals, relying primarily on a text called the Physiologus, a compilation of manuscripts deemed authoritative about animals (Klingender 1971, 341). Many late medieval texts about animals organized their suppositions and arguments around proofs drawn from the Physiologus. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries , the Physiologus was rewritten as the popular medieval Bestiarium , “the earliest medieval picture book devoted entirely to animals,” which greatly contributed to the Carolingian revival of natural science in particular (Klingender 1971, 342). Animal symbolism closely linked with the sciences was perceived, and codified, as cultural convention .1 This was a very fertile period for the production of a variety of imaginative literary works concerned with animals,2 and often animals supplied both the format and the impetus for authorship. The medieval period also looked to Aristotle’s History of Animals, Virgil, Pliny, and other classical writers as sources of information about animal life. Preachers consulted collections of animal stories in Latin for exempla that they could use in their sermons. Compiled during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such compendia were now also read by lay people and used in secular, vernacular works of fiction. The illustrations in medieval manuscripts in virtually every genre also referenced anecdotes about animal life and sometimes I n t R o d U C t I o n 3 expressed a perception of animals that was more naturalistic than stereotyped and subordinated to didactic aims.3 Further, heraldic art began to incorporate animals systematically, drawing on the stock of symbolic meanings ascribed to members of the animal kingdom. Birds and animals became prevalent, significant features, often providing the visual component in the self-mythologizing of the individual or family represented. During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, people began to make detailed observations from life about the ways animals lived, their habits and customs, and to add this new awareness to the...