Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries 9780226436876

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Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries

Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries S a r a h K ay

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2017. Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43673-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43687-6 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226436876.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of New York University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kay, Sarah, author. Title: Animal skins and the reading self in medieval Latin and French bestiaries / Sarah Kay. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016029267 | isbn 9780226436739 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226436876 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Bestiaries—History and criticism. | Manuscripts, Medieval. | Parchment. | Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval. | Books and reading—History—To 1500. | Animals in literature. | Animals, Mythical, in literature. | Animals in art. | Animals, Mythical, in art. | Human-animal relationships. Classification: lcc pa8275.b4 z59 2017 | ddc 809/.93362—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029267 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. G i o r g i o A g a m b e n , The Open

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Conventions Used in This Book xiii Introduction: Skin, Suture, and Caesura

1

1

Book, Word, Page

23

2

Garments of Skin

41

3

Orifices and the Library

63

4

Cutting the Skin: Sacrifice, Sovereignty, and the Space of Exception

87

5

The Riddle of Recognition

108

6 Skin, the Inner Senses, and the Soul as “Inner Life” Conclusion: Reading Bestiaries Appendix 157 Acknowledgments 163 Notes 165 Index 197

128 149

Illustrations

Color Plates (following page 96) Plate 1. Plate 2. Plate 3. Plate 4. Plate 5. Plate 6. Plate 7. Plate 8. Plate 9. Plate 10. Plate 11. Plate 12. Plate 13. Plate 14. Plate 15. Plate 16. Plate 17.

Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 247, fo. 147r. Siren and Onocentaur (B-Isidore). British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 15r. Adam naming the animals (Second family). British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 3r. Panther and the other animals; Dragons hiding underground (Second family). J. Paul Getty Museum MS 100 (“Northumberland Bestiary”), fo. 5v. Adam naming the animals (Transitional). J. Paul Getty Museum MS 100 (“Northumberland Bestiary”), fo. 3v. Creation of humans and animals (Transitional). BnF lat. 3630, fo. 94v. Segment on snakes (Second family). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France. BnF lat. 3630, fo. 95r. Segment on snakes, continued (Second family). Corpus Christi College MS 53 (“Peterborough Bestiary”), fo. 206v. Segment on snakes (Second family). Corpus Christi College MS 53 (“Peterborough Bestiary”), fo. 207r. Segment on snakes, continued (Second family). The Royal Library of Denmark Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8º, fo. 21r. Hydrus and Crocodile (Philippe de Thaon). ONB cod. 1010, fo. 67r. Hyena and Wild Ass (Dicta Chrysostomi). Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20, fo. 61v. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20 fo. 62r. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). St. John’s College MS 178, fo. 159v. Unicorn and Lynx (Second family). National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I, fo. 20v. Ape (Transitional). BnF lat. 3630, fo. 80r. Crocodile (Second family). BnF fr. 15213, fo. 83v. Crocodile eating the lover (Bestiaire d’amours).

x

Plate 18. Plate 19. Plate 20. Plate 21. Plate 22. Plate 23.

Plate 24. Plate 25. Plate 26. Plate 27. Plate 28.

I l l u s t r at i o n s

BnF lat. 2495B, fo. 29v. Lion (H bestiary). The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 81, fo. 35r. Tiger and mirror (Transitional). St. John’s College MS 61, fo. 5v. Tiger and mirror (Second family). BnF Arsenal 3516, fo. 200r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Private Collection, Virginia. Ex-Phillipps 6739, fo. 10r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BU Section Médicine, MS H 437, fo. 207r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 104v. Microcosm (Dicta Chrysostomi). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 105r. Macrocosm (Dicta Chrysostomi). Sidney Sussex College MS 100, fo. 33v. Elephants (Aviarium-H bestiary). Sidney Sussex College MS 100, fo. 34r. Elephants, continued (Aviarium-H bestiary). Aberdeen University Library MS 24 (“Aberdeen Bestiary”), fo. 34r. Woman with doves (Second family).

Black-and-White Illustrations Figure 1. Figure 2.

Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Corpus Christi College MS 22, fo. 168r. Great Fish, Partridge, Asp, and marginal drawing (H-type B-Isidore). 6 Private Collection, Virginia. Ex-Phillipps 6739, fo. 6v. Woutre with naked man and man with clothes (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). 51 Merton College MS 249, fo. 4r. Hydrus and Crocodile, Stag, Antelope (Philippe de Thaon). 55 British Library MS Stowe 1067, fo. 2v. Beaver, Hydrus, and Crocodile (H-type B-Isidore). 56 British Library MS Stowe 1067, fo. 3r. Crocodile and Hyena (H-type B-Isidore). 57 Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BIU Section Médicine, MS H 437, fo. 200r. Viper (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). 61 Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BIU Section Médicine, MS H 437, fo. 229r. Hydrus and Crocodile (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). 61

i l l u s t r at i o n s

Figure 8. Figure 9.

Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19. Figure 20. Figure 21. Figure 22. Figure 23. Figure 24. Figure 25. Figure 26. Figure 27. Figure 28.

The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 832, fo. 4r. Hyena and Wild Ass (Dicta Chrysostomi). 72 Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Typ 101 (“Houghton Bestiary”), fo. 9v. Pattern book illustrations: Hyena and Ape (Aviarium-Dicta Chrysostomi). 73 BnF fr.14969, fo. 30r. Hyena (Guillaume le Clerc). 73 ONB cod. 1010, fo. 70v. Beaver (Dicta Chrysostomi). 75 Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 247, fo. 150v. Beaver (B-Isidore). 75 BnF fr. 25408, fo. 91r. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). 82 BnF fr. 25408, fo. 91v. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). 83 BnF n.a.f. 13521 (“La Clayette”), fo. 23r. Pelican (Pierre de Beauvais). 92 British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 4r. Unicorn (Second family). 96 The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 890, fo. 5v. Crocodile (Second family). 100 British Library MS Egerton 613, fo. 31v. Lion (Guillaume le Clerc). 104 Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621, fo. 2v. Lion (Second family). 104 The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 890, fo. 1r. Lion (Second family). 105 ONB cod. 1010, fo. 73r. Caladrius (Dicta Chrysostomi). 115 BnF lat. 14429, fo. 116v. Caladrius (H bestiary). 115 Gonville and Caius College MS 109/178, fo. 110v. Tiger (Second family). 117 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 95r. Lion (Dicta Chrysostomi). 125 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève MS 2200, fo. 187r. Ape (Bestiaire d’amours). 140 BnF fr. 15213, fo. 86v. Ape (Bestiaire d’amours). 141 BnF fr. 14969, fo. 59r. Elephants; Adam and Eve (Guillaume le Clerc). 154 BnF fr. 14969, fo. 60r. Elephants (Guillaume le Clerc). 155

xi

Conventions Used in This Book

Names of Bestiary Creatures The elements of nature that are the subjects of bestiary chapters have a variety of Latin and vernacular names. For clarity, I have standardized them, usually using the nearest English equivalent. In cases where different texts attribute a variety of names but the same nature to a creature, I have used a single form of the name (e.g., the Great Fish). The names of some creatures are sometimes confused with one another, like the Wild Goat (caper) and the Roe (caprea), and where there is a risk of confusion I provide the Latin or vernacular name in parentheses. Both standardized names and local forms, when cited, are listed in the index. Editions and Abbreviations Bestiary texts are quoted from the following editions, with in-text references abbreviated to one or two letters as indicated in the square brackets before each entry. Citations of introductory and other editorial material from these editions use the abbreviated titles placed in parentheses following each entry: [A] Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy. Willene B. Clark, The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium; Edition, Translation and Commentary. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992. (Clark, Book of Birds) [BA] Bestiaire d’amours. Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiaire d’amour et la Response du Bestiaire. Edited and translated by Gabriel Bianciotto. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009. (Bianciotto, Bestiaire d’amour) [B-Is] B-Isidore. “Il ‘Fisiologo’ latino: Versio ‘BIS.’” In Bestiari medievali, ed. Luigina Morini, 5–102. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. (Morini, Bestiari medievali)

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Conventions Used in This Book

[DC] Dicta Chrysostomi. In Denkmäler deutscher Prosa des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 2, pt. 1, Kommentar, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm, 13–52. Munich: Callwey, 1916. [G] Gervaise, Bestiaire. In Bestiari medievali, ed. Luigina Morini, 287–361. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. (Morini, Bestiari medievali) [GC] Guillaume le Clerc, Bestiaire. Das Thierbuch des Normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc. Edited by Robert Reinsch. Leipzig: Riesland, 1892. (Reinsch, Guillaume le Clerc) [H] H bestiary. “Liber secundus qui est praecipue de naturis animalium.” In De bestiis et aliis rerum, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, online database (see below), vol. 177, cols. 0055D–0084A. [LV] Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais. Le Bestiaire: Version longue attribuée à Pierre de Beauvais. Edited by Craig Baker. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011. (Baker, Version longue) [P] Physiologus. 2nd ed. Edited and translated by Michael J. Curley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. (Curley, Physiologus) [PB] Pierre de Beauvais, Bestiaire. Edited by Guy Mermier. Paris: Nizet, 1977. (Mermier, Pierre de Beauvais) [PT] Philippe de Thaon, Bestiaire. In Bestiari medievali, ed. Luigina Morini, 103–285. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. (Morini, Bestiari medievali) [SF] Second-family bestiary. Willene B Clark. A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second Family Bestiary; Commentary, Art, Text and Translation. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2006. (Clark, Book of Beasts)

Abbreviations of Other Frequently Cited Sources Bible. The Latin Vulgate, online resource at http://www.latinvulgate.com. Eden, Theobaldus. P. T. Eden, Theobaldi “Physiologus”: Introduction, Critical Apparatus, Translation and Commentary. Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 6. Leiden: Brill, 1972. Isidore, Etymologies. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. PL. Patrologia Latina Database. Online version of J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina. Alexandria, VA: Chadwick-Healey Inc., 1995. Survey. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. General Editor J. J. G. Alexander. 6 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975–. Vol. 3, Romanesque Manuscripts 1066–1190, ed. C. M. Kauffmann (1975). Vol. 4, no. 1, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1: 1190–1250, ed. N. J. Morgan (1982).Vol. 4, no. 2, Early Gothic Manuscripts 2: 1250–1285, ed. N. J. Morgan (1988); Vol. 5, Gothic Manuscripts: 1285–1385, ed. Lucy Freeman Sandler (1986).

Conventions Used in This Book

xv

References to Manuscripts Abbreviations are used for major manuscript collections, as follows: BL BM Bodleian BnF BSB Fitzwilliam Getty Montpellier, BUM Morgan ONB Vatican

The British Library, London Bibliothèque municipale Bodleian Library, Oxford Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge J. P. Getty Museum, Malibu, CA Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section de Médicine, Montpellier Pierpont Morgan Library, New York Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Vatican Library, Vatican City

References to Printed Works Aside from the editions listed above, all print references are given in full on first mention in an endnote, and thereafter cited using the author–short title format. Translations English translations of the Aviarium and Second-family bestiary are those of Willene B. Clark. All other translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. The original of passages quoted in translation in the text can be found in the endnotes, except where the translation cited does not contain the original (as, for example, is the case with Isidore, Etymologies).

Introduction

Skin, Suture, and Caesura

“The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful to us in the body, but also what may be useful in the soul.”1 These words of the English theologian Thomas of Chobham (1160–1233 or 1236) repeat what a long line of Christian commentators had said before him, often in the context of writings on the six days of creation such as Ambrose’s Hexameron. The sentiment is traditional, but it was especially pungent in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century when production of bestiaries was at its height. Animals and their significance for humans feature in very many aspects of medieval culture, but they are the raison d’être of this High Medieval genre. Genre is not always a helpful concept, but I invoke it because the word “bestiary” is often used quite freely to refer to any series of representations of animals, visual or textual. “Freud’s bestiary” is the set of animals that appear in the case histories, and how Freud interprets them; “the bestiary of Eugène Delacroix” comprises the famous painter’s depictions of animals; “the medieval bestiary” can loosely be understood to refer to a medieval style of representing animals in any medium, from marginalia to misericords.2 I use the term more narrowly to refer to a group of interrelated texts and their realization as books. Bestiaries in this sense are works composed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that derive from the late antique Physiologus and are made up of short chapters about nonhuman animals broadly understood (mammals, reptiles, insects, birds, fish), together with a number of chapters about plants and stones. Typically each chapter attributes one or more “natures,” or alleged behaviors, to the creature that is its subject and then interprets each nature as encapsulating a point of Christian doctrine or

2

introduction

moral teaching. The Panther, for instance, is said to be a gentle, multicolored animal which sleeps for three days after eating, then roars; the sweetness of its breath attracts all the other creatures to it except for the dragon that fears it; it signifies Christ with his infinite qualities who, following his death and resurrection, drew all humanity to him, but was dreaded by the devil. In some versions all the chapters on plants and stones are omitted, making the bestiary solely about animate creatures; even those on birds are sometimes eliminated. Others, however, expand the scope of the bestiary to unexpected lengths by including chapters on “Man.” This book reassembles some of the contexts in which Thomas of Chobham’s contemporaries thought about their relationship with other animals, and might have found it beneficial to think about them when reading these texts. Medieval reflection was fraught (as is today’s) by competing theories about human exceptionalism within creation. Yet it was also conducted using a Latin lexicon in which the words animal or animans (“living creature”) frequently included humans alongside other animals—and without, as yet, any vernacular term for all animals together, either including humans or without them, the broadest available term being “beast” (French beste).3 Early debates are thus structured differently from modern ones where the word “animal” usually means “all living creatures except for human ones,” often with the unacknowledged rider, “especially quadrupeds.” In order not to obscure this important divergence between medieval and modern usage, I shall for the most part refer to “human and other animals,” particularly as I will have as much to say about the community of all animals in these works as about the divorce, from them, of humans. Even the titles of the works I address, in Latin Liber animalium or Liber bestiarum, in French bestiaire, attest a desire for inclusiveness. This inquiry is also shaped by modern concerns that do not have medieval antecedents: posthumanism and the “animal turn” in the humanities, the history of the book, and the small but lively field of skin studies. An eclectic approach is called for, in my view, to illumine the unique contribution that the Middle Ages can make to our thinking about human-animal relations. This is the age of the parchment book when some of the highest achievements of human culture are preserved in manuscripts made from animal skins. Expressions of language and reason, long the focus of humans’ self-congratulation on their exclusivity, rely for their transmission on other animals that have been slaughtered and flayed. The parchment page is thus the site of convergence between seeming incompatibles: between bare life and intellectual life, livestock and literacy, the history of the book and the seemingly ahistorical existence of nonhuman animals.

skin, suture, and caesura

3

Parchment is not just defined by a coincidentia oppositorum; it is also a space of ambiguity. Stripped on one side of flesh and on the other of the hair that made the creature it came from recognizable in life, parchment is a refined form of animal skin whose resemblance to human skin is obvious to anyone who has looked at medieval manuscripts.4 The more parchment is handled, the more oil or grime is transferred to it from the skins of its users and the more skin-like it appears; consider, for example, the corners and margins of the manuscripts in plates 7, 10, 26 and 27, or figs. 4 and 5. And when parchment is scarred or cut, it looks much like human skin that has suffered similar injury, as in plates 10, 12, 13, and 24, or figs. 13 and 14. Look closely at any of these and you are likely to experience a visceral response, as if confronted by a human wound or scar. Just as the single term animal includes both human and other animals, so too the same words commonly designate their skins. Human skin, animal skin, and parchment are all rendered by pellis in Latin, pel or peau in medieval French.5 Reading Skin By focusing on the page itself, as much as on what is written, drawn, or painted on it, I sketch a speculative phenomenology of the use of the parchment book. I inquire what it might mean for a medieval writer or reader to fix his attention on a page that faces him like a reflection of his own bodily surface, marked as his might be with pores, veins, scuffs, or scars; how it would feel to become absorbed in the contents of a page that can be perceived as an extension of the reader’s own skin, or as enfolding him like a second skin.6 Would this sense of sharing a skin with the book—albeit temporarily and in fantasy rather than fact—spark recognition of himself as similarly animal, or would it trigger aspiration to a sublime and disembodied self, purified, like the parchment has been, of its fleshly dimension?7 I am curious how apprehensions such as these, fleeting as they might be, could destabilize categories that are ordinarily relied upon, such as those of the reader as subject and the book as object, or between rational being and beast. Reactions will depend on individual readers’ encounters with individual pages, but are also to some extent guided and preempted by texts themselves—for example, when they discuss animals’ skins. Scribes, too, appear sometimes to want to intervene in readers’ reactions, choosing leaves appropriate to the material which is to be copied on them; for instance, bestiary chapters that focus on breaches in the skin, like the Beaver’s self-castration or the destruction by the Hydrus of the Crocodile, are often copied on a membrane that has been torn or holed.8 Studying how parchment interferes in the reading process is one way of fol-

4

introduction

lowing Thomas of Chobham’s injunction to explore how the creatures on its pages might “be useful to us . . . in the soul,” though it is not one he would necessarily have anticipated. When asked what his first question of a medieval book would be, an archaeologist colleague replied, “How many animals were killed in order to make it?”9 For any substantial codex, the answer is in the hundreds.10 Medieval authors were evidently aware that their writing materials were once living creatures like themselves, since they make macabre jokes about it.11 The resemblance of parchment to human skin is exploited in the iconography of saints like Bartholomew who were flayed, and thematized in the tradition of the Charter of Christ, a document purportedly written on Christ’s body as it was stretched on the cross like a hide on a parchment maker’s frame.12 Christ’s identification as the Lamb must be partly responsible for the convergence of ideas on which this tradition depends, since not only were lambs sacrificed for the sake of humans, but parchment is most commonly made from young sheep.13 The ideas that skin is both a surface of inscription and an envelope of identity are commonplaces of modern scholarship on skin. A frequent reference point is Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Moi-peau or “Skin Ego” which is at once the literal skin around the human self, its fantasy container, and its metaphorical equivalent; for Anzieu all a person’s capacities for thought and expression, including literary expression, ultimately refer back to the infantile experience of the self as embodied, and of the self ’s defining surface, the skin.14 Like psychoanalysts, scholars of skin from Claudia Benthien’s pioneering work of 1999 to the essays edited by Katie L. Walter in 2013 have typically so far focused on human skins,15 but the look, the feel, and the smell of parchment invite broadening their conclusions, if not to animal skins in general, at least to the medieval page. What can be gleaned from medieval commentators suggests that not only was no hard and fast distinction made between human and animal skin, but that Anzieu’s account of skin as a container for the self and a surface of inscription has a history reaching back at least until the Middle Ages.16 As a psychoanalyst, Anzieu himself belongs in a humanist tradition, but as I will show his work can be fruitfully articulated with Giorgio Agamben’s posthumanist account of the always precarious character of the human-animal divide.17 Other analysts on whose writings I draw, from Sigmund Freud to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, also raise the question of human animality in ways which directly illuminate reading (on) skin.18 Because bestiaries focus on nonhuman animals, the act of reading them can create a feedback loop between the page as an animal surface and the texts and images it supports. I follow Slavoj Žižek in calling this process a “suture”

skin, suture, and caesura

5

in which the distinction of levels between content and medium on which reading normally relies is momentarily suspended, with uncanny effect.19 Given that the content aims to instruct humans while the medium resembles human skin, this suture potentially implicates the human reader too, whose bodily surface is likewise caught up in the collapse of distinctions between levels whose difference from one another is usually taken for granted. The behaviors of bestiary creatures almost always involve their bodies and often their bodily surface. A Hoopoe loses its feathers, a Serpent sloughs its skin, a Hyena alternates between male and female, an Asp blocks both its ears: all these are corporeal events with obvious parallels in the experience of humans similarly ageing, craving renewal, impossibly desiring, or deaf to beguilement. An example where the potential for suture between page, creature and reader seems to have been realized is the chapter on the Asp in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 22, fo. 168r (fig. 1), dating from the third quarter of the twelfth century.20 On the left side of the image the illustrator has represented the Asp (which he thinks is a large quadruped) emerging from its hole. Because the drawing is unframed, the Asp appears to be dropping down from nowhere, the hole in question just a wavy line on the surface of the parchment. In the bottom margin there is a human figure which, like the Asp, is only partly outlined and seems, like it, to be emerging from the page. It may have been executed later—it is cruder than the drawings in the main part of the page—but if so, it has certainly mimicked the style of the figures above it, including the fact of being unframed. If the arrival of the Asp with its quivering red tongue is menacing, here it seems that the page itself has assumed a friendlier face and is waving to the reader, inviting him to wave back in response.21 Like many religious texts, bestiaries address (or provoke) a range of emotive reactions: wonder, dread, repulsion, shock, laughter, awe. Their teachings rely on what Julia Kristeva has called “the powers of horror” since they are as much experienced through visceral affect as taught through theological tenet. The uncanny suture between represented content, page, and reader, helps to heighten this affect. As or more powerful than exhortation to embrace this or that doctrine are the involuntary responses which the doctrine excites. Bestiaries’ material form increases the likelihood of suture between content, reader, and page. They are always conceived as books in which other animals are read as interpretable texts. Their period of composition corresponds with the High Middle Ages when the universal medium of book production was parchment of some kind. Before them, the late antique Physiologus must have been conceived for papyrus; at the later end, only a small proportion of bestiary copies make it into the age of paper, at a time when the growing

F i g u r e 1 . Corpus Christi College MS 22, fo. 168r. Great Fish, Partridge, Asp, and marginal drawing (H-type B-Isidore). Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

skin, suture, and caesura

7

separation of human edification from natural philosophy makes them appear outdated. In their heyday, bestiaries assume a privileged relationship with the “book of nature” on the one hand and the divinely ordained book of scripture on the other. They are typically conceived as illuminated books whose illustrations—painted or drawn on the parchment skin—inevitably represent the skins of their subjects, animal or human, as a defining element in the book’s organization (ordinatio). Often, as in the example of the Asp in fig. 1, the skins of the creatures concerned, both animal and human, are left bare of color so that they are, in fact, identical with the skin of the page. They are represented as skin by virtue of not being represented on the skin: another instance of suture. A factor of a different order might have encouraged this short circuit between representation, page, and the reader’s own containing surface: the extent to which the status of the natural world and the place in it of humans were rethought over the course of the bestiaries’ development. Their origins are late antique, but the period of greatest activity in redesigning and reconceiving bestiary texts, from the early twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, is one of great philosophical upheaval when patristic frames of thought are challenged by the Neoplatonic renaissance of the twelfth century and the Aristotelian revolution of the thirteenth. These intellectual movements provoke seismic shifts in conceptions of animality and in the relationship of theology to natural philosophy, the implications of which have been little addressed by bestiary scholarship to date. A summary outline history of the bestiary tradition shows the potential for interaction between it and its wider intellectual environment, as well as introducing the versions which I shall be addressing in particular. Although the detail of this history is complex, at its heart is a constantly revised understanding of the relationships between humans, the rest of creation, and the divine. The History of Bestiaries Western bestiaries go back to a Greek text called Physiologus following the name of its presumed author, thought to have lived in Alexandria in the second century CE. Contrary to what is widely affirmed, Physiologus does not here mean “naturalist” but “allegorist.”22 The work pioneers the format of short chapters in which creatures’ “natures”—gobbets of animal lore drawn from sources ranging from Aristotle to eastern Mediterranean folklore—are framed with biblical quotations or moral apothegms as if to imply that they

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exist only in order to be interpreted in accordance with Christian doctrines; their doctrinal significance is then elaborated via further passages from Scripture in a sermon-like manner.23 The Greek Physiologus was translated into Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopic, giving rise to Oriental traditions, and several times into Latin, whence the Western European versions derive. A Latin Physiologus can contain as many as 50 chapters, but their number and order varies and the Latin version which most influenced the subsequent development of the European bestiary—the so-called B version—usually has 36. Given the probable Egyptian origin of Physiologus, an African fauna predominates in the earliest versions and continues to furnish such chapters as those on the Lion, Antelope, Crocodile, Hyena, Elephant, Ibis, and Salamander. Alongside these are more seemingly mythological animals like the Onocentaur, Unicorn, Siren, and Phoenix. Sea creatures such as the Great Fish and Sawfish are inevitably somewhat fabulous given that mariners’ tales could hardly be corrected by underwater science. A result of Physiologus migrating from its African roots, and its translation across languages, cultures, and times, was to render more remote from readers’ experience almost all of the animals whose behavior it allegedly reports. As European versions accumulate, not only are animals introduced more familiar to European readers (like the Sheep, Horse, and Cat) but so too are more seemingly fabulous hybrids (such as the Crocota, offspring of the Lioness and the Hyena), as boundaries shift between the familiar and the outlandish, the mythical and the fantastic.24 But even everyday animals, once subsumed into the textual world of Physiologus and its descendants, become textual characters within it, and for this reason I write their names with initial capitals. A bestiary Lion is not the same as the lion thrillingly glimpsed in a medieval menagerie and nor is a bestiary Sheep the same as a real-world sheep grazing tranquilly in a nearby field. Their textual identities are unstable, many scribes, for example, conflating Ibis and Ibex, or classing the Ostrich as a beast; and illustrators too are uncertain how to depict the unknown, sometimes representing the Sawfish as a winged dragon, the Salamander as a bird, or Serpents with four legs. Because the spelling and sometimes the very form of names vary across texts and languages, I shall standardize them, indicating in parentheses where appropriate the term used in the text under discussion. The account of the medieval bestiary that follows here differs from that presented in existing scholarship, and is explained in greater detail in the appendix.25 The two earliest European adaptations of Physiologus are the B-Isidore and Dicta Chrysostomi versions. The former augments Physiologus B with material from late antique encyclopedias, especially Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, hence its name; the latter, so-called because it was attributed

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to St. John Chrysostom, reduces and redistributes chapters into two groups, beasts and birds. Both versions came into existence, probably in France, by about the tenth century and each was to prove influential on the important innovations of the twelfth. The twelfth century sees several new redactions in which chapters are reworked and reordered according to zoological criteria, broadly understood. In the first half century, the predominant model is the bipartite one pioneered by the Dicta Chrysostomi. In England, it leads to a redaction known as the H-type of B-Isidore which reorders B-Isidore in two sections, beasts and non-beasts; it also underlies the Northern French Aviarium or “Book of Birds” of Hugh of Fouilloy, apparently conceived as part of a larger work in which it would be accompanied by a bestiary, the whole thus having the order birds-beasts. The so-called H bestiary was seemingly created later, probably in Paris, at the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth, in order to fulfill the second part of this plan. But in England, from the second half of the twelfth century onward, two important bestiary redactions known as “Second-family” and “Transitional” adopt a form of the taxonomy used by Isidore in book 12, “De animalibus” (“On Animals”) of his Etymologies and accrue interpolations from him and other encyclopedists.26 This development, which resulted in some of the most luxurious and exquisitely painted of the bestiaries, led Montague Rhodes James and then Florence McCulloch to propose a genealogy of the entire tradition of which these would be the culmination.27 As has subsequently been pointed out, however, the bestiary “families” posited by these scholars are vulnerable to challenge; all efforts at categorization have constantly to be tempered to allow for the particularities of individual copies; 28 and a less Anglo-centric view does not necessarily accord the same importance to these English developments.29 Such scholarly divergences mean that that much of the nomenclature traditionally used to identify the various bestiary redactions reflects views that are not universally accepted or no longer current. Most of the names for Latin versions from the twelfth century on could be qualified as “so-called”: the so-called first and second families, the so-called Transitional version, the so-called H bestiary, and so on. I shall retain the traditional labels without these fussy qualifications simply because they are still widely used in English. Latin bestiaries inspired vernacular translations and adaptations across many languages, the oldest being in Anglo-Saxon and German. My focus, however, will be on the six extant versions in some form of French. Their production ranges from the early twelfth century to the mid-thirteenth and belongs in at least three different periods and more places, some Insular

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and others Continental. Those that were composed by the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century adapt Dicta Chrysostomi or B-Isidore texts whereas the later ones share some of the same entries as Latin Transitional and Second-family texts, including one on Man. But instead of manifesting the increasingly zoological structure of the Latin redactions they turn away from it, only the two earliest being organized by species. Philippe de Thaon’s Anglo-Norman bestiary of ca. 1121–35 resembles early twelfth-century Latin versions in dividing its entries between beasts and birds, though it also adds a third section on stones.30 By the time of the next group of French vernacular compositions, the amplified Latin Transitional and Second-family redactions from the second half of the twelfth century were already in circulation, but vernacular authors still look to earlier models. At the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, Gervaise’s short verse bestiary, like the early Germanlanguage bestiaries, is based on Dicta Chrysostomi. Between 1207 and 1213 the prolific Pierre de Beauvais wrote the first, somewhat flat-footed bestiary in French prose, now known as the Short Version of this work. Also belonging to this period is the verse bestiary dated 1210 or 1211 by the AngloNorman author Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, which was by far the most widely diffused vernacular version to date, as also the longest—not because Guillaume added chapters to his B-Isidore model but because of his enthusiastically prolonged animal descriptions and expansive didacticism. The final two French texts, both Continental and in prose, date from the middle of the thirteenth century. Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours is a brilliantly witty text in which the first-person speaker claims to turn to the prose bestiary in a last-ditch attempt to woo his lady. Scuttling back and forth between creatures in a way that undoes the chapter structure of earlier bestiaries, his appeals rely on comparisons between human amorous behavior and traditional natures, many of them of birds found in the Aviarium or creatures associated with Transitional or Second-family redactions. The Bestiare d’amours was not only the best-liked of Richard’s works but its success rivaled that of Guillaume le Clerc. A traditional chapter-by-chapter organization is restored in the so-called Long Version of Pierre de Beauvais which is twice the length of Pierre’s original, and almost certainly by a different, anonymous author. It opens with the same B-Isidore sequence as Pierre de Beauvais’s original, but then inserts chapters from other sources, often the Bestiaire d’amours which it must therefore postdate.31 In both Latin and French, many of the changes from earlier to later texts involve accretion and occasional deletion rather than radical reconceptualization. In Latin, the biggest changes from Physiologus B are introduced by Dicta Chrysostomi, the Aviarium-H bestiary sequence and the Second-family Latin

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version; in French, the most innovative redactions are those of Philippe de Thaon, the Long Version of Pierre de Beauvais, and most of all the Bestiaire d’amours, but even in these a great deal of traditional content remains. Typically, then, the reader of a bestiary in either Latin or French finds familiar lore, compiled perhaps with new sources and/or reordered to create differences of emphasis, but typically not with fresh observation of the creatures treated or wholly different ideas about they should be interpreted. Moreover, copying of earlier works continues alongside that of more recent ones, and can be influenced by it; conversely, manuscripts of even the most innovative works like the Bestiaire d’amours often have illustrations typical of older, more traditional bestiaries.32 Given the import and diversity of each text’s individual realization in book form, no work is safely quarantined in its original context of composition; the “work as such” does not exist except in its multiple manifestations. For these reasons, my commentaries on particular bestiary passages or pages provide information both about which textual version is involved, and the date and origin (as far as currently known) of the manuscript in question. Intellectual Contents and Contexts These processes of accretion, abbreviation, internal reorganization, and material differentiation, mean that what even we might think of as “the same” bestiary redaction is open to being shaped by several intellectual frameworks; and given the competing tug of conservatism alongside innovation in medieval centers of learning, such frameworks also tend to ride alongside more than supplant one another. Physiologus’s interpretations of what animals mean to its readers reflect the climate of Christian Neoplatonism in Alexandria, of which Origen is the foremost and best-known expression.33 The writings of Ambrose and Augustine also contribute to the worldview assumed by its early Latin translators.34 For Willene B. Clark, the main guide to bestiary thought throughout the tradition remains Augustine, for whom “ignorance of things makes figurative expressions unclear when we are ignorant of the qualities of animals or stone or plants or other things mentioned in scripture for the sake of some analogy.”35 Whereas these early Greek and Latin Fathers read the world allegorically with the help of the Bible, the contribution made by Isidore is rather toward understanding the world through the prism of language and its capacity to preserve past meanings. As developments away from the Latin Physiologus increasingly incorporate excerpts from the Etymologies, earlier insistence on God’s Word is supplemented by close attention to actual words. At the

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same time, while natural creatures are still read in conjunction with Scripture, there is somewhat more sense of history in general and, in particular, more highlighting of the cardinal points of sacred history. Eden, Adam’s naming of the animals, the fall, the incarnation, and the final apocalypse, emerge more clearly as reference points against which to map an understanding of creaturely life, both human and animal (see chapter 1). For the most part, criticism of medieval bestiaries has been overdetermined by their early history. Born of a combination of Christian homiletics and early encyclopedism, they give rise to commentaries that churn between these self-same poles. Who or what is the subject of the bestiary, man’s soul, or the throng of natural creatures? This framework of discussion is encouraged by the contents of codices in which bestiaries are compiled with other texts since their most frequent messmates are, unquestionably, some combination of devotional and encyclopedic works. It is generally accepted that they become less sermon-like, more oriented toward the natural world and more secular in their uses, as time goes on. Aside from the enthusiasm of art historians for certain luxury or exquisite manuscripts, the bestiary is rarely seen as aspiring very high. James, for instance, declares that “its literary merit is nil, and its scientific value (even when it had been extensively purged of fable, and reinforced with soberer stuff) sadly meagre.”36 Attempts to interpret bestiaries in the light of developments in thought more contemporary with their composition and diffusion have been limited. Francesco Zambon tentatively suggested a connection between early bestiaries and the negative theology of John Scot Eriugena;37 critics tend to stop at Hugh of Saint-Victor, a powerful interpreter of nature and its creatures.38 Franciscan sensitivity to nature has been evoked as a contextualizing influence but could be made more of in the case of manuscripts known to have produced in Franciscan circles, like the BnF fr. 14969 copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire (late thirteenth century; see figs. 10, 27, and 28);39 for as Lynn White puts it, St. Francis “forced man to abdicate his monarchy over the creation, and instituted a democracy of all of God’s creatures.”40 Bestiaries have been ignored by scholars like Brian Stock or P. Winthrop Wetherbee who have done so much to open up the field of twelfth-century natural philosophy,41 and whose work, conversely, is seldom cited by readers of bestiaries.42 In fact with the exception of the Bestiaire d’amours, widely recognized as responding to thirteenth-century Aristotelianism (but not always accepted as a real bestiary),43 bestiaries are rarely perceived as touched by his natural philosophy, even though a number of Latin copies are compiled with texts by, or thought to be by, Aristotle, including his De animalibus (“Of animals”).44

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Knowing that the Long Version of the bestiary ascribed to Pierre de Beauvais borrows heavily from Richard de Fournival, it becomes reasonable to read it—as does Claudia Guggenbühl—in the intellectual climate of its day.45 The possibility of twelfth-century Neoplatonist influence on how bestiaries conceived the natural world, suggested by E. G. Millar in his facsimile edition of the Northumberland Bestiary (ca. 1250–75, now Getty MS 100), has not to my knowledge been pursued. Millar points out that two passages of elegiac couplets from Bernardus Silvestris’s catalog of creatures in his Cosmographia are quoted in it and its two sister manuscripts, Morgan MS M. 81 (ca. 1175–210) and BL MS Royal 12.C.XIX (ca. 1200–1220),46 and that a further couplet appears in the Northumberland bestiary alone; 47 all three bestiaries are English, and classed as Transitional.48 In light of this, Millar identifies the two crowned female figures on either side of Adam as he names the animals (fo. 5v; plate 4) as the goddesses Nous and Natura, whose role in conceiving and fashioning the created order is central to the Cosmographia.49 Although bestiaries quote from Bernardus they seem not to be compiled with him, but several are copied alongside works by his fellow Chartrean William of Conches.50 Clearly bestiaries were not as sealed off from the philosophical controversies that raged alongside them as the critical silence on this score would imply. The predominant paradigm of bestiary criticism, with its alternation between Christian homiletics and early encyclopedism, needs to be expanded to admit contemporary intellectual preoccupation with nature, and with the nature of that nature. Doing so reveals how bestiaries position their readers not just outside the book but also within it, alongside other creatures in the natural world. Readerships The variety of manuscript contexts in which bestiaries are found invites broader reflection on their likely readership(s). A major reason for the low intellectual regard in which these works have been held is that they have been identified as elementary teaching materials aimed at lay brothers or schoolboys. The prologue of the Aviarium states that the text includes pictures for the sake of instructing the unlettered.51 Clark surmises that the Latin text was used as a prompt for teaching the work’s contents in whatever vernacular was accessible to its audience.52 The unornamented and generally short chapters of the Dicta Chrysostomi might similarly have served as a pedagogic basis for instruction across a variety of languages. The “readers” of such a text would then include not only those capable of deciphering its written form but also some who received its contents aurally and with improvised modifications

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from a teacher who may also have relied on its illustrations to capture his students’ attention. Their contact with the page would have been visual and possibly tactile, but not necessarily bound to the letter of the text. In other versions it seems more likely that the text as such was central to the reading process. That the Latin Second-family redaction was used as a textbook for schoolboys is suggested by Clark’s discovery, in fourteen of its manuscripts, of glosses and annotations consistent with those found in other contemporary schoolbooks.53 Clark also notes that Latin bestiaries are often found as single, relatively portable books, suitable for use in the classroom.54 Examining the glosses of the B-Isidore text in the early thirteenthcentury BL MS Royal 2.C.XII, Ilya Dines finds confirmation that bestiaries were used “to teach young pupils . . . in monasteries and cathedral schools all over England.”55 As well as assimilating religious instruction, pupils would be expected to acquire or advance their knowledge of Latin from studying bestiaries. The unillustrated Physiologus Theobaldi was designed to help them progress from prose to verse composition in Latin.56 Further evidence that Latin bestiaries were used in classrooms is the self-presentation of the oldest French vernacular bestiary as based on a livre de grammaire (PT 4, 1958), a phrase usually understood as meaning “a book in Latin,” but which could also  mean “a schoolbook designed for teaching Latin.” The Latin rubrics found in Philippe’s text juxtapose the Latin names of creatures to their vernacular counterparts, as if to update the process of learning by improvising a bilingual dictionary. Belief in the intellectual lowliness of bestiaries is sustained by this evidence of their use as elementary teaching texts. It is contested, however, by the contexts in which many of their copies were transmitted. As we have seen, associations exist between bestiaries and writings in natural philosophy. Some bestiaries are contained in university books, with obvious implications for their likely readership. Clark identifies the scribe of the Second-family Latin text in BnF lat. 11207 as an irreverent and witty university student who uses the bestiary as an occasion to display his knowledge of grammar and rhetoric; this is, she thinks, the earliest French copy of this redaction, made in Paris in the 1220s–1230s.57 An already educated, thoughtful readership is implied by the insertion of bestiaries into theological miscellanies, such as the monastic collections combining the Aviarium and H bestiary with other works by Hugh of Fouilloy.58 Two manuscripts with surprising implications for readership are Vienna, ONB cod. 303 and Munich, BSB clm 14693, both transmitting the Dicta Chrysostomi. The Vienna manuscript, from Northern France, is a thirteenth-

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century collection of predominantly secular poetic texts that were used for teaching Latin verse; the prose Dicta version is arranged as a gloss around the Physiologus Theobaldi as if its purpose were to aid the reading of the verse text. Even more remarkable is the beautifully written twelfth-century Munich 14693 in which a text of the Dicta Chrysostomi is compiled together with Horace’s Ars poetica, two books of his Epistles, and various works by Sedulius Scotus; in this collection seemingly intended for a highly literate reader with highbrow tastes in poetry the Dicta text is shorn of all its allegories and transformed into a secular, literary work. In short the readership of bestiaries was sufficiently varied to include twelfth-century literati, thirteenth-century arts students, scholars of natural science, and theologians of all kinds, as well (apparently) as the illiterate or juvenile pupils with whom they are most commonly associated. The vernacular bestiaries contribute the further likelihood of aristocratic women as readers in at least some sense of “reading” in this period. True, both Pierre de Beauvais and Guillaume le Clerc dedicate their bestiaries to men, with Guillaume repeatedly addressing a male readership as “Seigneur” (Lords), so there is no direct evidence that these texts were read by women.59 Gervaise for his part does not specify an audience. But Philippe de Thaon’s verse bestiary is first dedicated to Henry I’s queen, and Richard de Fournival purports to address his to his lady. Even if women readers are not directly inscribed in all of these vernacular works, women’s access to them cannot be ruled out; in light of this possibility and in order to avoid the contortions of gender-neutral syntax I shall refer to readers of Latin bestiary texts as “he” and of vernacular texts as “she.” Different pronouns are mere token reminders of the diversity of the bestiaries’ historical readership. The encounters with the skins of their pages that I shall be exploring in this book probably involve almost as much variety among readers as exists among the creatures that bestiaries represent, and among the forms and formats of the books themselves. The Skin Ego and the Anthropological Machine Bestiaries are usually seen as articulating conservative religious teachings. Only quite recently have scholars begun to see their potential to challenge orthodox positions. Debra Hassig’s Medieval Bestiaries contains a number of such suggestions, drawing attention, for example, to the titillation offered by images that flaunt the very sexuality the texts ostensibly reprove—like the dangling breasts of the Siren (plate 1) or the genital excrescences of the

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Hyenas and Wild Ass (plate 11).60 I will follow her lead in using bestiary pages, as well as their contents, to reflect on bodily similarities between humans and other animals. Several critics have already invoked critical animal studies as a reason for exploring how the human-animal boundary is blurred more than it is affirmed in bestiaries. This possibility, raised by Dorothy Yamamoto, is brilliantly analyzed by Susan Crane who uses the complexities of bestiary taxonomy to deconstruct the standoff between doctrinal and encyclopedist interpretations.61 My approach is broadly in tune with this trend except that, by starting from questions of perception, identification, and fantasy, I see the relation between human and other animals as a subjective one that, as described in object relations theory from Melanie Klein onward, is also that of the subject to his or her body, and that of the mother.62 It is in order to try to sort out the tangled nature of this relationship that Didier Anzieu posits the Skin Ego, the first role of which is to distinguish the outlines of a child’s self from its mother’s, with whom the child originally shared a skin. The process of differentiating such a self is halting and often painful and its outcome frequently imperfect, hence (for Anzieu) the large number of psychical conditions—masochism, for example—that play out on the skin.63 Likewise positing identity as the outcome of a tortuous and ultimately unattainable differentiation, Giorgio Agamben argues in The Open that human history is defined—both as human and as history—by the will to demarcate human from animal.64 The Italian philosopher terms the labor of constructing and maintaining this projected division of the self (“human”) from the other (“animal”) the “anthropological machine”; its operations are historically sensitive since “man” is fabricated differently in different historical moments, and so, of course, differing conceptions are also produced of the animals to which the human is “other.”65 The product engineered by this machine is never more than what he calls a “mobile caesura”: it is alleged, misheard, disputed, rethought, hence constantly shifting; moreover it always fails because its cut falls within the human, so that, for example, some of our own bodily functions, or certain kinds of person, are branded as “animal.”66 An example Agamben cites of an internal frontier that defines only part of a human as human is the influential antique distinction between rational soul (= “human”), sensitive soul (common with other animals), and vegetative soul (common with all life forms).67 “What is man,” Agamben asks, “if he is always the place—and at the same time the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?” 68 This is not an idle question, because the way it is answered governs how individuals and populations are categorized and treated—whether they are honored, policed, abused, or slaughtered. “In our culture,” he writes,

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“the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man.” 69 Starting from the historical specificity of bestiary texts, with their constantly renewed readings of the natural world and their distinctive mode of production as parchment books, I aim to expose the provisional nature of Agamben’s inner caesura between human and animal by setting it alongside the outer boundary (or skin) as construed by Anzieu, and conversely to expose the fantasmatic nature of the Skin Ego, by reading both in relation to skin of the page. Agamben’s inner boundary is factitious and ideological; its sustainability founders when it can no longer be distinguished from the outer one of the skin. Conversely the outer boundary of the Skin Ego, fantasy defender of individual human identity, is destabilized when identified with the skin of the page and thus also as “animal.” Reading the skin of a bestiary, I argue, can provoke moments of (mis)identification that suture the reading subject to the book, suspend the workings of the caesura between human and animal, and dehumanize the Skin Ego. I do not claim that these are conscious, welcome, or lasting effects. They may be so ephemeral as barely to register; they may make one wince or cringe; if they were to be consciously noticed they would likely be disavowed. And yet, as in the conclusion to Agamben’s essay, such momentary erasures of distinction leave in their wake the possibility—utopian perhaps, or maybe apocalyptic—of a human relationship to other animals that is not, at the same time, a severance from them. Surface Reading Aware that the speculative character of my approach falls outside the usual scholarly discourse on medieval texts and manuscripts, I support my interpretations by means of one of the most traditional tools of literary scholarship, namely close reading. My only departure from the traditional exercise of this skill is to read closely the page itself as well as what is written or depicted on it, a method developed in part in response to the practice of “surface reading” and which I integrate to the concept of the “manuscript matrix.”70 In chapter 6 I elaborate on my use of this term and how it can mediate our access to a “codicological unconscious” shaped by the surface of the skin. I end this introduction with an example of such a reading that illustrates the ideas outlined so far. An entry in Physiologus retained in a similar form in B-Isidore concerns the Siren and the Onocentaur (“ass-centaur”). Whereas most bestiary chapters address only a single creature, the two together form a structured pair.71 Each is a represented by a combination of human and nonhuman features, the Siren half woman and half bird or fish, the Onocentaur

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half man and half ass. Their shared chapter illustrates the workings of the anthropological machine since it turns on the meaning for the human reader of each creature’s conjunction-cum-separation of the two halves. Ron Baxter demonstrates the machine’s ideological effectiveness when he comments, “sirens are animals in human form, centaurs are men made like senseless animals. Together they form a warning against being deceived by the allurements of the world.”72 Effectively he has decided, of the Siren, that it is “an animal,” while making the opposite determination of the Onocentaur, that it is “a man,” each identity being determined with regard to the boundary that literally divides each creature through the middle. Yet neither Physiologus nor the B-Isidore text (§12) resolves their identity quite like this. Sirens are said to be lethal animalia, which in medieval Latin means “living creature” and does not exclude humans; they are said to be like a man ( figuram hominis habent) in their upper part but like a bird ( figuram volatilis) lower down. Similarly the Onocentaur’s upper body resembles a human (hominis similis) but its lower limbs are “of a wild nature” (nature . . . agrestis, B-Is §12). As I interpret these descriptions, the point—since Sirens may be tempting and Onocentaurs may have an ass’s appetites—is rather that any man is at risk of being an ass (for instance, when faced by a woman); or alternatively that every woman may reveal herself as a temptress (for instance, when faced by a man). The issue is less one of appearance and reality, as Baxter has it, than of desire and the need to police a certain definition of the human against its effects: to shore up the boundary of “the human” against urges stigmatized as “bestial.” We agree, though, that neither Siren nor Onocentaur really possesses two natures. The medial boundary does not demarcate two identities, one human and the other animal, as much as it signals the problem of conceiving and maintaining the single identity of “the human” again the threat, or the promise, of inner divergence. And as Agamben says, it passes within, for that which is labeled “nonhuman” irrupts and must be rejected within an individual man or a woman. In medieval visual representations this anticipated rejection is usually underscored by a line of demarcation between the two elements.73 In the oldest English B-Isidore manuscript (early twelfth-century), Bodleian Laud Misc. 247, fo. 147r, both Siren and Onocentaur are depicted with a thick welt or belt dividing the lower from the upper body (plate 1).74 The Siren’s chest is clearly drawn as human, immodestly displayed; her head and one of her hands are turned toward the head of the Onocentaur, seemingly calling and beckoning to him; the text evokes the capacity for enchantment of her song. Below her naked torso, her fish-tail has tiered fins; the bar which extends down the front from the belt ends in a kind of pleat at the division of the tail fins to

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mark where the aroused eye might seek out her genitals, only to meet with frustration and disgust. Her tail curves toward the center of the page so it almost rubs against the ass’s rump, likewise turned inward; the human heads are thus at the margins, as far from one another as the page permits. The Onocentaur’s fingers point one at his head and the other at the belt holding his nonhuman nature at bay, as if to acknowledge the need, in face of her approach, to separate his rational faculties from his “animal” impulses. The artist succeeds in drawing the viewer into the encounter, as if the Siren were beckoning to him, inviting his gaze to follow the line of her tail, feeling it brush against him, experiencing the same tug as the Onocentaur, provoking the same repudiation. The capacity for struggle between a human nature and its animal underside is not confined, then, to the creatures on the page. Any one of the manuscript’s readers might have a wild side or an inner temptress, the desire to succumb to them or the impulse to reject them. These possibilities and no doubt others are conjugated by the posing of the figures, which both stir up the reader’s “animality” and encourage him to recoil from it. Effectively he is encouraged to “belt up” or gird himself in his turn, resolving inner turmoil by figuratively dividing upper from lower, “man” from “beast.” Such a reaction, however, confirms my earlier comment to the effect that the medial boundary is virtual: it does not divide one “nature” from another but indicates the requirement to repudiate becoming something (“bestial”) which one (as “human”) is taught to disavow. A viewer experiencing his implication in the scene depicted on this page might be excited or disgusted by the prospect of becoming a beast or feel secure in not being divided at all. The way the drawing is realized might factor into these responses. Like those in the rest of this manuscript it is an outline with no use of colored wash and very little attempt at texturing; the delineation of the Onocentaur is especially stark, but even the Siren’s tail and torso are only lightly sketched. Insofar as both represent human figures, the drawing delineates each as an individuated subject. Neither is represented as wearing a garment of any kind on their upper body, so the skin of the page is also their skin, and as such represents “human” skin. Nor is the “animal” lower body of either creature represented as clothed; in the case of the Onocentaur it is not marked in any way that might distinguish the ass’s skin from the skin of the page, and the Siren’s tail is not much more elaborate (though it is the part of either creature that looks most like clothing). The identical parchment of their lower halves thus both represents the threatened animalization of the human and may also be recognized as being animal. Since the page is manifestly all one skin, the image shows up “the human” as a representation whereas the words suggest the reverse, namely that the “animal” parts of each creature are a way of

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figuring impulses that threaten “the human.” In short, the outer boundary of the skin is at odds with the didacticism of the inner boundary; and the viewer, whom I evoked wondering whether he is human or animal or both, finds his anxieties reflected not just on the page, but by it. Concluding and Looking Forward If one brings together medieval literary history and animal studies, one major point of juncture between the two is the genre of bestiary. And if one knots together critical animal studies with the history of the book, the parchment book is one point at which the knot can form. Each of the six chapters that follow involves asking how the page as such intervenes in what is, at one and the same time, a theme of the bestiaries and a problematic in animal studies, whether in premodernity or today. I continue to place bestiaries in the cross fire between Anzieu and Agamben as I inquire how identities are formed by an envelope of skin originally grounded in the Skin Ego, and by the historical “conflict . . . between the animality and humanity of man” that drives the anthropological machine; I also relate bestiaries to their own intellectual environment, whether Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, or based in monastic spirituality. The chapters are arranged in pairs, the two members of each pair moving back and forth across different ways of conceiving the boundary constituted by the skin/page, and the different ways it can be sutured to its content, and to the reader. Because the development of bestiaries is not linear—there is continuity in content between earlier and later redactions, and older ones continue to be copied as newer texts emerge—the book proceeds thematically rather than text-by-text. Where possible, however, I adopt a broadly chronological progression both within chapters, and from one chapter to the next; the first three chapters accord more space to the legacy of Physiologus whereas chapters 4–6 are more given over to developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first two take their cue from Augustine, Confessions XIII, to reflect on the skin (pellis) of parchment as connecting the book of nature to the book of scripture (chapter 1), and as associated with the tunicas pelliceas (“tunics of skin”) worn by the first humans after the fall—a motif associated with mortality but also with redemption (chapter 2). The next pair explores the discomforts of the skin’s permeability. Rather than forming a continuous envelope it contains orifices, some of which are sexual (chapter 3); it is liable to injury in both humans and other animals, particularly as inflicted by each upon the other (chapter 4). The two final chapters are about recognizing likeness and continuity between humans and other animals. When one creature

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finds its likeness in another, what implications does that have (chapter 5)? Do humans have a similar inner life to other creatures, and how does reading a bestiary, in particular, help found an inner life for the reader (chapter 6)? The focus is throughout on the reader, whose identity as human and/or animal is shaped by a reading experience that enfolds him in what is literally as well as metaphorically a second skin: these ideas are developed throughout the book and brought together in its conclusion.

1

Book, Word, Page

Nature, like scripture, is a book authored by God. This view is formulated in various ways by the Bible, the early Fathers, and medieval theologians. It is also actualized, again with differing emphases, by bestiaries from Physiologus onward. Yet there is something paradoxical about the choice of beasts and other elements of creation to bear the weight of mediating between these two universal books. The subjects of bestiary chapters make up only a part of the book of nature; and although nonhuman animals play an important role at the beginning of the book of scripture and feature again in the apocalypse at its end, their role through most of its course is slight. Although humans are afflicted with sin, suffering, and mortality, by way of compensation they have language, history, and the book. Other animals, being proverbially “dumb,” have none of these. Augustine articulates some of these ideas in Confessions XIII.15.16. Invoking the books of both nature and scripture, Augustine aligns them with the “tunics of skin” which the first humans wore in Eden. The two books, says Augustine, are like these garments in that they envelope humans like a skin. But the tunics were given by God to men as a punishment immediately after the fall, as a sign that they were now carnal and mortal; whereas the skins of scripture and the heavens are given them as marks of God’s eternal authority and the divine plan to redeem them from their fallen state. Who but you, O God, has made for us a solid firmament of authority over us in your divine scripture? For “the heaven will fold up like a book” (Isaiah 34:4) and now “like a skin (sicut pellis) it is stretched out” above us (Psalms 103:2). Your divine scripture has more sublime authority since the death of the mortal

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authors through whom you provided it for us. You know, Lord, you know how you clothed human beings with skins when through sin they became mortal (Genesis 3:21). So you have stretched out the firmament of your book “like a skin” (sicut pellem). . . . Indeed, by the very fact of their death the solid authority of your utterances published by them is in a sublime way “stretched out” over everything inferior. While they were alive on earth, it was not stretched out to express this supreme authority. You had not “stretched out the heaven like a skin” (sicut pellem), you had not diffused everywhere the renown of their death.1

In this passage, to which I return in considering the “tunics of skin” in chapter 2, Augustine holds out the hope of redemption toward which each individual should strive by means of an act of reading, which will envelop him in a new skin in exchange for his old one. To recast these ideas using Anzieu’s ideas as outlined in my introduction, Augustine is here describing these books as a psychic “skin” modeled on the earlier Skin Ego: a way of defining a new self that can be assumed through language and specifically through the skin of the page. The act of reading, even when the pages are those of a modern book, is a material experience which conjures up a second, psychic envelope: the reader feels contained within the text, divided by it from the outside world, and encircled by signification.2 As a surface made from skin that can be confused with the skins that contain and inscribe human individuals, the medieval page is especially well-placed to perform what, for Anzieu, is a psychical function and, for Augustine, a redemptive one. These in turn can be understood as potential dimensions of the “manuscript matrix” as conceived by Stephen Nichols: a term that groups together the materiality of the manuscript page and the complex ensemble of signifying elements upon it, within a broader manuscript culture.3 My own understanding of this matrix’s signifying extent is presented in chapter 6. A Space of Exception The Western pretension that humans are superior to all other animals can be traced back to Genesis. In his commentary on its opening books, Derrida contends that Adam’s act of giving the animals names was another way of depriving them of language, and interprets this scene in Eden, together with the subsequent fall, as inaugurating historical time and the domination, exploitation, and violence which have ever since characterized humans’ dealings with their fellow creatures.4 Looking for an end to this oppression rather than at its inauguration, Agamben reflects on a Jewish depiction of the apocalypse in which the blessed are represented with human bodies and

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animal heads. These images undo, he argues, the arbitrary severance of “the human” from other forms of creaturely life that is engineered by the anthropological machine (see the introduction) and that constitutes historical time. Agamben could equally have cited the Last Things in the New Testament apocalypse and its iconography. Much like the Jewish images, John’s visions of the Beast of the Antichrist, the Christological Lamb, or the Tetramorph— the Evangelists, called animalia (“living beings”) in the Vulgate, three of them with animal heads—show human pretensions to exceptionality dissolving as history comes to an end.5 Between them, these commentaries by Derrida and Agamben capture the two endpoints of secular time, providing a posthumanist perspective on the late antique and early medieval Christian belief that, as Lynn White Jr. puts it, “when Man regained the simplicity of Eden, the harmony of the cosmos would be restored.”6 White continues: “For our regeneration God has given us two sources of spiritual knowledge: the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. Each is filled with hidden meanings to be searched out.” Posthumanist critique helps to explain why nonhuman animals could prove central to such a project. Although they are shut out from language at the outset by virtue of being spoken for but unable to speak, at the end the Lamb with the Book and the animal-headed Evangelists ensure their ultimate place of honor in the Word.7 Even if they are not part of the grand narrative of salvation, they nevertheless define it by the fact of their exclusion, which is therefore at the same time an inclusion. That nonhuman creatures, by virtue of their absence, are integral to the definition of human history is confirmed by their cardinal presence at its beginning and its end. This simultaneous exclusion and inclusion produces what Agamben calls a “space of exception” (spazio d’eccezione), as opposed to a clean demarcation, in the privileging of “man” over “animal.”8 One way of interpreting the bestiaries’ focus on other animals, then, is that their strangely marginal relation to the word places them ideally to lead readers to the Word, encouraging them to contemplate the initial innocence of Eden and to prepare for judgment at the end of time. Latin Second-family texts include a chapter on Adam naming the nonhuman animals which appear, in consequence, the guarantors of man’s prelapsarian access to the divine logos. By dwelling on the page not as a sign of exile (the “tunics of skin”) but of their ultimate return to this lost paradise, human readers could assume it as a second skin whose animal nature would be positively valued. Balancing the book of nature with that of scripture takes different forms from one text to another, and manuscripts likewise situate themselves variously with regard to books and the Book, words and the Word, leaves of parchment and the Sacra Pagina. But the fact that they are material books about the doctrinal import

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of other animals for humans in a divinely ordered world means that they inevitably address—and mediate between—the terms of each of these pairs. Bestiaries, the Bible, and Sacred History Although Physiologus is in no sense organized as a history, its allegories are plotted against the massive arc which reaches from creation, Eden, and fall to incarnation, resurrection, and final judgment, and this continues to be true of the bestiaries that derive from it. Chapters on the Elephant liken the beast’s chaste once-in-a-lifetime copulation to the restrained sexuality of Adam and Eve before the fall. In some manuscripts, Adam and Eve are pictured alongside the male and female Elephants so as to underline that what humans have lost, Elephants still retain. Chapters on the Firestones, by contrast, dwell on the unbridled desires that follow from the fall, and often contain “strong visual references to Adam and Eve”;9 clearly readers should avoid the way of fire and seek the Elephants’ purity, their link to the paradise lost. As well as in the chapter on Adam naming the animals (SF §32), Eden is mentioned in chapters such as the Antelope (PT 771–2), the Dragon (G 603–15), or the Viper (SF §94). Even creatures with diabolical or sinful meanings—the Night Owl (nicticorax), for example—remind humans of their lost proximity to the divine. Other entries underline the theme of resurrection like the Pelican; forewarn of the last judgment, like the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in the chapter on Ants; or anticipate the community of heaven, like those on the Salamander and the Dove. This sense of belonging in biblical history is clearly shared by vernacular bestiaries. The two oldest German adaptations of Dicta Chrysostomi are copied between translations of the books of Genesis and Exodus.10 One French bestiary based on B-Isidore offers itself as a substitute for the entire Bible and the history it describes. Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire opens with a prologue of 136 octosyllabic verses of which a full hundred narrate the events of scripture. Creation institutes a world of creatures in which all have individual natures but only men have seignorie (“lordship”). In a flamboyant occupatio, Guillaume insists that everything which then ensues would take too long to narrate, but nevertheless contrives to summarize the entire Old and New Testaments, the growth of the church, and the deaths of the martyrs. “All this would be hard to relate. But you will hear about the bestiary, as I promised you, and now I shall begin it” (GC 133–36).11 Guillaume’s enumeration of creatures, the natures which God gave them, and their sacred meanings, is thus offered as a shortcut to sacred history; and since his book is the equivalent of the Sacra Pagina, his readers are dispensed from reading the latter. Al-

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though Guillaume is writing at a time when most bestiaries have adopted a zoologically grounded structure, he retains the counterintuitive order of Physiologus B or B-Isidore, commenting that it is designed to teach “man who wanders foolishly” (GC 350, qui eire folement) as though the reader was supposed to recognize in its seemingly erratic course his own alienation from the divine purpose. The much longer bestiaries of the Second Latin family are concomitantly more explicit about their historical scope. Immediately before the chapter on Adam naming the animals in the manuscript edited by Willene B. Clark there is a chapter which she calls “three spiritual guides” (SF §31) which explains how humans should prepare for their appearance before the final judgment. The endpoints of sacred history are thus introduced together, side by side, though in reverse order as if to confirm that judgment is a return to Eden. The Second-family redaction also contains a new sequence of chapters on Sheep and Goats, which in most copies follows immediately after the chapter on Adam (SF §§33–36). Sometimes these chapters contain lengthy allegoreses that reproduce the animal preoccupations of the Apocalypse: celebrating the Lamb, warning against Antichrist, and preparing the final judgment (e.g., in Bodleian MS Bodley 764, “Young kids . . . represent the sinners, who shall stand on the left hand of God on the Day of Judgment, in the same way that the just, represented by sheep, shall stand on His right hand”).12 Another deluxe copy, Aberdeen, University Library MS 24 (“Aberdeen Bestiary”), brings the themes of Genesis and Revelation together by juxtaposing an image of Christ in Majesty surrounded by the Tetramorph with one of Adam naming the animals (fos. 4v–5r).13 The role of animals as models for recovering paradise could not be signaled more clearly. In Physiologus, every chapter is dominated by quotations from the Bible; the chapter on the Night Owl follows the one on the Pelican not because of any relationship between the two birds but because the two chapters begin with adjacent quotations from the same psalm (P §§6–7; Ps. 102:7 and 6). Some chapters are almost a tissue of quotations, particularly those on the Lion and the Dove (P §§1, 50). Subsequently quotation wanes, but in B-Isidore the chapter on the Dove remains dominated by passages from scripture even if that on the Lion is less so. Philippe de Thaon faced an interesting challenge in rendering these quotations into French verse, a language into which—in his day—the complete Bible had never before been translated; he tends to fall back on paraphrase more than direct translation. Even though later in the twelfth century insertions from Isidore rival and eventually outweigh quotations from scripture, biblical sacred history continues to provide the warp on which the chapters’ weft is woven. Bestiary creatures are textual

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creatures, compiled from authorities and “read” by successive authors similarly to how they read scripture, proceeding from the literal to the allegorical level. Humans’ understanding of their own part in providential history is aided by other animals that play no role in its writing but that are a part of its fabric—what part exactly is the question I consider next. Words and Wordbooks Physiologus’s integration of animals to particular biblical passages reflects the thought of Origen and, later, of Augustine.14 Both these early Fathers regarded creatures as instances of visible phenomena that could point toward invisible realities. Augustine, however, insisted that they had no determinate meaning of their own, but only one deriving from their place in a particular context. In this respect, the Bishop of Hippo polemically equates animals not with words but with letters. For instance, a lion can be an image of God or the Devil, and a stone does not invariably signify Christ, rather “it means some things and then others, just as you understand the force of a letter according to the place where you see it is put.”15 A view similar to Augustine’s of the animal as in itself a meaningless material shape that acquires significance only from its place in a greater text is expressed at the time of greatest bestiary innovation by the twelfth-century divine, Hugh of Saint-Victor, speaking of the book of nature: “For the whole sensible world is like a kind of book written by the finger of God . . . and each particular creature is somewhat like a figure. . . . But in the same way that some illiterate if he saw an open book, would notice the figures, but would not comprehend the letters, so also the stupid and ‘animal man’ who ‘does not perceive the things of God’ [1 Cor. 2:14] may see the outward appearance of these visible creatures, but does not understand the reason within.”16 Hugh’s claim that animals are intended to be read by humans but not by other animals is echoed in a contemporary bestiary with regard to the Phoenix, since “in any case the birds are there for men, not man for the bird” (SF §64).17 Yet bestiarists’ fascination with the variety of creaturely behaviors certainly does not convey the impression that nonhuman animals are just letters, figures, or signs. Christopher Lucken has proposed that they are more like hieroglyphs in uniting depiction with meaning, a comparison obviously relevant to the Alexandria-produced Physiologus.18 A more pertinent reference for European bestiaries might be the medieval wordbook.19 Written by prominent masters, wordbooks were tools of vocabulary building of a kind fundamental to medieval (indeed, any) education; creatures occupy whole sections

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of at least two widely diffused examples;20 the English Second-family bestiary in Oxford, St. John’s College MS 178 (ca. 1300) is compiled in a codex alongside one of these animal wordlists.21 Although Dicta Chrysostomi bestiaries don’t manifest the same love affair with the lexicon as those with interpolations from Isidore, several copies are found in miscellanies that foreground the word in others of their contents: Rhaban Maur’s treatise on the alphabet,22 a list of biblical animal names,23 or a proverb collection, alphabetically arranged.24 In their discursive sparseness, their uniting of name and nature, and their ordinatio, bestiaries can be seen as a moralized and illustrated form of wordbook that teaches the lexicon of the natural world. The difference between creatures which readers might actually know (Fox, Weasel, Beaver, Ape, Dove, Coot . . .), ones they were less likely to have seen (Elephant, Lion, Antelope, Crocodile . . .), and those they could not have (Caladrius, Siren, Onocentaur, Unicorn . . .) pales into insignificance beside the all-important experience of acquiring their names together with a sense of what they are like. As Rita Copeland says of Alexander Neckam’s wordbook, “In the most concrete and fundamental way, language itself constitutes its own reality in the scene of instruction.”25 A large part of the appeal of illustrated bestiaries lies in the way their pictures draw readers in, help them remember creatures’ names, and provide a referent for them. Many are simple portraits of the animal concerned (more rarely, of a stone or plant), framed and placed at the head of the relevant chapter, and often clearly linked by a rubric to the name at issue. Sometimes, and typically in Second-family manuscripts, the picture represents the creature in action, performing its nature.26 In a few cases, pictures are squeezed into the text or margin near the relevant noun, rather like in a Larousse illustré. Either way, a pictorial program makes many bestiaries not just descriptive and moralized wordbooks but also illustrated ones. Only in a minority of mainly early manuscripts is the picture geared more to the moralization than the creature, and placed halfway through the chapter or at its end.27 (Analogously, the layout of some manuscripts privileges the chapter as the unit of composition, and hence the text as a list of named animals and other natural subjects, by placing enlarged initials only at the beginning of each; that of others emphasizes the division of each chapter into two by marking the onset of the allegory with an initial too.28) The convention of placing the image at the head of the chapter becomes more established over time; it is the norm in Second-family manuscripts.29 How closely the subjects succeed one another on the page, and consequently how list-like the text appears, depends on manuscript format and chapter length, which are both variable. In the case of

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vernacular bestiaries, the verbal enumeration of creatures may be reinforced by the texts’ juxtaposition with encyclopedic texts like the Image du monde.30 There is substantial overlap between bestiary fauna and the sections on the wildlife of exotic realms in the Image, the two traditions also sharing many of the same images, though the Image does not contain any moralizations.31 This crossover between encyclopedic and bestiary traditions underlines the latter’s value for helping readers name and visualize elements of the world around them—even if they have never seen in reality the elements in question, and probably never will. The close association of name, picture and chapter is illustrated in BL MS Harley 3244, a thirteenth-century Second-family text copied in a relatively large and handsome compilation of mainly devotional Latin texts copied in England ca. 1240, and helpfully digitized by the British Library.32 Take, for example, fo. 36r, on which the text corresponds to Clark’s edition of the Secondfamily text from the end of the chapter on the Hyena through that on the Bonnacon to that on the Ape (SF §§12–14). The Bonnacon is said to be unable to defend itself with its horns since they curve backward, instead it repels potential assailants with a scorching fart “three acres long” (SF §13); no spiritual teaching accompanies this memorable claim. In the tinted drawing all the creatures are labeled.33 The flatulent Bonnacon aside, the creatures depicted come from the previous chapter where we are informed that the Hyena is capable of changing sex at will, symbolizing the idolatry and concupiscence of the Jews; at the top of this folio we learn how it “copulates with the lioness, whence is born a monster named crocote. . .”(§12).34 The whole section is an exercise in the creature-as-name and as-image, probably the only mode of existence known to the Bonnacon35 and the Crocota—and indeed to the Hyena, at least as here described. The Second-family chapter following criticizes the mother Ape who, of her twin offspring, loves one but hates the other.36 When pursued by a hunter, she initially tries to save them both, instinctively clasping the preferred child to her breast while the despised one clings to her back—this is the moment captured in the picture, the mother looking adoringly at the child in her arms. But as the hunt intensifies she is obliged to run on all fours so now the ill-favored child is able to ride safely, while the favorite is dropped. The image is not labeled other than by the rubric De simia et eius natura (“Of the female Ape and her nature”), but the chapter begins with the etymology simia < similitudo, the Ape is so called because its similarity to man. Both images capture the creature’s “nature”—that is, the behavior attributed to it by lore, and in both cases that nature is yoked to its name by the dictionarylike layout of the page.

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Etymology Simia from similitudo is an example of the (pseudo-)etymologies which the B-Isidore version and its relatives incorporate from Isidore.37 Whereas Physiologus seeks the significance of its creatures in a patchwork of biblical quotations, B-Isidore also locates it in the true meaning of their names, to which etymology provided a key; insofar as they are word-lists, the words involved assume the status of the Word. Unlike its modern avatar, medieval etymology is, in Curtius’s phrase, “a category of thought”; it maps what can be meant by a particular word more than how the word is descended from its actual source.38 Isidore’s Etymologies is an encyclopedia structured with reference to the historical meaning of words because, as Isidore puts it, “when you have seen whence a word has originated, you understand its force more quickly” (Etymologies I.29.1, 55). Reliance on etymology has abundant precursors and followers, as it satisfies a widespread desire to touch across time a seeming identity of form and watch it pour out a variety of meanings, creating the illusion, if not the reality, of a deeper and more authentic encounter with the thing.39 Isidore’s use of etymology is pervasive but nonetheless cautious. He concedes that “not all words were established by the ancients from nature; some were established from whim” (Etymologies I.29.3, 55); etymologies possessing “force” are those that disclose a thing’s cause or its origin, or reveal its nature by its contrary; for example, the Parcae (Fates) are so called because they spare (parcere) no one. He often hesitates between competing theories of a word’s origin, reviewing Latin cognates, deferring to the authority of Greek, but rarely citing Hebrew or other languages; his discussion “Of animals” (Etymologies XII) which bestiary writers mined with enthusiasm mentions no languages except Latin and Greek. Isidore himself does not adduce etymologies that are allegorical, and quotes mainly from classical authors, only rarely from the Bible. Although in theory Isidore thinks that the meanings of animals’ names can be traced back to the names originally bestowed in Eden by Adam in its original language Hebrew (Etymologies XII.1.1–2, 247), in his practice they occupy a secular and primarily pagan temporality and derive their prestige from the Greco-Roman world.40 Although bestiaries contain chapters on birds, stones, and plants, etymologies are adduced only for the names of land or water animals, illuminating the meaning, history, or nature of the creature concerned. Among Latin bestiaries, etymology plays the most prominent role in the B-Isidore redaction, some manuscripts of which are in fact copied in the same codex as Etymologies.41 The majority of this version’s chapters include a historical explanation of

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its subject’s name, sometimes marked with a separate rubric.42 Although the later H-type of B-Isidore text integrates this information into the discourse of the chapters, in the earlier ones it is appended at the end so that a typical entry unfolds from the creature’s name to its literal behavior, and thence to a Christian allegoresis amplified by etymology. Of the Wild Ass, for instance, B-Isidore begins formulaically, “There is an animal called Wild Ass” (§21, “Est animal quod dicitur onager”), and then explains, with the help of a quotation from Job, that it represents the devil. The chapter concludes with two tidbits from Isidore: females emasculate male foals out of jealousy, and onager derives from the Greek on (ass) and agrian (wild). The etymology is presented as concordant with the ass’s savage treatment of its offspring and, more fundamentally, with its diabolical character. The annexing of etymology to allegory is especially clear in the case of the Great Fish (cetus). Isidore, with a rare quotation from scripture, writes: “The sea-monster (cetus, plural cete) is κήτος, plural κήτη, named on account of its vastness. These are huge types of sea-monsters (bellua), and their bodies are the same size as mountains. Such a cetus swallowed Jonah; its belly was so big that it resembled hell, as the prophet says (cf. Jonah 2:3): ‘He heard me from the belly of hell’” (Etymologies XII.6.8, 260). An edited form of this passage rounds off the B-Isidore chapter on the Great Fish (§25). The entry starts with its variant names (cetus, aspidocelone), then describes its two natures and their allegories. First, sailors mistake the great fish for an island and leave their boats to land on it only to drown when the creature dives; in this it resembles the deceits of the devil. And second, when the great fish opens its mouth, it emits a sweet smell that lures in little fishes which it then swallows; they are like men who are easily tempted from the path of faith by sensual pleasure. Isidore’s words are then altered to read: “The cetus is so called from the immensity of its body. They are a kind of huge sea monster (belua) as large as mountains, so that ships head for them as if they were islands, like the one that seized Jonah. Its belly was of such size that it could be taken for hell, as Jonah the prophet himself said: ‘He heard me from the belly of hell’” (B-Is §25).43 The etymological immensity of the fish now corresponds physically to the size of the island with which it can be confused and allegorically to the enormity of diabolical evil which its lure represents, as per the preceding allegories. Confirmation that etymology can be a synonym of “allegory” is found in the Bestiaire of Pierre de Beauvais, which interprets one of the natures of the Lion saying “it is an allegory (estimologie): my Lord slept on the Cross” (PB §1)44—even the spelling est- of estimologie seems to enhance its value as a means of knowledge. As well as being allegorical, etymology in B-Isidore occupies a different

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temporality from its source in Isidore. On the one hand, it leapfrogs Greek κήτος to go straight back to the Book of Jonah. On the other, given the emphasis throughout the chapter on judgment and the familiar figural identification of Jonah’s deliverance from the whale with resurrection, it also appears capable of looking forward as well as back. No longer restricted to a narrow relay between Greek and Latin, it expands to the beginning and ending of scriptural time. Another divergence from Isidore is the absolute certitude with which these etymologies are proffered. Whereas the encyclopedist has moments of hesitation and skepticism, B-Isidore sees etymology as participating in the same unquestionable capacity to reveal divine truth as scriptural quotation, and as the bestiary as a whole. For the bestiarist there is no gap between the word and the Word. The most thoroughgoing allegorical treatment of etymology is found in Philippe de Thaon’s bestiary, not only the earliest of the French-language redactions but also the most linguistically self-conscious. As French succeeds Latin, which earlier had taken over from Greek, etymology has more languages to work back through if the language of Eden is ever to be recovered. Yet Philippe is undaunted, actually reaching further than his models by beginning with his own etymology of Aelis, the name of Henry I’s queen, which he says comes from the Hebrew word for “praise.” If Hebrew is indeed the language of Eden, his dedicatee is the only part of creation that seems to have originated there. Where B-Isidore writes, “The Ant ( formica) is so called because it carries ( ferat) grains of wheat (micas farris)” (§11), Philippe de Thaon resourcefully translates, “About the Ant, Isidore further says in his text and explains why it is named furmi: because it is strong ( fort) and carries a grain (mie), that is what it means” (PT 1031–6).45 What is meant by the name is, as Guiette puts it, what can be heard in the name.46 The material signifier epitomizes the ant’s industrious behavior which in turn sustains its moralizations. Philippe jettisons the early B-Isidore chapter order in favor of one more similar to the H-type of B-Isidore and, as in that version, he tends to place relatively early in each chapter such etymologies as he retains. 47 But Philippe goes much further than, say, the H-type text of BL MS Stowe 1067 in yoking etymology from the outset to allegorical substance, sometimes using it as a chapter’s major thread.48 Of the Unicorn, Isidore says, “The rhinoceros (rhinoceron) is . . . also the monoceron, that is, the unicorn (unicornus), because it has a single four-foot horn in the middle of its forehead” (Etymologies XII.2.12, 252), information which B-Isidore includes at the end of its chapter (B-Is §16) and which the Stowe 1067 text places right at the beginning.49 Philippe, for his part, proceeds from the nature to the etymology, linking the unique horn to the unity of the godhead that is the theme of the allegory:

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“he is one God and ever shall be / and was and shall remain so” (PT 421–2).50 In his next chapter, which is on the Panther, both B-Isidore and Stowe 1067 place the etymology after the nature, whereas Philippe places it right at the beginning, translating the Greek pan as trestut (“absolutely all,” PT 465), and then repeating the word tut six times to insist on God’s universality (PT 471, 530–48). As for the Ape, Philippe again differs from B-Isidore and Stowe 1067 by proposing that its likeness (semblance) is with the devil (PT 1902), thus making a shortcut between the traditional etymology (aping man) and the Ape’s allegorical meaning (it is like the devil). (His chapter on the Great Fish does not include an etymology so cannot be compared with either B-Isidore’s or that of Stowe 1067, unfortunately.)51 To sum up, in the bestiaries composed up to the middle of the twelfth century, etymology goes well beyond Isidore’s scholarly and nonmystical usage. It serves a similar purpose to biblical quotation by showing how a particular animal is linguistically tied to a Christian truth; but it differs by virtue of locating that tie in the material form of everyday language, not in the contents of scripture. Properly read, ordinary words are now a material mirror of the divine Word. In the second half century, Latin Second-family bestiaries contain more encyclopedic matter and many more chapters than their precursors. Some new entries contribute etymologies from Isidore such as ovis, “sheep” < oblatio, “sacrifice” in the chapter on Sheep (SF §33). Manuscripts usually place these etymologies—when they include them, which is not as frequently as in B-Isidore—at the head of the chapter where their main role, as in Isidore, is to amplify the creature’s name and nature, paving the way for allegorical interpretation but not forming part of it. The value of etymology in the Secondfamily version is also more Isidorean than in B-Isidore: more restrained in its historical reach and in its claims, less eager to raise individual words to the status of the Word. Thus the Second-family chapter on the Great Fish begins, like the one in B-Isidore, with its Greek and Latin names. The text continues with a short comment on the word cetus: “The cetaceans are named for their large body size, for is huge, like the one that snatched Jonah” (SF §113).52 The quotation from Jonah forms the final element of this philological introduction, before the two natures and their allegoreses are provided in a form similar to in B-Isidore. As in the earlier redaction, there is a self-evident connection between the Jonah story and the allegorization of the Great Fish as hell but the linguistic discussion provides a cultural account of the creature’s name, and an admission of the difficulty of knowing about marine life, rather than an eschatological view of its meaning. The transfer of etymology from al-

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legoresis to nature is important in drawing attention back to the animal and away from its spiritual value for the reader, even if the history of the name is often merely a recapitulation of the uses to which the creature has been put in human society. In contrast to B-Isidore’s celebration of the Word the Secondfamily redaction is interested in secular words for their own sake. Adam Names the Animals Words now have a new point of origin, however, as a result of this redaction’s inclusion from Isidore of the account of Adam naming the animals, a scene which art historian Xénia Muratova long ago suggested is in some sense the germ of the entire bestiary.53 Isidore’s chapter begins with the claim that Adam named in Hebrew “each animal, according to the position in nature that it holds” (Etymologies XII.1.1, 247). Most of the encyclopedist’s discussion is then taken up by a lengthy enumeration of the classes of animal as we know them now. The Second-family chapter retains both these elements; but whereas in Isidore they make sense as a historical sequence (Eden, then life after it which the encyclopedist must describe), now they tug in different directions, one focusing the readers’ attention on life in the postlapsarian world, the other guiding him back to Eden and salvation. An extract from Isidore’s elaborate taxonomy conveys the character of the second component of this chapter (the bestiary repeats his discussion in its entirety): Those which, although they are similar to herd animals (pecoribus), yet are not under human care, such as hinds, fallow deer, wild asses, and so forth, are called quadrupeds (quadupedia) because they walk on four feet, but neither are they wild beasts (bestiae), such as lions, not animals yoked (iumenta) so that they can help man . . . furthermore, there is a difference between herd animals (pecora) and domestic animals (pecudes) . . . the beasts of burden (iumenta) took their names from the fact that they aid (iuvent) our labor, either by transporting a load with their assistance, or by plowing.54

Pierre-Olivier Dittmar has shown how these categories reflect the patristic belief that, after the fall, domestic animals (pecus, iumenta) continued to be subordinate to humans, whereas nondomestic ones (bestiae, quadrupedia) became wild and in some cases hostile and dangerous to them.55 For Isidore, the distinction provides a rationale for the plan of Etymologies XII, which places pecus and iumenta first before the wild or fallen beasts, and in the later medieval centuries it is perpetuated in saints’ lives.56 But it seems oddly tangential to Second-family bestiaries, whose chapter order, although now adopting

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something like the classification of Etymologies, sabotages its structure by inserting friendly animals (pecus and iuventa) between two groups of rebel ones (large bestiae and smaller wild animals). The resulting sequence makes no sense in Isidore’s terms: large wild quadrupeds (bestiae SF§§1–27), Dogs (§28–30), Adam (whose chapter includes Isidore’s taxonomy, §32), domestic animals and livestock (pecus and iumenta, §§33–45), small wild land animals (Mouse, Weasel, Mole, Hedgehog, Ant, §§46–50), and then birds (§§51–89), snakes (§§90–109), and so on. Moreover, in keeping with earlier bestiaries, the Second-family redaction maintains the traditional interpretation as Christ of several bestiae (the Lion and Panther, for example) and ingeniously discovers enlightenment in all animals. In consequence, Isidore’s postlapsarian taxonomy loses the programmatic status it has in Etymologies and appears barely relevant to the bestiary beyond its immediate context. The scene of Adam naming the animals does nevertheless contribute to the bestiary’s greater interest in redemption than in fall, and its overall purpose of preparing human readers for their end by taking them back to their beginning. The possibility that the names of all creatures might be traced back to their Edenic natures furthers this aim.57 No other words would have this power, since they are the only ones Adam is recorded as speaking before the fateful exchange with Eve. Although bestiaries associate only a handful of animals with Eden explicitly, in the Second-family wordbook all animal names potentially have the power to connect their readers to the time of innocence. The bestiary chapter on Adam thus offers two opposing perspectives on the word: one, the postlapsarian taxonomy, potentially divorces names from the original logos; the other, the Edenic setting and etymologies, reconnects them to it. Second-family manuscripts exploit this alternative variously. In copies similar to BL MS Additional 11283, the chapter on Adam naming the animals appears belated and oddly marooned in contrast to its initial position in Isidore.58 Other Second-family manuscripts move the chapter to initial position so that it opens the bestiary much as it opens the Bible: Bodleian MS Bodley 764 and its twin, BL MS Harley 4751, for example, or those luxury bestiaries that open with passages from the creation in Genesis, of which the chapter on Adam then forms a part, thus placing the entire text under the auspices of the earthly paradise.59 One of these, the Aberdeen Bestiary, has already been cited for the way it juxtaposes images of Eden with those of final judgment. To close this chapter, I compare the presentation of Adam naming the animals in two bestiary manuscripts. Each conceives the subject differently and consequently takes a different stance on the bestiary’s relation to book, word, and page. One is BL MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), copied in En-

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gland ca. 1250–1300.60 Fo. 15v (plate 2) depicts Adam naming the animals; on the facing page is the start of the section on domestic animals that opens with the Sheep and Wether (a young ram); the text is that of the Second-family chapters 32–33 and the start of 34. The other is the roughly contemporary Northumberland Bestiary (now Getty MS 100), considered a Transitional manuscript. It does not contain the text of the Adam chapter but it does conclude the creation sequence on its opening folios with a picture of the first man naming the animals (plate 4). The text accompanying the images of creation consists of extracts mainly from Genesis; and its subsequent chapters are augmented by quotations from Bernardus Silvestris’s account of the natural world from his Cosmographia (see the introduction, 13). In Sloane 3544 the animals form two groups with Adam in the middle; he is looking to the viewer’s right and across to the facing page. Unconsidered by him, on the viewer’s left, are species that are predominantly wild; on the right they are domestic. Those in the first group look challenging: positively fierce in the case of the lion in the foreground, with its raised clawed foot and arched tail; proud in that of the stag and the creature behind it (although this latter in fact reproduces the image used for the Dog on the preceding fos. 13v and 14r). The horned animal in this group is hard to identify and could be a Bonnacon (cf. fo. 7r), an Ox (17r), or even a Crocodile (38r). The animals in the other, domestic, side are more conciliating: a cringing rabbit, a hound awaiting instruction, a horse or ass, a camel, and another creature that I take to be a sheep. Adam extends his arms to both groups, naming them both, but looks only toward the creatures on the right, those disposed to serve him. Clearly the arrangement of the creatures reflects the distinction in the text, taken from Isidore, between bestia and pecus; it reminds the reader of his postlapsarian condition in which Eden is known only as that which is lost.61 Comparison with the illustration of the Panther on fo. 3r of the same manuscript confirms this interpretation (plate 3). Here, as in the Adam picture, the background is blue with a green frame and the Panther, like Adam, is in the middle looking to the viewer’s right, with two groups of other animals on either side, though the Dragon (or in this case two) cowers underground. Many of the same creatures are identifiable as on plate 2 but they are not divided in the same way. Those on the viewer’s right and in the Panther’s gaze are a horse or ass, exactly as on fo. 15v: a stag, on the opposite side from where it will be in fo. 15v; and the nose of a creature that could be anything from a lion to a sheep. Behind the Panther’s tail, on the viewer’s left, are what looks like a Bonnacon (or Ox or Crocodile) as in the Adam picture; a cowering rabbit, here on the opposite side from where it is on 15v; a huge bird that has no parallel elsewhere in the manuscript; and the nose of an animal that

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resembles the Dogs on 13v–14v. The parallels and divergences between the pictures imply that Adam presides over a division of the animals whereas the Christlike Panther will ultimately unite them, defeating the devil. Guided by the immediate textual content of the naming scene, the artist has depicted it so as to emphasize the reader’s fallen status, inscribing him—together with Adam—on the long hard road through time. The artist of the Northumberland Bestiary conceives the scene otherwise. In this larger-scale picture, Adam is at the top flanked by two crowned female figures while animals swarm below him (plate 4). Instead of facing the postlapsarian division between pecus and bestia, the first human is in the position of trying to create distinctions and maybe, in view of the fact that some of the beasts are fighting one another, to install order and rule. The only apparent structuring principle amid this rampant confusion is that birds are generally higher than quadrupeds which in turn are placed above crawling creatures— much as in the passages from Genesis just transcribed. Adam and each of the female figures is carrying a blank scroll exactly like the scrolls carried in the preceding images by God, first as he created Adam, Eve, and the animals (fo. 3v, plate 5), and then as he rested on the seventh day. The process of creation in plate 5 is exceptionally orderly. In contrast to the naming scene, the animals are grouped in tiers and several are in pairs, as are Adam and Eve. It may be the case, as Augustine proposes in De Genesi ad litteram, that in the first image God is creating ideal exemplars which become actual creatures when he rests on the sixth day; the picture for this latter day shows God enthroned with another scroll, perhaps representing this second stage in creation.62 Adam would then find himself faced by actual creatures, his task being to name them in accordance with God’s plan. However, the fact that he is aided by the two crowned figures with scrolls suggests, as Millar points out, that the Christian Neoplatonist account of Augustine has been subsumed into Bernardus’s twelfth-century elaboration, in which similarly “the nativity of creatures is celebrated first in the divine mind; the effect which ensues is secondary.”63 If as Millar proposes the goddesses are Bernardus’s Nous (left) and Natura (right), then their task is to translate the Divine Ideas into actual entities and so bring order and calm to the chaos and conflict of primal matter (described in Cosmographia I.i). Adam witnesses this second creative act and presumably, with the help of these divine agencies, finds words which mirror God’s Word. His scroll is a page on which the animal names of the bestiary are notionally inscribed, just as Nous’s (?) scroll records God’s Ideas for them, and Nature’s (?) their actual existence.64 These scrolls are all drawn as mere outlines on the page, which, in the case of fo. 5v, is the hair side of the parchment; the page curls slightly toward the reader as do the

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scrolls;65 the fact of their bearing the divine logos raises them to the level of the Sacra Pagina. This bestiary positions itself explicitly as a book between the two Books of Divine Wisdom and of Nature. Whereas in the Northumberland Bestiary, Adam is coauthor, under God, of the work in question, in the Sloane Bestiary he is more on a par with its reader. For while the Sloane picture marks a division between bestia and pecus it also epitomizes the experience of reading the manuscript itself, given that the wild animals on Adam’s left, in fact, were presented on the pages immediately before it and the domestic animals on his right announce those are to follow. In fact it is as a visual index to, or recap of, the preceding pages that the left-hand group makes most sense. The dog in this group is not a savage beast; however, the Dog was depicted a page earlier (on fos. 13v and 14r); I am the more inclined to see the horned animal as a Bonnacon because I read about it and saw it illustrated a few chapters back. Conversely the hard-to-identify sheep and the unexpected camel on the right prepare the reader for the Sheep on the facing fo. 16r and the Camel on fo. 16v. This scene of Adam naming the animals thus serves as a “reader’s guide” to the small volume in his own hands at a watershed moment in its organization, inviting him like Adam to identify the animals he encounters in its pages.66 The pictures in the Sloane Bestiary, like many pictures in bestiaries of this date, are a mixture of drawing and painting. The densest color is that used for the background, which is either a strong blue or a dark red. Adam and the animals appear as areas drawn directly on the parchment, some of the lines or areas delineated being lightly colored with a light wash. Consequently, although Adam and the animals are the subjects of the painting, they are the only part that is not (or is barely) painted. The parchment, made of animal skin, represents “human” skin in the case of Adam but “animal” skin in the case of the animals and very likely is sheep skin in the case of the sheep. The double page is copied on the hair side whose slight upward curl bends them toward the reader. On fo. 15v the wild beasts have strong outlines with only a few tinges of blue and some feral red- and gray-brown; among the domestic animals, color is used more sparingly and the hound in the foreground appears not to be colored at all. Likewise on the facing fo. 16r the various sheep are drawn without any color.67 They form symmetrical or identical pairs, unlike the animals being named: the name, originally that of a single individual, is now one of a species—the undifferentiated group from which the pages are likely to have been made. Although the etymology ovis < oblatio is attributed by the text to antique practice, it might prompt the recognition that one of reasons sheep are sacrificed is to produce books such as this; in fact all of the creatures described and drawn on fos. 16r–v are potential “skin-donors.”

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This conjunction of words (Adam) and the page (Sheep) is replicated across the Second-family manuscript tradition, the main variable being the size of the manuscript pages which leads to more or fewer parchmentproducing animals being clustered around and next to the putative source of the words written on their pages.68 The Northumberland Bestiary, for its part, it not immune to the postlapsarian constraints on book manufacture, since the ruling for the mise-en-page is very visible in plate 5: something the divine scrolls presumably did not need, but is required on a page intended, like this one, to convey their content. Conclusion I began this chapter with Augustine’s use of instances of skin as a trope to connect the book of nature with that of scripture. The third instance of skin that Augustine deploys in this passage from Confessions, that of the tunics assumed in the fall, is addressed in chapter 2. This one has shown that bestiaries do not convey spiritual teachings at the expense of awareness that they are time-bound material objects. As material books, bestiaries are made of actual pages that show themselves as such. They are part of a material world to which, so far as humans are concerned, animals contribute most when they are dead, and yet they also translate the Sacra Pagina on which salvation history is revealed. Nonhuman creatures stand at the beginning and end of that history, excluded from its process yet defining it; the dealings humans have with them are shaped by the fall yet their names may still retain the immediacy of Eden. Such persistent doubleness points to the human-animal relationship as a “space of exception,” in Agamben’s terms. Its contradictoriness maps the incoherence of the caesura between humanity and animality but also reveals it as provisional and finite; once history has ended it too will cease.

2

Garments of Skin

I began the last chapter with a quotation from Confessions in which Augustine links the Bible both with the scroll of the firmament on which God’s word can be read and with the tunics of skin worn by Adam and Eve after the fall. I quote it again, with slightly different inclusions and omissions from last time: Who but you, O God, has made for us a solid firmament of authority over us in your divine scripture? . . . You know, Lord, you know how you clothed human beings with skins when by sin they became mortal. So you have stretched out the firmament of your book “like a skin.” (sicut pellem) . . . Indeed, by the very fact of their death the solid authority of your utterances published by them is in a sublime way “stretched out” over everything inferior. While they were alive on earth, it was not stretched out to express this supreme authority.1

Augustine’s thought hinges on traditional metaphors of skin as both bodily clothing and writing surface. In the latter role, “skin” designates both scripture and the heavens by which we are “clothed”; in the former, it defines the body in the state both of mortal sin and of immortal salvation. The articulation together of these metaphors led me, in chapter 1, to trace how we can distinguish, in bestiaries, between their existence as books and their mediation of the Book. Here it will be seen to indicate how the skin’s materiality as the envelope of a sensuous, sinful body can be dissolved in favor of an immortal skin outlining an identity that is no longer corruptible, a passage made possible, says Augustine, by God’s book where human readers’ mortality and the possible means of their redemption are explained. Hugh of Saint-Victor relates Augustine’s ideas specifically to parchment codices when he considers whether books are mortal or eternal, and whether they confirm or counter the reader’s mortality. Reading means assuming the

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book as a garment, and living or dying in consequence of whether its skin is that of a dead animal or an immortal being: The books that men write are made of the skins of dead animals or some other corruptible material. . . . And all who read these books will die some day, and there is no one to be found who lives forever. These, therefore, being made of dead things by mortal beings who are going to die, cannot bestow enduring life on those who read and love them. They are certainly not worthy to be called books of life, but would be termed more fitly books of death, or of the dead or dying. [Whereas] this is the Book of Life in which nothing that has once been written will ever be deleted, and all those who are found worthy to read it will live forever. 2

Like Augustine, Hugh points to questions we can ask about the “garment of skin” assumed by a bestiary reader. Can a bestiary share in some of the attributes of a book of life, or does the skin of its parchment remain compromised by the mortality of the animals from which it was made—and of the reader who reads it? As the envelope assumed by his reading self, the parchment page might anchor the reader in the mortal world of other animals, but alternatively it might lead him toward a sublime, perfected identity in which, like the parchment, his skin might be purified of all vestiges of flesh. Bestiaries are works that urge their readers to reflect on the alternatives of flesh and spirit, corruptibility and eternity. Each of the pages on which they are copied is similarly implicated in these terms: in any particular codex the skin of the parchment might be perceived as inclining the reader one way or the other as he negotiates the text’s opposition of the animal, fleshly and mortal, to the sublime and eternal. (Another way of reading bestiaries as defining a life for the soul will be explored in chapter 6.) Skin as Garment and Skin as Writing When Augustine invokes connections between garments, writing, and skin, he shows his adherence to both Jewish and Greek traditions of thought. In the passage I quoted from Confessions he cites the Bible when he equates the heavens with a scroll (Isaiah 34:4, Psalm 103:2) and evokes the verse just before Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden: “And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).3 He also draws on Hellenistic Neoplatonism when he compares these garments to the heavens, for just as the physical body is the “garment of the soul,” so the sky is also the “mantle of the heavens.”4 Jean Pépin’s study of Augustine’s use of the motif of clothing documents the dependence of his thinking on

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both these traditions, which were indeed already fused in the writings of the early Fathers. In particular, Pépin shows how Augustine’s understanding of the Genesis “tunics of skin” reiterates that of his Greek predecessors, his likeliest source being Origen.5 Here in Confessions we find just the summary statement that the tunics represent the moment “when through sin [man] became mortal,” but Augustine’s commentaries elsewhere are more elaborate. Because they come from dead animals, the tunics of skin fittingly represent the mortality with which God punished the first couple’s sin.6 Additionally, they imply that sin animalizes the human being. Augustine understood the statement that human beings were created in the image of God as marking their difference from other animals, which lacked likeness to their creator. The garments made from animal skin symbolize how far human beings, through sin, have fallen away from this privileged resemblance to God into the dissimilitude from him of the beasts.7 On the other hand, the fact that the effects of sin can be represented as donning a garment means that, like a garment, they can also be taken off, laid aside, and replaced with another. Putting on a new skin or taking off an old one are ascribed as natures to various bestiary creatures, typically kinds of snake—animals that do, in reality, slough off one skin and replace it with another in the course of their growth. The allegories which the texts supply for these natures revolve around concepts of sin and redemption. Indeed the motif of skin concretizes the paradox of felix culpa whereby the fact of the fall is, by the same token, the reason for salvation. One side of the paradox identifies skin according to the traditional understanding of tunicas pellicias, representing the mortality and fleshly concerns or faults of human beings as in some sense animal— bestial even. But its other side places the capacity to assume a new skin on the side of incarnation and resurrection, in which a mortal skin is exchanged for one of immortality.8 The idea that skin is, like a garment, something inferior but removable, is echoed in the idea that interpretation operates via an involucrum or integumentum. These Latin terms for an “envelope” or “wrapping” are used to refer to allegory as a “covering” that needs to be “uncovered” in order to show forth the truth beneath. 9 As the primary form of covering, the skin represents the need to read through or beyond it in order to arrive at a spiritual reality. Ambrose, for example, “states that ‘mens hominis . . . quasi involucro quodam corporis tegitur’ (the soul of man . . . as if by a certain wrapping of the body, is concealed).”10 Similarly Augustine speaks of the mind escaping the degradations of the flesh that cover it: “‘sapiens . . . ab omnibus involucris corporis mentem, quantum potest, evoluit’ (the wise man . . . has uncovered the mind,

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as far as possible, from all the coverings of the body).” 11 These conceptions of allegory and allegoresis as wrapping and unwrapping continue the metaphors of clothing and unclothing whose association with the skin is such a commonplace of early patristic thought.12 Since the page is a skin too, the reader is called upon to “unwrap” it in order truly to understand what is written on it. Sometimes the skin of the page may facilitate this unwrapping, via exegesis, to some ideal skin. Sometimes, however, the impetus to remove the skin from the realm of corruptible matter is not sustained because the page instead directs the reader back to fleshly investments, including those of sex and gender. In discussing these various manifestations of skin as a covering that can also be uncovered I shall focus on the bestiary chapters on Serpents and on the Hydrus and Crocodile. Each proposes to disclose a perfected or immortal skin within the integument of an animal skin, and each, in its treatment in some bestiaries, especially vernacular ones, raises questions about the bodily experience of skin. From different standpoints, both Augustine and Anzieu have reflected on this potential doubling or reduplication of the skin which, in Augustine, serves his own particular version of what Agamben calls the anthropological machine, since the “skin of life” demarcates spiritual man from the carnal, animal one defined by the “skin of death.” The Three Natures of the Serpent and the “Tunics of Skin” The doubleness of skin is articulated among the natures of the Serpent in Physiologus. The Serpent’s first nature is that, when it grows old and wishes to renew itself, it fasts until its skin loosens, then sheds it by squeezing through a narrow crack in a wall; “we too, throw off for Christ the old man and his clothing through much abstinence and tribulation” (P §13). The second has the Serpent leave its venom behind it when it goes to drink at the river, a model to be followed by all who thirst for the word of Christ. And the third is that, like the serpent in Eden, the Serpent is powerless against a man as long as he is naked—that is, before he becomes vulnerable to sin and subsequently assumes the tunics of skin that mark him as such; “but when he dressed in a tunic (that is, the mortality of a sinful fleshly body), then the serpent assaulted him” (P §13). In order to remain immune to temptation, men should beware putting on the clothing of worldliness. The Serpent also has a fourth nature according to Physiologus, that it surrenders its body to its attackers but defends its head, as do martyrs when they submit to their tormentors but still adhere to Christ, their head. But the first three form a unit around the conception of skin as a container of

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identity that can be altered, by donning or removing it, or by evacuating its contents (the venom). Remarkable in this short chapter is how the Serpent of the fall is countered and outnumbered by Serpents whose valence is positive. To achieve this, the skin takes on opposing meanings: before sin (human nakedness in Eden), sin itself (the Serpent’s temptation, which precipitates the coverings of the fall), the state of sinfulness and its consequences (the tunics of skin as the envelope of mortality), the container of a sinful self (the poison), and renewal from sin (the Serpent casts out its venom and sloughs off its old skin to reveal the new one).13 This chapter is not included among the 36 chapters of Physiologus B14 and is correspondingly absent from early copies of B-Isidore. But it is transmitted in the Latin y tradition (§13)15 whence it is taken up by that other important early Latin bestiary redaction, the Dicta Chrysostomi. This text’s chapter on the Viper (§11) begins with this snake’s astonishing sexual habits: the female has sex with the male by biting off his head, and then gives birth when her offspring eat their way out of her insides. But this is followed by accounts of the Serpent that grows blind with age, fasts and passes through “the narrow gate and the constricted path that lead to life” (Matthew 7:14), of the Dragon that vomits its poison before drinking, a behavior here equated with confession, and of the Dragon that takes fright before a naked man, just as “when our father was naked in Paradise the ancient serpent the devil could not prevail against him.”16 The same three natures are reiterated en bloc in the Second-family, whose chapter “De naturis serpentium” (SF §109) concludes a lengthy section on snakes beginning with an introduction (§90) and containing entries on nearly twenty individual species (SF §§91–108). The Serpent sheds its skin to show that “through Christ we divest ourselves of the old man and his garments, and seek the spiritual rock, Christ, and the narrow fissure, that is, the narrow gate”; and it leaves behind its venom when it drinks, a sign that readers should “throw off venom from ourselves, that is, earthly and evil desires” (SF §109).17 The wording of the third nature adds to that of the Dicta Chrysostomi a passage in which the theme of skin as a garment is repeated: Therefore, if you are wearing an earthly garment, that is, the old man, and you have grown old in evil days (Deuteronomy 13:52), the serpent strikes at you. If however you divest yourself of the clothing of the princes and powers of this world of darkness (Ephesians 6:12), then the serpent, that is, the Devil, cannot strike at you.18 (SF §109)

Given their thematization of skin, both text and illustration in this chapter conspire to draw readers’ attention to the skin of the pages on which they are

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copied, made from animal skins that have undergone the same processes as the Serpent’s, stripped and cleansed within and without. In Second-family bestiaries the section on snakes is often set out with horizontal depictions of the various reptiles between the chapters, as in fos. 94v–95r of BnF lat. 3630 (plates 6 and 7), a late thirteenth-century English manuscript. This layout helps bring out the extent to which the characteristics of individual species in §§91–108 anticipate the natures of Serpents in general as presented in §109. The trait selected for illustration from this concluding chapter is the Serpent’s fear at the sight of a naked man as opposed to a clothed one (see the foot of fo. 95r in plate 7). Although its other natures are not portrayed, the behaviors of some of the other reptiles on these pages are sufficiently similar to stand in for them. At the top of fo. 95r, the picture of the Salamander represents it not in the midst of fire, but as capable, with its venom, of poisoning all the water in a well, a nature which recalls how the Serpent, on the contrary, leaves its poison behind when it goes to drink. Immediately below, the Saurus—a lizard which goes blind with age but then crawls through a crack in a wall, looks at the sun, and is rejuvenated— anticipates the Serpent’s first nature in which its skin is renewed by squeezing through a narrow aperture.19 The orchestration of this page, then, captures this bestiary’s “scientific” character by suggesting how the statements about the generic nature of Serpents in its concluding chapter summarize and extend those pertaining to individual species in the preceding entries. The double page also captures the permutations of snakes’ relations with skin, and with sin, as resumed in this concluding chapter. The various snakelike creatures are depicted with their skin variously tinted or left bare in a manner consistent with the way color and the absence of color are deployed throughout this manuscript. In BnF lat. 3630 the subjects of illustration are usually left unpainted, their form suggested only by line or light wash, while dense color is reserved for background and frame.20 On fos. 94v–95r many of the reptiles are almost completely lacking in any color or texture; similarly, the nude man at the foot of fo. 95r has bare skin on which the features of his face and chest are only lightly drawn, and the contours of his leg muscles hinted at with a pale gray wash. The two snakes wriggling away under the rejuvenating Saurus, which are likewise without color, may be thought to share the innocence of human beings before they were clothed in the tunics of skin. The series of snakes devouring human and animal prey on fo. 94v (plate 6) seem not to share the fear of bare human skin ascribed to the Serpent in the concluding chapter, perhaps because the men are already dead;21 I return to these images in chapter 4. The convergences on this page between human skin, the skin of other

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creatures, and the skin of the page are instances of what I have been calling suture. Skin is represented by virtue of not being represented; it is merely an outline drawn around a section of the naked parchment that delimits and identifies it as being already skin, and a skin that is the same for humans as for other animals. Unlike the images I have discussed up to this point, however, these pages also equate skin with a garment that can be discarded like the Serpent’s or assumed like Adam’s tunicas pellicias. As such, skin is presented not just as a surface on which meaning is recorded and within which identity is defined, but as a covering that can be unwrapped, or rather that should be unwrapped, in order for another, further meaning and identity to emerge. As integumentum or involucrum, these pages in BnF lat. 3630 lead from the qualities (naturae) of snakes via a process of uncovering (allegoresis) to Christian teaching (allegoria). Removable skins, whether of snakes or men, become a figure of their own mode of readability. Sutured to the skin of these representations, the page, too, may appear both as a surface to be read on and as a surface to be read through, not to a depth of which it is the shell, but to what is proposed as a sublime skin under or prior to it. Not that pages are removable or that one reads by discarding them, but any page could nonetheless be seen as a merely provisional support for contents that ultimately belong on a more permanent plane, just as mortal skin is proposed as the temporary container for a self for which eternity will hopefully provide an immortal replacement.22 My question, then, is whether the parchment of these folios supports the claim of their contents to portray skin as it might have been in Eden, before it was covered over by the tunics of skin. Perhaps it does—but not compellingly. The facing pages 94v–95r of BnF lat. 3630, especially 95r (plate 7), show clear signs of animality such as the very visible hair follicles in the bottom margin next to the gutter and the veins in the outer margins. The worm holes in both pages, though of course later in date, likewise align these leaves more with the tunics of skin than they do with the uncorrupt and unsensuous skin of the first man before the fall made him subject to death. A different inflection is given to this segment by the equivalent pages of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 53 (also known as the Peterborough Bestiary, fos. 206v–207r, plates 8 and 9), despite the obvious kinship between it and BnF lat. 3630. Both are late thirteenth-century English manuscripts belonging to the same textual family;23 both use narrow, horizontal pictures of the various snakes to punctuate the chapters of this section and help it cohere; both chose similar subjects for their illustrations and combine areas of paint with uncolored, outline drawings. Like the Paris manuscript, the Peterborough Bestiary illustrates the Salamander poisoning the tree (fo. 206v,

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col. a; plate 8): the larger and more active Salamander is pictured in the act of doing so, curled around its trunk and holding a fruit in its mouth just like the serpent of the fall. The Saurus (at the top of the next column) is depicted squeezing its way out of masonry, allegedly rejuvenated. As in BnF lat. 3630 these portrayals clearly anticipate the first two natures of the Serpent in the concluding chapter, which starts at the top of the facing recto (plate 9). The picture for this chapter confirms the parallel with the Saurus by including, on the far left, a snake shedding its skin by crawling through a ring-shaped crevice. Again, as in BnF lat. 3630, the nature that dominates the illustration is the third, the Serpent’s fear of a naked man. A group of snakes squirm this way and that, confronted with both a clothed and a naked man, some attacking the former, others fleeing the latter. The naked man is drawn with disarming realism on the bare parchment, as are all the instances of exposed flesh in the other human figure on these pages; the snakes at the top of the facing verso (plate 9) are also drawn more than they are painted. One of them is attacking a man wearing clothes, as in the concluding image, which makes the chapters on these pages more consistent than their equivalents in the Paris manuscript where snakes appear to be attacking naked men on fo. 94v. The main visual difference between the two manuscripts is that the parchment of the Peterborough Bestiary is whiter, smoother, and altogether less redolent of the body than that of the Paris codex. This difference illustrates how the page is not just a neutral writing surface but a factor in how its written contents are read. The rarefied surface of the Peterborough Bestiary helps the reader envisage a prelapsarian man whose skin was not yet carnal or mortal, like the man from whom snakes take flight at the top of fo. 207r (plate 9). Because it is itself a product of refining, it also parallels the processes of purging and stripping away whereby snakes shed an old skin and assume a purer one. The injunction to read allegorically beyond the skin of carnality, and the allegorical message of eventual Christian renewal, may not be justified by the fine grade of this parchment, but it does lend them credence. The pages of the Paris manuscript, by contrast, suggest that for the reader there is work still to do before the “tunics of skin” of his animal nature can be finally set aside. Naked Skin in Vernacular Bestiaries Several of the vernacular bestiaries adopt the motif of a snake that either sheds its skin or fears a naked man, sometimes extending these natures to other animals. Since they address a lay and sometimes female readership, they also allow the possibility that reactions to the sight of the naked man might differ according to the status and gender of the reader.24 This is not to say that

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the sight of a naked man might not hold erotic interest for Latin clerical readers; but this gaze is more explicitly sexualized in vernacular texts. Although Dicta Chrysostomi inspired three German vernacular bestiaries, Gervaise’s is the only French one to be modeled on it. Gervaise (or his source) adapts the Dicta Chrysostomi chapter on the Viper to create one on “three kinds of snake,” the Viper, the Grass-Snake and the Dragon (G 501– 5). As in the Latin, the Viper has alarming reproductive habits, its offspring bringing destruction on their mother just as she does on their father. Next, to the Grass-Snake (coulouvre) Gervaise ascribes what Latin texts present as the Serpent’s first nature. With age it grows blind, then fasts; grown thin, it seeks out a hole in a rock and squeezes through. Its clothing (vesteüre) stays outside, on the rock; its hide (cuir) separates from its body. When it is stripped naked, its eyesight grows clear once more and its new skin (novele peaus) grows. (G 546–51).25

The moralization compares it with the sincere penitent who “can be reconciled with God and be freed (desvoloper, lit. unwrap him or herself) from sin” (G 569–70).26 Gervaise starts with a word that refers to human garments (vesteüre), then opts for one more typically associated with animal hide (cuir), then one that includes the skin of both humans and other animals (peaus), and ends with a term that evokes the wrapping and unwrapping of a text’s involucrum (desvoloper). The sequence charts a sinuous movement from species differentiation toward implications of overlap and even identity between humans, other animals, and the process of reading (allegoresis). The vocabulary of wrapping and unwrapping is also found in Gervaise’s third snake, the Dragon, which is afraid of a naked man but not of a clothed man. Similarly to Latin models, Gervaise identifies this creature with the serpent in Eden who dared not approach Adam before he became “wrapped in vile sin” (G 612, “envolopez de laiz pechiez”). Only confession can leave the human being stripped (desnuez) of this unwanted dress and so secure him safely from the Dragon (G 616–20). The patristic associations of skin with garment, inscription, and allegoresis are here graphically rendered in medieval French. At the same time, the everyday vernacular associations of these words increase the potential for metaphors of dressing and undressing to have their meanings reversed, since for laymen and women “clothing” is more likely to be associated with status than with sinful fall, and “nakedness” could represent a great many things other than purity. There is little support for aspirations to purity in the lone, French manuscript of Gervaise, BL MS Additional 28260 (second half of the thirteenth century),27 since many of its leaves are reduced and misshapen as

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a result of the edges of the original hide falling short of the planned dimensions of the page. Nor do these folios, which are barely adequate to the purpose of supporting the text, offer much scope for imaginary unwrapping— rather, they look as if they were themselves only just unwrapped from an animal body. Two later French-language bestiaries resemble Gervaise in distributing the natures of the generic Serpent to individual reptiles. In the Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais a snake called the Tieris (LV §37) sheds its skin as an emblem of penance,28 and in the Bestiaire d’amours the nature of being afraid of a naked man is ascribed to a serpent identified as a Wyvern (French wivre) (BA §7). Such moves are part of a process of extending the Serpent’s natures to other creatures more broadly and, in the process, admitting changes in the meaning of bare skin. For example, in the Long Version again, fear of a naked man becomes the nature of a beast called a Woutre (LV §10), and the gloss on nakedness is again more moral and less narrowly theological than in Gervaise. It now signifies having no care for worldly goods, whereas clothing indicates that a man cares for nothing else so that he is “dressed (vestu) in covetousness, lust, and envy, and the other evil vices of the world” (LV §10).29 Illustrators visualize the Woutre as a quadruped resembling a small lion or large dog, and in the ex-Phillipps manuscript the two Woutres and the naked man are all represented on the page by the same bare skin (fo. 6v; fig. 2), now firmly associated with lust and vice even though the text affirms the opposite.30 A connection between nakedness and animality is suggested by the appearance of the parchment, with its prominent pores, scarring, and tear. Another, perhaps accidental extension of the nature of the serpent to another creature, this time the Wolf, is found in the Bestiaire d’amours in Richard de Fournival’s appeal to the writer’s lady that she should return his love. The text states that if a man sees a Wolf before the Wolf sees it, the Wolf loses its strength but conversely, if the Wolf sees the man first, the man loses the power of speech (BA §4). This is explained as figuring the risk run by whichever of a man or a woman is the first to declare their love: making one’s feelings known is equivalent to being seen, the man in the scenario representing the lover and the Wolf the lady. Illustrations usually confront a Wolf and the supposedly dumbstruck man, but in one case the artist has depicted the Wolf recoiling before a man with no clothes on (BnF fr.25566, fo. 84v)—perhaps in anticipation of the naked man and the Wyvern that follow.31 The rubric is unambiguous: “the Wolf which is afraid of the naked man.”32 Both man and Wolf are outlined on the parchment and tinted with the same whitish gray wash so that both are undressed down to the identical skin. The display of animal

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F i g u r e 2 . Private Collection, Virginia. Ex-Phillipps 6739, fo. 6v. Woutre with naked man and man with clothes (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Reproduced by kind permission of the owner.

nakedness is more reminiscent of today’s nude selfies than it is of medieval allegory, while the address to the writer’s lady unavoidably conjures female eyes upon it. Aspiration to a pure decorporealized state, as fostered by the Latin texts, seems an unlikely reaction to attribute to a female reader of this page as compared with, say, snickering or sexual curiosity. Similarly unmoored from its theological moorings is the Wyvern’s meeting with the clothed or naked man a few segments later (BA §§7–8), in which

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“clothing” represents a love that has been affirmed and “nudity” an as yet undeclared, newly kindled love. Richard’s point seems to be that the achievements of human culture (such as love poetry) are nothing but a handicap and that retaining natural nakedness is the way to succeed in love: a saucy joke in favor of animality. The depiction of this scene on BnF fr. 25566 fo. 85v shows the naked man modestly covering his genitals while the man being attacked by the Wyvern is in clerical dress.33 This illustration, then, does little to encourage the woman reader to embrace religious teaching; and the grade of the parchment, with its residues of embodiment, is accordingly unlikely to subsume her into an ethereal or immortal self. Note in particular the way the bottom outer corner of the original page was irregularly shaped due to the way it was cut from the animal’s hide, and all the stretches and scarring around what was once the edge of the leaf, before another piece was joined to make up the rectangle. The mend extends the page more than it can be said to underlie it. Here is no involucrum to unfold: bare skin is just bare skin, and seemingly the better for it. Other examples would confirm that in later vernacular bestiary texts the motif of skin in the nature of Serpents drifts away from the allegoreses proposed by earlier Latin bestiarists.34 Instead of unwrapping a mortal skin to discover one that is sublime, the reader is allowed to dwell on the corporeal, animal quality of skin, and one factor that interferes in her reactions is the often lower quality of parchment from which these books are made. The same tendency to lose sight, in the presence of animal skin, of the possibilities afforded by an immortal one, is found in the chapter on the Hydrus and Crocodile. The Hydrus and the Crocodile and the “Hide of the Flesh” The chapter on the Hydrus and the Crocodile is a constant across the bestiary tradition that also invokes the motif of tunics of skin. For some authors the Hydrus is a Nile serpent but it is more commonly identified merely as an animal in Latin (DC §4, B-Is §19) or a beste in French, and indeed the Physiologus text translated by Curley, which calls it a nilius, describes it as having “the shape of a dog” (P §39). B-Isidore bestiaries follow Physiologus’s account in which this creature, whatever it is, smears itself with mud, then creeps into a sleeping Crocodile and devours it from the inside by chomping through its entrails; allegorically this refers to the incarnation of Christ and the harrowing of Hell (P §39, B-Is §19). The reference to mud invokes the Genesis account of how the first humans were created from the dust of the earth, de limo terrae.

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In Philippe de Thaon’s version of this chapter, the mud in which the Hydrus is smeared is further identified as the hide of the flesh, de char cuir: The Hydrus, in truth, signifies God. For the sake of redemption God assumed incarnation, for he became covered with filth and muddied with dust. Clay comes from mud and [thus] we wear the hide of the flesh (e de char quir avun). God was clothed in flesh (de char fud vestud), through which Satan was vanquished. (PT 665–74) 35

Philippe’s expression “the hide of the flesh” recasts the biblical tunicas pellicias assumed at the fall in a context that compounds them with the original creation of human bodies from clay. Adam’s fallen mortality, he insists, is inverted by the incarnation when, in order to redeem mankind, Christ takes on this same combination of muddy clay with the “hide of the flesh.” Philippe also reworks the patristic view that the tunics of skin represent humans being animalized by sin. His bestiary is organized in a way that both underscores and complicates the association between carnality and animality. Chapters are distributed between three sections—beasts, birds, and stones—a reverse hierarchy that distinguishes beasts as alone having natures that can represent the devil. But within each of Philippe’s three sections, the first set of entries all represent Christ, so while beasts are unique in their damnable carnality they are equally and abundantly capable of representing the incarnation of God as man. This is another instance of the paradox of felix culpa: if carnality is identified as animality, then it is only by assuming it that Christ can be incarnated and thus redeem humanity from the animality into which it has fallen. These ideas are epitomized in Philippe’s entry on the Hydrus and the Crocodile which, reworking the commentary tradition on the “tunics of skin,” explicitly identifies the animality of the flesh as skin, and as what both leads to death and overcomes it. The chapter occupies a turning point in the beasts section, coming toward the end of the Christological animals and announcing the struggle over humanity between Christ and the devil that will then be developed by the next group of beasts which represent man. The motif of skin forges the connection between man, Christ and the devil, since later in this same chapter the same word quir (skin, especially an animal hide) is used of the Crocodile within whose tough hide the Hydrus has penetrated (PT 714). Allegorically, this hide is the pit of hell into which Christ enters in order to destroy death’s rule forever. As carapace of sin or garment of redemption, animal hide is also literally present as the manuscripts on which Philippe’s bestiary is copied, of which there are three. The oldest, which is also the most complete and serves as the

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basis for all modern editions, is the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript British Library Cotton Nero A.v. It transmits the fullest version of the text’s extensive Latin rubrics, many of which announce the pictures that are supposed to accompany the text; but these were never provided although spaces were left for them.36 The chapter on the Hydrus on fo. 49v is typical. The importance of the allegory is announced (PT 663–4), a Latin instruction follows—“Here the Hydrus is depicted (depingitur), and the Crocodile being killed. For the Hydrus eviscerates it by weaving in and out. And the Hydrus figures Christ and the Crocodile the devil and its entrails his people”37—and then comes an empty space before the text picks up again. Many bestiary manuscripts similarly have spaces for illustration but not the illustrations themselves, the reasons for their unfinished state being no doubt various and practical. The effect of the blank on this particular page, however, is to make the allegory seem to defy representation, as if, although the Hydrus can weave in and out of the skin of the Crocodile, the folds of its involucrum remain unfathomable. The bare parchment, that equivocal “hide of the flesh” in which man, Christ, and the devil mysteriously interact, mutely resists the demand to unwrap it. A thirteenth-century manuscript, Oxford, Merton College MS 249, preserves a second Anglo-Norman copy. Here Philippe’s section on stones, which was to have been the crowning moment of the work, is mangled and divided; a part of it precedes the bestiary proper, and the part which should conclude it is drastically shortened by comparison with the Cotton Nero copy. Destroying the three-part hierarchy of the work makes the section on the beasts appear the most prominent. The manuscript is rather crudely illustrated, with the majority of the pictures appearing not at the point where the allegory has just been announced, but in the more usual position at the start of each chapter (fig. 3). Pictorially, then, the Hydrus has looped its way through the Crocodile before the account of the animals’ behavior has even begun; the drawing does not illustrate a theological meaning, as the Cotton Nero artist is charged with doing, as much as it posits an enigma which the ensuing text will explicate. It depicts not allegory as theological content but allegoresis as a textual process: the irruptions of the Hydrus through the body of the Crocodile are to reveal one surface appearing through the envelope or involucrum of another. Philippe’s text identifies each of these surfaces as a skin: Christ’s “hide of the flesh” discloses itself as it breaks through the “tough hide” of the pit of hell. Since, however, this scenario is drawn not painted, and not framed but somewhat haphazardly sketched between writing block and margin, the two skin surfaces contrasted by the text converge, in the illustration, with

F i g u r e 3 . Merton College MS 249, fo. 4r. Hydrus and Crocodile, Stag, Antelope (Philippe de Thaon). Photograph: Courtesy of the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford.

F i g u r e 4 . British Library MS Stowe 1067, fo. 2v. Beaver, Hydrus, and Crocodile (H-type B-Isidore). Photograph: © The British Library Board.

F i g u r e 5 . British Library MS Stowe 1067, fo. 3r. Crocodile and Hyena (H-type B-Isidore). Photograph: © The British Library Board.

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the single, identical, hide of the page. Another conundrum which the picture poses, then, is that of how to discern alleged symbolic difference within apparent material identity. As with the challenge to distinguish innocent from sinful skin in the chapter on Serpents, it is helpful to compare two similar manuscripts of the same passage. BL MS Stowe 1067 is an early twelfth-century English copy of a Latin text not unlike Philippe’s (see chapter 1), whose layout and artistic style could well have served as a model for the makers of Merton 249. The chapter on the Hydrus begins at the foot of fo. 2v (fig. 4) and continues onto fo. 3r where it is followed by a freestanding entry on the Crocodile alone, the text of which corresponds with the end of the Hydrus in B-Isidore (fig. 5; I will have more to say about this new chapter in chapter 4). In the image for the first chapter, the Crocodile is having difficulty swallowing the huge Hydrus which pokes its head, grinning, out of the Crocodile’s belly; in the second it is happily gulping down little fish. The leaves of this manuscript are discolored and scattered with holes, some falling within the writing block; for example, in the chapter on the Panther on fo. 4v the words significat (“signifies”) and later bestia (“beast”) have both been written around holes, drawing attention to how the page itself can disrupt how beasts are understood to signify. On fos. 2v–3r the holes fall diametrically in the margins, a small one in the bottom left corner of fo. 2v just below the start of the Hydrus chapter and a much larger one in the top outer corner of fo. 3r, echoing the apertures in the Crocodile and literally punctuating the Hydrus’s moves. These features may be overlooked by many readers of Stowe 1067, but what of the experience of one who notices them, even subliminally? Faced with a page that aligns itself more with the defeated Crocodile than with Savior-Hydrus, such a reader may be more likely than a reader of the relatively even-colored and undamaged surface of Merton 249 to perceive his reading self as breached and perforated, perhaps by a divine presence within or perhaps not. The most polished manuscript of Philippe de Thaon’s bestiary is the third, copied in France in the second third of the thirteenth century and preserved in the Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen, as MS Gl. kgl. S. 3466. Given that it contains neither birds nor stones, the hierarchy of sections announced at the beginning is now irrelevant—this text contains only beasts. This is also the only one of the three manuscripts where Philippe’s six-syllable lines are set out one rather than two per line, giving an extreme expression of space. Illustrations are placed not at the beginnings of chapters but at the point of their allegoresis. Brightly colored and jaunty, they make a solution to the empty spaces of the British Library copy seem all too easy. In the chapter that

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concerns us, the artist has threaded the Hydrus through the Crocodile with care and deliberation (plate 10). Although the streams of blood from its exit and entry points indicate the lethal effects on the Crocodile of the Hydrus’s progress, the overall impression remains—or so it seems to me—more decorative than traumatic. What makes the “hide of the flesh” appear as such on this page is not its representation in the image but the margins of the page itself, the long sewn up tear in the top right hand margin of fo. 21r producing an emphatic parallel to the holes bored by the Hydrus in the Crocodile.38 Analogously to Stowe 1067, then, but more explicitly given the twin references to cuir (hide) in Philippe’s text, the teaching that impresses itself on the reader’s mind is borne in this manuscript by a skin that can be identified with the “hide of the flesh” of the Hydrus and the harsh hide of the Crocodile. And because it also expresses her own human “hide of the flesh,” filling it with thoughts that are assumed as hers, the hide of the page appears in some sense as the reader’s own skin. She herself and not just the Crocodile are to be pierced and internally consumed by the incarnate Christ. The vulnerability apparent in the manuscript may carry its own impetus to allegoresis, its holes and fissures a provocation to read beyond the integumentum of carnal existence to the sublime skin operating beneath it. Or it may simply return the reader to her own carnal, animal existence, a condition inescapable and maybe even, in its own way, ornamental. It is striking how many bestiary manuscripts, similarly to Stowe 1067 and Copenhagen MS Gl. kgl. S. 3466, copy their Hydrus and Crocodile chapter on folios that are damaged, and in some at least the effect is the same: to draw attention to the fragility of the “hide of the flesh” in contrast to its eternal alternative. In the twelfth-century Dicta Chrysostomi manuscript Munich, BSB clm 536, a large round hole and a long, looping stitched tear fall right beside the rubric De ydro on fo. 69; although not the first damaged leaf in this text, it is the first with holes in it. Both of the facing pages 3v–4r of another early manuscript of this text, Morgan M. 832, which contain the Hydrus chapter among others, also have holes, this time within the writing block (fo. 4r is reproduced as fig. 8), through many of which it is possible to read the words on the pages beneath. Working with the Hydrus through the tunic of skin of the Crocodile literalizes the motif of integumentum, one skin layered on another as the pages are bound into the codex. The Hydrus also coincides with some of the most spectacularly damaged leaves of vernacular manuscripts. In at least two copies of Guillaume le Clerc (BnF fr. 902, fo. 155v, and Bodleian, MS Bodley 912, fo. 6r, both fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman) this passage (GC 1643–1728) is immediately next to holes or splits. In the copy of the Long

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Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais preserved in Montpellier, BUM MS H 437 and completed in 1341, this chapter (§42) begins on the recto of fo. 229r, the bottom outer corner of which has a large, stitched tear (see fig 7). In this last case, however, the reader’s dilemma between the skins of life and those of death is clearly posed.39 The picture of the Hydrus in H 437 fo. 229r is almost identical to the one of the Viper (§6) nearly thirty folios earlier on fo. 200r (compare figs. 7 and 6). Both chapters are also copied on folios with long stitched tears, that on fo. 200 extending right across the page. This coincidence in the visible presentation of the two creatures contrasts with the radical difference between their allegories. The Hydrus here retains its traditional, Physiologus-derived meaning as incarnation and redemption, whereas the Viper who conceives by biting off her mate’s head, and then gives birth when her children eat their way out of her, is interpreted as a figure of envy that conceives envious desires but then is destroyed when it gives birth to them. The little heads poking out of the reptiles’ bodies in the two pictures look identical, but they mean opposite things: in the case of the Hydrus, the allegory is one of salvation triumphing over carnality and in that of the Viper, one of carnality giving way to its own concupiscence. The stitched holes on the two leaves are equivocal, then, as to whether the resurrected Christ or evil designs might break forth from them—the question of which skin-surface is carnal and which immortal proves unanswerable. Conclusion As we will see in chapter 4, in some texts the Crocodile also slips toward quite non-Christian considerations of what is vulnerable to what or to whom. But to conclude this one, we began by seeing how, for Augustine, Adam and Eve’s tunics of skin are associated with the books of nature and scripture, and how this influential idea is elaborated by Hugh of Saint-Victor with reference to contemporary parchment books. Bestiarists would want to put their compositions on the side of life, and their references to skin, whether of the Serpent or the Hydrus, are first conceived as images of redemption and incarnation. But in their material manifestation as parchment books, bestiaries do not always disclose a pure or Christly skin within the integumentum of a worldly and sinful skin, they can become more literal animal skins. Such skins can point to the kinship between human beings and other animals, and as they become more literal their connection with readers’ gendered, sexed and mortal bodies becomes more apparent. The manuscript page, as a tunic of skin assumed by readers, may profoundly influence the way they perceive their own garment of the flesh.

F i g u r e 6 . Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BIU Section Médicine MS H 437, fo. 200r. Viper (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Photograph: Courtesy of BIU Montpellier /IRHT (CNRS). F i g u r e 7. Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BIU Section Médicine MS H 437, fo. 229r. Hydrus and Crocodile (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Photograph: Courtesy of BIU Montpellier /IRHT (CNRS).

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For Pépin, Augustine’s treatment of the theme of the garment highlights its doubleness. In his commentary on the clothes of linen and of wool worn by the women in Proverbs 31:13, Augustine distinguishes between an outer layer that pertains to action in the world, and an inner one of spiritual disposition.40 This same duality is found in Porphyry, who focuses particularly on an outer skin constituted by the “tunics of skin” and the nudity beneath that is purified, like a gymnast’s, by discipline. When layers of skin are stripped away, some are visible like when a person abandons indulgent pursuits, others invisible, like the capacity to resist desire.41 Anzieu’s analysis of the Skin Ego likewise assumes the doubleness of skin, beginning with the biological superimposition of dermis and epidermis, and proceeding from there to distinguish between its double role as perceptual surface turned toward the outside world, and its function as the container of an inner “self.” How the doubleness of Anzieu’s account serves both a theory of the psyche and one of reading will be explored in more detail in chapter 6; it is enough here to note its formal similarity with early Christian teaching. Unlike Anzieu’s, though, the patristic distinction of layers is hierarchical and moralized, its purpose being to facilitate the eventual separation of a spiritual human being from its basis in the animal, much as an allegorical meaning can be unwrapped from the literal text. In the case of the Siren and the Onocentaur, discussed in my introduction, the caesura manufactured by the anthropological machine passes visibly through the middle of the body, dissecting it. But the case of the Serpent and the Hydrus, as read in the light of Augustine and Anzieu, the caesura aspires to render visible an immortal skin which would be the sublime double of a corruptible one, just as the theory of integumentum aims to make visible a purer meaning within the mundane language of the text. The material character of bestiaries sometimes, as we have shown, supports these aspirations. Some parchment really does appear decorporealized, and some that does not may emphasize the need for the reader to look beyond her mortal body. But the machine’s distinction of the “human” from the “animal” is often undone when, in other cases, attention and desire linger on the surface that was supposed to be surpassed, and transcendence itself is put in doubt by the convergence of animal, human, and page in the selfsame skin.

3

Orifices and the Library

Whereas history has estranged humans from their original state, other creatures are still in touch with Eden. Unlike in the parallel genre of the fable where animals struggle with oppression, in bestiaries they inhabit a world which is not yet political and follow natures that rarely extend beyond individual behavior or that of the immediate family. Sex and violence exist, but in the absence of a secular social or political order and with no law except for God’s, they are primarily understood in terms of reproduction and predation, not property or power; and although creatures’ natures may allegorize organized religion they rarely shed light on any other institution. In a passage reproduced in Second-family bestiaries Isidore says of “nature” that it means “causing to be born,” “for it has the power of engendering and creating” (Etymologies XI.1.1, 231 = SF §121), and bestiaries in general reflect this sense of nature as corporeal process prior to any social formation. This Edenic, presocial character is consistent with their connection to hexameral literature, and is also paralleled in twelfth-century Neoplatonic mythological cosmologies like those of Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille.1 Shared Bodies In the sermon-sequence on the start of Genesis that makes up his Hexameron, Ambrose writes engagingly about creatures’ behaviors as models for human instruction. He commends the wisdom of serpents, especially with regard to their sexual arrangements.2 The viper, most cunning of all the snakes, enters into a passionate marriage with the Moray eel who always hastens to her spouse’s whistle and satisfies his desires.3 Ambrose promotes the eel as a

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model to all wives. Put up with your husband’s failings! So what if he is repellent and demanding!4 Conversely, a husband should take note of the viper’s manners. It is courteous enough to spit out its poison before copulating, “with due regard for his consort and the nuptial rite.” Husbands, do not behave worse than a viper! Unexpectedly, Ambrose next asserts that an adulterous man “has the very traits of a serpent.”5 Recognizing this 180-degree swerve he hastily adds: Do not form the opinion that we have based our argument on contradictions, in that we have made use of the example of a viper in order to point both a good and a bad moral. It serves the purpose of instruction to bring forward a twofold consideration. On the one hand we are like the serpent in being ashamed to be loyal to our beloved. Again, by severing the bonds of holy matrimony we prefer the harmful and lubricious, as in the case of union with a serpent, than what is really and truly salutary.6

Ambrose’s account is absent from the earliest bestiaries; it is first included verbatim as a chapter on the Viper in the Second-family Latin redaction (SF §94). But its lavish embellishment anticipates all bestiarists’ fascination with the bodily functioning of other animals and their constant recourse to it as a guide for humans. Even if the lessons Ambrose derives from the viper and eel are contradictory, and even if he is undecided whether their sex is good, like marital sex, or bad, like marital infidelity, he is confident they have sex like humans do. The sparsest and most abstract bestiary allegories draw substance from this conviction than animal embodiment is essentially no different from human embodiment. Their physical equivalence to humans is the reason other animals can be relied on as models for thinking about Jesus’s incarnation or the resurrection of the body, and why relations between parents and offspring among creatures illumine those within human families. Their view of the body as self-evident helps to explain why bestiarists interpret animals’ natures with such assurance. Particularly those chapters that focus on human virtues and vices treat animal bodies as literal supports of a physiological apparatus just like the human one: the chastity attributed to the Elephant exemplifies that required of humans, the meretricious allurements of the Siren are the same as should be avoided by human readers. Illustrations often graphically display the similarities that exist across animal bodies, human or otherwise. For example, the Beaver, hunted for his testicles and who saves his life by sacrificing them, is often depicted biting off and throwing to the huntsmen what look like male human genitalia, as in Copenhagen, Royal Library of Denmark MS S 1633, fo. 8v.7 Similarly, the portrayal of the man being devoured by a Crocodile in the St. Petersburg Bestiary seems unnecessarily

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anatomical. Does the man need to be naked as well as eaten? Does his anus have to be quite so visible, and look so like the Crocodile’s?8 The bodily orifices associated with sex and the senses that are common to human and other animals are my subject in this chapter. Chapter 4 will address another kind of aperture in the body: one resulting from physical injury, whether self-inflicted or aggressive. Both this chapter and the next show how many of the troubles afflicting human beings in their exile from paradise are founded in the physical capacities they share with other animals for sexual pleasure and reproduction on the one hand and animosity and destruction on the other. The two are linked in the nature of the Beaver which gives up its reproductive potential in an act of self-mutilation, and in the Physiologus chapter on the Viper (P §13), in which the female Viper reproduces by biting off the male’s head and is later killed when her offspring, in order to be born, eat their way out of her insides (cf. chapter 2). The early bestiaries are particularly alert to the interrelations between bodily orifices, especially those associated with sex and the external senses. The Physiologus entry on the Viper is repeated, as we saw in the last chapter, in the Dicta Chrysostomi (DC §11).9 Early B-Isidore manuscripts do not usually include an entry on the Viper but they follow Physiologus in claiming that the Weasels’ sexual intercourse takes place via the mouth or the ears, a chapter not typically found in the Dicta Chrysostomi. The insinuation of oral sex that characterizes each of these natures can be extended to other creatures, thanks particularly to illustrations that place animals’ mouths in close proximity to their own or another creature’s genitals. In addition to operating in the mouth, libido is active in the ears when men hear the Siren, or in the sense of smell when the Unicorn succumbs to the virgin; the Bestiaire d’amours draws on these chapters to develop a humorous, quasi-encyclopedic treatment of sensuality in humans and other animals (BA §16).10 Connections between orifices also make sexual difference unstable. The Hyena alternates between having male and female genitals; it develops a perverse appetite for devouring corpses. The Moray eel’s enthrallment pales to vanilla beside the polymorphous acts of these creatures. Although all the early texts emphasize sexual-sensory themes, they differ in the structural prominence they award them. The most upfront is the Dicta Chrysostomi which, once past the four Christological chapters with which it opens, stresses damnable or diabolical evil in the next three and then focuses in its remaining beast chapters on aspects of human life starting with the Elephant (§8). Since sexual and sensual concerns dominate the segment dedicated to evil, thanks to the entries on the Siren, Onocentaur and Hyena (§§5–6), and since the Elephant is a living exemplar of the innocent sexuality

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which existed in Eden before desire and its knowledge were precipitated by the fall, this redaction affirms early on that if sex is not the only temptation to which humans are vulnerable, it is the worst and the one most responsible for their fallen condition. As chapters on man continue, so does this message. The Antelope (§9) points to various failings caused by appetite, the chapter’s sexual focus sharpening in the last few lines where the Firestones warn men to keep from women, or burn. The Sawfish (§10) that fails to keep up with the ship (= the church) on the sea (= the world) falls short in perseverance and abstinence. Then we meet the sexually challenging Viper (§11) and the various other serpents discussed in my last chapter which again raise the specter of man’s lost innocence. Now more than halfway through the beasts section, the reader has been repeatedly reminded of the dangers posed by sexual and sensual appetites. Aside from the chapter on Firestones (B-Is §3) the opening chapters of B-Isidore redaction are less insistent on sexual errancy. The problematic character of desire is raised by the Siren and Onocentaur in §12 but sex and sensuality do not really come center stage until the chapters on the Beaver and Hyena (§§17–18). These paired chapters, whose juxtaposition dates back to the Greek Physiologus (§§37–38), represent a twin assault on sexual activity, the castrated Beaver being praised for its self-imposed abstinence just as the Hyena is condemned for its sexual excess. From here on B-Isidore becomes more interested in sexual-sensual failings, especially in the chapter on the Weasel (§27), a chapter which, as noted, is not usually found in Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts. It is noticeable that the H bestiary, which is based on B-Isidore but radically reordered, moves the sexual chapters nearer the beginning so that the Beaver and Hyena appear as §§8–9 and the Weasel as §17. This redaction also positions the Firestones immediately after the Weasel (§18), thereby emphasizing the theme of sexual misconduct. The likely model of the H bestiary, the so-called H-type B-Is bestiary of the early twelfth century, does not have either of these configurations,11 so it appears that the H redactor deliberately re-sexualizes its source’s teaching. Seemingly created in the late twelfth century for use in monasteries as a partner for the Aviarium, the H bestiary is animated by some of the same moral attitudes as the Dicta Chrysostomi and like it typically circulates with texts of pastoral theology.12 Much earlier than H, Philippe de Thaon’s vernacular bestiary offers another interesting reordering of B-Isidore in which the Beaver-Hyena-Weasel chapters form a single sequence (PT 1135–244). In Oxford, Merton College MS 249, all three beasts share the same page (fo. 5v) along with the Onocentaur. In the Copenhagen manuscript, the Hyena-Weasel entries become fused

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as the copyist jumps from the naming of the Hyena (PT 1178) to the allegory of the Weasel (PT 1229; fo. 34v): the sexually indeterminate Hyena becomes as incapable as the sexually perverse Weasel of retaining God’s word, the two beasts becoming fused at the site of their common, excessive orifices. A result of Philippe’s decision to dedicate a part of his beasts section to allegories of the human is that—like the Dicta Chrysostomi which may have inspired this move—he generates a sequence on animal apertures from whose gaping reality he seeks to read to the truth. Orifice, involucrum, and Invagination That humans share the same external sensory-sexual apparatus as other animals contributes to the similarity between human and animal skin, and hence to the ambivalence of the page. Any suggestion of bodily orifices in the parchment can serve as a reminder of the reader’s own. When a bestiary talks about porous animal bodies it may influence how readers react to traces of porosity on its pages, which in turn may interfere in their own libidinal investments. A sense of their own skin as penetrable (or not) will be experienced differently by different readers, the difference stemming at least partly from their own gender and sexuality. As with animals, so the surfaces of human bodies turn inward to form invisible channels on whose inner surfaces sexual and sensory experiences flow together, but which are differently configured for male and female animals, human or not. These configurations also impact the ways in which readers apprehend the envelope of allegory. My last chapter argued that the process of unwrapping provoked by the concepts of integumentum or involucrum is enacted in the chapter on the Serpent where the “tunics of skin” are discarded in favor of a prelapsarian Skin, or in that on the Hydrus whose “hide of the flesh” emerges from within the “tough hide” of the Crocodile. Uncovering does not reveal a depth so much as it discloses another surface that is not always easily distinguished from the one that covers it. Bestiaries’ insistence on the interconnecting orifices of animal bodies confirms that we should not seek a model for involucrum in a topology of surface and depth, and proposes instead one of the fold whose inner recesses cannot simply be “unwrapped.” In his study of the motif of the scriptorium of the heart, Eric Jager explores medieval equations of the book with a writing surface or inner parchment that may be folded or unfolded, expressions that are clearly related to exegetical terms like involucrum (wrapping) and integumentum (covering), but more adequately capture its movement.13 The existence of these folds, pockets or sheaths where the surface of the

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skin turns inward, is one of the reasons why the surface of the Skin Ego is perceived as a continuous envelope, capable of masking their recesses and shielding against the excitement associated with them.14 By the same token the urge to read can produce a fantasy surface of legibility even when the material surface has zones that are illegible.15 Derrida coined the term “invagination” to evoke the way texts, like the skin around our bodies, are home to a process of continual exchange between insides and coterminous outsides, and meanings are folded into one another.16 More than involucrum, his concept of invagination recommends itself to works copied on manuscripts taken from bodies organized around orifices, because it acknowledges the affect and libido that flow out from their inaccessible surfaces onto the ones that can be seen. The Anthropological Machine inter urinas et faeces The resemblance of human orifices to those of other animals, and their progressive repression from human consciousness, are considered by Freud in his 1912 essay “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” Freud observes that the biological evolution toward making the human body more beautiful has not extended to the genitals: “They have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was.”17 This is in large part because the genitals are “intimately and inseparably bound up” with excretion: “The position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor.”18 Freud posits a development of the drives from oral to anal and from anal to genital via a process of investment that moves from one organ to another, at each stage repressing the drive associated with the organ that has been left behind. Although the organs and their associated urges are common to humans and other animals, this process of combined progression/repression is distinctive of humans; which is to say, as Chasseguet-Smirgel puts it, that “becoming human consists in endlessly seeking to overcome our animality.”19 Her formulation brings out how Freud’s theory of the drives is another version of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine”: one which operates not by instituting (as Agamben has it) an internal boundary or caesura, nor yet (as Augustine advanced) by adducing one skin as the double of another, but by changing how the subject configures its identity in relation to significant points on its bodily surface. Psychoanalysis conceives of the machine as engineering ways of connecting, repressing, and masking orifices, so as to maintain the subject’s precarious sense of “humanity.” Anzieu adapts the Latin tag Freud quotes, “We are born between urine

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and feces,” as the title of one of the short stories in his collection Contes à rebours, many of which explore the concept of the Skin Ego in narrative form.20 The one-page tale “Inter urinam et faeces nascimur” opens the volume and starts provocatively, “A library is a vagina. I mean the ideal library that gathers together the best books. Will this vagina receive me?”21 What seems to be a dream recounted by the first person of this story condenses the experience of an infant being born in the midst of filth via a deep pocket in the skin, with that of an adult writer entering into the universe of inscribed abstractions that is a library. The shock of exiting from the mother’s body before having assumed one’s own independent existence is conflated with the novice author’s anxiety about entering a new envelope, the library of books each of which offers a venerable, meaningful skin for prospective readers. The narrating voice’s vision of a “vagina library” jarringly asserts shared ground between the high cultural legibility of books and the polluted recesses of the body, and proposes a model of reading in which surface and legibility are the counterparts of orifice and revulsion. The one draws its nature from the other: they invaginate. The story is a reminder, then, that the adult self who reads or writes in a library remains tied to a time before that self was formed, a time of slippery contiguity between external and internal skins. If the Skin Ego appears to stabilize identity, it does so in response to gaps or folds which are always in excess or in deficit with respect to signification, and by which the ineffectiveness of the anthropological machine can always be exposed.22 From the psychoanalytical point of view the interconnections posited by some bestiary chapters between beasts’ sexual and other sensory orifices are regressive in the sense that they hark back to the preadult human or the nonhuman animal. The purpose of the allegories, by contrast, is to machine readers’ disinvestment from the libido attached to these orifices so they can “become human,” in Chasseguet-Smirgel’s sense. What we might think of as allegorical “depth” would then be an effect produced by the shocking or exciting quality inscribed in the apertures in their surface—an effect better captured by the term involucrum, and even more so invagination, than that of depth. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the Hyena, the Weasel, and the creatures most closely associated with each, the Beaver and the Asp.23 Considering them together with the physical properties of the pages on which they are copied, it explores how bestiaries might favor or resist the processes of “human” progression versus “animal” regression, and potentially affect female readers otherwise then male ones.

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The Hyena The Dicta Chrysostomi says of the Hyena that human beings are forbidden to eat it and that in the Bible it evokes the utmost desolation. Then, Physiologus explains that this is because it has two natures. At times it is male and at others female, and hence it is an impure animal. The sons of Israel are to be seen as similar to it in that first they worshipped the living lord but later, abandoned to lust and sensual pleasure, they worshipped idols; and whoever now cultivates avarice, which is enslavement to false images, is comparable with this beast.24 (DC §6)

The B-Isidore chapter is twice as long, but mainly because it contains more biblical quotations and an etymology, not because of substantial additions. Although both these early redactions state that the Hyena has two naturas, they are in fact interpreted as a single nature in the bestiarists’ usual understanding of the word, since they are subsumed in only one gloss: the danger of carnal attachment which may blind readers to spiritual realities.25 The unexpected plural form naturas conjures another of the word’s meanings, namely “genital.”26 The allegory does not so much explain the creature’s behavior as it is projected from its double genitalia, casting over them a surface of allegorical, spiritual meaning. In parallel with the Hyena’s genital excess is the text’s over-qualification of its uncleanness. In the first place, its transgressing of category distinctions renders it impure. Initially its alternation between two sexes is understood as a movement back and forth between equivalent poles, but the allegory, which equates maleness with true worship and femaleness with the subsequent idolatry of the Jews, compounds the transgression by implying that the Hyena’s body in fact degenerates from an originally male body to a female one, and from a positive to a negative value. The surface of truth presented to the reader is above all a reaction against the irruption of an excessive female orifice in a properly male body. This truth is like the library in Anzieu’s short story: a refuge from, as well as a reminder of, the ghastly aperture inter urinam et faeces. Some early B-Isidore illustrators represent the Hyena with a forked growth coming out of its mouth, presumably in reminiscence of the double tongue with which the Hyena is metaphorically endowed by Physiologus, but perhaps also as a visible, oral correlate of its invisible, genital duality; see, for example, BL MS Stowe 1067, fo. 3r (fig. 5, bottom right).27 In some Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts it is likewise depicted on its own, twisting or deranged, an iconography that persists in the sole manuscript of Gervaise. In

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others, however, the creature’s sexuality is underlined by the decision to draw two Hyenas standing and embracing face-to-face in a weird simulacrum of human intercourse.28 In one such German manuscript, the twelfth-century Morgan MS M.832, the excessive quantity of the Hyena’s orifices is echoed in the multiple perforations of the page (fig. 8). A hole in the center of the writing block on fo. 4r exactly punctuates the description of the hyena’s aberrant physiology: aliquando quidem masculus aliquando quidem femina est et ideo inmundum animal est cui similes estimati sunt filii israeli qui primum dominum suum coluere postea luxurie et uolup tatibus dediti idola coluerent. (sometimes it is male < HOLE > sometimes it is female thus it is a filthy creature < HOLE> to which are held comparable the sons of Israel who first worshipped Israel’s God, then, given over to lust and pleasures of the flesh, worshipped idols.)

The holes and the first half of the word voluptatibus (pleasures of the flesh) are roughly on a line with the genital area of the two Hyenas. Pictorially their sex is indeterminate, leaving the viewer uncertain what kind of voluptas, exactly, they indulge in; but given their alleged degeneration from male to female, it may well be understood as homosexual. The urge to visualize the Hyena’s sexual act has been realized in another manuscript of this group, ONB cod. 1010, a theological compendium dating from the second half of the twelfth century, possibly from St. Florian, Austria, which again is perforated by several holes (plate 11). Someone (not the original illustrator, but perhaps a contemporary scribe) has added large erect male genitals in red ink to several of the animals in this bestiary. External organs have been clumsily awarded to both the embracing Hyenas on fo. 67r, a large penis to the one on our right and a vulva to the other; the Wild Ass below also sports a huge erection. Even more than in Morgan MS M.832, there is a potentially pornographic interaction between text, image and the multiple holes on this folio. Not only is nature sex and sex nature but the appearance of each natura is magnified for the reader’s enjoyment.29 Other manuscripts modify the Hyena’s nature so as to include its existence as a tomb-dweller consuming the corpses of dead human beings, and this is overwhelmingly the subject of illustration in later manuscripts.30 An example is the picture of the Hyena on fo. 9v of the Houghton Aviary-bestiary (Houghton Library MS Typ 101), a copy from Paris dating ca. 1230–1250 which combines the Aviarium with a version of the Dicta Chrysostomi bestiary (fig. 9).

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F i g u r e . 8 . The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 832, fo. 4r. Hyena and Wild Ass (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Neither aviary nor bestiary is illustrated but both have spaces left for illustration and are prefaced by a portfolio of model pictures.31 In the middle of this collection, the Hyena is almost bisected by a stitched, vertical tear that calls attention in a particularly graphic manner to its double nature. In a number of manuscripts (including Second-family and Transitional texts), the Hyena

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F i g u r e 9 . Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Typ 101 (“Houghton Bestiary”), fo. 9v. Pattern book illustrations: Hyena and Ape (Aviarium-Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Houghton Library, Harvard University. F i g u r e 1 0 . BnF fr.14969, fo. 30r. Hyena (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

is portrayed as if in the act of ravishing a corpse, its jaws stretched wide and both male and female genitalia plainly legible on its body.32 This necrophiliac hermaphrodite Hyena raises to new levels the affect provoked by orifices, and the odium directed at the Jews. A good deal of library shelf space was occupied by writings arising from the orifices of the Hyena.

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The Beaver Alongside its geminated chapters, like the Siren and Onocentaur, B-Isidore creates affinities between chapters that are adjacent rather than conjoined, such as the Beaver and the Hyena (B-Is §§17–18). Both entries focus on their subjects’ genitals. Excessive in the Hyena, they are erased by the Beaver, the two chapters together seemingly staging a right and a wrong way to escape from sexual difference. The juxtaposition is reminiscent of the fabliau of the “Four Wishes of St. Martin” in which a peasant and his wife misuse the wishes granted them by the saint first to cover their entire bodies with genitalia, then to remove every single one, and finally to return to their original configuration—except that whereas the fabliau endorses the original status quo, B-Isidore seems rather to take the absence of genitals as the ideal. The Beaver is sometimes depicted displaying its castrated body to the huntsman as if to say, “Look, no balls.” In juxtaposing the Hyena and the Beaver, B-Isidore manuscripts transfer to the Beaver some of the affect borne in Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts by the Hyena alone. The Beaver’s option of having male genitalia or no genitalia at all is positively valued, especially beside the sexual ambivalence of the Hyena. The latter’s polymorphous orifices could be seen as contrasting with the “progressive” maturation modeled by the Beaver whose drive passes to the genital area only to be controlled and sublimated.33 Yet however orthodox psychoanalytically, castration is hardly an appealing prospect and the violence of the repression it involves is sometimes graphically conveyed. Early depictions of the Beaver’s mutilation, like that in the early twelfth-century manuscript BL MS Stowe 1067, fo. 2v (fig. 4, top right), show no attempt at realism; the object of castration appears as an abstract, flowerlike shape flying through the air. The same is true of Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 247, fo. 150v (fig. 12), where two ovals representing the Beaver’s testicles bear little resemblance to the real organ. In this case, however, the hole in the parchment just beneath them is real, and only slightly larger than the testicles immediately above it, as if the page itself were the site from which they had been physically severed. Subsequently it becomes more common for the Beaver to be depicted with large, human-looking genitals. Sometimes these are in the Beaver’s mouth as it bites them off, at others thrown through the air toward the huntsman whose desire is set on them alone and who ceases pursuit once he is assured of obtaining them. Readers are thus presented with what look like images of contorted self-fellation, flying male genitalia, or genitalia being caught and handled by the huntsman,34 depictions that are again reminiscent of fabliau

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F i g u r e 1 1 . ONB cod. 1010, fo. 70v. Beaver (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. F i g u r e 1 2 . Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 247, fo. 150v. Beaver (B-Isidore). Photograph: Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

plots and that potentially re-sexualize in non-normative ways the chapter’s ostensible commendation of chastity. A B-Isidore manuscript that represents the Beaver’s testicles with manifest sexual interest is Getty MS Ludwig XV.4, an Aviary-bestiary copied probably in Saint-Omer ca. 1277.35 The Beaver chapter begins with its portrait on fo.

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86r.36 A huntsman with horn and hound is hot on the Beaver’s heels as, with eyes closed and mouth wide open, it ducks its head between its front legs toward its naked, pink penis; the whole creature has been painted a warm flesh color that is only slightly pinker and darker than the hound, the huntsman’s face, and the surrounding parchment. The description of the Beaver’s nature continues on the verso together with the moral; the etymology, in which a scribe anticipating the allegory has turned Castor (beaver) into Pastor (priest), concludes the chapter at the top of fo. 87r, where it is followed by the chapter on the Hyena. The end of the chapter on the Beaver and the start of the one on the Hyena thus face one another on fos. 86v–87r of this copy. In the bottom margin of fo. 86 there are two tears of different sizes, both very visible. On the same page there is a hole on the surface of the parchment halfway down the outer column of the writing block (unfortunately not visible on the recto): tunc < HOLE > demum ex to to corde conversus (then < HOLE > thereafter with his whole heart turned)

This forms part of a sentence from the allegory that translates the Beaver’s throwing away its testicles and resuming its flight into human acts of renouncing the flesh and the devil, and committing oneself to God.37 The hole preserves awareness of this renunciation as a bodily sacrifice and not just a metaphor. These literal apertures in the skin may affect the reader’s reaction to the Hyena on the facing page, but despite the text’s disparagement of its oversexed body its visual portrayal is not sexualized, it is depicted with the same efflorescent tongue as the ones in Stowe 1067 and Laud Misc. 247. Whatever erotic interest or disgust the Hyena may provoke, their effects have been preempted by the Beaver. In Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts the chapter on the Beaver (§16) is quite distant from the Hyena (§6), and so its castration cannot have the same role as it does in B-Isidore of remedying the Hyena’s orifices. It is also not as common in these manuscripts as in B-Isidore ones for the Beaver’s nature to be consonant with the page. An exception is Vienna cod. 1010 in which, as noted earlier, the Hyena is copied on a page perforated by holes. In the Beaver chapter, the scribe seems actually to have compressed the text in comparison to the one edited by Wilhelm so as to arrive at the passage about the Beaver biting off its testicles at exactly the point where there is a large hole in the parchment (fig. 11):

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quia cum inuestigatus fuerit a uenatore . respiciens post se et ui dens uenatorem ; mor su abscidit sibi proiciensque eos in faciem uenato ris aufugit . Venator autem colligens testiculos de sinit ul tra persequi eum. (that when [the Beaver] was pursued by the hunter, looking behind him and see ing the huntsman, with one bi te he cuts them off, and throwing them in the face of the hunts man he flees. The huntsman, gathering the testicles, ceases his pur suit of him.)

The Beaver’s bite, the huntsman’s face, and the impetus behind the huntsman’s pursuit all coincide with this hole in the page in this exceptionally orificeaware manuscript.38 T h e H y e n a a n d t h e B e av e r i n Vernacular Bestiaries The bestiaries’ interest in bodily orifices directs attention to sexual difference, even though such difference is to some extent undone by both the Beaver and the Hyena. It is likely, then, that women readers would receive these chapters rather otherwise than men. Women might be differently interested in the Beaver’s testicles, or feel less directly affected by their mutilation; conversely, they might feel more personally implicated in the Hyena’s opprobrium when its male genitalia are replaced by female ones, a situation permanently experienced by women readers. Whereas Gervaise and Pierre de Beauvais treat the entry concisely, Guillaume le Clerc’s is greatly amplified.39 He credits the Hyena with “two natures” (GC 1599) in terms that brings back to the fore the meaning “genital” of Old French nature, downplayed by Gervaise and Pierre: “It is said that you will find it now male, now female, with both teats (traianz) and breasts (mamele),” adding, “it is astonishing how it can change its garment to such an extent” (GC 1602–4).40 Guillaume does not mince words either in his first allegorical expansion, where he says that the sons of Israel, although formerly loyal, “afterwards became females” (GC 1612, “après femeles devindrent”). It is only in the second development of the allegory that weight is put on the sexual indeterminacy, glossed as duplicitous unreliability, of the Hyena. Copies of this chapter of Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary sometimes fall on damaged leaves.41 The most spectacular example is fo. 30 of BnF Fr. 14969, where a long tear rises up from the middle of the bottom edge of the page

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right through the image, extending into the writing column (fig. 10).42 The passage concerned describes the stone in the Hyena’s eye which, when placed under the tongue, enables a man to divine the future; the tear separates the closing syllables from the rest of all but the shortest of the six affected lines (= GC 1593–98). The image depicts the Hyena in the act of devouring corpses. The bodies are outlined on the parchment, their contours slightly tinted. With one paw, the Hyena is grabbing the breast of a male corpse and making to bite what might be its crotch; the corpse’s head gazes back at it with a horrified expression. On the other side of the tear, the Hyena’s hindquarters are immediately above another dead body, less visible that the first; it is hard to say whether it is male or female and its eyes are closed—were they not, it would be looking straight at the Hyena’s genital area. The passage about the Hyena’s double sexuality appears overleaf, but doubleness and sex are amply insinuated by the way the postures of the figures in this picture combine with the damage on the page. Another striking feature of this configuration is its resemblance to the model picture proposed in the Houghton Aviary-bestiary pattern book, where the Hyena is similarly traversed by a long, vertical tear (see above and fig. 9). Is it possible that the point of the pattern was not only to model the Hyena’s iconography but also to recommend that ideally it should coincide with a damaged leaf? As in Latin B-Isidore manuscripts, the parchment in vernacular bestiaries sometimes materializes the Beaver’s castration more than it does the Hyena’s orifices. There is a cut in the margin next to the chapter on the Beaver in another copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary (BnF fr. 20046, fo. 13, dated 1338); as in the Latin copies, castration extends from representation into reality. The same is true of the Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais as copied in Montpellier, BUM MS H 437, fo. 227v. In both cases, it is as if the page were conspiring with the representations on it not just to record the castration of the beaver but to excite physical anxiety about castration in the reader too. It is hard to imagine her reactions as she is solicited to feel her own skin tear apart—or anyone’s skin for that matter. The Weasel Just as B-Isidore pairs the Beaver with the Hyena, so it associates the Weasel with the Asp, sometimes in one chapter, sometimes in two adjacent ones. Both partnerships are about about sexuality but that of the Weasel and the Asp more patently addresses the proximity between sexual orifices and the external senses and their interconnections. Like the Hyena, the Weasel is a proscribed animal. According to Physio-

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logus, “The weasel has this nature: the female receives the seed of the male in her mouth and, having become pregnant, gives birth through her ears” (P §35). The chapter is not usually found in Dicta Chrysostomi texts but B-Isidore cites Physiologus: “The Weasel receives the male’s semen through her mouth and thus takes it into her womb; when the time of her delivery comes she gives birth through the ears” (B-Is §27).43 The allegory condemns this behavior as representing the inconstancy of believers who willingly take in God’s word but promptly misrepresent or forget it. The wording of texts varies so that sometimes the Weasel conceives through the ears and gives birth through the mouth.44 The fact that both accounts exist suggests the alarmingly interchangeable character of the Weasel’s apertures, which make her excessively porous and penetrable. Like the Hyena she has too many sexual orifices, and they are even more in the wrong places. To evoke again of “The Four Wishes of St. Martin,” the Weasel’s reproductive organs have proliferated from her lower body upward, so that like the peasant’s wife in the fabliau she has vaginas in and around her face. The Asp, by contrast, is too sealed off. Its nature is that it protects itself against the voice of the snake-charmer by pressing one ear against the ground and blocking the other with its tail. “Such are the rich of the world who lay one ear to earthly desires and stop up the other, adding new sins to past ones” (P §35). To the Physiologus account B-Isidore adds, from Isidore, a passage identifying various subspecies of serpent and stressing the virulence of snake venom, “for when an Asp bites a man, it at once annihilates him, causing him to turn entirely to liquid in the snake’s mouth” (B-Is §27).45 The Asp thus opposes the Weasel as carapace to sieve, and its victim as watertight to fluid.46 Like its Hyena and Beaver, B-Isidore’s Weasel and Asp perform complementary anxieties about the pockets and gaps that lurk within the surface of the skin. Whether the apertures that convey the body’s rhythms and desires are open or closed, they seem inevitably to be too open or too closed. Their excess marks the limits of their legibility; their invagination is then recuperated as allegorical meaning. The Weasel and the Asp in the B e s t i a ry o f G u i l l au m e l e C l e r c The treatment of the Weasel by Gervaise and Pierre de Beauvais is quite perfunctory, as it was with the Hyena. The most interesting and expansive of the vernacular bestiaries is Guillaume le Clerc’s. Again, it is uncanny how frequently material imperfections in the parchment heighten the chapter’s impact.47 I shall look here at two copies that are very different in all but this

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respect. One is in contained in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20, a large, resplendent French codex dated in a colophon to 1323 which contains a variety of French religious and didactic works.48 The start of each bestiary chapter is signaled by an enlarged initial and the allegoresis by a much larger historiated initial that extends over seven to eight lines. Allegory is thereby unusually privileged over nature. The decision to miniaturize the creatures within initials, or to enlarge initials so that they can encompass depictions of creatures, is even more unusual. The chapters on the Weasel and the Asp occupy the facing pages 61v–62r of this copy (plates 12 and 13); as I have argued elsewhere, the framing of their animal orifices within its elegant letters captures the movement between bodily aperture and the library described in Anzieu’s short story.49 The manuscript with which I shall compare it is BnF fr. 25408. Made in England, with the bestiary dated 1267, this volume is much smaller in format than Fitzwilliam J 20 and contains some Latin texts alongside religious and didactic works in French. Whereas the parchment of the Fitzwilliam manuscript is creamy and generally flawless, and the whole codex luxurious, the membrane of BnF fr. 25408 is brownish and full of defects. Its text of Guillaume le Clerc is set out with the start of most chapters marked by a colored initial, usually accompanied by a marginal rubric. Its layout is simpler and inconsistent. At first the initials are red and pen-flourished in green; later the colors are the other way round. Divisions within chapters, such as the start of the allegory, are usually indicated by marginal paraphs in black ink touched in with red (line-initial letters are picked out with red in the same way) but sometimes with enlarged colored initials. There are no illustrations, and no decoration other than these indications of textual structure. Unlike the elegant Fitwilliam manuscript, this codex shows frequent traces of use thoughout, presumably by a scholarly reader. Passages are underlined, additions or corrections have been made to the bestiary as if it were being collated with other manuscripts, and sporadic marginal manicula point to passages deemed noteworthy.50 The text concerning the Weasel and Asp is on either side of fo. 91 (figs. 13 and 14), with the Asp continuing onto fo. 92r. These very different manuscripts diverge markedly in their presentation of these creatures. The Weasel and the Asp form separate chapters in the Fitzwilliam manuscript but only one in BnF fr. 25408. Thus while there are no illustrations in BnF fr. 25408 there are two in Fitzwilliam J 20; and although both copies divide the text into similar segments, their divergence in layout means these segments do not have the same status from one copy to another. Because BnF fr. 25408 privileges the beginnings of chapters, it presents the entire sequence as being about the Weasel. By contrast, the highlighting of

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the allegories in Fitzwilliam J 20 draws attention to the the passages expounding the meaning of the Weasel and the meaning of the Asp, and the possible relationship between them. The Weasel’s nature is outlined differently in the two manuscripts, as illustrated in these two transcriptions: DE la belete est grant meruelle [fo. 91r col. a] Quer el effante par lorelle Et parmi la boche receit La semence par quei conceit De malle quant ele la [erasure] proche [col. b] Prent la semence par la boche Qe dedenz son ventre norrist Et parmi lorelle sen ist Ceste petite beste mue

De la belette est grant merveille [fo. 61v col. b] Car ele conchoit par l’oreille Et parmi l’oreille rechoit Le germe par coi on conchoit Dou malle quant ele sapareille Prent la semenche par oreille Que dedens son ventre nourist Et parmi la bouche sen ist Ceste petite beste mue

It is a great marvel regarding the Weasel. For she gives birth through the ear and receives through the mouth the seed by which she conceives. From the male when she approaches him she takes the seed through her mouth which she then feeds in her belly and this tiny dumb creature issues out through her ear.

It is a great marvel regarding the Weasel. For she conceives through the ear and through the ear receives the germ by which one conceives. When she couples with the male she takes in the seed through the ear which she feeds in her belly and this tiny dumb creature issues forth through her mouth.

(BnF fr. 25408, fo. 91r; corresponds with GC 2419–26)

(Fitzwilliam J 20, fo. 61v; corresponds with GC 2419–26)

In BnF fr. 25408, as in the majority of copies, the Weasel conceives through the mouth and gives birth through the ear. This draws attention to the Weasel’s appetite, the reference to her swallowing the male’s semen specifically evoking fellation. But in Fitzwilliam J 20 the Weasel conceives through the ear and gives birth through the mouth, a formulation which instead makes her a parody of the Virgin birth since Mary was believed to have been inseminated by the Holy Spirit through her ear.51 BnF fr. 25408 is thus from the outset more captivated by the Weasel’s physical behavior, whereas Fitzwilliam J 20 is already looking toward its spiritual meaning. Having the Weasel conceive via the ear also intensifies the parallel between her nature, receptive but unretentive, and the resolutely deaf Asp. The Asp’s

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F i g u r e 1 3 . BnF fr. 25408, fo. 91r. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

refusal to listen is the subject of elaboration in the text of Guillaume’s bestiary, which adds to the short presentation of Physiologus a lengthy anecdote about a repentant entrepreneur-turned-sage who listens to God’s word, unlike the Asp, and then acts upon it, unlike the Weasel, gathering together his gold and hurling it into a crevasse.52 The illustration in the initial that opens the moral in Fitzwilliam J 20 juxtaposes this act with the Asp sealing its ears; the image lies opposite the one on the facing page which represents the Weasel’s

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F i g u r e 1 4 . BnF fr. 25408, fo. 91v. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

incontinent conception through her ear. Like the elaboration of the text, the development from one picture to another reforms the topology of the orifice. The gold that is thrown away is not something precious that goes to waste; on the contrary what underwrites the repentant man’s sagacity is his ability to make the burden which weighed on him simply evaporate away. The profondeces into which his fortune is cast, the only reference to “depths” in the text in these chapters, does not designate somewhere more profound but

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a “no place,” a dissipation into thin air that is a blessed escape from the always excessive orifices of the body because it is totally unlike them. The gendering of this sequence in Guillaume le Clerc’s text, in which the Weasel is female, the Asp is referred to in the feminine, and the figure who solves the problem of the orifice is a wise man, is consistent with what was observed about the Beaver-Hyena partnership: in both, perverse, dysfunctional, and generally negatively valued female orifices are countered by an act of male sacrifice. That this progression should be more marked in Fitzwilliam J 20 than in BnF fr. 25408 suggests that a more publicly acceptable version of the anthropological machine is displayed in the prestige volume whereas the copy in more restricted, personal use is less bent on countering the fantasies licensed by the Weasel. The same material on fo. 91v of BnF fr. 25408 does not work toward reform in the same way as in Fitzwilliam J 20. Given that the Weasel’s sexuality is first associated with her mouth, the Asp’s deafness is not such an obvious reply to it. And although the rich man’s plotline is identical in both manuscripts, the memory with which it leaves the reader of BnF fr. 25408 is not of the shower of gold that countermands the Asp’s shortcomings in Fitzwilliam J 20, but of the extensive damage at the edge of the column that accompanies a slew of erasures and corrections in the surrounding text. Already on the recto this long hole falls right below the passage transcribed above about the Weasel’s reproduction, as if the hole in the page were the literal manifestation of her problematic orifices; it intrudes into the immediately following lines which describe the Weasel moving its offspring from place to place. On the verso, the same tear disrupts the passage in which the narrator reflects on the harmful nature of wealth: Richeces sunt de male part Que a grant dolor [underlined] traual [written above] sunt conquises Et puis a grant poor porsisses [line squeezed in as an afterthought] Et a grant dolor deguerpies (fr. 25408 fo. 91v col. b; corresponds with GC 2486–2489) Riches are evil for they are won with great pain [underlined] labor [written above], and then held with great fear and abandoned with great pain

Pain, anxiety, and suffering are inscribed in a page that appears sutured to the problematic orifices of the beasts described upon it, contaminated as they are inter urinam et faeces. Fos. 61v–62r of Fitzwilliam J 20 also respond equivocally, however, to Anzieu’s question, “will this library accept me?” On the bottom left of fo. 61v, under the chapter on the Weasel, is a large scar, probably the result of some

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injury that the animal, whose skin this was, suffered in the course of its life (plate 12). On the bottom right of fo. 62r, under the chapter on the Asp, there is a large tear that has been stitched up and is more likely the result of damage that the skin sustained after the animal’s death as it was processed into parchment (plate 13). These two flaws in these otherwise exquisite pages are a mute but uncanny reminder of the anxieties of the two chapters it contains, the excrescence of the scar corresponding to the “too closed” of the Asp and the stitching of the slit evoking the “too open” of the Weasel. Unlike in BnF fr. 25408, where the damage obtruding on the writing block is unmissable, a reading focused on the text of Fitzwilliam J 20 might not notice the scar and stitched hole in its margins, but once these flaws have been registered they make the skin of the page more visible as such: more noticeable both as surface and as skin. The scar in the Fitzwilliam manuscript and the tears and stitching in both recall human scars or stitched wounds and reinforce readers’ awareness that human sexual and sensory orifices are just like those of the animals depicted on these pages. Not, of course, that the human animal conceives through the ears and gives birth through the mouth (or vice versa) or sticks its tails in its ear any more than we now think Weasels and Asps do. But the concern with bodily apertures in these chapters evokes human worry about having a body that is excessively leaky or permeable—or else too closed up and impermeable; Anzieu’s case histories contain clinical examples of both kinds, and so, in fictional form, do his Contes à rebours.53 The accumulation of tissue over an aperture in the scar, and the stitching of an aperture in the case of tears, draw attention to the way human bodies experience vulnerability (like the Asp’s) and porosity in the face of desire (like the Weasel’s). Representing them as spiritual failings, and promulgating allegorical interpretations whereby they can then be “corrected,” exacerbates as much as it allays the affects which these apertures excite. Conclusion In a concluding sermon, Guillaume le Clerc asks his readers to remember the beautiful allegories of the bestiary as a means of forgetting the awful manner of their birth. “Good people,” he says, “. . . look how man is deceived, look how he is conceived, look how he is enveloped [in the womb] (envolupez), look in (or into) what pain he is born” (GC 3603, 3613–16).54 The “envelopment” to which Guillaume refers, situated between conception and the moment of birth, and the passage from it to the wonders of his book, can be likened to what Anzieu’s conte describes as an exchange between the vagina

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and the library, in which the envelope of words reproduces the envelope of the mother’s body. Exploring this exchange, this chapter has built on Chasseguet-Smirgel’s observation that for Freud “becoming human consists in endlessly seeking to overcome our animality.” The patients whose case studies the French psychoanalyst presents attest the extent to which failures in this onward progress toward the human can be experienced as debilitating. Read normatively, a psychoanalytical account of the progress of the drives gives rise to a form of anthropological machine which favors the emergence of a clean and proper human self from a body perforated by apertures shared with other animals. The bestiaries, especially the early redactions like Dicta Chrysostomi and B-Isidore, are very clear that human embodiment as such is animal, and fairly clear too that if this causes anxiety, it potentially also releases enjoyment. When they exhort their readers to repress the polymorphous animal body and choose instead the path of “castration,” bestiary allegories show how what Freud postulates as a maturation process involving successive repressions can be translated into moral denunciation of orifices and admonishments to turn from them to spiritual truths. But bestiarists do not forget that orifices continue to excite desires, even ones that psychoanalysis would be inclined to call regressive. The chapters on the Hyena and the Weasel in the early bestiaries court such desires, at the same time as they condemn them, allegorize them, and counter them with examples such as the Beaver and Asp whose apertures are less eroticized, and therefore less animal—more “human.” The movement from orifice to moralization exposes the ideological character of the anthropological machine. Equally, it expands what Derrida calls invagination—the exchange of meaning between inside and outside so that both terms are destabilized—by showing how this movement is also one between human and animal. Invagination finds a material correlate in the pages of these books in whose physical makeup there linger traces of animality, and particularly of animal orifices around which the text circulates. Lastly, the movement from orifice to moralization illustrates the dream described in Anzieu’s short story of a vagina that is also a library. Just as bestiaries claim to help their readers escape their animal body, so the page reminds them of it, and plunges them once more back into it—or at least into an animal skin. The text translates animal apertures into teaching, which is then copied into books, whose very pages confront the reader with human-looking apertures in their animal surface and the alarming or exciting animal identity which they found.

4

Cutting the Skin: Sacrifice, Sovereignty, and the Space of Exception

In my last chapter I argued that the moral value of a body and the meaning of a text are both construed in relation to the orifices in the surface of a skin, which itself is more visible as skin as a result of their hidden recesses. In this chapter, too, skin—whether as a body’s outline or as a support of writing— will be seen to appear and to mean in relation to the extent to which it may be pierced. “The skin (cutis) is that which is uppermost in the body, so called, because in covering the body it is the first to suffer from an incision, for in Greek κυτίς means ‘incision’” (Etymologies, XI.1.78–79, 236). Skin’s essence is to be vulnerable and to expose to injury the body which it covers. The scrapes, cuts, and tears in manuscript folios are what make apparent their essence as skin.1 No one can say of a parchment book that “no animals were harmed” in its making but bestiaries offer a purchase on the kind of harm involved and what it means for how relations between humans and other animals are understood. Initially bestiaries do not cast this relationship in a violent light. Other creatures are presented as models for human readers and a means of rejoining the paradise they have lost. Although Physiologus mentions hunters in a few of its chapters the only creature that sheds blood is the Pelican whose wounds, representing the sacrifice of the Cross, are self-inflicted. As the genre develops, however, two waves of interspecies conflict irrupt in rapid succession, at odds with this self-immolation. The first, which reaches its peak in the Second-family redaction, involves humans killing other animals, often gorily. The second represents other animals committing acts of aggression against humans and seems to arise in response to the first since it is most common in Second-family texts.2 An image which captures this state of mutual antagonism between humans and other species is the Crocodile on BnF lat. 3630, fo.

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80r (plate 16).3 Illustrating a chapter newly introduced by the Second family, it depicts the Crocodile swallowing a man but as itself also a victim of human violence since it has a large knife implanted in its back. How the knife got there the text does not say; a last glimpse of the man’s hand as he disappears down the Crocodile’s throat may be the only clue. Readers of bestiaries were likely to assign very different value to men injuring animals and to animals injuring men. In the later Middle Ages an animal that killed a person could be put on trial for murder, whereas a person who killed another animal would suffer legal reprisal only for damaging another person’s property.4 By suggesting that the Crocodile’s attack on the man was in retaliation for his attack on it, the image in BnF lat. 3630 implies a willingness at least to unsettle this assumption, on the part of humans, that they are entitled to kill other animals when their interests are at stake whereas animals have no corresponding right to kill them. Karl Steel has argued that maintaining the right to kill other creatures was a factor in sustaining medieval humans’ belief in superiority over them, since it was difficult to justify that superiority by any other means.5 The ideology of dominion is sustained only in its own practical exercise, or in Steel’s words “the human requires a continual reenactment of subjugation to attempt a stabilization it can never attain.”6 Humans might even entertain the idea that some animals are very similar to themselves and thus a threat to their exceptional status, since this could trigger violence against them and the accompanying reassurance that dominance that can be performed in act is therefore founded in fact. Steel’s argument illumines bestiarists’ treatment of the Ape which is singled out for attack precisely, it would seem, because of its likeness to humans (see below). It has been further suggested by Peggy McCracken that human domination in medieval culture consists in the right to take not just another animal’s life but its skin. Humans’ material uses for animal pelts vary pragmatically but are united in possessing symbolic importance. Wearing clothes and writing, for example, are not just practices that humans happen to pursue; they are also cited as examples of human superiority over creatures that do not wear garments or communicate by means of written signs, so that in the Chevalier au Papegau, for example, the skin of an animallike predator, the Fish Knight, is used symbolically to map the territory won from him.7 Bestiaries, especially prestigious illustrated ones, could be seen as one of the high points of this lethal practice of appropriation. Artifacts made from the skins of other animals, they are also vehicles of symbolic capital ranging from instruction in Christian piety to assertions of social privilege. The term “sacrifice” is often used to designate the way humans kill other

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creatures: they are said to be “sacrificed” to human concerns. The anthropocentrism of sacrificing another creature for the sake of the human involves a degree of anthropomorphism. When a ram is found for Abraham to kill in lieu of Isaac, the transfer of value is one-directional; it elevates the beast, it does not bestialize the boy. In a repeated trope of Christian typology, a lamb stands in for a firstborn and then becomes a figure for Christ.8 As a practice of exchange, then, sacrifice has an inevitable impetus toward metaphor, and this affects how readers respond to parchment books. Texts involving humans sacrificing their skin can lead to the pages on which they are copied being read as metaphorical expressions of that same, human skin. A recent example is Nancy Vine Durling’s reading of the passion lyrics on fos. 76–81 of BL MS Harley 2253. Correspondences between the poem’s evocation of Christ’s wounds and the five large holes in the pages on which they are transcribed lead her to infer that “the holes in the parchment have been exploited in order to focus the reader’s attention even more intensely on Christ’s wound as she or he reads the various poems,” and more concretely that the parchment is “a skin that has been exploited by the scribe as a kind of analogue to Christ’s own wounded body.”9 Durling’s analysis attests the metaphorical and anthropomorphizing power of sacrifice which enables her to override or disregard species difference and view the parchment skin as in some sense “human.”10 Sacrifice is an ideological use of violence that many theorists have challenged, but which is difficult to relinquish entirely. When Derrida enjoins humans to desist from killing animals his call to “sacrifice the sacrifice” both resists and reaffirms its lure.11 Affective and religious connotations continue to freight the use of the term in critical animal studies even if their valuation is reversed. Proponents of animal rights see the killing of animals not as evidence of human superiority but as an abomination, and often compare it with the Holocaust.12 It is shocking to evoke in the same breath the use of skins for making codices and their use for making lampshades, but part of the shock results from the fact that while for some the comparison is offensively inappropriate, for others it is all too justifiable. Taking a stand outside the sacrificial circle and limiting the metaphorical reach of its substitutions, Agamben volunteers the concept of “bare life” (nuda vida).13 His book Homo Sacer is so called because Agamben identifies the first historical attestation of bare life as the homo sacer (“sacred man”) of early Roman law, whose life is considered so bereft of value that it can be taken without fear of punishment but “cannot be sacrificed.”14 The homo sacer is thus outside both human and divine law, subject neither to the regulations governing homicide, nor to those prescribing ritual killing.15 His status as an

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exception makes him the mirror and equivalent of the sovereign who is similarly placed outside (though above) the law: At the two extreme limits of the political order, “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereign.”16 For Agamben in Homo Sacer this correlation is the root of political life, which consists in the exercise of sovereign decision over bare life, and which thereby depends on the inclusion of that which it professes to exclude.17 Agamben adopts the term “state of exception” (stato di eccezione) to refer to this simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of life in law, in which the boundary between them becomes impossible to draw.18 The sacred man of Homo Sacer is a sub-political human and Agamben’s starting point for describing his status is Aristotle’s well-known opposition, in the Politics, between the “political animal” and those other animals that fall outside the political and are thereby bestialized.19 The latter may have a voice that can express pleasure and pain, but they do not have a vote because they cannot formulate values in language or contribute to an order that possesses any degree of transcendence.20 The argument of Homo Sacer thus paves the way for Agamben’s subsequent thinking in The Open about the relation between “humanity” and “animality” which, Agamben argues, operates via an analogous process of inclusion and exclusion since animality is included within the human as well as being excluded from it.21 This zone of ambiguity constitutes what, in The Open, Agamben calls a mobile “space of exception” (spazio di eccezione) where the precariousness of attempts at separation can be read.22 Like the “state of exception” of Homo Sacer, this “space of exception” is an indeterminate threshold; the arbitrary decisions that seek to define it are the foundation of political life since “in our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man.”23 Animality, then, is an instance of bare life: as bare life, the “animal” is barred from the polis, its life is defended by neither secular nor religious law, it cannot be murdered and—crucially for my purposes—it cannot be sacrificed. Whereas sacrifice is an exchange that insinuates a metaphorical approximation between what is killed and who it is killed for, the concept of bare life instead insists that deciding what can be killed, and whose interests are entitled to be served by doing so, is a matter of sovereign decision. To paraphrase in the language of The Open the sentence I quoted earlier from Homo Sacer, “human sovereignty is that with respect to which life is potentially animal, and animality is that with respect to which the human assumes sovereignty.”24 Sovereignty was an especially moot point in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, as local laws were weighed against Roman or written law and the

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status of local princes or kings assessed against its maxim that “the prince is loosed from the laws.”25 The bestiary Lion may come to represent sovereignty in this contemporary sense, as we shall see below. How animals are thought of as dying—as sacrificial victims or as the result of a sovereign decision—will influence not only the exchanges of lethal violence represented on the pages of bestiaries, but also the status of the pages themselves. Parchment’s ambiguous appearance between human and animal is illumined differently by sacrifice, which moves arbitrarily to install the animal within the realm of human concern, than it is by sovereign decision, which installs an arbitrary separation between the agent of violence and its object. But although they take opposite directions, both sacrifice and the slaughter of bare life may disclose the extent to which they are arbitrary, whether because metaphorical identifications fail to convince, or because categorical separations fail to satisfy. Either outcome opens up a space of exception between the terms “human” and “animal” on which they rely and which the parchment, insofar as it appears undecidably one or the other, mutely occupies. Authors, book designers, scribes, artists, and readers all contribute to shaping the oscillations of overlap and separation between human and animal which constitute each page as an ambiguous space. Like the previous chapter this one will proceed roughly chronologically, reflecting on how bestiaries present other animals as the benefactors, quarry, and assailants of humans. I shall end with some observations on the evolution of the chapter on the Lion in which all three themes are introduced, confronting readers at the very beginning of a bestiary with the options of sacrifice and sovereignty, and their interaction with the page. Beasts as Benefactors: The Self-Sacrificing Pelican Physiologus presents some animals as serving human interests to such an extent that they do not need to be sacrificed: they willingly immolate themselves on behalf of their human readers. One example is the Beaver, whose act of self-castration is variously represented in graphic illustrations or realized in cuts or holes in the page (see chapter 3); here I will focus on the Pelican. Provoked beyond endurance by the aggression of its offspring, the Pelican attacks and kills them, but then sheds its own blood in order to bring them back to life (P §6). Subsequent texts vary as to whether the initial conflict involves one or both parents, and whether the blood sacrifice is performed by the mother or father bird. This lightning-fast allegory of the creation and fall of man, the crucifixion, and the redemption, occupies significant positions in the two earliest bestiar-

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ies: the Pelican is §20 in the Dicta Chrysostomi, where as an image of Christ it opens the bird section, and §6 in B-Isidore where it is second in a group of birds introduced by the similarly Christological Caladrius. Among vernacular texts, the entry retains the same position as in B-Isidore in its French adaptations by Guillaume le Clerc and Pierre de Beauvais while Gervaise approximates to the order of Dicta Chrysostomi.26 Only in the Second-family redaction does the Pelican (SF §68) lose its prominence, adrift in the middle of the long birds section.27 Its devotional importance is restored in the H bestiary that retains only two bird chapters, both Christological: the Pelican (H §27) and Caladrius (H §31). Accordingly the manuscripts which best perform the Pelican’s tearing open its breast are the same as those that register the self-mutilation of the Beaver: some copies of B-Isidore and Dicta Chrysostomi, the vernacular texts derived from them, and the H bestiary. As with the Beaver, sometimes the Pelican’s wounds are represented in illustrations and sometimes realized in the physical state of the pages.28 An example of the former is the copy of Pierre de Beauvais in BnF n.a.f. 13521, the important late thirteenth-century La Clayette manuscript which transmits this author’s corpus, where the illumination of this chapter on fo. 23r shows the chicks at the moment of their resuscitation (fig. 15). Cradled in a nest, their six white heads crane up to receive the dark red blood welling up from the wound which a dark blue parent bird (here the father) has made in its breast. The curve of the parent bird’s body forms a discontinuous circle with the semicircular nest below so that the blood is framed at the heart of an improvised roundel. There is an echoing curved scar in the margin beside this image but no actual puncturing of the page. Damaged leaves shadow the Pelican’s self-mutilation in a number of Latin

F i g u r e 1 5 . BnF n.a.f. 13521 (“La Clayette”), fo. 23r. Pelican (Pierre de Beauvais). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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manuscripts,29 but the most spectacular instances fall in vernacular ones like those of Guillaume le Clerc30 and the Long Version of Pierre de Beauvais. In an order found nowhere else, the latter inserts a chapter on the Viper between the Caladrius and the Pelican so that the Pelican’s rupturing its skin appears a virtuous riposte to the sexual splitting open of the Viper. It also places shortly after the Pelican its own idiosyncratic chapter on the Woutre (§10), a creature (elsewhere a Serpent—see chapter 2) that is afraid of a naked man but attacks a man wearing clothes. The result is that the Long Version has an exceptional focus on skin in and around the chapter on the Pelican. The copy in BnF Arsenal 3516 contains on fo. 200r an illustration configured like that in the Clayette manuscript, again with the flow of blood framed in the near circle described by the parent and the nest; but now the piercing of the Pelican’s skin is accentuated by a small hole in the column above it, the punctured Viper on the facing page, and the Woutre in flight from a naked man on the verso.31 In the even more physically compelling Montpellier, BUM MS H 437, the Viper appears on one side of fo. 200 and the Pelican on the other, the whole page being traversed by an enormous stitched tear (cf. fig. 6). The skin of the page coincides with both these instances of skin that is cut, as though the tear itself were sexual and guilty on the recto but sacrificial and redemptive on the verso.32 First written in Alexandria, Physiologus must initially have been conceived for transmission on papyrus and if a connection were to be made between the Pelican and the page, it would most likely have lain in the association of bloodshed with writing. But by the mid-thirteenth century when the Long Version was composed, writing was also intimately associated with skin. The Pelican’s self-mutilation enacts a religious truth on behalf of human readers; its metaphorical meaning as Christ brings the animal and the human closer together; and the vulnerability of the skin they both share is actualized on a parchment page in a way the late antique author of Physiologus could never have anticipated. Beasts as Quarry: The Unicorn and the Ape The limits of this benign view of relations between humans and other animals are found from the very first chapter of the early bestiaries with the reiteration of Physiologus’s references to human hunting. The Lion effaces its tracks so as not to fall prey to a huntsman; another hunter pursues the Unicorn, though it can only be caught by a virgin. The Antelope is less lucky. Its horns become entangled in bushes so that “the hunter hearing its voice comes and kills it.”33 But hunting is not a major threat in these early texts. Neither the Lion nor the

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Unicorn can be caught since both represent the mystery of the incarnation; both are left unharmed; the man who tracks the Beaver achieves his goal, but only because his prey voluntarily gives up what the hunter meant to take by force. In fact the only huntsman reported as killing his quarry, the Antelope (B-Is §2, DC §9), is glossed as the devil; the Merton College manuscript of Philippe de Thaon in fig. 3 graphically illustrates the Antelope’s death at his hands.34 A major change comes with the Second-family Latin redaction, of all Latin versions the one which most elevates human hunting to a systematic rather than an occasional behavior. A typical Second-family text mentions hunting in chapters 1 (man hunts Lion), 2 (man hunts Tiger), 5 (man hunts Antelope), 6 (man hunts Unicorn), 9 (man hunts Elephant), 10 (man hunts Beaver), 13 (the Bonnacon is attacked—it is not specified by whom), 14 (man hunts Ape), 16 (man hunts Stag), 17 (man hunts Wild Goat), 18 (Roe deer is wounded—how is not specified), and 19 (man hunts Unicorn—again).35 The exotic character of these hunted animals makes this opening section of the bestiary like a fantasy of African safari avant la lettre. Another Second-family innovation concerns not the text but the conventions of its illustration, as ever more humans are introduced alongside the creatures featuring in the text36—“alongside” here typically meaning “in lethal pursuit of.” Turning the pages of a Second-family manuscript reveals image after image of men trying to kill the very creatures that are supposedly there to improve them. Of the chapters in which hunting is a motif in the text, huntsmen are regularly depicted in the illustrations accompanying the Lion, Tiger, Antelope, Unicorn, Beaver, Bonnacon, Ape, Stag, and Wild Goat. Chapters in which hunting is not mentioned in the textual content—like those on the Ibex and the Boar—are also often illustrated by hunting scenes. In many cases where the text is explicit that the huntsmen do not catch, or do not kill, their quarry, illustrators ignore it and depict them running the unfortunate creatures through regardless. Second-family bestiaries standardly depict the Unicorn being gored by a man or even by several, even though the text continues to repeat from Physiologus that the creature cannot be caught by a hunter but only in a virgin’s embrace.37 In BL MS Harley 4751, fo. 6v, the girl protectively embraces a fearful-looking Unicorn who is being assailed by a group of three men armed respectively with a spear, a sword, and an axe; both the spear and the sword have penetrated the Unicorn’s skin and streams of blood issue from both wounds.38 In the related Bodleian MS Bodley 764, fo. 10v, the same scenario has two of the three men armed with spears and the third with a longbow; both spears are sticking into the Unicorn causing wounds that run with gore.39 The difficulty of reconciling these depictions

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with the text’s identification of the Unicorn as the incarnation seems not the least to have detracted from the artists’ enthusiasm for the kill. On the contrary, the increased human presence provides new points of identification for the reader who shifts from recipient of instruction to practitioner of blood sports. Hunting scenes often involve such a wide array of weaponry, and sometimes armor too, that hunting appears as a form of warfare, or at least the huntsmen look like knights temporarily vacationing from battle. Like warriors, huntsmen operate in well-organized bands that stand in contrast with the absence of social order ascribed to bestiary creatures. A particularly bizarre example is BL MS Royal 12.F.XIII, fo. 10v, where the hunter of the Unicorn is incongruously clad in chain mail from head to toe and sporting a round shield, his overdressed state contrasting with the maiden who is just as incongruously naked.40 The text speaks of incarnation but its illustration edges nastily toward military rape. Secular aristocratic patronage may be responsible for this focus on armed aggression. Bodleian MS Bodley 764 was likely produced in the midthirteenth century for a baronial family of the Welsh Marches, possibly the Monhauts, Lords of Mold in Flintshire;41 the identification is based on the shields borne by warriors being conveyed to battle in a tower on the Elephant’s back (fo. 12r). This warlike representation of the Elephant with howdah, which is first introduced in the Second-family redaction and contrasts absolutely with earlier depictions of it giving birth in paradise,42 typifies the taste for violent pursuits attested throughout both this manuscript and its likely model, BL MS Harley 4751.43 Hunting scenes are similarly prominent in the manuscripts of several vernacular bestiaries that probably likewise had secular aristocratic readers, and in which Beavers are unnecessarily stabbed and Unicorns exultantly run through.44 As artists incorporate more color, the wounds inflicted on animals get increasingly bloody. The red paint issuing from the hides of hunted animals is a reminder of the red blood spilt when the animal that furnished that page was itself slaughtered, and coincides with the red pen lines of its décor and ordinatio, as if the time when the reader encounters the parchment were folded back to touch again the time of its production, and as if the reader’s role was conjoined with those of butcher, parchmenter, and rubricator. The sense of a relationship between the history and prehistory of the page and what is depicted on it is especially close in the case of pale-skinned animals, such as the Unicorn, which are often either not painted at all, or given a light wash in the same hue as the parchment. In BL MS Sloane 3544, fo. 4r, the Unicorn is outlined on a colored ground and left unpainted except for a light wash and the red blood flowing from the wound where the huntsman’s spear has

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F i g u r e 1 6 . British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 4r. Unicorn (Second family). Photograph: © The British Library Board.

pierced its side (fig. 16). The faces, arms, and legs of the huntsman and virgin are also unpainted, the bare parchment also rendering their bare skin. Both this human skin and that of the Unicorn are visibly the same as the skin of the page; the parchment is flecked with the same very pronounced hair follicles as are found in the bottom margin. The vulnerability of shared skin is especially perceptible in Oxford, St. John’s College, MS 178, an English miscellany of ca. 1300 that compiles a Second-family bestiary with various school and scientific texts,45 where the Unicorn appears on a leaf marked with two large scars (fo. 159v, plate 14). The Unicorn has areas of light gray, but its shades tone with those of the parchment. The skin of the hunter and virgin resembles that of the animal they have captured, their hands and faces bare or lightly washed. The Unicorn occupies an irregularly shaped frame, its background the same bright red as the gush of blood from its wound and as the ink which picks out initial letters in the surrounding text, so that both the picture of the Unicorn and the name Vnicornis just above it are streaked with scarlet. The word Vnicornis, in turn, begins a sentence lifted from Isidore reporting that “the unicorn often fights with elephants and casts them down wounded in the stomach.”46 Although its final words vulneratum prosternit refer to the elephant, they are placed immediately over the wound in the side of the Unicorn that has itself been laid low. Unusually as regards this copy, this image follows the text of its chapter rather than prefacing it. The fact of coming after the allegory increases the sacrificial quality of the Unicorn’s death. Its evident contentment in the virgin’s lap prefigures Christ’s willingness to undergo the passion, the ultimate

P l a t e 1 . Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 247, fo. 147r. Siren and Onocentaur (B-Isidore). Photograph: Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

P l a t e 2 . British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 15r. Adam naming the animals (Second family). Photograph: © The British Library Board.

P l a t e 3 . British Library MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), fo. 3r. Panther and the other animals; Dragons hiding underground (Second family). Photograph: © The British Library Board.

P l a t e 4 . J. Paul Getty Museum MS 100 (“Northumberland Bestiary”), fo. 5v. Adam naming the animals (Transitional). Photograph: Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

P l a t e 5 . J. Paul Getty Museum MS 100 (“Northumberland Bestiary”), fo. 3v. Creation of humans and animals (Transitional). Photograph: Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

P l a t e 6 . BnF lat. 3630, fo. 94v. Segment on snakes (Second family). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

P l a t e 7. BnF lat. 3630, fo. 95r. Segment on snakes, continued (Second family). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

P l a t e 8 . Corpus Christi College MS 53 (“Peterborough Bestiary”), fo. 206v. Segment on snakes (Second family). Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

P l a t e 9 . Corpus Christi College MS 53 (“Peterborough Bestiary”), fo. 207r. Segment on snakes, continued (Second family). Reproduced with permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

P l a t e 1 0 . The Royal Library of Denmark Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8º, fo. 21r. Hydrus and Crocodile (Philippe de Thaon). Photograph: Courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

P l a t e 1 1 . ONB cod. 1010, fo. 67r. Hyena and Wild Ass (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

P l a t e 1 2 . Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20, fo. 61v. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

P l a t e 1 3 . Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20, fo. 62r. Weasel and Asp (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

P l a t e 1 4 . St. John’s College MS 178, fo. 159v. Unicorn and Lynx (Second family). Reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of St. John’s College, Oxford. Photograph: Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

P l a t e 1 5 . National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I, fo. 20v. Ape (Transitional). Photograph: Courtesy of the National Library of Russia, St.Petersburg.

P l a t e 1 6 . BnF lat. 3630, fo. 80r. Crocodile (Second family). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

P l a t e 1 7. BnF fr. 15213, fo. 83v. Crocodile eating the lover (Bestiaire d’amours). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

P l a t e 1 8 . BnF lat. 2495B, fo. 29v. Lion (H bestiary). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

P l a t e 1 9 . The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 81, fo. 35r. Tiger and mirror (Transitional). Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1902. Photograph: Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. P l a t e 2 0 . St. John’s College MS 61, fo. 5v. Tiger and mirror (Second family). Reproduced by permission of the President and Fellows of St. John’s College, Oxford. Photograph: Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

P l a t e 2 1 . BnF Arsenal 3516, fo. 200r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France. P l a t e 2 2 . Private Collection, Virginia. Ex-Phillipps 6739, fo. 10r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Reproduced by kind permission of the owner. P l a t e 2 3 . Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire BU Section Médicine, MS H 437, fo. 207r. Harpy (Long Version of the Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). Photograph: Courtesy of BIU Montpellier /IRHT (CNRS).

P l a t e 2 4 . Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 104v. Microcosm (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

P l a t e 2 5 . Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 105r. Macrocosm (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

P l a t e 2 6 . Sidney Sussex College MS 100, fo. 33v. Elephants (Aviarium-H bestiary). Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

P l a t e 2 7. Sidney Sussex College MS 100, fo. 34r. Elephants, continued (Aviarium-H bestiary). Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

P l a t e 2 8 . Aberdeen University Library MS 24 (“Aberdeen Bestiary”), fo. 34r. Woman with doves (Second family). Photograph: © Aberdeen University Library. Reproduced by permission.

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consequence of his incarnation, while the composition of the image projects the virgin forward in time to the mater dolorosa of the deposition. The sacrificial nature of the Unicorn’s death emerges more clearly when compared with depictions of the hunted Ape. The earlier iconography of an Ape alone, or of the various types of Ape described in the text, tends to give way, in Transitional and Second-family bestiaries, to depictions of the hunter closing in on the female Ape. The Second-family chapter text begins by saying the Ape is so-called because of its apparent similarity with human reason and then recounts the lore involving her twins. The mother Ape is often shown with the favored child clutched in her arms, the other clinging to her back, with the hunter—who typically resembles her in height and even in facial features—in hot pursuit.47 Elsewhere the huntsman’s arrow transfixes a still upright Ape, as in BnF lat. 3630, fo. 78r, where the female Ape is shown pierced by a hunter’s arrow while she is still upright, before dropping either of her children. She has a sprinkling of hairs that only slightly intensifies the dappling of hair follicles on the manuscript page; the hunter’s face and hands are also bare. With blood running from her wound she turns to look at him, but he is unmoved by her stare. Another disturbing image is that transmitted in the St. Petersburg Bestiary (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I, fo. 20v; plate 15).48 This Transitional copy has the B-Isidore form of the chapter, which more thoroughly vilifies the Ape as resembling the devil rather than the human; her similarity to humans is cited only to be repudiated (“it is false,” falsum est, says the text on fo. 21v). This version does not include the story of the mother Ape so the hunter’s attack represented in the illustration is left without any explanation except for this unsettling and disavowed resemblance. Moreover, the Ape clearly looks similar to her assailant, since she is the same size as him, with humanlike proportions, and skin- (or at least parchment-) colored. Lacking the garments sported by the huntsman, or the dark fur of her more clearly animallike children, she appears quite literally as a bare life somewhere between the two. Whereas the fable narrative punishes the Ape for her diabolical nature with the loss of the child she loves, this manuscript depicts her bare life, such as it is, being assaulted before the reader’s eyes. The possibility, denied by the text, of her resembling the human is first given credence in the image and then stamped on; she is attacked while standing upright so as to maximize this potential similarity at the very moment of its repudiation.49 These examples illustrate compellingly how the threat of other animals’ similarity to humans is exploited in order forcibly to assert human dominance over them.50 The Ape apes humans, and attacking or killing it has the de facto

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effect of falsifying its claim to resemblance. These images, in other words, can be seen as rendering not the sacrifice of the Ape but a sovereign decision on the part of a human to stigmatize the life of a fellow creature as a bare life which cannot be sacrificed but should be extinguished with impunity. Beasts as Threat: The Crocodile As if in riposte to those injuries, these same manuscripts witness a surge of aggression from other creatures against humans. The early bestiaries do not represent animals as antagonists, though their actions may result in poisoning or drowning humans, as in the B-Isidore entries on the Asp, the Siren, or the Great Fish,51 and a few creatures like the Ibis or Hyena may eat the bodies of humans who are already dead. The Hyena’s victims are sometimes shrouded, but in general dead men are depicted naked.52 Although they may not have died from having their skin cut by animals, their skin is displayed as skin when exposed post mortem to animal attack. Animal violence against living humans is a major change for which the Second-family redactor is responsible. His version typically begins by identifying the Lion as “strongest of the beasts” (Proverbs 30:30), instantly transitioning to Isidore’s definition of bestiae that in B-Isidore was buried at the end of the chapter:53 The terms “beasts” is proper for lions, pards, and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and apes, and so on, that threaten with either mouth or claws, except for serpents. Further, they are called beasts from the power of their ferocity.54 (SF §1)

In its context in the Etymologies this passage introduces dangerous carnivorous quadrupeds as just one of many subsets of nonhuman animals. Bestiae are opposed not only to domestic animals (pecus), but also to small animals, crawling animals (reptiles), other wild quadrupeds that are not under human control, birds, and so on. However, since in bestiaries the definition is placed at the beginning of a book henceforth identified as a liber bestiarum, all the creatures that follow are to some extent assimilated into the category of “beasts.”55 By the same token, the capacity of animals to threaten humans is generalized beyond bestiae as Isidore conceived them since not only carnivores but some serpents, birds, and fish can be represented as dangerous in text or image or both. A sense of menace spreads from this point on through other Secondfamily additions. References to men hunting other animals are met with descriptions of animals that harm, kill, and eat other creatures, including humans. The new short chapter on the Pard says that it “lust[s] for blood,

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for with a leap it dashes to the kill” (SF §3, “praeceps ad sanguinem, saltu enim ad mortem ruit”). The Yale is also described as aggressive, again toward unspecified objects (SF §26). The Griffin (SF §8) is specifically “hostile to horses, and they tear to pieces the men they spot”56 while the Manticor “very zealously seeks human flesh” (SF §23, “humanas carnes avidissime affectat”). The new, second chapter on the Unicorn (SF §19) presents it as a huge, monstrous beast with a deadly four-foot horn that easily pierces though anything it attacks—this is a creature that the huntsman has to kill, presumably in a kill-or-be-killed situation. The B-Isidore chapter on the Hydrus and Crocodile is divided to form two Second-family ones, one focused on the Hydrus and placed among the serpents (SF §98), the other centered on the Crocodile defined by the fact that it eats humans and placed among the beasts (SF §22). Although it can be represented in any number of ways, the Crocodile is instantly recognizable from this aggression, whether it is just reaching out for an initial sniff, has half swallowed a human, or has downed the whole body except the head (see plates 16–17). These depictions are paralleled by other creatures visualized with human body parts sticking out of their mouth (e.g., plate 6). While most of the creatures hunted by humans would still be classed as “game,” animals of all kinds are now depicted rounding on men and eating them. Like pictures of hunting, these images both depict and reflect on the vulnerability of skin. But now the skin that is injured is that of humans, as emphasized in the case of the Crocodile whose own hide is said to be virtually impenetrable. In the late fourteenth-century English Morgan MS M. 890, which is illustrated throughout with unpainted drawings, the skin of the page, the skin of the Crocodile, and that of the man he is about to eat, are materially all the same surface, but readers are nevertheless encouraged by the text to identify the parchment with the man’s skin rather than with that of the beast (fig. 17).57 The textual and pictorial elaboration of the Crocodile is adopted widely. Indeed, just as the Hydrus killing the Crocodile furnishes one of the most characteristic and compelling subjects of illustration early in the tradition, the Crocodile devouring a man is one of the most attention-grabbing later on. A pair of images featuring first the Crocodile killing a man and then being killed by the Hydrus are found side by side in the copies of several bestiaries such as the Latin H text and the vernacular bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, which both propose a narrative of mortality followed by resurrection.58 In the Bestiaire d’amours the same sequence is recast as a fantasy of suffering avenged. The lady whom the hapless writer is trying to win is represented by the Crocodile who devours him and then weeps tears of repentance (BA §25;

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F i g u r e 1 7. The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 890, fo. 5v. Crocodile (Second family). Gift of Alastair Bradley Martin, 1958. Photograph: Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

plate 17); but she gets her comeuppance from the false, philandering Hydrus (BA §26) that insinuates itself into her intimacy and then unfeelingly kills her. This juxtaposition offers producers of these manuscripts a choice between underlining eternal life through incarnation and redemption, or emphasizing human vulnerability and mortality. A double page stages the two episodes even-handedly in the copy of the Bestiaire d’amours in BnF fr. 1444 (fos. 262v– 263r), copied at the end of the thirteenth century, probably in Arras.59 On the verso, just beneath the first picture which accompanies the passage about Richard’s lady devouring him and weeping like a Crocodile, a large stitched tear extends inward along the bottom margin; as he imagines the manyheaded Hydrus assaulting her, a large hole opens up at the top of the facing page. This manuscript has a number of holes in it but these are the only prominent flaws in the leaves containing the Bestiaire d’amours. In the fourteenthcentury copy transmitted in BnF fr. 15213, the Crocodile is similarly pictured eating a man on fo. 83v and being eaten by a Hydrus on the facing fo. 84r. But in this case it is the violence exercised by the Crocodile that coincides with damage to the page which is torn and stitched in its upper margin, in a way that appears to equate to the damage inflicted on the man (plate 17).60 The Crocodile in plate 16, which has been knifed in the back at the same time as it eats a naked man, is exceptional in being itself vulnerable. And whereas, by association with the lover, the skin of the page in plate 17 slides toward being apprehended as human skin, what is particularly interesting in plate 16 is how the folio reinstates skin’s ambiguity. The parchment is scarred, scraped, scratched, discolored, but not torn or holed. The dagger in the Crocodile’s back is haloed by a stain that draws the eye to it and exaggerates the slight declivity in the beast’s skin where the blade has passed. The mottling of

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hair follicles in the upper right-hand corner is, as it were, accented and given color by the dappling of red spots on the Crocodile’s hide. The choice of red for these speckles aligns the Crocodile’s skin with the written page—the color is the same as the rubric immediately above—even though, unlike in hunting scenes, in this case it does not directly evoke bloodshed.61 Although the man’s arm looks to have been washed with a brownish red, his buttocks and thighs are bare, as are his feet that stick out below the painting’s frame; the mottling of the parchment is quite clear on his naked rump. The Crocodile’s teeth closing round his upper body accentuate the man’s vulnerability. The skins of both creatures, then, share the qualities of the skin of the page, which forms a space of exception between the human prerogative to claim the lives and skins of other creatures, and the counterattack mounted by those creatures against the violence of this claim.62 The Lion The Lion chapter fluctuates dramatically in its presentation of the relations between humans and other animals. As the initial chapter of almost all bestiaries,63 it sets the tone for what follows in conflicting ways. A widely recognized symbol of strength and dominion, the Lion’s representations factor directly into questions of sovereign power. At first the Lion is presented as having quasi-kinship with human beings. The opening words of both Dicta Chrysostomi and B-Isidore repeat those of Physiologus: “Thus Jacob blessing his son Juda said, ‘Lion’s cub, son of my seed, who will rouse you?’” (DC§1, B-Is§1).64 They affirm not only that Juda is similar to a lion but that his bond with Jacob is similar to a lion cub’s bond with its parents. The quotation reorients its source in Genesis 49:9, where the young lion is sleeping after devouring its prey, to anticipate the Lion’s third nature a few lines later in which the parent Lion brings its stillborn offspring back to life. Now when the bestiary Jacob rouses his son, he appears not so much to be waking as resuscitating him, like the Lion revives its cub and the Father resurrects his Son; some French versions acknowledge this by translating “rouse” (Latin suscitabit) by a form of resusciter.65 The reader of the early bestiary is to take his bearings from the affinity of Lion and man, and from the Lion as an image of God granting him life. A less benevolent side to the relations between humans and Lions emerges immediately after, since from the beginning the Lion’s first nature is that it effaces its tracks with its tail so as not to fall prey to the hunter. This is allegorized as meaning that God’s incarnation as human is an unfathomable mystery, so of course the Lion conceals its location from those who seek it.

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But this does not prevent illustrators from depicting a huntsman pursuing and even goring the Lion, especially in vernacular manuscripts that postdate the Second-family redaction. For example, the mid-thirteenth-century copies of Guillaume le Clerc’s bestiary in BL MS Egerton 613 (fo. 31v; fig. 18) and in Cambridge, Trinity College O.2.14 (fo. 33v), depict a man in chain mail piercing a Lion through the neck; the beast is also wounded in Bodleian MS Douce 132, fo. 63v.66 Second-family bestiaries greatly expand the chapter on the Lion. Their chapter starts, as already mentioned, not with the fatherly life-giving Lion but with the assertion of the Lion’s strength even among the beasts, so-called “from the power of their ferocity,” as Isidore puts it. The earlier natures— erasing its tracks with its tail, sleeping with its eyes open, and reviving its still-born young—are retained but supplemented by new ones, of which some are quite bizarre, such as Lions’ mating and digestive habits, fear of cocks (especially white ones), or habit of eating an ape when feeling nauseous (SF §1).67 Most, however, amplify the Lion’s generosity or its vulnerability, or else its capacity, as a beast, for ferocity. Lions are terrifying to other animals yet usually peaceable toward humans, retaliating only when injured, and then only against one who continues to pose a threat to them: Rational men should reflect upon their example, men who become angry when not hurt, and who oppress the innocent, because Christian law requires that the guilty be set free. For the mercy of the lion is apparent in continuous examples, for they spare the prostrate, allow captives they encounter to return home. They rage against men rather than against women. They do not kill children unless they are very hungry.68 (SF §1)

The Lion emerges here as a model of the qualities expected of a human king or a warrior, gentle to the weak but unsparing of aggressors, and readers should imitate his example. Yet this message is not wholly reassuring for anyone whom the Lion might think has hurt him—the hunter, for example—nor even for children, who cannot count on all the Lions they ever meet having recently been fed. That Lions can retaliate preemptively is suggested by another addition to the effect that they seek out small creatures known as “lion-killers,” whose meat is poisonous to Lions, and kill them first (SF §1). In the Bestiaire d’amours (BA §12) and the Long Version of Pierre de Beauvais’s bestiary (LV §1) the Lion is also said to attack a human who sees it eating, though one who does not is ignored (see chapter 5). Pictures of the Lion ring the changes on these conflicting attributes of benefactor, quarry, and assailant. Many manuscripts select only one or two

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natures for illustration, like Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 372/621, which focuses on the Lion reviving its young (fig. 19).69 Some represent several natures, like Cambridge, Corpus Christi MS 53, which presents five in a series of linked roundels: side by side at the top the traditional natures of evading the hunter and resuscitating offspring, and at the bottom two of the new ones, sparing a naked man and eating an ape.70 Another arrangement distributes images of the various natures in tiers. Bodley 764 begins with new attributes—a Lion bites an ape, spares prostrate men, and cowers before a white cock—on its first page before continuing with some more traditional ones on the second. When a powerful benevolent Lion is depicted resuscitating its cubs and sparing prostrate humans, the potential kinship between the species is reinforced. The Lion seems to be giving the humans life, as it does its cubs. A Lion slinking away from a huntsman, menaced by lion-killers or cowering before a white cock, by contrast, appears vulnerable to attack. The Lion is anthropomorphized as God the father and its sacrificial role brought out as God the son. Depictions of the Lion’s ferocity are more problematic. Illustrators can adhere to the letter of the text and depict a Lion sparing men but eating an ape. But it seems the difference between human and ape is not always clear, because some manuscripts open with an image of a Lion with a human in its jaws, an image which is the polar opposite of the benign Lion bequeathed by Physiologus.71 An example is the H bestiary BnF lat. 2495B, a Parisian manuscript from ca. 1230 that also contains an Aviarium and other works by Hugh of Fouilloy.72 Its opening picture features a huge Lion carrying off a man whose friend attempts in vain to save him, and another smaller Lion resuscitating its cubs (plate 18). Not only is the apparently man-eating Lion by far the more prominent of the two beasts but there is no image of leonine benevolence toward humans to compensate for its aggression. Maybe the human went wrong by seeking to harm the Lion, when he ought to have humbled himself. Above the picture is the distich: The noble wrath of the lion knows how to spare those that are prostrate. Do likewise, whoever rules over the globe.73

The lines also occur near the end of the Lion chapter in H, where they are quoted to illustrate the Lion’s mercy toward the defenseless. Their general purpose seems to be to anthropomorphize the Lion as a figure of the just ruler and a rebuke to tyranny. But prefaced to the entire bestiary, they also warn humans against seeking to dominate all the animals in the course of the text following. Whereas some bestiaries open with the naming of the animals

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F i g u r e 1 8 . British Library MS Egerton 613, fo. 31v. Lion (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: © The British Library Board. F i g u r e 1 9 . Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621, fo. 2v. Lion (Second family). Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

as a first expression of human domination over them, this one begins with a warning to humans not to assume a position of sovereignty—and to face the consequences if they do. In other cases there is disagreement as to whether the Lion’s victim is human or ape, as in the later Morgan MS M. 890 which opens with a tier of three images (fig. 20). The most traditional is the middle picture of a parent licking three cubs into life. Below it the Lion that spares the prostrate has become a Lion breathing life into two miniaturized men who occupy the same position in the image as the cubs in the frame above. This benevolent and life-giving portrayal of the Lion is belied by the top image. The creature in the Lion’s jaws is hard to make out, and some have labeled it an ape in conformity

F i g u r e 2 0 . The Morgan Library and Museum MS M. 890, fo. 1r. Lion (Second family). Gift of Alastair Bradley Martin, 1958. Photograph: Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

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with the text, but more likely it is a naked man.74 The logic of the three tiers would then be that Lions are loving toward other Lions but can be either lethal or life-giving to humans: another alarming beginning to the bestiary, one which puts humans at the mercy of the Lion’s whim. Alternatively, perhaps the artist’s model, or the artist himself, confused human with ape, unsure whether the Lion is self-medicating, exacting principled revenge, or just giving vent to natural ferocity. Although the Lion in the middle picture is anthropomorphic and fatherly, the others may simply stand outside the law. The presence in the middle of the facing column of a heraldic lion lends the Lion’s power political immediacy. The beast seems to have become the sovereign, exercising arbitrary judgment whereby what it decides to spare takes on its “breath” and becomes “human,” but what it decides to eat is “bare life,” which catalogers identify as “an ape.” The “space of exception” between human and animal is uncomfortably exposed by the unaccountability of this decision. The form taken by this manuscript’s drawings captures this space of exception by other means, in the use made of the page itself. The creatures receiving life from the Lion in the middle and bottom images are not only unframed, but their faces and hands seem to project directly out of the parchment (compare the Asp in fig. 1). What or whose, we might ask, is the skin on those faces and hands—is it a representation of human skin in the case of the humans but an example of animal skin in that of the Lions? But if the baby Lions are an allegory of humans receiving divine grace, then their faces are also representative of human faces. The fact that the parchment looks much more like human skin than the skin of a tawny animal may make it easier to accept them as metaphors of the human. But if the viewer recognizes that in a drawing colors are, as it were, understood even if they are not visible, and accepts the Lions’ skin as dark, the same choice presents itself for the figure in the lion’s jaws at the top. Understand the bare parchment within its outline as a dark color, and maybe it is an ape; stick with the nude color of the parchment, and more likely it is a man. Rather than an identifiable scenario, this image presents a space of exception in which it seems arbitrary to decide what is human and what is animal on the page. Conclusion This chapter explores the implications for bestiaries of skin being by definition what can be cut. Human and animal skin are both presented as equally vulnerable, as humans kill animals and are attacked in return. The surface of prestige Latin bestiaries is rarely in bad shape, and so actual cuts in the pages

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are not as common as they are in early or vernacular ones. But even fine manuscripts find ways of drawing attention to the problem of reading wounded skin. Pages result from killing animals and cutting them open, even if the cuts show only in the form of scrapes or scars. And some of the scenes depicted on them implicate the reader in this violence, turn that violence against humans like him- or herself, or create uncertainty attaching to the whole question of who or what is being cut. The relation of the reader to the creatures in the bestiary and the substance of its pages may be mellowed by the aura of sacrifice or insulated by the boundaries of sovereign power, but it is always also problematized by the vulnerable skin which they are all assumed to share and which they are all represented as violating.

5

The Riddle of Recognition

In his landmark study of the concept of resemblance in twelfth-century thought, Robert Javelet observes that “God can be known only in a mirror and as an enigma, at least here on earth. The mirror is creation, the enigma, holy Scripture.”1 Each of the terms he proposes here, mirror and enigma, is useful for thinking about bestiaries. Their creatures are both endowed with natures, as parts of creation, and read allegorically in the light of scripture, and so they enable both the mirroring recognition afforded by an exemplar or model and the more painstaking disclosure that comes with the unraveling of a riddle. What is true of their texts applies also to their images which are usually placed at or near the head of a chapter, as if to illustrate a creature’s nature, but sometimes held over to the start or even the end of the allegorical interpretation, with the consequently more challenging task of representing its theological meaning. Depending on its position, then, the picture of a Panther represents a gentle, spotted animal waking from its sleep and drawing other creatures to it, or (much less self-evidently) it depicts the resurrected Christ bringing salvation to all. That the same image can represent two vastly divergent things arises because allegoresis is a process whereby what is first apprehended as “nature” is retrospectively recognized as “allegory.” When manuscripts like the Queen Mary and Queen Isabella Psalters dispense with the written text and reduce the bestiary to a cycle of bas de page images, the process of allegoresis is no longer inscribed in time or space, nature is not held apart from allegory, mirror from riddle.2 As in St. Paul’s famous words about seeing “through a glass darkly” (“per speculum in ænigmate,” I Cor. 13:12), the riddle is not distinct from the mirror; it is what the reader ultimately seeks to understand in it. This chapter explores the acts of recognition which bestiaries describe and

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solicit, starting with resemblance as judged from the outside, by sight and touch. This will lead, in chapter 6, to a study of how sight and touch pass over into interior imaginings that furnish the dimensions of an “inner self ” or “soul.” Many animals recognize or misrecognize what they see; similarly, readers are repeatedly invited to glean from what they read aspects of their own nature, their relationship to other creatures, and to God, and they are warned against misapprehension and false interpretation such as the bestiarists, in their least appealing moments, attribute to the Jews. At the basis of these acts of (mis)recognition is the question of what constitutes “likeness” and how it is discerned. God’s decision to make man in “[his] image and likeness” (“ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram,” Genesis 1:26) was widely interpreted as meaning that if human were similar to God, that meant they were different from other animals. The similitude lay in humans’ intellectual or spiritual capacity, which other creatures either lacked altogether or possessed to a significantly lesser degree. Whereas imago indicated a static resemblance, similitudo was understood as a dynamic process whereby the human soul could come closer to God, eventually being united with him: likeness involves overcoming a degree of unlikeness through personal metamorphosis.3 This static-dynamic distinction is attested in the Long Version’s chapter on the Raven which, the text says, acts as a mirror (essamples) to humans because of the young birds’ achievement of likeness (semblance): When God made man he formed him in his likeness (semblance): therefore we should take on his feathers and resemble (resambler) him in plumage or he will not recognize us nor act until he sees us clothed in them, that is to say in alms-giving, humility, compassion, patience, and long-suffering toward our neighbor. Then God will know us as his sons by those feathers just as the Raven knows its chicks when it sees them feathered and resembling him (li resembler).4 (LV §15).

Similitude in the sense of similitudo is not given in a glance but achieved over time through works, just as allegorical truth is discovered in nature through the labor of exegesis. Similitudo to God, as an alibi of difference between humans and other animals, served the interests of the anthropological machine. From other perspectives, however, the question of what constituted “likeness” was central to the amalgam of epistemology with ontology which medieval philosophers inherited from antiquity. The formula “like knows like,” quoted by Plato from the poet Empedocles and reiterated endlessly thereafter, is shorthand for the view that knowledge is only possible when there exists

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something in common between knower and known; for example, the human soul’s internal memory of Forms is what enables it to recognize external entities that participate in those Forms.5 Not everyone agreed that all knowledge depends on likeness;6 but it was in relation to likeness that the equally important criterion of difference could be evaluated, the process of “abstraction” consisting in stripping away local differences in order to arrive at a core of identity. Discerning likeness does not depend on the senses, even though they may be where difference and similarity are first registered, but on intellectual processes that scholastics made the heart of intensely technical debate. A concept of likeness as what keys knowledge to reality is central to Aristotle’s account of metaphor in book 3 of his Rhetoric. Metaphor, for Aristotle, is successful when it leads one to perceive a likeness between things that was not previously obvious, and in this respect it resembles a riddle: In using metaphors to give names to nameless things, we must draw them not from remote but from kindred and similar things, so that the kinship is clearly perceived as soon as the words are said. . . . Good riddles do, in general, provide us with satisfactory metaphors: for metaphors imply riddles, and therefore a good riddle can furnish a good metaphor.7

Later in the treatise devising metaphors is compared with the philosophical process of discerning likeness; “metaphors must be drawn . . . from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not so obviously related—just as in philosophy an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart.”8 Simile operates in the same manner, likewise casting light on the underlying network of resemblances that structure reality and make it known.9 Metaphor’s most cognitively rewarding form is what Aristotle calls “proportional metaphor” in which there are at least two simultaneous points of analogy on the model of “a is to b as x is to y,”10 or in Aristotle’s example, “as the stone is to Sisyphus, so is the shameless man to his victim.”11 The proportionality lies not just in the entities but in the relationships between them: the torturer is like a stone in that he inflicts pain unfeelingly and his victim is like Sisyphus, condemned never to escape. Such metaphors are so solidly grounded that one can pursue the likeness from any point within them, so that, to take another example from Aristotle, “if a drinking bowl is the shield of Dionysus, a shield may fittingly be called the drinking-bowl of Ares.”12 Aristotle’s proportional metaphors are structurally the same as the multiple mapping of allegorical meaning onto aspects of a creature’s nature that Physiologus bequeathed to the bestiary tradition, and illumine its ontological foundations.13 The chapter on the Raven quoted above relies, for example, on parent-child relationships operating in the same way between God and

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man as between Raven and chick, and on getting feathers to fly resembling spiritual development through good works. The likenesses are sufficiently systematic for it to be possible to infer, for example, that humans are truly God’s children not only when their good works show their likeness to him, but also that such works enable them spiritually to fly. When scholars who work in critical animal studies decry the medieval tendency to allegorize animals because it means the animals are not valued “in themselves,” they underestimate the reality of these networks of resemblance in which humans, like everything else, are thought to be implicated. To say of a Raven that it is like a man is not essentially different from saying of a child that it is like its parent, and the Panther is not less panther-like because it resembles Christ. On the contrary, this is rather the Panther’s agalma, “that which is in it more than itself.”14 Allegory is not merely figurative but reaches down into the riddle of likeness in which all being is configured. The capacity for allegorical resemblance mitigates the operations of the anthropological machine by not only restoring but also ontologizing the kinship between all creatures. Different bestiaries at different dates envisage acts of recognition differently, according to what it is that is recognized and what kind of resemblance is at stake. The influx of new entries in the Second-family redaction that have natures but no allegory distances recognition from the theological domain. This redaction, like some other later bestiary versions, gives less weight to understanding supposedly grounded in affinity with God and more to intelligibility deriving from what are represented as natural affinities, a development that seems more “scientific” (or more ontological) to modern readers than the earlier, theological approach. There is more emphasis on visual perception and its interpretation; sometimes observation of likeness is linked to the wider discussion of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. Discussed by Plato in the Timaeus, this was an influential motif among twelfth-century Neoplatonists and was disseminated by encyclopedias, notably by Honorius of Autun’s Elucidarium. But as I will show, the date of a text’s redaction is not the only factor affecting how resemblance is recognized, since earlier and later copies of the same work can manifest different stances on recognition and the perception of likeness. Conceptions of similitude and the acts of recognition they solicit or describe are also reenacted in the process of reading. Bestiaries highlight issues of similarity, difference, and their perception. They offer themselves as mirrors and/or riddles for their readers, inviting them to evaluate their resemblance to the creatures they depict and to achieve greater likeness to the truths they disclose. Equipped with the same external senses as most other creatures, the reader depends in the first instance on sight and touch as a means

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to recognize, or misrecognize, what is represented before him; and this activity extends to the material codex, given that one of the riddles posed by parchment is how far the reader recognizes, or does not recognize, its reality as skin. Not only do readers see and touch the membrane of the page, but it also serves as a contact zone where they touch what others have seen and see where others have touched.15 Forms of recognition, then, are multiplied: an act between one creature and another is compounded with one between the reader and the creature, and between the reader and the book. This feedback between contents and page that I call “suture” is one of the most pervasive forms of self-reflexivity that are implied or advocated by bestiary texts, and turn the “mirror of parchment,” in Michael Camille’s felicitous phrase, into a riddle where likeness can only be recognized per aenigmate. I will now trace some of the ways in which the material makeup of manuscripts interferes in the process of reading to complicate themes of likeness and recognition, beginning with the earliest bestiaries. I will also show how a concept of resemblance—that of man’s similitude to the divine—which endorses human exceptionalism, gives way to one more likely to erode it, since it foregrounds instead the co-participation of humans and other animals in the natural world. Recognizing Recognition: The Caladrius The Caladrius bird belongs in the bestiary tradition from the time of Physiologus, and its history is much the same as that of the Pelican I discussed in chapter 4.16 In the early bestiaries its place is strategic:17 in B-Isidore, where it is the subject of the fifth chapter, it inaugurates the important series of birds that carry forward the text’s doctrinal teaching18 and in the Dicta Chrysostomi it is, with the Phoenix, one of two final chapters that conclude the work on a triumphal note (DC §26–27). The Caladrius drifts from sight in the long section on birds in the Second-family redaction (SF §56). Although its allegoresis is unchanged, its treatment seems much less serious thanks to its juxtaposition with the Parrot (SF §55). Like the Pelican, however, the Caladrius regains prominence in the H bestiary in which it is the only other bird. The Caladrius of the early bestiaries exemplifies the self-referentiality of some traditional chapters. Its nature and allegorical significance are recognizable one in the other, both converge in the theme of recognition, and this recognition requires recognition by the reader so he can achieve likeness with the divine. Each of the chapter’s main elements involves seeing and their sequence progresses from more physical to more metaphysical forms, with life

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and death at stake. The Caladrius is a pure white bird with no stain upon it. It is proscribed as a food but its dung can be used to cure blindness. It recognizes if a sick man will recover or not. Turning its face away from the one who is going to die, the Caladrius makes visible to all his impending death; but it approaches one who will live and with its mouth draws all his infirmity out from the sick man’s mouth, then flies up to the sun where the illness is burned away and dispersed. It figures Christ who has no stain and who turned his face from the Jews but took on himself the sins of those who could be saved and redeemed them. All these components are tightly bound together. The first two complement one another, since the bird that is spotless to behold also provides medicine for the eyes; what is pure as an object of perception also imparts clarity to the perceiver.19 This back and forth of the gaze takes a further turn in the next part of the chapter when the Caladrius’s medicinal effect on eyesight is reconfigured as its astonishing diagnostic ability. The capacity to foresee life and death makes “seeing” more than, and superior too, mere visual perception. The Caladrius does not only register the physical appearance of the sick man and somehow calibrate the gravity of his illness. It also acts as an agent of healing since its recognition that a man will recover becomes, in fact, the cause of his recovery. This behavior involves another reversal in which the bird first absorbs the sick man’s deathly exhalations and then dissipates and destroys them. What is pure to look at purifies everything around it, and instigates a movement of ascent from physical to spiritual perception.20 By an act of recognition that transforms what is recognized, the Caladrius anticipates its allegoresis as Christ who, recognizing those who can share his eternal life and turning away from those who cannot, enacts the final judgment. It also provokes its readers, in an answering act of recognition, to “see” the need for likeness to their Savior and strive for spiritual “health.”21 Illustrations for the chapter feature a man in bed with a large bird, usually perched at its foot and either looking toward him or looking away; in some the image is doubled so as to portray both outcomes. Presumably the Caladrius was at first conceived for papyrus rather than parchment, and insofar as the reader was conscious of being drawn into the back and forth of perception, recognition, and spiritual improvement which the chapter describes, his self-awareness will have involved the processes of reading but likely not the physical makeup of the book itself. With the development of parchment codices, especially illustrated ones, the skin’s role in the scene of recognition can also interact reflexively with the page’s function as material support, particularly in illustrated manuscripts where the invalid’s

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skin is left bare of paint. Everything crystalizes around the moment when the bird looks at or away from an ill man whose upper body is exposed to be read, and when the reader reacts to the legible skin before him. Bare skin is used to this effect in the Caladrius image in the Dicta Chrysostomi text contained in the twelfth-century Vienna, ONB cod. 1010 (fig. 21). The bestiary was clearly more appealing to readers than the works, mainly by Augustine and Ambrose, with which it is compiled, since although the codex looks generally well used, fos. 65r–73v on which it was copied are considerably more darkened with handling. On fo. 73r, the Caladrius provides its penultimate chapter and closing image since the Phoenix chapter following is unillustrated. Its double structure depicts two opposing acts of recognition: the Caladrius is flying toward the man sitting up in bed on our left, and turning away from the man lying down on the right. The two men are distinguished by their posture, and the one whom the Caladrius is about to heal is supported by a friend, but in other respects they look alike. A comparable image is found in the Caladrius chapter in the H bestiary BnF lat. 14429, probably produced in Paris ca. 1250–60 and compiled together with the Aviarium (fig. 22).22 In the upper register the man who will eventually recover is having his illness drawn from him by the bird, its face and beak right up against his nose, whereas below the man has turned his head away in a gesture that mirrors the bird’s. Unlike in the Austrian manuscript where the men are not painted at all, here bird and man are washed with white but so thinly that the ruling on the page is still visible through the wash. In both manuscripts the parchment adds a further turn to the to and fro of the gaze which the chapter describes. The skin of the two men that the Caladrius is looking at is the same as one another’s, probably similar to the reader’s own, and identical with the page, which in the case of the Austrian manuscript is thick and pretty rough, but in that of the Paris copy smooth and even. Now the reader’s sense of his own health, physical and spiritual, interferes in the act of reading. Does his face look like the face of the man who will live or the man who will die? How did the Caladrius recognize which is which, given their similar appearance? Indeed what differentiates these images is not just the bird’s ability to recognize the men but theirs to respond to it, and in this respect they serve as models for the reader to recognize and follow. Reading in a book of skin, the reader himself becomes a page on which his fate is invisibly written for some other reader—or creature—to decipher and in which his own response to what is before him is a matter of eternal life or death. Certain other chapters turn on recognizing recognition in a way that is similarly self-referential: the Raven discussed above, the Eagle that recognizes

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F i g u r e 2 1 . ONB cod. 1010, fo. 73r. Caladrius (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. F i g u r e 2 2 . BnF lat. 14429, fo. 116v. Caladrius (H bestiary). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

its young by whether or not they can gaze on the sun, and the Second-family Vulture that broadly follows the model of the Caladrius.23 It is noteworthy that all are birds. The theme of looking is not associated with beasts until the Second-family bestiary, and its most flamboyant manifestation is the Tiger. The Riddle in the Mirror: The Tiger The idea that nature is a mirror of its creator, and that individual creatures hold up a mirror to their human readers, is sometimes literalized by the presence of mirrors in bestiary chapters. A Siren may be depicted holding one24

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but the creature most consistently associated with mirrors is the Tiger, introduced by the Latin Second-family redaction which places this chapter second, after the Lion, so that it serves a prefatory—and premonitory—function for the volume as a whole.25 The Tiger attracts some glorious illustrations especially in luxury copies like the famous Aberdeen Bestiary of ca. 1200 and its relatives,26 or the less widely reproduced image in Oxford, St. John’s College MS 61 (plate 19).27 The chapter describes how a Tiger pursues a hunter who has stolen her cub. Although she is fast enough to outrun his horse he slows her down by throwing a mirror in her path. When she looks at it, the Tigress misrecognizes her own reflection as the lost cub and stops to gather it up. Realizing her error, she resumes her chase and once more gains on the rider. Again he delays his pursuer with the toss of a mirror, nor did the memory of the deceit deter the mother’s determination. She turned the empty image this way and that, and settled down as if to suckle her young. And thus deceived by the persistence of her affection, she lost both her revenge and her offspring.28 (SF §3)

The Tiger’s devotion to her offspring does not result in its rescue, even though she has the physical strength to overtake its kidnapper, because her own image in the mirror, which she misrecognizes as that her of her cub, overwhelms her. Even on the second occasion, when she knows the image is an illusion designed to trick her, she nevertheless halts, intent on suckling her child. Sight, recognition, and desire, interact and pass over into touch as the Tiger nurtures the delusory reflection. The passionate conviction that she can see and touch her cub are precisely what rob her of it. Some artists have shown the working of hunter’s trick by painting the Tiger’s reflection in the glass as a more or less exact replica of the Tiger herself, and hence of her cub in the huntsman’s arms. This is the case with the ingeniously miniaturized tiger-image in the glass depicted in Gonville and Caius MS 109/178, fo. 110v (fig. 23).29 In the late twelfth-century English Transitional manuscript Morgan M. 81, fo. 35r, however, the face looking out from the mirror is more like the portrait of an ape, or indeed of a monk. It thereby short-circuits from the image described in the text to the message the reader is to take from it: he is supposed to recognize himself in the creatures of the bestiary, an expectation literalized as his seeing himself reflected in the Tiger’s vision (plate 18). Several of the luxury manuscripts opt for another interesting way of illustrating these mirrors. Their surface is covered with gold or silver leaf, so they not only accurately represent what medieval mirrors were like but actually are miniature mirrors, capable of reflecting at least part of a face

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F i g u r e 2 3 . Gonville and Caius College MS 109/178, fo. 110v. Tiger (Second family). Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

peering into them. In the Aberdeen Bestiary (fo. 8r) the mirrors are finished with gold leaf; once smooth, today its slight tarnish produces a ghost of a reflection in both of them. In the related Ashmole Bestiary (fo. 12v) both mirrors are silver and blank.30 So are they, too, in St. John’s College MS 61 (plate 19) where the mirrors are disproportionately large for the Tiger and seem all the more intended for the reader himself to gaze into. These varied treatments turn the issue of what is seen in the mirror into a riddle in which the exact location of likeness is elusive. The mirror’s resemblance to the pictures in round frames sometimes found elsewhere in bestiaries (and standard for the bird portraits in the Aviarium) means that the Tiger’s enrapture by the image resembles the way the reader’s gaze is likewise drawn to a manuscript’s medallions. When the image in the glass is a miniature Tiger, the mother Tiger gazing on it exactly mimics the reader’s role, raising the question of how far he is informed or misled by what he sees. If, however, the reader himself could be reflected in the surface of one of the metal-leaf mirrors, then reader and Tiger change places as the Tiger is seemingly depicted “reading” the image of a human. The grime marks on the outer bottom corners of the pages sediment the succession of historical readers who have likewise put themselves in the positon of the Tiger, drawn like her to gaze on and to touch the image placed before them. Just as for the Tiger, skin—their own and that of the page—becomes a part of the scene of recognition. The representation of the Tiger in St. John’s MS 61 is typical in visualizing the creature as spotted rather than striped. Only two chapters later the Second-family text describes another spotted beast, the Panther, as being

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“decorated with small spots, so that it is adorned with color variety, black or white, as with circular eyes on a tawny coat.”31 Illustrations of the Tiger would thus represent its skin as always already all eyes, whether or not they can see. The glass spheres of the text are also represented like circular eyes, and are a further way of suturing the reader’s vision to the scopic field of the page where whatever is represented within these “eyes” can be understood as being “seen” in them. And following the artistic convention of the medallion, each moment of recognition (or misrecognition) is also “framed” as a representation (or misrepresentation). As in the Caladrius chapter, the reader becomes implicated in a to and fro of looking and recognition, but with the complication that what is at stake here is engineered by the hunter’s deceit—or the bestiary designer’s art. Text and image together argue powerfully that what the Tiger recognizes in the mirror is shaped by what she most wants, an insight that readers are encouraged to relate to their experience as subjects constrained by their own desires, and also to their knowledge as readers, viewers, and handlers of bestiary manuscripts. But the chapter, which is not derived from Physiologus,32 has no allegoresis, so the question of what readers are supposed to unriddle from the experience of the Tiger, and their own mirroring experience of her, is left without an answer. Crisscrossing Resemblance: The Lion and the Harpy in the Long Version Several other new additions to the Second-family—the Griffin (SF §8), Bonnacon (SF §13), Leucrota (SF §21), and Parandus (SF §22)—are described as combining the features of other creatures. Although some seem fantastical or at least improbable, like the hybrid Crocota, offspring of the Hyena and the Lion (SF §12), often it seems as if the easiest way for the redactor to describe a real but unfamiliar beast is by comparing it with similar, better-known ones.33 Since none of these new chapters contains an allegory, their proliferation implies the existence of networks of resemblance within nature, deriving from the kinship between species more than from an individual species’ capacity to mirror the divine. The vernacular Long Version of the bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais similarly introduces a number of creatures from outside the Physiologus tradition. Although some like the Tiger are Second-family additions, many are independent and all have likely been drawn from vernacular sources, the majority from the Bestiaire d’amours.34 Unlike in the Second family, these new Long Version chapters have moralizations that were probably devised by the anonymous author, although typically he follows his model, Pierre de

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Beauvais, in ascribing them to Physiologus.35 Another divergence from the Second family is that these new Long Version chapters focus more on natural creatures’ similarity to humans than to one another. The anonymous author builds on Pierre de Beauvais, whose prologue states that “all the creatures that God created on earth, he created for man and to provide models for him to follow (pour prendre essample) in matters of belief and faith” (PB §1),36 repeatedly insisting that other creatures are an essample (a model for, or mirror of) the human and even asserting the identiticalness between them (“You, man, take example from this, for you are the Swallow,” LV §11).37 Concomitantly humans are sometimes included in the text of Long Version chapters. Pierre de Beauvais’s is the only French-language text to retain the Latin B-Isidore chapter on Amos the prophet (PB §34). In the Long Version not only does Amos stay (LV §61) but he is repeatedly cited as a guide to the meaning of other animals—the Tiger (LV §8), Asp (LV §13), Peacock (LV §19), Ape (LV §46), Partridge (LV §50), and Ostrich (LV §52)—in a selfreferring circle whereby one bestiary creature generates the glosses on the others.38 Several other chapters in which humans are involved are scattered throughout the collection: the Harpy (LV §16), Argus the cowherd (LV §25), the Sagittarius and the Wild Man (LV §66), and the nature of Man himself (LV §67). The Long Version dates from the mid- to late thirteenth century, by which time Latin bestiary redactors had long since adopted some form of zoological order, but its chapter sequence has no such motivation and may merely reflect the sequence in which sources presented themselves to the compiler.39 The first of these sources appears to have been the Bestiaire d’amours, and an interesting effect of its importation into the opening twenty chapters of the Long Version is to generate a network of looks that both detect and help to constitute a network of resemblance.40 The anonymous redactor uses exchanges of glances to insist that likeness binds humans and other animals together within creation, beginning with the entry on the Lion. Drawing on the Bestiaire d’amours §12, the author of the Long Version extends Pierre de Beauvais’s opening chapter by adding that when a Lion sees that that man is watching him eat, he is afraid of the man’s gaze, because he bears the image of a man (“por ce que figure d’ome porte”) as a mark of lordship, inasmuch as he is made in the image and likeness (“a la figure et a la samblance”) of the Lord of lords.41 (LV §1)

Ashamed of its fear, the Lion at once attacks the man; but if the man does not look, the Lion does not attack. The subjects of the verbs in the sentence quoted are not spelled out, so the reasons for the Lion’s fear are not certain. If

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he is understood to be afraid of the man “because the man bears the image of a man as a mark of lordship, inasmuch as man is made in the image and likeness of the Lord of lords,” the sentence, though oddly tautological, would state that the reason a man looks like a man is that he was made in the image and likeness of God, which in turn is what strikes terror into the Lion.42 To impute this meaning is to credit the beast not just with processing visual information but with grasping a theological tenet (human likeness to the divine). However, we might understand that the Lion, whose name means “king” and who himself is an image of God, is afraid “because the Lion is an image of man, as a mark of his lordship, inasmuch as man is made in the image and likeness.”43 It would then be as figure of man or more precisely as Christ that the Lion is ashamed of his fear which jars with the reality of his sovereign identity. As the chapter concludes, “man has a part [or a share] in the Lion’s nature, for he will not be angered unless he is injured or shamed” (LV §1).44 The exchange of looks involves not only recognition but the assertion that Lion, human, and God all participate in the same characteristics and the same theological meaning. Similarities interconnect to the point where it no longer matters what exactly is like what. A similar play with vision, recognition, and similarity is found in a further ten of the first twenty-five chapters of the Long Version, in the Caladrius (§5), Tiger (§8), Crane (§9), Woutre (§10), Raven (§15), Harpy (§16), Woodpecker (§18), Peacock (§19), Eagle (§21), and Argus (§25);45 I will restrict my comments to the Harpy which resumes many typical Long Version traits. Compounded of various other creatures, its entry comes immediately after the Raven in a series about looking and resemblance, involves a human agent, and turns on likenesses that crisscross between beasts, humans, and Christ: Physiologus tells us that [the Harpy] has the countenance (samblant, also means “likeness”) and hair of a man, and a lion’s body, a dragon’s wings, and a horse’s tail. And it is one of the most bloodthirsty (cruels) beasts that there is. And its nature is such that it kills the first man it meets in its path. And immediately after, it goes to a pool of water and looks at its face in it and sees that it has killed its fellow (son samblant, also means “its own likeness”) and is filled with grief. And every time it sees its reflection its grief bursts out anew. This Harpy signifies the soul that has killed its fellow (sanblant). For Jesus Christ, who took our likeness (sanblance) upon him, died for our sins and the soul [whose sin was responsible for his death] should greatly grieve. (LV §16)46

Likenesses mirror one another, captured in the multiple repetitions of semblant / semblance. They produce a crossover in representation whereby the Harpy represents “man” while the “man” whom the Harpy kills represents

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Christ. The result, as Sylvie Lefèvre observes, is that “what we find is man face to face with himself ” in a Narcissus-like moment of self-discovery: gazing at her reflection, the Harpy recognizes herself as human like her victim.47 This recognition comes simultaneously with the realization that she is a murderess and implies that when the text says that the Harpy is “the most bloodthirsty beast that there is,” it means that is what humans are. The scene of recognition takes place in a mirror, but it is also enigmatic because the Harpy, with her lion’s body, eagle’s wings and horse’s tail, does not altogether look like a human being. As in the realization attributed to the Lion, part of what she “sees” is a set of theological tenets: 48 man’s original similarity to God at creation, the dissimilarity produced by the fall, the incarnation as a return to that ideal likeness, and the crucifixion in which that likeness was killed. Her ability to perceive physical difference as theological similarity emphasizes that resemblance in the sense of similitudo involves not visual data but personal transformation. On the other hand, the text insists that she does have a human face and hair, so the Harpy really does looks like a human and really does recognize herself as such, just as Jesus really did look like any other man. Indeed, maybe the Harpy perceives herself as human not despite but because of the parts of other creatures that make up her appearance—humans include elements of animality, even though they deny or repress them. The Harpy’s seeing her lion-, eagle-, and horselike features as contributing to her humanity would be like the Lion seeing itself as the image of a man: just more evidence (if any were needed) that humans are caught up in a vast web of resemblance to other creatures as a result of their co-presence in creation. Different illustrators record the Harpy’s recognition scene differently, but all three depict her not gazing into a stream, as in the text, but reacting to the face of a human corpse. That is, the chapter’s two narrative elements—the Harpy killing a man and seeing itself reflected as a human—have been superimposed by all three artists so that the various relations of resemblance, however they are conceived, are compounded in the single event of the Harpy’s realizing her likeness to her victim. In the oldest manuscript, BnF Arsenal 3516, copied in Artois in 1267 or 1268, the Harpy has the least human features of the three (plate 21). A tawny beast straddling a naked human corpse, it looks up as if in anguish at its crime; in front of it is a well or spring. At the top and bottom of the frame a later hand has recapitulated the description of the Harpy’s bestial features, which were also copied as an afterthought into the text below, the Harpy’s bestial nature is thus presented multiple times, casting her humanity in its most animal guise. The former Phillipps manuscript (late thirteenth century) shows the two figures in profile, the Harpy with a human

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face but otherwise animal body gazing at her murder victim propped up and clothed in front of what appears to be a hillside, though it could be water (plate 22). In the most recent manuscript, Montpellier, BUM MS H 437 completed in 1341, a sphinxlike creature is depicted looking straight at the reader, a severed human head on the ground beside it (plate 23). Whatever its variations, as with those of the Caladrius and the Tiger, the depiction of the Harpy asks the reader to read one creature reading the face of another. But now both participants in the scene are “human” in ways that plot the elasticity of the term: one of them, Christ, is human and divine while the other, the Harpy, is in varying degrees human and beast. Both can be depicted with human faces and with human skin, but are not so consistently. In Montpellier the face of the dead human is exactly like the Harpy’s: bare parchment with bright pink cheeks and dark curly hair, its only marker of death is that its eyes are shut. In the former Phillipps manuscript both faces are also very similar to one another, with just a faint wash that barely differentiates them from the page. In Arsenal 3516, however, they are clearly differentiated, the Harpy’s face being brown whereas the man’s, aside from touches of wash and some contouring, is bare. Collectively problematizing the status of physical resemblance, these divergences draw attention to the chapter’s implicit commentary on how one recognizes what one thinks one sees when likeness itself is so flexible. Reiterations of resemblance tangle human, animal, and divine together in ways that are not always visible and that are compounded by the variable character of the parchment on which the different manuscripts are copied. Amid these crisscrossing similarities, a look that is more than visual is required in order to recognize the range and potential of the human.49 Microcosm and Macrocosm If bestiarists see humanity mirrored in all creatures, this shows their awareness that, as Javelet put it, “harmonization is possible between all things and man is at the heart of this accord, capable of knowing and loving everything. He is in truth a microcosm.”50 He continues: “All creatures are in man by virtue of a certain affinity: he has being in common with stones, life in common with trees, the senses with animals and understanding with angels.”51 Consequently, “spiritual life is a gradual realization—by means of the senses, reason, understanding and charity,—of the hidden reality of the divine kinship of the universe and especially of man.”52 As Marie-Dominique Chenu expresses it rather more concisely, “Man in Nature is nature.”53 The theory that man is a microcosm of the macrocosm was a major preoccupation of twelfth-century Neoplatonists, popularized mainly by Honorius of Autun (1080–1154) in his

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encyclopedia-like Elucidarium which circulated widely in Latin and in vernacular adaptations.54 All bestiaries are implicitly about the nature of nature, but the impetus to reflect more explicitly on what this might mean is increasingly attested from the late twelfth century. Some manuscripts include creation sequences illustrated with encyclopedia-like depictions of the cosmos as composed of concentric spheres or circles.55 Some quote Bernardus Silvestris’s Comosgraphia, a work structured around the macrocosm’s relation to the microcosm.56 The Second-family redaction (SF §§121–22) recapitulates Isidore’s discussion of “man” in Etymologies XI, which begins by situating the human in nature. In French, the Bestiaire d’amours followed by the Long Version also contain a discussion of the nature of man (BA §15 and LV §67). Both identify each of the four elements with a creature that lives from it alone: the Salamander from fire, a bird called the plouvier (? “plover,” BA) or gamalian (? “chameleon,” LV) from air, the herring from water and the Mole from earth;57 they say the world is like an egg in which all these elements are enclosed by the shell of the firmament.58 They also describe the interconnections between the five senses such that, if one fails, another is enhanced. Up to this point, the Long Version is content to adapt Richard de Fournival, but the anonymous author develops the material differently, basing himself rather loosely on a French translation of the Elucidarium.59 All humans, whether they are Christian, Jew, or pagan, are said to be a microcosm of the elements, humors, and other properties of the natural world, and all are exhorted to recall that Adam was made in God’s image (a s’ymage) and redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus, on account of which all readers should renounce sin and aspire to the company of the saints. These alterations collectively solder the encyclopedialike material adapted from the Bestiaire d’amours to the anonymous redactor’s theme of likeness as divine similitudo. According to the Long Version chapter as a whole, then, all the affinities within creation circulate within its parts like perception among the senses, are combined in the human being, and ultimately reflect their creator. There are thus several experiments in combining the bestiary tradition with the natural philosophical theme of the microcosm. The most ambitious, however, involves not a new bestiary redaction but the radical recontextualization of what is likely the oldest of them, the pre-eleventh-century Dicta Chrysostomi. BSB clm 6908 and clm 2655 are both illustrated thirteenthcentury manuscripts that copy this text immediately after De natura rerum by the Flemish Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré.60 This treatise, transmitted by at least 144 manuscripts, was composed between 1237 and 1240 and took (so its author says), fifteen years to compile from the best sources, which he

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enumerates in extenso in his prologue.61 Although Aristotle is the most frequently cited, “Physiologus” is also named among them; Thomas does not aim to provide a cutting-edge work of Aristotelian philosophy as much as a middle-brow compendium intended for use by preachers.62 But its character is nonetheless squarely scientific; for example, its books 4–9 are devoted to quadrupeds, birds, marine monsters, fish, and worms, respectively, the entries in each category arranged in alphabetical order and treated in a manner quite distant from the bestiarists’. Placing the Dicta version alongside De natura rerum completely transforms the status and meaning of this early bestiary. I shall discuss just one of these manuscripts, BSB clm 2655, which sandwiches the Dicta text between De natura rerum and the De philosophia mundi of William of Conches, a Neoplatonist work similar in inspiration to the Cosmographia composed between 1135 and 1145.63 The central position of the Dicta Chrysostomi bestiary in this natural philosophy codex is the more remarkable in that it is not just compiled with, but actually integrated to Thomas of Cantimpré’s treatise by means of two full-page drawings depicting the microcosm and macrocosm (fos. 104v–105r; see plates 24–25). These follow on immediately from the end of the bestiary, continue its pictorial style, and bind it into the contents of the treatise.64 In particular, they recall Thomas’s chapter of human anatomy, which begins “the parts of the human body were first created, as Aristotle says, and then positioned in accordance with creation and the disposition of the entire world, which is why in Greek man is called the microcosm or ‘lesser world.’”65 In this particular manuscript, this chapter, which in the published edition comes at the beginning of De natura rerum, is placed at its end, immediately before the bestiary. In the image of the microcosm on fo. 104v, concordances between human anatomy, the elements, and aspects of the natural world are detailed on the scrolls linking one with the other. Their wording derives, however, not from Thomas but from the Elucidarium, the same source as for the microcosm theme in the Long Version. For example, the scrolls connecting the human figure to the elements repeat almost word for word Honorius’s “from earth flesh, from water blood, from air breath, from fire warmth” (“ex terra carnem, ex aqua sanguinem, ex aere flatum, ex igne calorem”); others reiterate his parallels between rocks and bones, trees and nails, grasses and hair; and the scroll across the man’s belly recapitulates his “the belly receives all fluids like the sea all rivers” (“Venter omnes liquores, ut mare omnia flumina, recipit”).66 The similitudo of this human figure to the divine model, which is stated in the text of the Long Version,67 is here brought out pictorially by the correspondences between it and Christ in the facing-page macrocosm. Unusually, Christ is figured here as the creative force in the universe, that is, as wis-

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F i g u r e 2 4 . Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 2655, fo. 95r. Lion (Dicta Chrysostomi). Photograph: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

dom or the Word. The concordance between man and the rest of nature is brought out—as it is in the Bestiaire d’amours and the Long Version—by the way each of the elements constitutive of the human body is typified by an animal. The choice of creatures cleaves more closely to the bestiary tradition, however, than it does in the vernacular texts:68 fire is represented by a lion, air by an eagle, water by a fish, and earth by a centaur. The connection to the preceding bestiary is cemented by the identical depiction of the lion in both (compare plate 23, top right, to fig. 24, the bestiary Lion from a few folios earlier). Whereas some Second-family and Transitional bestiaries from the late twelfth-early thirteenth centuries begin with the Genesis creation sequence, this Dicta Chrysostomi copy resoundingly concludes by depicting a concept of creation shaped by medieval Neoplatonism. With its expanses of naked skin that connect with a series of inscribed banderoles, the figure of the microcosm underlines the skin’s primary functions as both container of identity and surface of inscription. While the figure’s outline demarcates “human” identity, the scrolls collectively identify humanity additionally with the nonhuman, insisting that it participates in

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the airiness of air, the grassiness of grass, and so on. Primarily they document links between the human body and the elements, and secondarily with geological and botanical formations but, given that each element is typified by an animal, the image also manifests how fundamental attributes of flesh, blood, breath, and warmth are shared with other creatures. The theme of the microcosm is also performed by the connections and continuities between the various surfaces in this image—both the represented surfaces and the surfaces on which they are represented. The scrolls connect the human body with the page, and in effect turn it into a kind of page, while the identity between the skin of the page and what is represented as the “man’s” skin mutely enacts the shared nature of humans with other animals. I am struck, too, that all these inscriptions resemble the band of stitching in the inner bottom corner of this page. This is especially true of the word written vertically down the center of the human’s chest, which reads “Saturnus,” the planet associated with old age and death. Its parallel with the place where the animal skin has been torn or wounded may perhaps serve as a reminder that, if flesh comes from the earth and breath from the air, mortality comes from the animal. The inscriptions on both microcosm and macrocosm are written in all directions so that, in order to read them, the reader has to either move the book around, or else move around it. Both these movements imitate the revolutions of the rotae, or wheels, the circular forms within which knowledge is marshaled and which also imply temporal progression, the succession of the seasons, for example. Thus implicated in the structures described on the page, the reader becomes another orbiting or rotating element. Traces of this process survive in the way the margins all around the page are marked by use. The microcosm is of course a mirror of the reader, but the page, too, has been used as a literal mirror, held up and scrutinized from every side. Whereas the Tiger in the mirror in bestiaries such as St. John’s MS 61 required the reader to ask to what extent he recognized, or misrecognized, himself in the creatures on the page, and the Long Version chapter on the Harpy implied that it was possible to acknowledge features of other animals as contributing to the human, codex 2655 explicitly performs a synthesis of the human with the rest of nature, and calls on the reader to recognize its mysterious mirroring of the divine. Conclusion Here I have examined how medieval bestiaries reflect on two questions that were fundamental to medieval thought: what constitutes likeness? How is it

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recognized? I have shown how answers range from an early identification of likeness as spiritual change that depends on an inner response (the Caladrius) to a later one of likeness as the result of the harmonies that structure nature and reflect its divine creator. Along the way the role of the senses, especially sight but also touch, are weighed and cases of misrecognition (the Tiger) and crossed wires (the Lion, the Harpy) are confronted. Likeness and its recognition involve the reader, whether in an act of conversion, as when the sick man literally “turns towards” the Caladrius as a figure of Christ, or participation, as when the human is said to derive all its properties from the natural world, which explains why he is able to recognize them. Overall there is a progression toward greater and greater inclusion of the human as a part of the bestiary. Initially recognition and resemblance typify the anthropological machine, since the divergence between imago and similitudo installs a caesura within the human; but the machine’s workings falter with the discovery of similitudo between all creatures and the divine, and with the prioritization of resemblances within the natural sphere. One medium for effecting this inclusion is the skin that humans and other creatures share with one another and with the book. Officially conceptions of likeness and the processes of recognition involve intellectual and spiritual work, but they are nonetheless anchored in the senses of sight and touch and focused on the skin. Officially the claim that humans were created in the image and likeness of God was assumed to mean that they were unlike other animals, but for the reader of bestiaries they are caught up in exactly the same riddles as the rest of creation. Humans are not set apart from other animals but intricately connected with them so that whatever understanding can be gleaned from the macrocosm will illumine the microcosm, and vice versa. Support of the many mirroring essamples of which bestiaries are composed, the mirror of their pages reflects the reader back through their surface into the riddle of creation.

6

Skin, the Inner Senses, and the Soul as “Inner Life”

I showed in the last chapter how the process of recognizing likeness gradually draws the reader into the bestiary, situating the human among its creatures. The external senses of sight and touch furnish points of similarity between humans and other animals as well as means by which that similarity is recognized; foremost among the surfaces they register is the skin. I now consider the mind, spirit, or soul: the “inner life” (anima) that the skin is thought of as containing. Certain bestiaries—Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium or “Book of Birds” together with its various bestiary partners, and Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours—explicitly aim to foster an emotional, moral, or spiritual self. They have abundant precedents, like the twelfth-century Speculum virginum (“Mirror for Virgins”) conceived, as Janice Pindar puts it, “as an image against which the religious woman can measure her inner self, a reminder of who she is and what she is supposed to be like.”1 Both Hugh and Richard deploy the imagination of sight and touch—holding, enfolding, or adhering—in order to conjure in their readers the sense of having an inner life experienced as “inner vision” and as “inner touch,”2 and formed by the internalized sight and touch of another skin: a parent’s (often mother’s) skin, the social skin of an institution, or the skin of a page. The position adopted by these texts and their manuscripts on the relation of an eternal self to a bodily one thus differs from that of the Physiologusderived chapters on Serpents discussed in chapter 2. There it was the adoption or shedding of a skin that was held to mark the passage from one to another; here what is at issue is the furnishing of an internal surface, not an external one. But as in that chapter, the distinction of “human” from “animal” may be undone when both are seen as sharing the same interior experience, or when the skin of the one is indistinguishable from the skin of the other.

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De anima The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which major modifications were made to Latin bestiaries and the French versions emerged, were also a period in which treatises on the soul proliferated. The texts I discuss reflect a more Augustinian and a more Aristotelian approach to ensoulment. Hugh of Fouilloy (ca. 1096-ca. 1172, known in Latin as Hugo de Folieto) was an Augustinian canon whose works, which include the Aviarium and various spiritual treatises, were often attributed to a more famous canon of the same order, Hugh of Saint-Victor.3 Confirmed as prior of Saint-Nicolas-de-Regny in 1132 and promoted prior of the superior house of Saint-Laurent-au-Bois ca. 1152, Hugh of Fouilloy seemingly conceived the Aviarium for novice monks or lay brothers in his care.4 Sometimes the Aviarium is inserted into the birds section of a Second-family Latin text;5 at others it is copied alongside a bestiary text, often that of H which was specifically designed to accompany it.6 Most Aviarium copies of known provenance are either Augustinian or Cistercian; this is also true of combined Aviary-bestiaries.7 The Aviarium builds on the allegorical legacy of the Physiologus but concentrates more on conversion and devotion than on doctrine; its main objective is to foster love of God and one’s neighbor in its pupils. Others of Hugh’s works are also intended for a monastic readership and are often transmitted with the Aviarium, particularly his De claustro animae (“The Cloister of the Soul”), a treatise promoting a reformed monastic spirituality of which there are over 500 known manuscripts.8 The relative chronology of these works is not certain, but the Aviarium is probably the earlier of the two.9 A more Aristotelian orientation is found in the thirteenth-century Bestiaire d’amours by Richard de Fournival, which sidesteps the religious allegories of traditional bestiaries in favor of comparisons between the behaviors of humans and those of other animals, drawn ostensibly to further the writer’s efforts to win the love of a recalcitrant lady.10 In four manuscripts, Richard’s text is followed by her sharp rebuttal of his suit.11 Like the Aviarium, then, though in a very different vein, love and the behavior it induces are the grounds for comparison between humans and other animals, the professed aim being to instill love in the reader. Although the Bestiaire d’amours does not circulate with the works with which it invites comparison—Aristotle’s Metaphysics, his De anima, and the De anima of Avicenna—Richard quotes from the Metaphysics in his prologue and all three works are known to have been included in Richard’s library, the contents of which he describes in another of his texts.12 Philosophers in the tradition of Aristotle’s De anima, while they may not have agreed on what constitutes a human soul, concur that the

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framework in which it should be discussed is a comparative one in which the capacities of humans are weighed with those of other animals. Animated alike by breath, locomotion, and appetite, and “sensitive” in the sense of having similar powers of sensation, humans and other animals also share a number of cognitive abilities like imagination and memory. The Bestiaire d’amours humorously explores this common ground, sometimes ruing that love confines humans within domains of the soul that are shared with other animals, at others finding animals better equipped than humans to love and be loved.13 Hugh of Fouilloy’s texts on spiritual development take a less biological view, yet also entertain human affinity with other creatures. Reason, which presides over the soul in De claustro animae, is said to act like Noah in his Ark when “he edifies the soul, ordering the irrational animals below and placing birds and humans above, that is, he subordinates carnal movements and promotes spiritual ones.”14 Some animals may be irrational and carnal, but birds belong alongside Noah, reason, and the spirit. Their capacity to enhance the life of the soul is the enabling trope of Hugh’s Aviarium. In its prologue, indeed, Hugh says that birds and other animals serve “as an example of moral character” (ad exemplum morum; A Prologue §1), evidence that he at one stage contemplated writing a bestiary as well. The exemplariness of other creatures’ behavior—especially birds’ treatment of their eggs and chicks— lies, it would seem, in their capacity to model and inspire care for the soul in human readers.15 The extent to which the soul’s development is bound up with the modes of its bodily containment is well conveyed by the Aviarium’s initial entry on the Dove. Hugh successively identifies it as a figure for the whole person of the monk (A Prologue §1), divine Grace (A §1), the Church (A §§2, 5), the soul (A §3), and a priest (A §4).16 These glosses accord with Caroline Bynum’s account of the medieval “self ” as delineated both by personal interiority, and by inclusion within a group subject to a particular external authority. Although less emphatic than neo-Aristotelians about the soul’s enmeshment in the body, Hugh nevertheless insists on its bodily and social dependencies.17 Both the Aviarium and the Bestiaire d’amours use nonhuman animals to foster awareness of an “inner life” or soul in their reader and to inspire it to love. Both begin with similar prologues that stress the importance of imagination and the senses to their effectiveness, both stress the theme of parenthood, specifically the physical contact of mothering, as a source of imagined sensations, and Richard seems indebted to the Aviarium for some of his avian comparisons. In both works the reader’s interior self is encouraged to take shape via imagination more than indoctrination, and what is imagined gradually shifts from visual image to imagined touch within a nurturing environment.

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Both works provide their readers with a skin within which they “see” what the book expounds and “feel” the touch that it describes; reading acts, then, as a second skin in which the reader’s inner self is informed by the sight and touch of the page. Prologues on Imagination The prologue to the Aviarium stakes the work’s effectiveness on its appeal to the imagination. It is addressed to the eye rather than the ear of readers who are described as “unlettered” (illiterati, A Prologue §2): I decided to paint the dove whose wings are silvered and the hinderparts of the back in pale gold [Ps. 67:14], and by a picture to instruct the minds of simple folk (simplicium), so that what the intellect of the simple folk (simplicium) could scarcely comprehend with the mind’s eye, it might at least discern with the physical eye; and what their hearing could scarcely perceive, their sight might do so. I wished not only to paint the dove physically, but also to outline it verbally, so that by the text I may represent a picture; for instance, whom the simplicity (simplicitas) of the picture would not please, at least the moral teaching of the text might do so.18 (A Prologue §1)

In addition to indicating the instruction to be derived from the Dove Hugh’s insistence on its feathers evokes the value of authorship as writing, a value confirmed by occasional manicula clutching pens in the margins of these pages.19 References to the Dove’s silver and gold plumage also anticipate his treatise’s realization as a lavishly decorated book.20 Such a book will encourage his readers to submit to the monastic rule;21 for example, Hugh says that he will both describe and paint the Turtledove in order to help them maintain the monastic virtue of chastity (A §23). Imagination is called upon to sustain and furnish an inner life by recourse to actual paintings, by the imagined “sight” of birds’ behavior as Hugh expounds it and also, as the Aviarium develops, by imagining the sense of touch of one bird’s body on another. A hundred years later, Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours begins with a much-studied prologue explaining the impact he wants his book to have.22 Appealing to hearing and sight, the words and images of his text will pass through the gateways of these two external senses into the house of memory. Some manuscripts illustrate this passage with a surreal rebus of its contents: an architectural structure sporting a huge ear and eye.23 Like Hugh, Richard is conscious of crafting a book, differing from his predecessor mainly in being more intellectually ambitious, less condescending, and infinitely more slippery.24 He starts by translating the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphys-

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ics, “All men by nature desire to know,”25 and proceeds like Aristotle to expound how knowledge is preceded and enabled by sensation and perception. While their nature drives humans to seek out knowledge, says Richard, the totality of their knowledge is inevitably shared out among many individuals, some of whom are dead; it can only be preserved through memory with its two doorways, seeing and hearing, and its two media, painting and speech. As I have argued elsewhere, however, his illustration of this process veers deliberately away from his model in Metaphysics.26 Rather than showing the relevance of memory to reason, Richard instead reflects on the persistence of images lodged in the imagination. The reason why he is writing this illustrated book, he reveals, is not to impart knowledge but to make an unforgettable impression on his lady. As in the Aviarium, this effect will be achieved by conjuring not only the imagination of sight but also, as the book advances, that of the touch of one body on another. Motherhood and Enclosure in Hugh of Fouilloy The second half of the Aviarium (§§38–60) relies on imagery of nurture, dwelling on birds’ treatment of their young and attributing strong parenting skills to nearly all the birds that are interpreted positively. Hugh’s aim is to fill new monks with love for God and their neighbor, a love they are to internalize by contemplating the natural affection of birds. The motif of the Raven feeding its chicks is amplified over several pages as an image of a preacher ministering to the repentant (A §40). Cranes are said to halt in their flight so they can support and take care of an exhausted fellow; they are tireless sentinels, whose nature lends itself to informing the life of those in religious orders (A §44). The Swallow wisely nests near human habitation where its young can be reared in safety (A §46); Storks “have an exceptional sense of duty toward their offspring” (A §47, “eximia illis circa filios pietas”); and so on with the Heron (A §52) and the Quail (A §56). Conversely, the negative value of some birds is reflected in their being unfit parents. A long chapter describes how the Ostrich lays its eggs at a time when they will be warmed by the wind so it can devote itself to its own concerns (A §42). It is glossed as a hypocrite and lengthily condemned for its failure to nurture its young, for “to have left the eggs on the ground is to fail to raise the sons born of conversion from worldly activities by providing them with the nest of encouragement” (A  §42).27 Similarly with the Partridge, both parent birds aggravate their tabloid-worthy vices by the scandalous way they treat their young (A §55). Instead of conceiving parent-child relations in terms of likeness and recognition (as in the texts discussed in chapter 5), Hugh offers his charges the

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inducement of physical tenderness while also conveying to them the inexorable duty of loving one’s fellow. To do so, he builds on imagery common to other spiritual thinkers of his time, such as Anselm’s prayer to Jesus “who, like a hen, collects her chickens under her wings” (cf. Matt. 23:37).28 Readers’ imagination is stimulated and furnished with representations, as evocations of sight and touch pass over into their inner equivalents. Each new convert monk is encouraged both to visualize and to feel himself a child enfolded in a parent’s embrace; contained within this nurturing structure, his soul is exhorted to see, feel, and love in return. These chapters follow on from the Aviarium’s opening sequences that locate the nurturing of its readers’ souls in the cloister rather than a parent’s solicitude. In chapters 1–22 the Dove and the Hawk share a monastic “perch,” and in chapters 23–37 church institutions are among the meanings of the Palm and Cedar trees where the Turtledoves and Sparrows make their nests. The value which these opening chapters place on the cloistered life invites comparison with De claustro animae, in which Hugh submits the architecture of a monastery to fourfold exegesis: its construction is praised as granting unique access to the religious life (book 1), and then interpreted as materializing a rule that conduces to virtue and shuns vice (book 2), as an allegory of the soul (book 3) and as anticipating the heavenly Jerusalem (book 4). All four books, but especially book 3, clearly show how a sustaining external environment equates to an inner spiritual and moral development; the topography of the cloister both maps that of the soul and nurtures its progress.29 Like the Aviarium with which it is often copied, De claustro is more pastoral-affective than theological-intellectual in content. The aspects of spiritual life that it stresses are community and charity, discipline of the self and care for the other, and the need for the monk constantly to strive toward perfection.30 Like the nurturing care promoted in the Aviarium, De claustro teaches that “the practical care of one’s fellow brethren [is] of paramount importance for moral and spiritual life in the monastery” as it “prepares the mind for loving God.”31 The fact of spending his days moving around the monastery will remind the monk to reflect on the teachings which the treatise has “placed” in its various parts: the layout of the building is not only a set of memorial loci but the setting for the daily practice of the virtues they prescribe. The text promotes a constant exchange between what appears to be outside (the institution) and what is conjured inside (the individual soul), the purpose of the treatise being to bring one into harmony with the other and both to a state of perfection.32 As between mother and child in the Aviarium, the boundary between inside and outside in De claustro acts as a limit within (or upon) which the

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interiority of the soul is constructed. Ivan Gobry draws attention to a passage in which this limit is expressed as skin: “Sing to the sound of a tambourine to sing in the choir. Those who sing to the sound of the tambourine mortify their flesh. Those who sing in the choir maintain the harmony of their conscience” (De claustro 3.15).33 External discipline is figured here as lashes that strike the skin like beats on a tambourine; each member of the community sings to the resulting music, which is what forges them into a “choir.”34 A different emphasis, one that stresses purity within the skin boundary, is found in the section on the dormitory (De claustro 3.9), of whose chaste spiritual rapture Hugh writes that “just as the flesh of animal beings is covered on the outside by skin, so the spirit of the living creature, casting abroad in quest of vain glory, takes its delight from what lies outside it.”35 The goal of monastic discipline is to make the externally defined rule inform the internal self-regulation of each monk. “Spread out the straw of the flesh,” instructs Hugh, “so that animality may be subject to (lit. lie underneath) the reason of the mind” (De claustro 3.9),36 a striking image that recalls the passage already quoted in which reason, who presides over the community’s chapter house, acts like Noah with his Ark when subordinates “irrational animals” to humans and “carnal movements to spiritual ones” (ibid).37 The Aviarium sequence most like De claustro is that concerning the Sparrows and the Cedar (A §§30–38).38 Sparrows are preachers, but also their young converts; they live in the branches of the Cedar which represents Christ because Cedars “surpass other trees in height, beauty and strength” (A §30, “proceritate, specie et robore alias arbores praecellunt”). As members of the church, Sparrows are safeguarded by the patronage of the mighty who are another meaning of the Cedar. Yet other Cedars represent predatory barons whose lot is to be felled so their wood can be used in God’s service. Sparrows are unsteady creatures that need the protection of the house built from the Cedar: See how the sparrow , which previously used to migrate to the mountain of faithlessness, now, on guard for the truth of faith, cries from the heights. He is therefore called a recluse , because he is far removed from earthly desires.39 (A §34)

The Sparrows’ faith and their capacities as preachers or pupils are inward qualities deriving from their life in the nest of monastic rule and subjection to Christ. The monastery as Cedar and its preachers as nesting Sparrows are variously illustrated. The earliest representation is as a stylized tree containing birds and framing, within a mandorla, a male figure who is sometimes the

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monastery’s patron.40 But the illustrators of a few manuscripts have stripped away the tree in favor of an opulent gold field, and substituted doves for sparrows and a female figure for a male one; prime examples are Aberdeen University Library MS 24 (plate 28) and its sister manuscript, Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511 (fo. 45r).41 The woman in the Aberdeen manuscript has been variously interpreted as the Virgin, or wisdom, or the church.42 That she is a powerful mother of some kind is implied by the way she cradles one of the birds in her arms, whereas other illustrations place all the birds in the tree. The dove’s position as nursling evokes the fledglings mentioned in the text and emphasizes the protective authority exercised over them by the allegorical woman. The image combines the intimacy of a maternal environment, mediated by sight and touch, with the discipline implied by the figure’s stern countenance. Although depicting the Cedar as a woman is an iconographic departure, the choice of a female figure anticipates the maternal images of spiritual formation already seen as dominating the second half of the Aviarium. It epitomizes Hugh’s teaching that a soul is shaped, regulated, and filled with love by internalizing the sight and feel of a parent, especially a mother. The fact that the birds depicted in the Aberdeen image are doves rather than sparrows recalls the Doves earlier in the Aviarium who represent the monks in Hugh’s care, his addressees both here and in De claustro. The picture’s context in the Aberdeen manuscript further overdetermines the value of motherhood. In this and a related group of Second-family bestiaries, the Aviarium is inserted into, and replaces most of, the usual Secondfamily section on birds (i.e., from SF §51 on). Earlier chapters in this redaction stress the maternal behavior of the Lion (SF §1), Tiger (SF §2), Elephant (SF §9), Ape (SF §14), and Bear (SF §20). Often the initial chapter recasts the father Lion’s act of resuscitating its cubs as the Lioness’s care for her infants, even though so doing goes against the traditional gendering of the allegory in which the Father resurrects the Son; this may reflect the trend in twelfthcentury spirituality to interpret Jesus as a mother.43 The Aberdeen Bestiary has lost a number of folios, but nevertheless, in the pages preceding the inserted Aviarium, retains imagery of motherhood in its illustrations of the Tiger (fo. 8r), Ape (fo. 12v), and Bear (fo. 15r). In the related Ashmole Bestiary, motherly behavior is depicted on the part of the Lion (fo. 10v), Tiger (fo. 12r), Ape (fo. 18v), Bear (fo. 21r), and Cow (fo. 30v). Mother-child interactions typically center on the mother’s mouth as she breathes on her offspring or licks them into shape (see plates 19–20 and figs. 18, 23). Their inverse is a terrifying swallowing, the behavior early attributed to the Fox or Great Fish now extended to the man-eating Crocodile (plates 16–17 and fig. 17). The coexistence of these alternatives recalls the way psychoanalysts understand an infant’s earliest

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interactions with its mother, an idea to which I return below.44 When Lacan describes a mother’s desire as snapping shut on her child like the jaws of a crocodile, he may even have in mind images like these.45 The Second family theorizes a connection between motherhood and imagination in its chapter on the Horse. After observing how interbreeding produces hybrids, the chapter quotes from Isidore an explanation of how young are conceived in conformity with an image imprinted on the mother’s mind at the time of her impregnation: Likewise, Jacob tended that, contrary to nature, were of the same color, for his ewes conceived offspring like the images of the rams mounting them, which the ewes saw mirrored in the water (Gen. 30:37–42). . . . Wherefore it happened that certain people urge pregnant women not to look at the faces of the ugliest animals, such as baboons and apes, lest they give birth to babies resembling they see. . . . For in mating, animals (animalia, “living beings”) transmit their external forms into during sexual intercourse, and filled with their images, she carries their appearances (species) over into her pregnancy.46 (SF §44)

In the last sentence, Isidore wrote not “animals /living beings (animalia) transmit” but “the soul (anima) transmits”; by species he means not just that an “appearance” is transmitted but also that a generic “species” or “form” is imprinted on the future offspring—the claim being lodged is that species is imposed on raw matter by a soul in thrall to an image. As received in the twelfth century, however, the text has come to mean that the imposition of species in motherhood is common to all beings susceptible to imagination. This is the susceptibility that Hugh of Fouilloy taps into to determine the form of his readers, and that Richard de Fournival will also exploit. The page of the Aberdeen Bestiary depicting the Cedar as a woman attests an unusual history of touch, evidence that indeed it was used to shape the imagination of historical readers. Whereas most manuscripts show greatest signs of handling at the bottom outer corners of their pages, here they are concentrated in the middle of the top margin, just above the illumination. Scholars agree that this page, alone in the volume, was frequently held up from the top with the rest of the page pointing down and outward, as if a teacher were repeatedly showing it to students, presumably exhorting them both to visualize and to feel themselves reflected in the image as Christian nurslings in the arms of a holy mother.47 Being thus imaginatively enclosed and cradled by the maternal embrace of the cloister would move them to enclose and cradle within themselves a soul warmed by her love. At stake in this image is the repeated contact of skin against skin: church to soul, mother

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to child, reader to page. The power of this contact, real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, to shape and furnish the sense of an inner life, is exploited in a very different vein in the Bestiaire d’amours. Motherhood and Adhesion in the Bestiaire d’amours Richard, too, evokes a mirroring of touch and sight in order to awaken love in his purported addressee, the lady. But his approach is the reverse of Hugh’s. Where the Augustinian prior acts the benevolent parent (teacher/church) to his child (pupil/novice), Richard acts the child clinging to an indifferent or neglectful parent: love is modeled by the author-offspring and the readermother appealed to for a response. Even more than the Aviarium, the latter part of the Bestiaire d’amours stresses the tactile, here adhesive dimension of motherhood alongside vision and the voice. The theme of parenting begins somberly. Richard warns his lady to avoid indiscrete and philandering lovers since they would mistreat her like a Viper does its parents, whose birth involves the death of both its progenitors (BA §26). Were she to meet with a Viper, he hopes she will fare like the Ape and her babies. He then rehearses the example of the mother Ape and her twins in a way that eliminates the hostility traditionally directed toward her and instead emphasizes her bond with her offspring (BA §27). Devastated by the hunter’s pursuit, the Ape dearly wishes to save both her children; the best she can do is to run away on her hind legs, her favorite clasped in her arms and the other clinging to her back. As in the Second-family chapter, when the chase continues the mother needs to run on all fours and so is forced to lose hold of the child at her breast; the child on her back is now the more secure of the two. Let this be the outcome for his lady, Richard hopes (BA §28), for the mother Ape’s discrimination between her offspring ends up benefiting the one she discriminates against, namely himself, and not his rival, whom she prefers. Richard repeatedly underlines the importance of holding (tenir) in his account: “For the [child] that she loves does not hold on to her, rather she holds him, and she does not hold the one she dislikes, rather he holds her. And so it is right . . . that she should lose the one she holds and the one who holds on to her should stay” (BA §27).48 This motif provides the link to his next comparison, with the Sawfish that pursues a ship with all its strength but, when it catches it, loses interest and drops to the bottom of the sea: it is like a false lover with his lady, for while she may hold to him the Sawfish does not hold to her, whereas he, Richard, does hold to her and would never cling (ne . . . prendroie) to anyone else (§29). These passages use adhesion as

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both a metaphor for love and an incitement to it. They lead to a series of comparisons with bird-parenting in which the central image is that of a mother bird sitting on her eggs, for “laying eggs is falling in love, and sitting on them is sustaining it” (BA §31, “li prendres est li ponres, et li couvers li retenirs”). An egg cannot hold on to its mother like a baby Ape, but it needs contact with her, and as in the Aviarium this contact seems intended to trigger an “inner touch” in the reader. In fact the whole sequence appears modeled on the Aviarium, even treating all but the first bird in the same order as Hugh: Partridge (BA §§30–31=A §55), Ostrich (BA §32=A §42), Stork (BA §32=A §47), Hoopoe (BA §33=A §57), and Eagle (BA §34=A §60),49 as Richard first censures mother birds that neglect their young, and then shows good parenting rewarded by appreciative offspring.50 (The final comparison, with the Eagle, relies on a detail found in the Aviarium entry and otherwise only in Dicta Chrysostomi bestiaries, according to which it sometimes needs to break its beak, interpreted by Richard as the lady needing to restrain her pride if she is to experience love.51) At the end of this sequence, Richard transitions through the Crocodile and the Dragon to arrive at the final comparisons of this parenthood sequence, of his lady with the Elephant and himself with her young. The Elephant’s prudence in shielding her baby from the Dragon shows her care for it. Conceiving young is now an image for falling in love, and the metaphor of giving birth replaces that of sitting on eggs: “For giving birth signifies retaining love, as was said earlier about the nature of the Partridge, for a woman makes a man her cub when she retains him as her lover” (§34).52 As with the Ape, this passage radically alters the traditional bestiary image of the Elephant as continent. Comic as these images may be, they clearly rely like the Aviarium before them on touch as well as sight: holding, covering, enclosing, shielding. Richard’s choice of the Ape and the Elephant to bookend material reminiscent of—and likely adapted from—Hugh of Fouilloy makes it possible to measure the difference between the two authors’ appeal to the imagination. Hugh evokes birds’ bodies in order for readers to experience a mirroring inner sense of sight and touch, but he does not thereby institute a biological continuum connecting birds and humans. In the Bestiaire d’amours, by contrast, the sight and touch that passes between higher animals, such as between the mother Ape and her twins, or the manipulations of the Elephant to defend her child, serve in the first place to shape an interior world which is attributed to them, regarding which it seems quite plausible to infer that humans share it too. The other creatures that Richard evokes are drawn by association into what henceforth appear as inner lives common to humans and themselves.

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Aping the Ape Richard’s treatment of the Ape implies a particular understanding of the etymology simia < similis. In the earliest bestiaries the Ape’s apparent likeness to humans is regarded as suspect; if anything, the Ape resembles the devil; some texts condemn the mother Ape for the perversion of judgment whereby she loses what she judges to be best.53 Increasingly, however, the view that “Apes are so called in Latin because in them a likeness to human reason (similitudo rationis humanae) is sensed” is allowed to pass without rebuke, an attitude that H. W. Janson, in his study of ape lore, identifies as “scientific.”54 The likeness Richard identifies is not reason as such, however, but an inner life of which reason is only part, and a dysfunctional part at that. His comparison with the Ape is remarkable for the fact that he hopes for success as a result of imitating an animal that apparently fails. The impossibility of avoiding judgment brings affliction on the mother Ape, just as her adoption of human posture—which corresponds with the privileging of reason—ensures her bereavement. The operations of the cognitive process described by Aristotle and others are subject to error and derailment once they pass beyond the representations produced by the external senses, and the inner imaginative processes to which they give rise. In the face of reason’s fallibility, humans should ape the Ape, and the love that binds the mother Ape to her babies should inspire that between lady and lover even if in her case its realization is thwarted. The weaker twin’s adhesion to its only support is the true model to be followed. Bestiare d’amours illustrations echo this more positive attitude. The mother is usually shown still trying to save both children, holding the one and being held by the other, with sympathy seemingly directed to the family group.55 An early example is that in Paris, Sainte Geneviève MS 2200 (fig. 25), copied in Thérouanne or Saint-Omer in 1277, where a hunter has his arm raised ready to strike yet the three Apes, clasped together with their eyes closed, seem completely absorbed in one another.56 The triumph of the neglected twin is sympathetically depicted in Bodleian MS Douce 308, a fourteenth-century manuscript copied in Metz where, in the second of two images on fos. 100v– 101r, the rival that in the first picture is riding on its mother’s shoulders is now abandoned on the ground behind her; a similar image is found in the Houghton Bestiary, Houghton Library Typ 101, fo. 9v, see fig. 9.57 BnF fr. 15213, an elegant late fourteenth-century manuscript with illustrations identified as by Richard de Montbaston, also privileges the child on the mother Ape’s back by making him considerably larger than the one in her arms (fig. 26). Like Douce

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F i g u r e 2 5 . Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève MS 2200, fo. 187r. Ape (Bestiaire d’amours). Photograph: © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. Photography: Courtesy of IRHT.

308, it depicts the drama of the Ape family alone, without the hunter.58 That it impacted the imagination of medieval readers is shown by the traces of rubbing which pass down the right hand side of the picture, through the child in its mother’s arms, and down into the writing column below, obliterating part of the text—as if readers’ hands had sought to undo the mother’s hold on the favored child, and affirm the other’s grip on her. As with the woman and doves in the Aberdeen Bestiary, then, representations of sight and touch are mirrored, in BnF fr. 15213, by traces of how the page was seen and touched. In both cases, this residue of the readers’ skin connects with and interferes in the scene that is represented, whether of a

F i g u r e 2 6 . BnF fr. 15213, fo. 86v. Ape (Bestiaire d’amours). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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maternal skin that touches (like a mother’s arms) or is touched (like a child’s clasp). Mediating between the outer and inner senses, shaping and equipping an inner life, the skin of the page mediates between the contents of a book and its impact on the reader. The Manuscript as Second Skin and the Inner Life of the Reader In a discussion of the “manuscript matrix” in her book Imaginary Worlds, Martha Rust opens Nichols’s term to three dimensions: for her the open book is the support of a virtual space which projects forward from the page to include the reader. Sometimes this space is the mirror image of a third dimension that a perspective painting already projects backward from the page, like an annunciation scene in a Book of Hours.59 But its key correlate, for Rust, is the space of imagination that, in medieval theories of mind, occupied “a discreet cell-like area of the brain.”60 Reading, she proposes, is “an experience . . . of interacting with books as if they bounded a virtual, externalized imaginative faculty,” as if the internal cell of the imagination were extended outward to form a space from mind to page that the reader inhabits.61 Just as imagination is formed by both sensory and intelligent experience, so the manuscript matrix is determined both by the physical features of the book and by what Rust calls “codicological consciousness,” the reader’s awareness of “the interplay among diverse semiotic systems that is only in potentia on the physical page.”62 Reading, then, is a space of thinking and, more fundamentally, of being, that is framed by its physical support.63 Rust’s description of medieval reading has obvious similarities with mine and is based on the same mechanism of introjection: a reader may feel held or enclosed by a book, and absorbed within its world, even though physically he or she is the one holding the book that can be set down at any moment. But although Rust uses the annunciation to explain her understanding of the manuscript matrix, which she then equates with an inner cell, she does not perceive it as maternal, despite the fact that matrix can mean “womb.” And Rust’s notion of imagination is seemingly immune to unconscious influence, being shaped instead by what she calls “codicological consciousness”: awareness on the reader’s part of such aspects of book production as ordinatio and the quality of illustration. In addition to such conscious appreciation, I have been advocating for a codicological unconscious in which reading can be subject to contingent interference from the look and feel of the page itself. The ultimate source of this interference lies in the primitive relation to the mother since, as Henrot puts it, “from the time of its conception on, the

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human being can only live and develop within the shelter of an envelope that ensures it is contained, body and spirit, within a ‘skin.’” 64 From this perspective, the manuscript matrix is one more such envelope: one whose maternal origins have long since retreated from the reader’s awareness in favor not only of the aspects of the book that Rust enumerates, but of other kinds of experience associated with the skin: as a surface on which adult erotic feelings, or feelings of mortality are registered, or as a symbolic container within which knowledge and ideas are harbored.65 In the Aberdeen image of the mother cradling a dove in plate 28, for example, nostalgia for the infantile envelope is overlaid by more adult ideas about the containment of the individual within the institution. Neither the allegorical female figure nor the bird that she holds is a literal mother or child, and rocked in its roundel, the bird is a representation of a picture of a symbolic Dove, not an image of an actual sparrow. The tenderness of a maternal touch is evoked only to give way to abstract interpretation. Yet traces of the body remain, even if they are not consciously registered. In the bottom outer corner of this folio is a round hole which has the same dimensions as the medallions; but instead of framing an exquisite painting of a dove-or-Christian-soul, what it outlines is an area of parchment on the page beneath, the darker, slightly coarser hair side of which contrasts with the smoother, paler flesh side of fo. 34r. The page combines what Rust calls codicological consciousness (recognizing the dove as an allegorical medallion) with an imaginative echo of maternal holding (the woman) together with something much less open to interpretation: an almost invisible trace, barely perceptible to the touch, of an unseeing gaze onto an area of dead animal skin. Another unsettling echo is that between the mandorla in which the female figure is placed and the three or more scrape marks at the outer edge of the folio. Each scrape spreads out from a central cut from which projects a curved area, a bit like a ghostly leaf. The mandorla shape, associated with divinity and sanctity, is also, as Caroline Bynum has pointed out, the shape associated with the wound in Christ’s side.66 Whoever is the figure standing where the Cedar notionally is, the shape in which she is placed evokes not only her holy status but also the wound that Christianity identifies most strongly with salvation; the picture is barely three dimensional, yet the gold frame does project upward from the figure incised in the middle. The scrapes on the parchment next to her, however, in a materialist pastiche of the sacred Wound, resulted from the processes of turning the skin of a slaughtered animal into a writing surface. As Bynum also says, the mandorla is uncannily like a vagina, an as-

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sociation that may rise unbidden to the fore alongside these representations of motherhood and wounding as residual memories of a long forgotten birth. A movement from infant nurture to adult preoccupation similarly accompanies depictions of the Ape with her children in the Bestiaire d’amours, where the child’s clinging to its mother is coded as the lover’s desire for his lady and then overcoded as a male elite’s ironic amusement at this conceit. In BnF fr. 15213 a man rather than a woman appears in images beside the author, who is portrayed in clerical dress, making it likely that the fingers which partially obliterated the mother Ape’s favored twin in fig. 26 were an expression not of heterosexual interest in courtship, but of adult male solidarity. A different kind of imprint of holding can be made out on the parchment of Sainte Geneviève 2200 (fig. 25), however. A little below the image of the Ape on fo. 187r, and opposite that of the Sawfish on the verso, there is a tear that falls in the writing block of the outer column and was mended before the text was copied, so the writing skirts around it—no other page of the text is damaged in this way. From this tear there fan out a series of scrape marks which, together with the stitches holding the tear closed, make up the outlines of a ghostly hand. Successive handling of this area of the margin has darkened the parchment except for these “fingers” which now stand out starkly against it, their color exactly paralleling the nude paint that represents the skin of the three Apes.67 The text about one creature clinging to another has been overlaid by what looks like the hand of a spectral reader, gripping the page with the same skin as they. The tear, meanwhile, materializes the panicked fear of being torn away from the mother’s skin, since it falls in the middle of this passage (corresponding to BA §28): kal vous auenist de lui et de moi ausi con il auient ale singesse de ses .ii. faons. Car il me san ble be . . . that it should happen to him and me the way it happens to the mother Ape < TEAR > with her two offspring. For < TEAR > it seems to me indeed . . .

Fear of being ripped away and the need to hold on are spectrally superimposed in the same defect of the page.68 To sum up, these copies of the Aviarium and the Bestiaire d’amours are obviously far removed from the primitive maternal environment. They are prod-

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ucts of an adult world where children are separate from parents and where the inner self is imagined as being distinct from body, a world without which “codicological consciousness” could not be conceived. They also show, however, that the originary envelope with its fusion of parent and child, and its still ongoing disengagement of mind from body, is not altogether lost and can be evoked by the manuscript matrix, within which the reader is enclosed.69 The H Bestiary Elephant The H bestiary chapters on the Elephant exemplify the complex layering that makes up the manuscript matrix in a way that is relevant here, given that this bestiary is regularly combined with the Aviarium. It may also have helped to shape the treatment of the Elephant in the Bestiaire d’amours: H places its entry on the Dragon (H §24) immediately before those on the Elephant (H §§25–26), and this same sequence serves as the culmination of Richard’s comparisons between maternal love and the love his lady should feel for him (BA §34), where as we saw “giving birth signifies retaining love” (BA §34).70 Like many H manuscripts, Cambridge, Sidney Sussex MS 100 organizes these chapters so as to present illustrations across facing pages (fos. 33v–34r; plates 26–27). This manuscript was probably made in Paris ca. 1250, roughly at the time the Bestiaire d’amours was composed.71 It combines the Aviarium (fos. 1–26v) with an H bestiary (fos. 26v–43), both texts now with missing leaves, and is copied on large pages of even-colored parchment whose hair and flesh sides are barely distinguishable.72 The left-hand image (plate 26) illustrates the text’s earlier description of the powerful Dragon crushing other creatures with its tail, even one as large as an elephant, a nature glossed as the devil that ensnares even mighty men (H §24). The right-hand image (plate 27) illustrates parts of the first Elephant chapter (H §25) which begins at the foot of fo. 33v and continues across these facing pages, ending on fo. 34v. Elephants are said to be intelligent and chaste. On the rare occasions when they reproduce they head east, close to paradise, where first the female and then the male eats a mandrake root; this is depicted the upper register, where the mandrake is the anthropomorphic figure and the paradise is represented as the heavenly Jerusalem. There the Elephants mate and the female conceives. To give birth, she goes into a great lake where the Dragon cannot attack her child; she is also guarded by the male Elephant, who tramples serpents underfoot. This scenario is depicted in the lower register of the picture, the presence of the same Dragon in both pictures helping to weld what were originally independent chapters into a single narrative sequence. The chapter continues by contrasting the Elephants with Adam and Eve whose concupiscence led

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to their expulsion from paradise. Burning an Elephant’s skin and bones will drive away serpents, which confirms their inner purity.73 The next chapter (H §26), which continues to fo. 35v, does not include any pictures but reprises this material from different sources repeating that the Elephant is continent, conceives with the mandrake, gives birth in water with the father guarding, contrasts with Adam and Eve, can fumigate serpents with its burned skin, and stands for inner virtue. The baby Elephant is variously and repeatedly framed by both text and image which evoke the maternal environment in which, still tiny and helpless, it is nurtured and protected. The water surrounding the infant is literally womb-like. The mother’s body dwarfs and shields it, seconded by the vigilant father. But these images of the infant’s physical dependency are further framed by the mandrake, the paradise, and the many glosses supplementing and allegorizing the Elephants’ natures. Although the baby Elephant forms the thematic core of the picture in the lower register, the overall point of the chapters is that Elephants are the opposite of, and better than, human beings, because they ate only what was needed to procreate, whereas Eve and Adam ate in disobedience to God’s decree. The reader is thereby encouraged to envisage himself not only as the baby but as an adult Elephant trampling evil underfoot by leading a life of continence, or sacrificing his skin for the sake of inner purity. The commentary on the mandrake, from Isidore, equates its fruit with the malum terrae, a phrase that recalls the malum (“apple” and “evil”) which Adam and Eve were said to have eaten. The second passage about burning the Elephant’s skin to repel serpents comes just before this commentary. “In this way,” says the text, “God’s commandments purify the heart of the one who guards and observes them within himself, and no suggestion of the enemy is able to gain entry to him.”74 The reader of these facing pages is inserted into a complex manuscript matrix that builds out from a protective maternal environment, elaborating contents that, reflected inward into the reader’s mind, will shape it by means of inner vision and inner touch so as then to fill it with inner strength and purity. The reader is reminded that he and the book share a skin that is important primarily as the container of a pure interior—and which he may be called upon to “burn.”75 The manuscript matrix connects him with the sacrificial skin and inner purity of an Elephant, the truly worthy inhabitant of an Eden from which Adam and Eve were expelled. The Elephant’s soul is the model for his own. Standing out beside these exemplary Elephants is the mandrake. Not only is it human in appearance, quite unlike the leafy plant described by Isidore,76 but it stands next to a paradise that looks like a human city. The

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mandrake’s face is unpainted and its body painted a nude pink, so its surface also looks like human skin. If the manuscript projects a matrix continuous with the reader’s skin and identified with the skins of the Elephants, another support of that continuity is the mandrake. It, so the subsequent text says, is the sole manifestation of sexuality in the Elephants’ sober lives, the only trace in their experience of the forbidden fruit that led Eve and Adam to fall. Perhaps this potentially jarring element in the Elephants’ chaste idyll is what Richard restores to visibility in the Bestiaire d’amours when he praises the female Elephant for her skill in sexual deceit. But on Sidney Sussex 100 fo. 34r the mandrake occupies the very center of the image and stands closest to the paradise which is banded with the same nude tones. Fixing the reader with its colorless human eyes, the mandrake could also represent the paradisal future that awaits the purified human. The text immediately under the picture reads: “With expectation I have waited for the Lord, and he was attentive to me. And he heard my prayers, and brought me out of the pit of misery and the mire of dregs” (Ps.39: 2–3).77 The pit and mire in question might be identified, by implication, as the water the Elephants are confined to, from which the mandrake-human escapes to the paradise that awaits him. Or they might be interpreted as the human sexuality represented by the mandrake: something that persists despite all the instruction that surrounds it. The manuscript matrix describes a place of imagination and prescribes contents for it, but it cannot guarantee either imagination or thought against potential fear or desire. The physical character of the page can advance or retreat from the reader’s codicological consciousness; it can relax or increase the encroachment of the body on his inner self or soul; and, above all, it can equivocate between identity with another animal (in this case the Elephant) or differentiation from it (in this case the mandrake). Conclusion Taking its place in the bestiary tradition, the Aviarium uses birds to foster awareness of an inner life in the reader, and to inspire it too. This care for the inner self spreads to the bestiaries with which it is combined in fulfillment of Hugh’s anticipation that his birds will be complemented by moralized beasts. The resulting ensembles may well have provided Richard de Fournival for his humorous elaboration of a loving self in his ostensible reader, the lady. Both works begin with a prologue that stresses the importance of imagination and the senses to their effectiveness and, in their latter halves, promote the theme of parenthood, specifically the physical contact of mothering, as a stimulus to the formation of an inner space filled with emotional inclination.

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They also rely, though in different ways and with different philosophical agendas, on human resemblance to animals as a means of grounding imagination and modeling relationships of affection. The books themselves support this work since the parchment skin of their pages is cumulatively held and seen to be held by successive readers whose skin is similar to theirs. In reading, the reader enters the envelope of the manuscript matrix, an enclosing environment in which his inner life takes shape through imaginatively dwelling on the contents of the page and through literally seeing and touching its surface. And above and beyond its contents, the page itself interferes in the reading experience, forming a second skin that is continuous with the reader’s own and variously, equivocally, supported by human and nonhuman elements in the text and in the material book.

Conclusion

Reading Bestiaries

This study of medieval Latin and French bestiaries was undertaken in order to explore how a widely read and influential genre may have shaped readers’ sense of the relationship between themselves and other animals. In the course of writing, I have been led to reconsider how the bestiary genre evolved. This is the first book in English since Florence McCulloch’s to attempt a review of the corpus, and not surprisingly it comes to some very different conclusions from those she reached in 1962.1 McCulloch sees the bestiary as primarily English, its Latin texts arranged in successive families, and French-language works connected to the first family via Insular, Anglo-Norman culture. I, by contrast, foreground the bestiary’s Continental roots, and the role of what is now France as an area of exchange between its different versions. I downplay the family framework in favor of a single history that integrates the texts privileged by McCulloch with the versions she sidelines, especially Dicta Chrysostomi and H bestiaries. Evidence that the Long Version of the bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais postdates the Bestiaire d’amours also attests the predominantly Continental character of the six French vernacular bestiaries, of which only two—those of Philippe de Thaon and Guillaume le Clerc—are Anglo-Norman; and even these survive in Continental copies whereas there are no Insular manuscripts of the four Continental texts. The bestiaries’ impact, I propose, will have been twofold, operating both through the content of the texts themselves and through their transmission as parchment books. As I have argued, these two factors are consistently sutured one to the other, via textual references to skin and because of the fact that the pages themselves are instances of skin.2 Each of my six chapters is framed by an aspect of bestiarists’ treatment of skin that has implications for how human readers might envisage their relation to other animals. Chapter 1 considers the

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position of nonhuman animals relative to language and the book; chapter 2 raises the question of mortality and immortality; chapter 3 reflects on crossspecies similarities in sensory and sexual apparatus; chapter 4 confronts the problem of who or what can be put to death; chapter 5 discusses the conditions of recognizing kinship between human and nonhuman animals; and chapter 6 inquires into similarities between their inner lives. These topics may well be prominent in bestiaries because they reflect aspects of the intellectual culture in which these works were produced. The role of animals in the books of nature and scripture was an object of commentary from patristic writers on, as was the idea of mortal existence as a garment or skin. Policing sexual conduct is an abiding preoccupation of religious instruction, and indeed legislation, just as policing killing has always been a concern of law. Questions of likeness and the interconnections between beings interest philosophers, especially those in the fields of metaphysics and natural philosophy, and both philosophers and pastoral theologians care about the capacities of the soul. But when considered from the standpoint of critical animal studies, each of these topics has also played a part in delimiting the human from other animals, an endeavor that Agamben labels the anthropological machine. Humans, says Agamben, found their history on the exclusion of the animal (chapter 1), thus relying on animality for its definition. A similar paradox of exclusion/inclusion characterizes the demarcation of humans from other animals as regards the legal status of their lives (chapter 4). The human may be thought to reside in the capacity for sublimation, an embrace of the eternal over the mortal (chapter 2). It has been seen as the capacity for relinquishing or repressing the recesses of a sexual body in favor of the rarefied world of the library (chapter 3). Human exceptionalism has been posited in similitude to God (chapter 5) or in the cultivation of the soul (chapter 6). But all these pretensions to exclusivity are to some degree undermined, in the content of the texts themselves, as increasingly they install common ground between humans and other animals (chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6), or at least concede that difference is only asserted arbitrarily (chapter 4). My presentation of these preoccupations centers on the possible experiences of a reader encountering a bestiary text in a parchment book. Here they are not so much abstract arguments as questions about the reader’s own nature and identity. I have envisaged a variety of readers, with vernacular bestiaries in particular being available to—and sometimes explicitly intended for—a female readership. Given the large number of manuscript contexts in which bestiaries are transmitted, their readers may have been more or less adept actually at reading, and if some were the “illiterates” Hugh of Fouilloy

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evokes in the prologue of his Aviarium at least some others were sophisticated literati, thinkers, or men of science. I regret that I have not considered race or ethnicity among the possible attributes of readers; a scholar better informed about medieval Jewry than I would have interesting things to contribute about the possible reception of these works by Jewish readers, whom bestiarists consistently animalize. Above all, I have maintained that the page as such interferes implicitly in this reflection on the reader’s self, inflecting how the various questions posed by the texts are apprehended and responded to. Whereas critical writing is usually directed to what is deliberately represented on the page, whether text or image, I make a point of including and even privileging the page as such. With its animal origins and ambiguous appearance, it may intrude on the reader’s experience in ways that seem now human, now nonhuman. Drawing on a theory of reading as assuming a second skin, which was first outlined by J. Guillaumin in the context of Anzieu’s theory of the Skin Ego, and which I subsequently developed to take account of the literal skin of the parchment codex, throughout my book I explore the possibility that the parchment page, as the skin assumed by the reader in the course of reading, variously humanizes or animalizes him or her. These reflections lead me to extend previous accounts of the “manuscript matrix” to emphasize its connection both to the maternal body and to the body as animal; as a result, an account of reading based in a humanist psychoanalysis opens itself to posthumanist scrutiny. In pursuing this scrutiny I have aimed to keep in play two different ideas of how identity is bounded: Anzieu’s, based in the Skin Ego that grounds both a literal and a metaphorical envelope around the self; and Agamben’s suggestion of a caesura that cuts within the human so as ideologically to separate the “truly human” from its animal components. The two kinds of boundary are well instanced in the bestiary treatment of the Siren and Onocentaur discussed in my introduction but, as the chapters of this book advance, become harder to separate, as the fantasy of distinguishing one skin from another becomes more difficult to sustain (chapter 2), or the maintenance of a properly human body as theorized by psychoanalysis becomes itself a form of anthropological machine (chapter 3). The various forms of resemblance and identification studied in chapters 5 and 6 show the skin envelope coming to define the human in a way that is more inclusive and no longer divorces it absolutely from the animal. This process of inclusion corresponds to what I have elsewhere called “the zoological machine”: the tendency of bestiaries, despite their lack of generalizing vocabulary, to construct a category of “the animal” which was previously not well recognized in medieval thought, and which comes to include the human.3

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The fact that there are no bestiaries that are actually copied on human skin warns against prematurely celebrating their Edenic or postapocalyptic suspension of all boundaries between the human and nonhuman, even if that is the state for which they might be thought to yearn.4 On the contrary, the interrelation of the human and nonhuman is more likely a “space of exception” (chapter 1) or “state of exception” (chapter 4), navigating the indeterminacy of which becomes both the problem and the privilege of the reading self. It is this self that determines how far meaning can be unwrapped (chapter 2), how to negotiate the status of the library relative to the orifice (chapter 3), what can be sacrificed and what slaughtered (chapter 4), what can be recognized (chapter 5), and how an inner life is shaped (chapter 6). Such determinations, I have also contended, are not necessarily conscious and in particular may be unconsciously affected by the reading process itself, in which, as I have said, the reader may become more human or more animal through the assumption, as a second skin, of the skin of the book. What Agamben describes as “the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, . . . that between the animality and the humanity of man” is often subliminally conducted in the reading process.5 I conclude with a final reading which, like the one at the end of the last chapter, is addressed to the Elephant, a creature that both contrasts with humans’ present state and represents what they were once and should again become. BnF fr. 14969 is an English Franciscan manuscript dating from the late thirteenth century which transmits the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc. Unusually for vernacular bestiaries, the text is set out in only one column per page and is the sole occupant of the codex.6 Each entry is identified in a rubric as a “sermon” and its initial and most prominent image is of the allegorical meaning of the creature concerned rather than its nature; all other images are located at the foot of a page. The pictures use a combination of drawing and painting, so that backgrounds and some elements are colored but elsewhere bare parchment is outlined. The text’s “sermon on the Elephant” begins at the foot of fo. 58v with a complex image combining a bishop preaching, the temptation of Adam and Eve, the Psalmist David in the waters, and the crucifixion; the entry continues to the foot of fo. 60v, with the ensuing “sermon on the Mandrake” forming a separate chapter starting on fo. 61r.7 This manuscript’s custom of placing the many noninitial illustrations at the foot of a page results in their being somewhat out of sync with its written contents. Fo. 59r contains lines 3175–3205, explaining the Elephant’s use in battle, then its long gestation and birthing in water; however, its giving birth is not illustrated until fo. 60r (fig. 28), while the Elephant with a tower on its back is depicted even later, as the entry’s conclusion on fo. 60v. In-

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stead, the image on fo. 59r captures the contrast between the Elephant couple and the human one which is the focus of the later allegory (fig. 27). It shows on one side two Elephants following one another in chaste harmony and, on the other, God reprimanding a still-naked Adam and Eve whom he is on the point of ejecting from the garden. Whereas the Elephants are framed in Edenic green, God and the humans are surrounded by angry red flames. Turning the page, the verso, which is unillustrated, continues the narrative of the Elephants’ continence and copulation, amplifies the account of how the female gives birth in water, and begins the allegorical exposition that equates the Elephants with Adam and Eve before the fall (GC 3206–3237). Facing it, the text on fo. 60r (GC 3238–3269; fig. 28) pursues the allegory: exiled from Eden, the fallen humans suffer in the mire of the world; verses 2–3 of Psalm 39, quoted in the H bestiary (see chapter 6), are here reprised and amplified in the vernacular. And yet, the text continues, a redeemer will be born who will save them. At the foot of this page is the image of the Elephant giving birth. The entry concludes (GC 3270–3296) on fo. 60v with the continuation of Christ’s redeeming role, the importance of prayer, and the capacity of the Elephant’s skin and bones to drive away serpents, concluding unexpectedly, as mentioned, with an image of it bearing a howdah. Although images divide the text arbitrarily and illustrate it unexpectedly, their placement as regards the mise-en-page is entirely predictable: each marks the bottom of a page. The frames ruled around each image are continuous with the columns on either side of the writing block so that the text on each page is held in the same frame as the picture, a frame made more prominent by the way the initial letter of each line is touched in in red and the end of each line marked with a black and a rust-colored dot. Each page, then, is orchestrated as a visual unity. Given the somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of the written text with the pictorial program, it really is the page as such that is the unit of meaning; it is the stable entity within the context of which the relatively free sprung elements of text and image are read. Fos. 59v–60v are ordered hair-flesh-flesh-hair, so it is the slightly darker, rougher surface that realizes the areas of bare skin of the two Elephants and the naked bodies of Adam and Eve on fo. 59v. Next to them, the bottom outer corner of this page has been worn to a hornlike consistency, perhaps with the effect of making the fallen Adam and Eve appear more animal than the serene Elephants. When the text of the allegory is copied on the smoother, paler flesh side of fos. 59v–60r, the Elephant giving birth benefits by having her own skin and that of her baby seem paler and smoother too. Although the earlier picture represents the “allegorical meaning” and this the “nature,” in some ways these functions are swapped over: the birthing scene in fig. 28 appears more radiant

F i g u r e 2 7. BnF fr. 14969, fo. 59r. Elephants; Adam and Eve (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

F i g u r e 2 8 . BnF fr. 14969, fo. 60r. Elephants (Guillaume le Clerc). Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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than that of the expulsion in fig. 27. The placement of the birthing image in the text complicates its meaning too. It represents human sexuality before the fall, with the water protecting the Elephants from sin (GC 3226–30, copied on fo. 59v); but the water also—thanks to the recast verses of Psalm 39 in the text just above it (GC 3242–4)—symbolizes the mire of the world that follows after the fall. And the birth of the Elephant, placed as it is immediately under the news of Christ’s incarnation, seems also to represent his birth; the female Elephant, then, is not only herself, but also both Eve and Mary. Although there is no depiction of a literal human, the lighter skin of the parchment contributes to this humanizing of the Elephants’ nature. The painter has made both mother and baby Elephant appear to fix the reader with their eyes, as if demanding recognition, identification even, from her or him. In many ways these pages recapitulate themes considered in earlier chapters. The Elephant is the animal that most prominently represents salvation as a return to Eden (chapter 1). The disposition of the parchment on fos. 59–60 means it is not easy to separate a literal, animal, mortal skin from an allegorical, eternal one, an effect compounded as the female Elephant’s body unwraps to reveal the Christ within. If sin animalizes humans, it is also through their animal nature that they are redeemed (chapter 2). The sexual body can be configured in such a way as either to animalize it or to humanize it and turn it into a support of culture (chapter 3). Motherhood shapes an interior self that emerges smiling to the recognition of the world while the touch of earlier fingers on page corners leaves its trace (chapters 5 and 6). The mention of burning the Elephants’ skin on the final page of the entry ensures that embodiment and the shaping of identity remain anchored in the skin envelope. Being animal is both good news and bad for humans, for in the animal their identity is both lost and found. Thomas of Chobham’s words, “The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful to us in the body, but also what may be useful in the soul,”8 are borne out in unexpected ways by the bestiaries that were being composed and copied as he wrote. And the skins of those other creatures not only provide the material support for that instruction, they also shape readers’ understanding by the constant, if silent, challenge to rethink the grounds of their identity.

Appendix

Chronology of Latin and French Bestiary Versions

Late Antique (Fourth-Century Onward?) Latin Translations of the Greek Physiologus Physiologus versio y. The oldest manuscript containing a text of this 48- or 49-chapter version is Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 611, copied in eastern France, ninth century.1 Physiologus B, a derivative of versio y with 36 chapters; the oldest manuscript is Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 233, from the Loire region, eighth or ninth century; the other two manuscripts transmitting this text are probably also from France.2 Physiologus C, deriving from versio x of the Latin translation of Physiologus, was the first to add excerpts from Isidore.3 Its oldest representative is Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 318, copied in northern France (Reims?) ca. 830.4 Pre-Twelfth-Century Latin Bestiary Redactions Dicta Chrysostomi. Most scholars think that this 27-chapter version originated in what is now France in the ninth century.5 Groups creatures into two broad zoological categories, beasts and then birds, beginning Lion, Unicorn, Panther, Hydrus and Crocodile, Siren and Onocentaur, Hyena. 6 Does not contain etymologies or any other Isidorean additions, but often includes verses at the ends of chapters. According to P. T. Eden, the oldest manuscript is Morgan MS M. 832, which is eleventh or twelfth century, from southern Germany or Austria.7 Most of the 38 or more extant copies are likewise German or Austrian. “The Medieval Bestiary” website lists 35;8 another is described by Dorothea Walz in her catalogue of Vatican Palatinus Latinus manuscripts;9

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and I have turned up two more, including one English copy in Oxford, St John’s College MS 136 (previously misidentified as a copy of Physiologus B).10 B-Isidore. Based on the Latin Physiologus B text; contains ca. 36 chapters, beginning Lion, Antelope, Firestones, Sawfish, Caladrius, Pelican, and adding etymologies of the creatures’ names from Isidore at the ends of 27 chapters. Generally believed to have originated in France; the oldest manuscript is Vatican MS Palatinus Latinus 1074, which is tenth- or eleventh-century, French or possibly Catalan.11 Most other manuscripts are English but three are French or Franco-Flemish, including the two in the Getty (Ludwig XV.3 and XV.4), and Tours, BM MS 312 (this last the likely model of the short version of the bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais). The most recent census puts the total number of manuscripts at 12,12 but this figure does not include two manuscripts of the H-type of B-Isidore bestiary, listed separately below, that most scholars class with B-Isidore. Physiologus Theobaldi. A verse 12- or 13-chapter bestiary, closer to the Dicta Chrysostomi than to any other Physiologus redaction, but still relatively independent of it, beginning Lion, Eagle, Serpent. Probably composed by an otherwise unknown Italian-speaking magister of the eleventh to early twelfth century in either France or Italy.13 The oldest copy is BL MS Harley 3093 (late eleventh century, from southern France); numerous twelfth-century copies survive, mostly from France.14 Thereafter more are from Italian- or Germanspeaking regions, giving rise to two distinctive regional groups.15 The most prolific of the Latin Physiologus derivatives: in his 1972 edition, Eden identified over 70 manuscripts, making it the “version of the Physiologus [which] far exceeded in popularity all the other versions with a recognizably stable form.”16 A self-consciously poetic bestiary displaying a variety of meters, widely used as a schoolbook and often glossed; almost never illustrated. Latin and Anglo-Norman Bestiary Redactions from the First Half of the Twelfth Century H-type of B-Isidore. This variant of B-Isidore arose by about 1120 and is so known because of its resemblance to the H bestiary, which used to be thought to antedate it (see below); it is transmitted by just two manuscripts, both English (BL MS Stowe 1067, dated 1120–140, and the later Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 22), but is more widely attested as the first part of Transitional bestiaries (see below). Dividing some of the chapters of B-Isidore in two and adding others, it numbers 44 chapters that are arranged

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in two groups, beasts and non-beasts, beginning Lion, Antelope, Onocentaur, Hedgehog, Fox, and Unicorn; it also integrates the Isidore excerpts more fully into the chapters than does the earlier B-Isidore text.17 Philippe de Thaon’s bestiary. Anglo-Norman verse text of ca. 1121–35, preserved differently in its three manuscripts. The oldest and longest (3194 lines) is BL MS Cotton Nero A.v., which also contains Philippe’s Comput; here the bestiary is dedicated to Aelis de Louvain, who became the second wife of Henry I of England in 1121. Ranks animals below birds and then places birds below stones; within these three headings, entries are grouped according to their glosses: God, Man, Devil. Though this arrangement is comparable with the Dicta Chrysostomi, the subjects of Philippe’s chapters are closer to B-Isidore, and include etymologies, usually early in each chapter as in the H-type of this version. The text is in hexasyllabic couplets except for the closing section on stones, which is in the more solemn octosyllable. In Oxford, Merton College MS 249, dedicated to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the section on stones is severely mangled and both this section and that on birds are absent from the only Continental copy, Copenhagen, Royal Library Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8º. Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy and projected aviary-bestiary. Composed ca. 1132–1152, perhaps at the Augustinian house of Saint-Nicolas-de-Regny (just west of Saint-Quentin, in Picardy) where Hugh became prior in 1132. Exclusively dedicated to birds, though its prologue implies that Hugh contemplated writing a bestiary also; if so, his original conception was not realized until decades later with the H bestiary (see “H bestiary” below). But the Aviarium is often copied together with bestiaries, most commonly with H (producing the unusual sequence birds-beasts), sometimes with B-Isidore or Dicta Chryostomi, and the Aviarium can also replace or supplement the birds segment in Second-family bestiaries.18 The oldest Aviarium manuscript was copied in the twelfth century in eastern France;19 those which include H originate in Paris; the second-family bestiaries with an interpolated Aviarium are English; with at least 125 manuscripts, the Aviarium was very widely diffused.20 Latin Redactions from the Second Half of the Twelfth Century Second-family bestiary. Originated in England and about half of the ca. 50 extant manuscripts are English; most of the rest are French; generally regarded as the high point of the bestiary in England because of the number of luxury manuscripts with high quality illustrations. The oldest manu-

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script, BL MS Additional 11283, chosen by Clark as the base for her Book of Beasts, is English and dated by her to ca. 1180;21 Baxter advances the date to 1160–80.22 The text consists of a completely recast and reordered B-Isidore bestiary, including the additional chapters found in the H-type of B-Isidore, and further increased to a length of up to 123 chapters with material from various sources, especially Isidore;23 begins Lion, Tiger, Pard, Panther, Antelope, Unicorn, Lynx, and continues according to zoological categories approximately based on Isidore’s Etymologies, book 12. Either contemporary with the version described as Transitional or, more likely, slightly earlier than it,24 the Second family represents a more thorough-going experiment with grafting additional chapters onto a B-Isidore stock. Transitional version. This in hindsight misleading name designates a rather loose grouping of manuscripts of which no edition has been attempted.25 They consist of an opening sequence that is most often that of an H-type B-Isidore model, beginning Lion, Antelope, Onocentaur, Hedgehog, Fox, and Unicorn; but sometimes that of the commoner B-Isidore sequence Lion, Antelope, Firestones, etc. Once the B-Isidore cycle has been completed, it is followed by some 60 mainly Isidorean chapters beginning Tiger, Pard, Lynx, etc., broadly following the same taxonomy as the Second-family redaction. This version is of English origin and its oldest manuscripts are English; antecedence is debated among various members of the group related to Morgan MS M. 81 of ca. 1175–210.26 Clark counts nine manuscripts;27 most are English but a few are French.28 H bestiary. So called because it was believed (wrongly) to be by Hugh of SaintVictor. “The question of the origin of the H Family bestiaries is one of the most difficult puzzles in the bestiary field, whose full solution must await the preparation of a critical edition of the text,” says Ilya Dines.29 Usually copied immediately after, and as an integral part of, the Aviarium by Hugh of Fouilloy (see above). Currently believed to have originated in the late twelfth century in northern France; consists of ca. 34 chapters almost solely about beasts, seemingly derived from an H-type B-Isidore version (i.e., with the extracts from Etymologies more integrated than in most B-Isidore texts and following a chapter order beginning Lion, Antelope, Onocentaur, Hedgehog, Fox, Unicorn).30 “The earliest surviving H manuscript is Paris BnF lat. 2495B of about 1200 and all known manuscripts are of thirteenth-century production.”31 Clark counts 14 manuscripts and one excerpt collection, all French and almost all from the Paris region.32

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Latin, French, and Anglo-Norman Redactions from the Early Thirteenth Century Gervaise. A short (1280-line) verse bestiary in octosyllabic couplets with 29 entries, based on the Latin Dicta Chrysostomi version. The work of a Norman cleric who might be identified with a Gervasius active at the Cistercian monastery of Barbery near Caen, it was probably composed at the beginning of the thirteenth century and is preserved with few if any Norman features in a single manuscript, now BL Additional 28260, from what is now eastern France.33 Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais. The first French prose bestiary. A fairly close (and flat) translation of a B-Isidore model (maybe Tours, BM MS 312) with 37 chapters, executed between 1206 and 1212 (at the latest 1218) by the prolific author Pierre de Beauvais for his patrons Philippe de Dreux bishop of Beauvais, or his brother Robert, Count of Dreux.34 Also known as the Short Version of his work, because of the existence of a later Long Version that is now though probably not to be by him (see below). It survives in four copies, the oldest and only illustrated one being the late thirteenth-century BnF n.a.f. 13521, known as the “La Clayette” manuscript, that transmits Pierre de Beauvais’s oeuvre.35 Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, also known as the Bestiaire divin.36 Verse bestiary of 36 chapters and 4,174 lines of octosyllabic couplets modeled on a Latin B-Isidore text (perhaps BL MS Royal 2.C.XII) and dated by a reference to the Interdict to 1210 or 1211. Like his contemporary Pierre de Beauvais, Guillaume le Clerc is a successful author with a varied output; unlike Pierre he made his career in England, dedicating his bestiary to a certain Lord Raoul (4139). According to Robert Reinsch, editor of the 1892 edition which is still the best available, the oldest manuscript is BL MS Egerton 613, which Reinsch dates to the middle of the thirteenth century, but which the British Library catalogue places in the second quarter.37 Reinsch’s list of 20 manuscripts is now out of date, the best available is on “The Medieval Bestiary” website which lists 24. The oldest are Insular but thereafter many are Continental French.38 Third-family bestiary. A Latin redaction, originating in England in the early thirteenth century, that is even longer than the Second-family version. It puts the monstrous races at the beginning, and contains different moralizations from the Physiologus tradition; five thirteenth-century manuscripts.39

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Mid Thirteenth-Century French Bestiaries Bestiaire d’amours. Ca. 1240 the poet and polymath Richard de Fournival highjacked the bestiary genre in a prose text which jettisons the chapter structure and Christian allegories of traditional bestiaries and instead weaves comparisons back and forth among some 50 bestiary creatures, citing their behaviors as reasons why his lady should return the writer’s love—a procedure that recalls the imagery of some of the early troubadours.40 The elements of creation on which Richard draws include chapters found in the Aviarium and the Second family. The oldest manuscript, discovered only recently, dates from ca. 1260, bringing the currently known total to 23, most of which are illustrated.41 Although Cesare Segre was unaware of the full extent of the manuscript tradition, his remains the best analysis of it.42 The Bestiaire d’amours prompted responses, versified reworkings, epitomes, and translations/adaptations into other languages.43 Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais. 72 chapters, preserved in five manuscripts, the oldest being BnF Arsenal 3516, copied in Artois (SaintOmer?) in 1267 or 1268.44 Understanding of Pierre de Beauvais’s bestiary has been revolutionized by Craig Baker’s research which shows that only the socalled Short Version is actually by Pierre de Beauvais; the Long Version is a later, anonymous work indebted to a number of different sources, almost all in vernacular French, a major one being the Bestiaire d’amours.45

Acknowledgments

Too many people—librarians and curators, colleagues, the Press and its advisers, friends, and family—have helped me with this project for it to be possible to thank you all individually. Please believe that my appreciation is not diminished for being so widely shared. But I must record my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for the honor and support of a fellowship in 2014–15, and to the College of Arts and Science at New York University for additional leave and support that same year. Altogether this book has been a pleasure to write, and I thank you all for making it so.

Notes

Introduction 1. Quoted from David D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 232–33; and also by Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Iconography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xv (henceforth Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries). 2. E.g., Christian Heck and Rémy Cordonnier, Le Bestiaire médiéval: L’animal dans les manuscrits enluminés (Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2011), documentation in which far exceeds bestiary creatures. 3. A situation wryly noted by Alan of Lille in his Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium, PL 210: 701A–B, where animal is defined as “all animals including man,” “all animals except for man,” and “man only.” On vernacular usage, see Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 124, no. 2 (2009): 472–79, and, on the vocabulary of bestiaries in particular, Sarah Kay, “Before the animot. Bêtise and the Zoological Machine in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries,” Yale French Studies 127 (2015): 34–51 (henceforth Kay, “Before the animot”). 4. On the two sides of parchment equivocating between human and animal skin, see Susan Small, “The Medieval Werewolf Model of Reading Skin,” in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie L. Walter (New York: Macmillan, 2013), 81–97 (83); and on the indistinction between human and other animals with regard to skin, Robert Mills, “Havelok’s Bare Life and the Significance of Skin,” ibid., 57–80. Henceforth this volume will be cited as Reading Skin, ed. Walter, and Mills’s essay as “Havelok’s Bare Life.” 5. Anne Grondeux, “Cutis ou pellis: Les dénominations médiolatines de la peau humaine,” in La pelle umana / The Human Skin (Florence: Sismel, 2005) = Micrologus 13 (2005): 113–30: “Au Moyen Âge . . . il n’est pas fait de distinction fondamentale entre la peau de l’homme et celle de l’animal” (113). Henceforth this volume will be cited as La pelle umana. 6. This question is being explored in current work by Catherine Brown, e.g., “Manuscript Thinking: Stories by Hand,” postmedieval, a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 350–68, hereafter cited as Brown, “Manuscript Thinking.” 7. Some of these points have already been investigated by Carol Freeman, “Feathering the Text,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynn Van Dyke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 33–47; Michael Camille, “Sensations of the Page. Imaging Technologies and Medieval Il-

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luminated Manuscripts,” in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Press, 1998), 33–53; and Bruce Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment. Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 124, no. 2 (2009): 616–23 (henceforth Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment”). 8. For other accounts of how defects in parchment guide the reader through a codex, see Nancy Vine Durling, “Birthmarks and Bookmarks: The Example of a Thirteenth-Century French Anthology,” Exemplaria 16 (2004): 73–94; and “British Library MS Harley 2253: A New Reading of the Passion Lyrics in their Manuscript Context,” Viator 40, no. 1 (2009): 271–307 (henceforth Durling, “MS Harley 2253”). 9. Personal communication. 10. See, for example, Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment,” 619. See also Bruce Holsinger, Archive of the Animal: Science, Sacrifice, and the Parchment Inheritance (Chicago: University Press, forthcoming). Contrary to popular belief it now seems unlikely that the very thin parchment known as “uterine vellum” was made from aborted fetuses; it was more likely the result of more finely processing the same skins as were used for regular parchment production (i.e., mainly sheep). See Sarah Fiddyment et al., “Animal Origin of 13th-Century Uterine Vellum Revealed Using Noninvasive Peptide Fingerprinting,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, 112, no. 49 (December 15, 2015): 15066–15071. 11. Sarah Kay, “Original Skin: Flaying, Thinking, and Reading in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 35–73 (37); and “Legible Skins. Sheep, Wolves, and the Ethics of Reading in the Middle Ages,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2 (2011): 13–32 (19–26); henceforth cited as Kay, “Original Skin” and “Legible Skins,” respectively. 12. Kay, “Original Skin,” 38–46; also implicit in Nicole Bériou,“‘Pellem pro pelle’ (Job 2, 4): Les sermons pour la fête de Saint Barthélemy au XIIIe siècle,” La pelle umana, 267–84. 13. Kay “Legible Skins,” 17–18. 14. Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Dunod, 1995), 57–66. The first edition is translated by Chris Turner as The Skin Ego (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 15. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World, trans. Arthur Dunlop (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; first pub. in German as Haut: Literaturgeschichte, Körperbilder, Grenzdiskurse, 1999); Reading Skin, ed. Walter. 16. See Katie L. Walter, “Introduction,” in Reading Skin, ed. Walter, 1–10 (2–4); also Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Secrets et discours de la peau dans la littérature médiévale en langue vernaculaire,” in La pelle umana, 155–82; the same findings are borne out by most of the essays in both volumes. 17. For reservations about Agamben being not posthumanist enough, see Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), e.g., 27–29; henceforth Wolfe, Before the Law. 18. Sigmund Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love: Contributions to the Psychology of Love II,” in The Complete Psychological Works, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 179–90 (189); Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Le corps comme miroir du monde (Paris: PUF, 2003), 137–62. Henceforth cited as Freud, “Universal Tendency” and ChasseguetSmirgel, Le corps comme miroir, respectively. 19. See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 235–39.

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20. Survey, vol. 3, #104 (124–25); Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing; London: Courtauld Institute, 1998), 147 and passim (henceforth Baxter, Bestiaries). 21. There is an actual hole in the left-hand side of the outer column just above the represented hole that the Asp drops from, but it is more recent. There is also some scarring next to the half figure in the bottom margin, which has become discolored, creating a ring that also looks rather like a hole. 22. Curley, Physiologus, xii. 23. Curley, Physiologus, xxi–xxiii. 24. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 124–25. Some of these beasts are adopted by bestiary authors from the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun; see Annie Angrémy, “La Mappemonde de Pierre de Beauvais,” Romania 104 (1983): 316–50, 457–98. 25. See also Sarah Kay, “The English Bestiary, the Continental Physiologus, and the Intersections between Them,” Medium Aevum, 85 no, 1 (2016): 118–42 (henceforth Kay, “English Bestiary”). 26. Dora Faraci stresses the precedent set by Dicta Chrysostomi and the German-language bestiaries long before the zoological reordering of their English counterparts in “Pour une étude plus large de la réception médiévale des bestiaires,” in Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele (Louvainla-Neuve: Institut d’Etudes médiévales de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, 2005), 111–25. Henceforth this volume will be cited as Bestiaires médievaux, ed. Van den Abeele. 27. Montague Rhodes James, The Bestiary: Being a Reproduction in Full of the Manuscript  Ii. 4. 26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of the Latin Bestiary as Current in England (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1928) (henceforth James, Bestiary); Florence McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962) (henceforth McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries). 28. Baxter, Bestiaries, 87. 29. Kay, “English Bestiary,” 120–22. 30. Kay, “English Bestiary,” 128–32. 31. Luigina Morini, “Une nuova edizione del ‘Bestiaire’ attribuito a Pierre de Beauvais,” Medioevo Romanzo 37, no. 1 (2013): 150–76 (henceforth Morini, “Una nuova edizione”). 32. Armand Strubel, “Le Bestiare d’amour de Richard de Fournival, un objet littéraire non identifié,” in Lire les textes médiévaux aujourd’hui: historicité, actualisation et hypertextualité, ed. Patricia Victorin (Paris: Champion, 2010) 71–84 (73). 33. Curley, Physiologus, xiii–xv. 34. Francesco Zambon, “Figura bestialis: Les fondements théoriques du bestiaire médiéval,” in Epopée animale, Fable, Fabliau. Actes du IVe Colloque de la Société Internationale Renardienne Evreux, 7–11 septembre, 1981, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat (Paris: PUF 1984), 709–19. (Henceforth Zambon, “Figura bestialis.”) This essay is expanded as chap. 2 of Francesco Zambon, L’alfabeto simbolico degli animali (Milan: Luni, 2001), henceforth Zambon, Alfebeto. 35. Clark, Book of Beasts, 1. The quotation is from Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44. 36. James, Bestiary, 1. 37. Zambon, “Figura bestialis,” 714–17. Eriugena’s influence on human views of other animals

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is also examined by Peter Dronke, “La creazione degli animali,” in Peter Dronke, Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1992): 193–217 (201–2), henceforth Dronke, “Creazione.” 38. Willene B. Clark, “Four Latin Bestiaries and De bestiis et aliis rebus,” in Bestiaires médiévaux, ed. Van den Abeele, 49–69 (henceforth Clark, “Four Latin Bestiaries”). 39. Xénia Muratova, “The Bestiaries and the English Franciscan Culture,” Icon 3 (2010): 179–88 40. Lynn White Jr, “Natural Science and Naturalistic Art in the Middle Ages,” American Historical Review 52 (1947): 421–35 (433); henceforth White, “Natural Science.” 41. They are not mentioned in Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), nor in Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), nor yet in Peter Dronke, Fabula. Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1974). Henceforth cited as Wetherbee, Platonisim; Stock, Myth and Science; and Dronke, Fabula, respectively. 42. An honorable exception is Susan Crane, Animal Encounters. Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 99 (henceforth Crane, Animal Encounters). 43. Jeanette Beer, “The New Naturalism of Le Bestiaire d’amour,” Reinardus 1 (1988): 16–21; Elizabeth Sears, “Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard de Fournival,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17–39; Sarah Kay, “Medieval Bêtise: Internal Senses and Second Skins in Richard de Fournival’s ‘Bestaire d’amours,’” in Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages, ed. Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 305–32. Cited henceforth as Beer, “New Naturalism”; Sears, “Sensory Perception”; and Kay, “Medieval Bêtise.” 44. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 109/178. Another text attributed to Aristotle that is often compiled with bestiaries is De secretis secretorum, found in BnF n.a.l. 873 (B-Isidore) and in Oxford, St. John’s College MS 178 (Second family); a French translation is found together with the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc in Paris, Arsenal 2691 and in Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.14. A moralized version of Aristotle’s Enigmata is copied together with a Dicta Chrysostomi text in Chicago, Newberry Library MS 31.1. 45. Claudia Guggenbühl, Recherches sur la composition et la structure du ms Arsenal 3516, Romanica Helvetica 118 (Basel: Franche, 1998), 268–78, suggests that BnF Arsenal MS 3516, which contains the best copy of the Long Version, “souligne l’enjeu philosophique de son époque, période transitoire entre une vision traditionnelle du monde, fidèle à la doctrine chrétienne, et une approche rationnelle et analytique de la création” (278). Henceforth cited as Guggenbühl, Recherches. 46. A Thirteenth-Century Bestiary in the Library of Alnwick Castle, ed. E. G. Millar (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1958), 7–8; henceforth Thirteenth-Century Bestiary, ed. Millar. The passages in question are Book I.iii, 205–16, beginning “ossibus extruitur elephans dorsoque camelus” and the immediately following Book I.iii.217–32, beginning “Grandior in tauro virtus sed parvula uulpes.” Quoted from Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden: Brill, 1978). Together they correspond to almost the whole of the paragraph extending 80–81 in Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris., trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). In the Northumberland Bestiary these passages are copied on fo. 21v at the end of the chapter on the Dog, immediately before the start of that on the Stag, and on fos. 22v–23r, between the Weasel and the Ant. A marginal note to the former passage indicates “bernardi

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silvestris” in a hand contemporary with the copy. The passages are in an equivalent position in Morgan M. 81 (29v, 31r) and BL, MS Royal 12.C.XIX (fos. 22v–23r and 24r–24v). For dating see Baxter, Bestiaries, 147, Survey, vol. 3, #106 (126–27), Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #13 (60), and Survey, vol. 4, pt. 2, #115 (85–86); and see also the appendix, p. 160, for discussion of this Transitional group. Extracts from the first book of the Cosmographia are also found in some of the later bestiary redactions (James’s and McCulloch’s “third family”); here he is cited as “bernardus francus” (see McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 39). 47. Thirteenth-Century Bestiary, ed. Millar, 10n1; the lines are a variant of Cosmographia I.iii.459–60 (ed. Dronke; trans. Wetherbee, 86), and appear at the end of the chapter on the Dove fo. 45r and immediately before the Peridexion Tree. 48. McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 33–34; Baxter, Bestiaries, 100–123. 49. Thirteenth-Century Bestiary, ed. Millar, 17. See also Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19. Henceforth Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human. 50. The Dicta Chrysostomi in BSB clm 2655 is compiled with William of Conches’s Philosophia mundi, as are the B-Isidore text in Getty Museum MS Ludwig XV.4 and Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours in Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève MS 2200, both copied in Saint-Omer or Thérouanne in ca. 1277, according to Alison Stones, Gothic Manuscripts 1260– 1320, vol. 1, pt. 2, Catalogue, published as part of A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France, General Editors Francois Avril, J. J. G. Alexander and Christian Heck (London: Harvey Miller, 1996–, 2013), catalogue numbers # III–116 (507–12) and III–122 (543–47); henceforth cited as Stones, Gothic Manuscripts. In a later, fourteenth-century manuscript, the Bestiaire d’amours is copied with a French translation of Moralia dogma philosophorum which used to be attributed to William of Conches: Florence, Laurentiana Plut. LXXVI.79. See Cesare Segre, ed., Li Bestiaires d’amours di Maistre Richart de Fornival et li Response du bestiaire (Milan: Riccardo, 1957), lx–lxi, henceforth cited as Segre, Bestiaire d’amours. 51. Aviarium, Prologue §1 and Clark, Book of Birds, 2; “the typical lay-brother had converted to the religious life as an adult and lacked the education required of choir monks.” 52. Clark, Book of Birds, 2–3. 53. Clark, Book of Beasts, chap. 8 (esp. 103–5). 54. Clark, Book of Beasts, 85–91, 103, 256. 55. Ilya Dines, “The Bestiary in British Library Royal MS 2.C. XII and Its Role in Medieval Education,” Electronic British Library Journal (2014), article 9, 2 (henceforth Dines, “B.L Royal MS 2.C. XII.” 56. Eden, Theobaldus, 80–81 (appendix 3) lists 35 manuscripts with one set of commentaries and glosses plus another four with a different tradition of glosses. 57. Clark, “Four Latin Bestiaries” and “Catalog of Second-Family Manuscripts,” Book of Beasts, no. 29, 221–53 (247). Henceforth this resource is cited as Book of Beasts, “Catalog.” 58. Clark, Book of Birds, 24: “About half the 96 extant copies of the Aviary are in manuscripts which include other works by Hugh of Fouilloy, most commonly the Cloister of the Soul.” 59. Pierre de Beauvais’s dedication to a “bishop Philip” (evesque Philippon) is not in the base manuscript used by Mermier for his edition, nor in the other early copy BnF, fr. 834, but it is found elsewhere and is retained in LV§1. See GC 4137–4174 for the dedication to Raoul; Guillaume’s address to Seigneur (Lords) is found passim. 60. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, chaps. 8 and 10; also Debra Hassig, “Sex in the Bestiaries,” in The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Garland, 1999), 71–97, henceforth cited as Hassig, “Sex in the Bestiaries.”

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61. Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, chap. 1; Crane, Animal Encounters, chap. 3; Freeman, “Feathering the Text.” 62. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude. A Study of Unconscious Sources (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd, 1957); more recently Chasseguet-Smirgel, Le corps comme miroir. 63. Presentations of Anzieu’s thought can be found in Naomi Segal, Consensuality. Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), chap. 2, and in Geneviève Henrot, Peaux d’âme (Paris: Champion, 2009), 25–47; Henrot, pp. 26–27, also helpfully summarizes the prehistory of the concept of the Skin Ego from Freud to Esther Blick. 64. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); first published as L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). Cited as Agamben, The Open, with Italian original supplied when necessary. 65. Kay, “Before the animot.” 66. Agamben’s familiarity with object relations theory is evident in his earlier writings but is not explicitly at issue in The Open. 67. The Open, chap. 4. 68. The Open, 16. 69. The Open, 80. 70. The Way We Read Now, ed. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best with Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood = Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–148; Sarah Kay, “Surface Reading and the Symptom that Is Only Skin-Deep,” Paragraph 35, no. 3 (2012): 451–59 (henceforth cited as “Surface Reading”); and cf. within a different framework Karl Steel, “Touching Back: Responding to Reading Skin,” in Reading Skin, ed. Walter, 183–95. 71. Like the Weasel and the Asp, which likewise start by sharing a chapter; on “double chapters,” see Baxter Bestiaries, 35–37. 72. Baxter, Bestiaries, 36. 73. Pace Sébastien Douchet who comments on the division but locates it between two natures. See his “La peau du centaure à la frontière de l’humanité et de l’animalité,” La pelle umana, 285–313. Useful for talking about this quasi-separation of the Onocentaur into two is the concept of the “body suit” advanced by Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim to describe the outlines of clothing drawn on otherwise naked men in this Anglo-Saxon manuscript in Inconceivable Beasts: The “Wonders of the East” in the “Beowulf ” Manuscript (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2013), 86–90. 74. Survey, vol. 3, #36 (75–76) dates this manuscript to 1120; Baxter, Bestiaries, 148, proposes 1110–130. Chapter One 1. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 282–83. Latin original ed. Pius Knöll, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 33, pt. 1 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1896), 357; henceforth cited as Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick or ed. Knöll. 2. J. Guillaumin, “La peau du centaure, ou le retournement projectif de l’intérieur du corps dans la création littéraire,” in Corps et Création: Entre Lettres et Psychanalyse, ed. J. Guillaumin et al. (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1980), 227–69. 3. Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 1–9. Nichols’s prolific publications since then have further elaborated the usefulness of the term, to which I return in chapter 6.

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4. Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 33–38 (henceforth Derrida, L’Animal). 5. Wolfe, Before the Law, 25–26, disparages Agamben’s apocalypticism, but it is singularly attuned to the bestiaries. 6. White, “Natural Science,” 424. Cf. Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle de Saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1967), 139: “Il faut toujours commencer l’histoire de la créature avant le temps, là où la ressemblance rejoint son archétype éternel.” Henceforth cited as Javelet, Image. 7. Zambon, Alfabeto, chap. 1, esp. 19–21, records beliefs in the loss and recovery by animals of language. 8. Agamben, The Open, 38. 9. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 83. 10. Nikolaus Henkel, Studien zum Physiologus im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976), 67, 73–74. 11. “Ceo me serreit fort a retraire. /Mes vos orreiz del bestiaire, /si com vos ai en covenant, / si comencerai meintenant.” 12. This wording is taken from An English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, M.S. Bodley 764, trans. Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 82, henceforth cited as Barber, Bodley 764. The manuscript is English, and ca. 1240–50 according to Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #21 (241–42) and Survey, vol. 4, pt. 2, #98 (53–55); Baxter dates it 1240–60 (Bestiaries, 148). 13. The Aberdeen Bestiary was probably copied ca. 1200. See http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ for photographs, transcription, translation, and commentary of the entire manuscript; Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #1 (223–26), localizes it in southeast England, perhaps Canterbury; Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #17 (63–64) suggests North Midlands. Connections between the bestiary and the apocalypse are understudied, even though these two texts inspired some of the most prolifically produced and richly illuminated books of the time. 14. Curley, Physiologus, xiii–xiv; Zambon, “Figura bestialis,” 709–14; and Alfabeto, chap. 2. 15. “Significat alia atque alia, sicut littera quo loco ponatur vide, ibi intellegis eius vim,” In psalmum 103 enarratio, 3:22, quoted from Saint Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos, read online at http://www.augustinus.it/latino/esposizioni_salmi/esposizione_salmo_127_testo.htm. See also Zambon on the heritage of Augustine in Alfabeto, 33–38. 16. Quoted by Wanda Cizewski, “Reading the World as Scripture. Hugh of St Victor’s De tribus diebus,” Florilegium 9 (1987): 65–88 (70). 17. Valerie Jones, “The Phoenix and the Resurrection,” in The Mark of the Beast. The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Garland, 1999), 99–115 (106). 18. Christopher Lucken, “Les hiéroglyphes de Dieu: La demonstrance des bestiaires au regard de la senefiance des animaux,” Compar(a)ison 1 (1994): 33–70. 19. Clark, “Four Latin bestiaries”; Kay, “Before the animot.” 20. See Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in 13th-Century England, 3 vols. (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), esp. Alexander Neckam’s De nominibus utensilium §§65, 71–72 (1: 182, 184) and its French glosses (2: 68, 72, 83, 84–85, 87, 88, 91–2, 98, 101–2, 111, 113, 122), and John of Garland’s Dictionarius §§70–74 (1: 201–2) and its French glosses (2: 140–42, 152). Several medieval word-lists enumerate animals. One with Anglo-Norman glosses described by Hunt, Teaching and Learning 1: 22–24, shares common ground with the Second-family redaction. 21. Hunt, Teaching and Learning 1: 401; this is a version of the “Douce Glossary” 1: 420– 32. For detailed contents of this manuscript, see Ralph Hanna, A Descriptive Catalogue of the

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Western Medieval Manuscripts of St John’s College (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), #178 (249–54). Henceforth cited as Hanna, Catalogue. 22. Morgan MS M. 832, and ONB cod. 1010—two of the oldest Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts. 23. BSB clm 3221: the list is cataloged as “Vocabularius biblicus, i.e. dicta et veritates biblicae ordine alphabetico”; in addition the bestiary is followed by a treatise on the interpretation of Hebrew names. 24. BSB clm 536, bound with “Othlonis liber proverbiorum.” 25. Rita Copeland, “Naming, Knowing, and the Object of Language in Alexander Neckam’s Grammar Curriculum,” Journal of Medieval Latin 20 (2010): 38–57 (50). 26. Clark, Book of Beasts, 62–64, comments on the forward-looking style of SF artists who integrate their subjects into scenarios involving people in contemporary settings. 27. See, e.g., Baxter, Bestiaries, 62–72, for study of an early Physiologus B manuscript (KBR MS 10066–77) where images are located mainly at the end of chapters and divided between two registers of beast and gloss. 28. Ludmilla Evdokimova, “La disposition des lettrines dans le Bestiaire de Pierre de Beauvais et dans le Bestiaire de Guillaume le Clerc: La signification d’une lettrine et la perception d’une œuvre,” in Le bestiaire, le lapidaire, la flore: Actes du Colloque international, Université McGill, Montréal, 7–8–9 octobre 2002 (Montreal: Cérès, 2004), 85–105. Henceforth cited as Evdokimova, “Disposition.” 29. Clark, Book of Beasts, 55. 30. Anglo-Norman copies of Guillaume le Clerc such as Fitzwilliam MS Mclean 123; BL MS Egerton 613; Bodleian MS Douce 132; and Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.14, juxtapose the bestiary with sermons and religious texts; see Betty Hill, “A Manuscript from Nuneaton: Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean [sic] 123,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12:3 (2002): 191–205. Continental copies where Guillaume le Clerc is compiled with the Image du monde include BnF fr. 1444, fr. 2168, fr. 14964, and fr. 24428; fr. 2168 additionally contains a French text of the Elucidarium; in Fitzwilliam MS J 20, another continental manuscript, Guillaume le Clerc is copied alongside excerpts of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor. The Long Version is also found together with the Image du monde in Montpellier, BUM MS H. 437, and in BnF Arsenal 3516. For encyclopedic texts in Bestiaire d’amours manuscripts, see Christopher Lucken, “Les manuscrits du Bestiaire d’amours de Richard de Fournival,” in Le Recueil au Moyen Âge. Le Moyen Âge Central, ed. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Olivier Collet (Tournhout: Brepols, 2010), 113–38; henceforth cited as Lucken, “Manuscrits.” Philippe de Thaon’s bestiary is compiled with his Comput in BL Cotton Nero A.v, and the sole manuscript of Gervaise, BL Additional 28260, also contains a treatise on the ages of man. 31. “L’Image du monde, une encyclopédie du XIIIe siècle,” ed. Chantal Connochie-Bourgne (PhD diss., Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), lines 2307–2596 (beasts of India), 2857–2900 (fish of India), 3151–2350 (beasts of Europe and Africa). 32. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=harley_ms_3244. See Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #13, 232–4; Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #80 (127–28) indicates “after 1235.” 33. There is also a rubric which reads, “De bauna animali monstruoso.” Perhaps the form bauna arose from miscopying “animal . . . quod baunacon dicunt” to produce “animal . . . quod bauna condicunt”? 34. “Coit cum leaena, unde nascitur monstrum cui crocotta nomen est.” The Crocota is said to be able to imitate the human voice like the Hyena and hold its stare; it has no gums and one continuous tooth that closes like a box.

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35. Though see Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts. Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991), 75, where the Bonnacon is unhesitatingly identified as a European bison. 36. This anecdote originates in Æsopic fables. See H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952), 32; hereafter cited as Janson, Apes. 37. I.e., the H-type of B-Isidore, Transitional, Second-family, and H bestiaries. In fact Isidore mentions this etymology only to repudiate it in favor of one deriving from the Greek for “pugnosed,” Etymologies XII.2.30, 253. 38. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 495–500. 39. Paula Blank, “The Proverbial ‘Lesbian’: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice,” Modern Philology 109 (2011): 108–34 (110–12). 40. Baxter, Bestiaries, 84, further observes that the Etymologies follow “not the chronological order of creation described in the Genesis myth . . . but the hierarchy of the food laws given in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.” 41. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 22; BL MS Royal 12.C.XIX contains excerpts. 42. E.g., in Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 247. 43. “Cetus dicitur ob immanitatem corporis. Sunt enim ingentia corpora et genera beluarum, equalia montibus in tantum, ut eciam ibi naves quasi ad insulam applicentur, sicut ille quod accepit Ionam. Cuius alvus tante magnitudinis fuit, ut putaretur infernus, dicente ipso Iona propheta: ‘Exaudivit me de ventri inferi.’” 44. “C’est estimologie: mes Sires dormi en la Croiz.” 45. “Formica dicta, quod ferat micas farris”; “Uncor de furmi dit / Ysidre en sun escrit / e ben mustre raison / pur quei furmi ad nun: / fort est et porte mie, / ço cest nun signefie.” 46. Robert Guiette, “L’Invention étymologique dans les lettres françaises au Moyen Âge,” Romanica Gandensia 8 (1960): 87–98 (87). 47. Kay, “The English Bestiary”; details of different redactions are given in the appendix to this book. 48. On the contents and influence of Stowe 1067, see Baxter, Bestiaries, 90–110; Baxter dates it 1120–140 (ibid., 147). 49. Fo. 2r: “Est animal quod dicitur monoceros grece . latine ; dicitur eo quod unum cornu habeat in medio capite.” 50. “Un Deu est et serat / et fut et permaindrat.” 51. Although the etymologizing impulse slackens in vernacular authors after Philippe, their bestiaries continue to take the form of listed names, with Latin (and sometimes Greek) forms appearing alongside French. Guillaume le Clerc supplies the Greek forms of the words for hyena, panther, and ostrich, also citing the Hebrew word (GC 2593–4). My thanks to Emma Campbell for pointing this out. 52. “Cete enim dicta ob immanitatem corporis, est enim ingens sicut ille qui excepit Ionam.” 53. Xénia Muratova, “‘Adam donne leurs noms aux animaux.’ L’iconographie de la scène dans l’art du Moyen Âge: Les manuscrits des bestiaires enluminés du XIIe et du XIIIe siècles,” Studi medievali 18 (1977): 367–94 (374); henceforth cited as Muratova, “Adam donne leurs noms.” See also Dronke, “Creazione.” 54. “Quadrupedia vocata, quia quatuor pedibus gradiuntur, quae dum similia sunt pecoribus, tamen sub cura humana non sunt, ut cervi, dammae, onagri, et cetera, sed neque bestiae sunt ut leones, neque iumenta, ut usus hominum iuvare possint . . . ; differt autem inter pecora

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et pecudes. . . . Iumenta nomina unde traxerunt quod nostrum laborem vel onus suo adiutorio subvectando vel arando iuvent.” Translation adapted from Clark, Book of Beasts, 150. 55. Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux entre pecus et bestia: Les animalités paradisiaques des années 1300,” in Adam, le premier homme, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: Galluzzo, 2012) (= Micrologus 45), 219–54 (henceforth Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux”). 56. Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), e.g., 30–31. 57. Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux,” 225; Crane, Animal Encounters. 58. This marginal status is perceptible in this manuscript’s illustration of Adam naming the animals, where the animals that are named occupy a space the size of the other drawings in this copy, whereas Adam himself is seated rather uncomfortably in the margin, without so much as a stool to sit on. 59. Muratova, “Adam donne leurs noms,” 375–76, lists the St. Petersburg Bestiary (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I), the Aberdeen Bestiary, the Northumberland Bestiary, the Ashmole Bestiary (Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511), and Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 372/621. 60. In Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #16 (237), Clarks says the Sloane Bestiary was copied in England ca. 1300, but earlier (Book of Beasts, 85) its production is said to be 1250–1300. In an appendix (Book of Beasts, 256), Clark places it in the same textual group as Bodleian MS Douce 88A along with Canterbury Cathedral MS Lit. D. 10; Copenhagen, Royal Library 1633.4o; BL MS Royal 12.F.XIII; and Bodleian MS Bodley 533. 61. A pre- and postlapsarian division is also implied in the image in the related BL MS Royal 12.F.XIII, fo. 34r. 62. Saint Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S. J. The Works of the Fathers in translation, vol. 41 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 2.8.16: “The creation of heaven was first in the Word of God according to Wisdom that was begotten; then it was produced in spiritual creatures, that is, in the minds of the angels in virtue of created wisdom in them; then heaven was made, so that created heaven existed in its own proper order. The same may be said about . . . the living creatures brought forth from the waters and the earth. [2.8.17] . . . The form [ratio], therefore, according to which a creature is created, exists first in the Word of God before the actual creation of the work itself. So also the knowledge of this form is produced first in intellectual creatures not yet darkened by sin, and then the work is created. We in our acquisition of wisdom go forth to see and understand the invisible things of God through the things that are made; but the angels from the moment of their creation enjoy the eternal Word Himself in holy and loving contemplation”(57). The translator explains, “Augustine’s theory is that the words And so it was done indicate that God first infused an idea of form of each work to be created into the minds of the angels before the works were produced. He distinguishes four steps in the narrative, setting forth the several works of creation. Thus, in the case of the firmament, (1) God said: ‘Let there be a firmament’ indicates that God the Father, in His eternity begetting the Word, decrees to create a work according to the pattern of the uncreated exemplar in the divine mind; (2) And so it was done indicates that God infused the idea of this work to be created into the minds of the angels; (3) And God made the firmament indicates that the actual work was created; (4) And God saw that it was good indicates God’s complaisance in His work” (233n22). 63. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, trans. Wetherbee, 69. 64. Cf. the account of the creation of man in Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, trans.

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Wetherbee, 114. On Noys’s instructions Urania is to compose a soul from Endelechia, Physis is to compose a body and Nature is to unite the two. Urania is given as a tool the Mirror of Providence, Physis the Book of Memory and Nature the Table of Destiny. “This threefold gift embodies, to speak plainly, insight into the deliberations of God; true knowledge; and the most productive kind of certitude.” 65. Although it is hard to tell which side of the parchment is which, the flesh side was more liable than the hair side to stretch when the skin was scraped and pulled taut on the frame, so that it was more likely to become convex while the hair side became concave—the mirror image of the skin on the animal in life. 66. Analogously the illustration for the chapter on the Bonnacon in Harley 3244, discussed above, recapitulates the animals presented in its immediately preceding chapters. 67. See http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid &IllID=3074 for a low-resolution image of this page. 68. Compare BL MS Additional 11283; BnF lat. 3630; Canterbury Cathedral MS Lit. D.10; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 53. Chapter Two 1. Augustine, Confessions XV.16, trans. Chadwick, 282, and ed. Knöll, 357. 2. De arca Noe morali (“Noah’s Ark”) II.12, in Hugh of Saint-Victor Selected Spiritual Writings, Introduction by Aelred Squire (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 88. My thanks to Karen Sullivan for pointing out this passage. 3. “Fecit quoque Dominus Deus Adam et uxori eius tunicas pellicias et induit eos.” 4. Jean Pépin, “Saint Augustin et le symbolisme néoplatonicen de la vêture,” in Augustinus Magister: Congrès International augustinien (Paris, September 21–24, 1954), published as a Supplément to L’Année Théologique Augustinienne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955), 1: 293–306 (293–94). Henceforth Pépin, “Saint Augustin.” 5. Pépin, “Saint Augustin,” 301, cites Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Methodus, and Epiphanius. 6. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manicheos 2.21.32 (PL 34, 212–3). “Quo enim maiore indicio potuit significari mors quam sentimus in corpore, quam pellibus quae mortuis percoribus detrahi solent?” quoted by Pépin, “Saint Augustin,” 303. 7. Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 61, quoting Augustine’s De Trinitate; Javelet summarizes, “Les pécheurs ressemblent aux bêtes; ils ont revêtu les tuniques de peau (Gen. III, 21).” On later authors’ treatment of this theme, see ibid., 262–66. 8. In his commentary on the flaying of Marsyas, Anzieu interprets the integrity of Marsyas’s skin as preserving him against extinction, Le Moi-peau, 67–75. See also Kay, “Original Skin,” 35–37, 41–42. 9. See Stock, Myth and Science, 49–59, on the terms integumentum (rare in Classical Latin) and involucrum (found from Classical Latin onward). 10. Stock, Myth and Science, 51, citing Ambrose, De institutione virginitatis III.18. Cf. Ambrose’s sermon 8, PL 15, col. 1303b: “Omnes pollutas cogitationes de corde tuo abjice, nihil sit quo tuus inquinetur affectus: simplex mens, pura sinceritas sit. Talibus se Dominus cum involucrum corporis deposuerint, demonstrare dignatur.” 11. Stock, Myth and Science, 51, quoting Augustine, Contra academicos I.viii. See also R. J. O’Connor, S. J., “The Enneads and Saint Augustine’s Image of Happiness,” Vigiliae Christianae 17 (1963): 129–64 (146 and n38).

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12. Stock, Myth and Science, 50–51. 13. Augustine shows his familiarity with the Physiologus tradition when he reiterates most of these natures in On Christian Teaching (trans. Chadwick, 44). 14. At least not in the text printed as Physiologus latinus: Editions préliminaires, versio B, ed. Francis James Carmody (Paris: Droz, 1939). 15. Physiologus latinus versio y, ed. Francis James Carmody, University of California Publications in Classical Philology, vol. 12, pt. 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941). 16. “Quando erat pater noster in paradiso nudus non preualebat aduersus eum diabolus serpens antiquus.” Quotation from Dicta Chrysostomi §11, translation from its iteration in the Second-family §109. 17. “Pro Christo deponamus veterem hominem et indumentum eius et quaeramus spiritualem petram, Christum, et angustam fissuram, id est, angustam portam”; “debemus . . . abicere a nobis venenum, id est, terrenas et malas concuspiscentias.” 18. “Si habes ergo in te mortalem vestem, id est veterem hominem, et inveteratus fueris dierum malorum, exsilit in te serpens. Si autem exspolies te indumento principum et potestatum saeculi huius tenebrarum, tunc non poterit exsilire in te serpens, id est, Diabolus.” 19. Analogously the Dicta Chrysostomi chapter on the Viper and the natures of serpents is followed by one on the Lacerta, a creature like the Saurus that is rejuvenated by passing through a narrow crevice. 20. Other good examples of this practice are the Second-family bestiaries in BL MS Sloane 3544 and Bodleian MS Douce 88A, where all the backgrounds are colored and the beasts are bare of paint. 21. On fo. 94v the man attacked by the Jaculus is painted gray, to represent him as already dead (compare the Hyena with a corpse in BnF lat. 3638A fo. 64v) and the men being devoured by the Seps have largely disappeared from view. Presumably they were not fully (or not truly?) naked unlike the man whose nakedness puts the Serpent to flight at the foot of fo. 95r. 22. Though since quires were assembled with the darker hair sides of the parchment facing other hair sides, and the same with the lighter flesh sides, leafing through a book results in an alternation of lighter and darker pages, each darker one revealing a lighter one and vice versa, as happens in Morgan MS M. 890. 23. Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #27 (246), identifies BnF lat. 3630 as late thirteenth century; and ibid, #3 (226), places Corpus Christi MS 53 at ca. 1300. Both transmit texts in the same family as her base manuscript BL MS Additional 11283. Clark’s dating of Corpus Christi 53 is confirmed in Survey, vol. 5, #23 (29–30). 24. See the section on “readership(s)” in my introduction, 13–15. 25. “Sa vestëure / remaint a la pierre de fors; /li cuirs li dessoivre dou cors. / Quant tote est despoillie nue, / dont li reclarcist la veüe,/ et li revient novele peaus” (lines are misnumbered in the ed.). 26. “Se puet bien de Deu accorder / et de pechié desvoloper.” 27. Morini, Bestiari medievali, 291. 28. The reference to the Serpent is clear from the image for this chapter in Montpellier, BUM MS H 437, fo. 225v, which resembles that of §109 in Second-family manuscripts, e.g., BnF lat. 6838B, fo. 35r. 29. “Vestu de covoitise et de luxure et d’envie et des autres mal vices del siecle.” 30. This manuscript, formerly Phillipps 6739, is now in a private collection in Virginia. I wish to thank the owner for allowing me access to it. I refer to it as “ex-Phillipps” since the owner

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keeps his identity private and does not have a public catalog of his holdings. The manuscript, possibly copied in Mons or Hainault, dates from ca. 1280–1290 (Baker, Version longue, 61–62). 31. This manuscript is probably from Arras, or perhaps Lille, ca. 1300. See Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, xxxiii–xxxvii; Bianciotto, Bestiaire d’amour, 107–9; Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, #III-10 (167–74); and Lucken, “Manuscrits,” 128. 32. “Li leus qui a peur del home nu.” This image can be seen on the BnF Gallica site, http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6001348v/f176.image.r=francais%2025566. 33. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6001348v/f178.image.r=francais%2025566. On this section of the Bestiaire d’amours, see Kay, “Medieval Bêtise,” 323, and also Jeanette Beer’s discussion of Richard’s allusions in this chapter to the Genesis story, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s ‘Bestiaire d’amour’ and a Woman’s Response (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 31. 34. Several creatures whose natures involve enmity with the Dragon or with snakes, like the Elephant and Stag, include attributes of the Serpent that are then glossed in positive terms. 35. “Le ydrus en verté / nus signifie Dé; / Deus pur redemptiun / prist incarnatiun, / car devint enpudnete / et puldre enboëte. /De boe vint limun / e de char quir avun; /Deus de char fud vestud / dunt Satan fud vencud.” 36. A few drawings have been realized in Philippe’s Comput which is preserved in the same manuscript. 37. “Hic ydrus depingitur et cocodrillus moriendo. Nam ydrus viscera eius ingressus et egressus foras trahit. Et ydrus iste Cristum significat et cocodrillus diabolum et viscera eius gentes.” 38. In fact as in figs. 3–4 there are holes on both facing pages; a low resolution image of fo. 20v and its position facing fo. 21r can be seen at http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/225 /eng/21/?var=. 39. Perhaps because the anonymous author is responding to the Bestiaire d’amours in which Richard reinterprets the Hydrus as a false lover? Because of its greater emphasis on the Crocodile, I address this part of the Bestiaire d’amours in chapter 4. 40. Pépin, “Saint Augustin,” 295. 41. Ibid. Chapter Three 1. See the introduction and also chapter 5. These cosmologies take their cue from Plato’s Timaeus which begins as an inquiry into the nature of justice by way of the original order of the world. 2. Saint Ambrose, Hexameron V.7.18, read in “Hexameron,” “Paradise,” and “Cain and Abel,” trans. John J. Savage (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press / Consortium Books: 1961, repr. 1977), 172–73. Cited henceforth as Ambrose, Hexameron. 3. Clark translates “Moray eel,” Book of Beasts, §94, and I have used this in preference to “sea murena” in Ambrose, Hexameron. Wanda Cieweski opts for “lamprey” in her “Beauty and the Beasts. Allegorical zoology in twelfth-century hexaemeral literature,” in From Athens to Chartres: Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought; Studies in Honor of Edouard Jeauneau, ed. Haijo j. Westra (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 289–300 (297). 4. Ambrose, Hexameron, V.7.18, 173. 5. Ambrose, Hexameron, V.7.19, 175. 6. Ambrose, Hexameron, V.7.20, 175–76.

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7. English, early fifteenth century (Baxter, Bestiaries, 147). See http://www.kb.dk/perma link/2006/manus/221/eng/8+verso/?var=. 8. St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I), consultable in facsimile in Xénia Muratova, The Medieval Bestiary, trans. Inna Kitrosskaya (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1984), fo. 75r. This late twelfth-century English Transitional manuscript is in competition with its sister manuscript Morgan MS M. 81 for the honor of being the oldest of this redaction. Baxter, Bestiaries, 148, dates it 1175–85. 9. See Zambon, Alfabeto, 57–79, for extended commentary on the viper, including its association (by Pliny) with fellatio (65). 10. Sears, “Sensory Perception.” 11. Instead it separates the Beaver (§7) from the Hyena (§10) and places the Weasel (§16) next to the Dragon (§17) and the Stag (§18), shunting Firestones forward to the end of the beasts (§22). 12. On the manuscript contexts of the H bestiary, see chapter 6. Paper copies of Dicta Chrysostomi are almost all pastoral-theological in character: see BSB clm 5921, 19648, and 23787, and the interrelated 5613 and 14216. In both of these latter, a new chapter order is adopted in which the Hyena is run into the chapter on the Viper, with the shared gloss “of inconstancy” (de inconstancia). Another late paper copy related to these two last is ONB cod. 4609. 13. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 44–64, esp. the persistence of terms formerly related to scrolls, 47–49, and the formation of quires, 49– 50; on p. 49 Jager notes that the word volumen originally meant “scroll.” 14. The third function of the Skin Ego is to guard against excessive stimulation and its sixth is to generalize libido across its surface, making it more narcissistic than sexual; Anzieu, Moipeau, 125–26 and 127–28. 15. Cf. Brown, “Manuscript Thinking.” My “Surface Reading” reviews in this light a number of works in skin studies. 16. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronnel, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–81 (70). 17. Freud, “Universal Tendency,” 189. 18. Ibid. 19. Chasseguet-Smirgel, Le corps comme miroir, 150: “l’homination consiste à tenter de surmonter sans cesse notre animalité.” 20. Didier Anzieu, Contes à rebours. Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée (Paris: Les Belles Lettres / Archimbaud, 1995), henceforth cited as Anzieu, Contes à rebours. I am grateful to Segal, Consensuality, 72, for introducing me to this collection. Anzieu ascribes the quotation in a note to Augustine (Contes à rebours, 11) but its origin is elusive and it seems more likely to have been coined by Porphyry or the Gnostics. 21. Anzieu, Contes à rebours, 11: “Une bibliothèque est un vagin. J’entends la bibliothèque idéale réunissant les meilleurs livres. Ce vagin m’accueillera-t-il?” (Trans. Segal, Consensuality, 72). 22. Chasseguet-Smirgel, Le corps comme miroir, contains extensive therapeutic examples of pathologies of this kind as does Joyce McDougal, Théâtres du corps: Le psychosoma en psychanalyse (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1989). 23. All these beasts are treated in some detail by Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 29–39 (Weasel and Asp), 84–92 (Beaver), and 145–55 (Hyena). 24. “Phisiologus hinc narrat quoniam duas naturas habeat. Aliquando quidem masculus . aliquando femina est et ideo immundum animal est. Cui similes estimati sunt filii israel qui

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primum dominum uiuum coluere . postea luxurie et uoluptatibus dediti . ydola coluerunt . uel qui nunc auaricie student quod est seruitus simulacrorum comparantur bestie huic.” 25. This teaching differs from Physiologus (§28) where the Hyena’s double sexuality represents psychological ambivalence and the inability to adhere to a masculine sense of purpose. 26. This meaning persists from Classical Latin to Middle French (see Lewis and Short, s.v. natura, II.D, consulted online at http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm, and Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, s.v. nature, C.3.b, consulted online at http://www.atilf.fr/dmf). The Second-family text chapter restores natura in the singular to mean a typical behavior: “it is [the Hyena’s] nature that it is sometimes male, sometimes female” (§12, “cuius natura est, ut aliquando masculus sit, aliquando femina”). 27. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 146, suggests that this iconography reflects a motif found from Second-family texts on that the Hyena can imitate the human voice. Its depiction with wings in Stowe 1067, as in the related Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 22, suggests it was also imagined as a hybrid monster of some kind. 28. BSB clm 6908 and 2655; ONB, cod. 1010; and Morgan MS M. 832. BSB clm 16189 is a copy of clm 2655 with the same illustrations. In the Second family it is the Bear that has sex embracing face-to-face like a human (SF §20). 29. In some Dicta Chrysostomi manuscripts the chapter on the Hyena is unillustrated but marked by defects in the parchment: see BSB clm 536, fo. 69, cited in chapter 2 re the Hydrus, but also involving the Hyena; and clm 14348, fo. 248, which is holed and with its outer edge and margin very damaged. 30. See also Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 146, her concern being primarily with the chapter’s anti-Semitism. 31. See Clark, “Aviary-bestiary,” 31 32. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 146, with reference to Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Library MS 24; and BL MS Royal 12.F.XIII; and St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, ms. Lat. Q.v.V.I. 33. On the “essentially defensive nature” of “sexual phallic monism,” see Janine ChasseguetSmirgel, “Freud and Female Sexuality: The Consideration of some Blind Spots in the Exploration of the ‘Dark Continent,’ ” in Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 9–18, at p. 12, and passim for the implications. In particular she distinguishes “castration” as absence of sex from “castration” as reversion from a male to a female sex. 34. See BL MS Harley 4751, fo. 46r, discussed by Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 88. 35. Clark, Book of Birds, “Catalogue,” #29 (292–93). 36. See http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/4872/. 37. “In the first place, those things that are the devil’s are to be given back to him, renouncing him and all his evil works; then thereafter, turned with his whole heart toward God, let him drive away the works of the flesh, which is to say the tax and tribute of the devil” (B-Is §17, “In primis ergo diaboli reddantur que sua sunt, hoc est abrenuntians illi et omnibus operibus eius malis; tunc demum ex toto cordo conversus ad Deum, repellat a se opera carnis, quod est vectigal et tributum diaboli”). 38. Another Dicta Chrysostomi bestiary in which the folios recording the chapter on the Beaver are damaged is Cambridge MA, Houghton Library MS Typ 101 (Houghton Aviary-bestiary), where fos. 84–85 are cut and holed. 39. Guillaume le Clerc’s Hyena chapter (GC 1567–1642) is amplified by additions—the Hyena haunts graveyards devouring corpses, and a stone extracted from its eye, if placed under a man’s

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tongue, enables him to foretell the future—which temporarily divert attention to orifices other than sexual ones (Philippe de Thaon also has this detail of the stone, PT 1209–1214). 40. “L’em dit, que vos la trovereiz / une feiz madle, altre femele / e od traianz e od mamele.” 41. E.g., Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.14, fo. 46, where there is a stitched tear in the bottom margin just under the picture of the Hyena. 42. Nigel Morgan, “Pictured Sermons in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art and Architecture, ed. Susan L’Engle and Gerald B. Guest (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 323–40, discusses the style of this English manuscript and dates it ca. 1270; henceforth cited as Morgan, “Pictured Sermons.” See also Patricia Stirnemann, Manuscrits enluminés de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Manuscrits d’origine insulaire VIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1987), #144 (93–99) and Survey, vol. 4, pt. 2, #129 (110–12). 43. “Mustela semen masculi per os accipit et sic in utero habet; tempore vero pariendi per aures generat.” 44. See Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le versant épistémologique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), appendix 2, 345–47, “belette”, for a wide conspectus of other sources that describe the weasel conceiving through the mouth and giving birth through the ear or (less commonly) vice versa. 45. Etymologies, XII.4.12, 256. These various species subsequently become independent chapters in the Serpents section of the Second-family bestiary, SF §§96–97 and 99–103. 46. For survey see Florence McCulloch, “The Metamorphoses of the Asp in Latin and French Bestiaries,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 7–13. 47. Cf. also the copies of Guillaume le Clerc in BnF fr. 1444, fo. 251 and BnF n.a.f. 873, fo. 49. Some other French vernacular copies where Weasels and holes coincide are the Bestiaire d’amours in BnF fr. 12786, fos. 34 and 35, and in BnF fr. 25566, fo. 87 a; and the bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais in BnF n.a.f. 13521, fo. 27—the only folio in this copy to present significant irregularities. 48. Clearly designed as a whole, the manuscript is illustrated throughout by a single artist known as the Ghent master with exquisite miniatures and elegant marginal bars that sprout foliage and grotesques. The Fitzwilliam’s description of this manuscript can be found at http:// www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/support/friends/opac/cataloguedetail.html?&priref=169648& _function_=xslt&_limit_=100 (accessed January 26, 2013). 49. Sarah Kay, “Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on folios 61v–62r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20,” Exemplaria 26.2–3 (2014): 127–47. 50. Célestin Hippeau, who used this manuscript as the base for his Le Bestiaire divin de Guillaume, clerc de Normandie (Caen: Hardel, 1852) observes (72n2) that this manuscript “a évidemment été retouché par le copiste.” 51. Though according to Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 31, this belief is never referred to in texts of this chapter. 52. Ed. Reinsch, Guillaume le Clerc, 128. 53. Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, 88–9, 132–35, 141–45. 54. “Bone gent . . . , / veez, com home est decëuz, / veez, com il est concëuz, / veez a quel doel il est nez.” Chapter Four 1. Like orifices, wounds create a sense of depth in contrast to a surface which they thereby throw into relief. Guillaume le Clerc warns that applying plasters may actually cause wounds to

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fester underneath, an analogy which acknowledges that putrefying recesses may actually result from what overlies their surface (GC 3981–6, “Quant ceste mescine savez, /tant come leisir en avez, / entremettez vos de garir / ne laissez vos plaies porrir: / car si eles sont sorsanees, / a peine serront puis curees”). 2. Dittmar, “Le Seigneur des animaux,” and cf. chapter 1. 3. The section on serpents in this late thirteenth-century English Second-family manuscript was discussed in chapter 2. 4. Peter Dinzelbacher, “Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32, no. 3 (Winter 2002): 405–42; and more generally Karl Steel, “How to Make a Human,” Exemplaria 20, no. 1 (2008): 3–27 (henceforth Steel, “How to Make a Human”) and also, in expanded form, in How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 61–91 (henceforth Steel, How to Make a Human). The evidence for animal trials is Continental—it may be doubted if they took place in England. Legal identification of animals with property not persons still obtains; see Taime L. Bryant, “Sacrificing the Sacrifice of Animals: Legal Personhood for Animals, the Status Of Animals as Property, and the Presumed Primacy of Humans,” Rutgers Law Journal 39 (2008): 247–330, for a case in which some primates sought redress for their treatment under a contract, on which it was ruled that “The chimpanzees and monkeys are the property that is the subject of the contract, not the beneficiaries of the contract”( 271); henceforth cited as Bryant, “Sacrificing the Sacrifice”; also Wolfe, Before the Law, 12–14. 5. Also true today: “the uncritical, unselfconscious ease with which humans kill animals is a potent means by which humans sustain the idea of sufficient discontinuity between humans and animals to justify their status as the property of humans” (Bryant, “Sacrificing the Sacrifice,” 295). 6. Steel, “How to Make a Human,” 17; also, in expanded form, in How to Make a Human, 14–15 and passim. 7. Peggy McCracken, “Survival, Skin, and the Technology of Sovereignty,” chap. 1 of In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). My thanks to Peggy McCracken for sharing this chapter with me. 8. Bryant, “Sacrificing the Sacrifice,” 301–27, cites as example of the modern sacrificial animal the companion animal in the contemporary US since these are “animals we as a society claim we care for as ‘family members’” (311). Assimilation to the self is particularly blatant when an owner wills that their companion animal be euthanized on their death. The identification of the sheep (ovis) with sacrifice (oblatio) is found in SF §33, taken from Isidore, Etymologies, XII.1.9 (247). 9. Durling, “British Library MS Harley 2253,” 280 and 291. She reiterates the same point 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, and 288. 10. I did the same myself in a study of manuscripts transmitting the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew; see Kay, “Original Skin,” and for critique, Kay, “Legible Skins.” 11. Bryant, “Sacrificing the Sacrifice,” 257, with reference to Derrida. 12. Derrida, L’Animal, 46: “De la figure du génocide il ne faudrait ni abuser ne s’acquitter trop vite.” 13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vida (Turin: Einaudi, 1995); trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) and cited henceforth from the translation as Homo Sacer. 14. Homo Sacer, 12, italics in the original. The Roman definition is cited, “The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice (immolari) this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide (parridicidia)” (47). Agamben’s aim is not to redress the use made of the concept of sacrifice as such, but to

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show the workings of power over human life while also explaining why that subjection makes life “sacred.” 15. Homo Sacer, 48. 16. Homo Sacer, 53. 17. Homo Sacer, 54. 18. Homo Sacer, 38. 19. “A kind of bestialization of man,” according to Foucault, cited by Agamben, Homo Sacer, 10. 20. “Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings. . . . But language is for manifesting the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. To have the sensation of the good and the bad and of the just and of the unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other living beings, and the community of these things makes dwelling and the city.” Aristotle, Politics 1253a, 10–18, cited Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12. 21. The essay on the threshold between nature and politics in Marie de France’s werewolf story “Bisclavret” (Homo Sacer, 63–66) could just as readily have been included in The Open to illustrate how the anthropological machine forces a decision on the undecidable overlap of man with animal. 22. The Open, chap. 9. 23. The Open, 80. On the relevance of Homo Sacer to Agamben’s later discussion of this human/animal conflict, see Mills, “Havelok’s Bare Life,” and Kimberly W. Benston, “Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies,” Publications of the Modern Languages Association 124, no. 2 (2009): 548–55. For Benston (550) killing animals in the name of human interests is precisely not a sacrifice but an expression of “sovereign power” in Agamben’s terms. Wolfe, Before the Law, grounds his complaints against Agamben on Homo Sacer rather than, as I do here, reading it retrospectively through The Open. 24. Cf. Homo Sacer, 53, quoted above. In Séminaire: La bête et le souverain vol. 1 (2001–2002) (Paris: Galilée, 2008), Jacques Derrida makes a similar argument; see 38 for summary. 25. Paul Hyams, “Due Process versus the Maintenance of Order,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Peter Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62–90, esp. 66. My thanks to Paul Hyams for his helpful observations. 26. Philippe de Thaon also places the Pelican near the head of his bird section, beginning it (as does Gervaise) Eagle—Caladrius—Pelican. 27. The entry is that on the Hoopoe whose offspring take care of their parents in old age; the illustrations of these chapters can be so similar that the meaning of the Pelican no longer seems centered on sacrifice and resurrection but on intergenerational conflict. 28. They are also prominently illustrated as wounds in H bestiaries and in the Aviarium tradition. 29. In ONB cod. 2511, fo. 139r (Dicta Chrysostomi) the damage in the outer margin, near the bottom of the page, comes at the end of the first few lines of the Pelican chapter. In Morgan MS M. 832, fo. 8r (also Dicta Chrysostomi) a hole in the writing block falls on the same page as the Pelican, but in the chapter on the Eagle on the verso. In Getty MS Ludwig XV.3, fo. 72r (B-Isidore) there is some damage next to the Pelican that may have occurred after the book was made. In BnF lat. 3638A (H Bestiary) the first damaged folio is fo. 84, with a big slit next to the Pelican. 30. In BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.vii, fo. 8v (Guillaume le Clerc), there is a long split down the inner writing column, which the scribe has written round, within the chapter on the Pelican.

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In BnF fr. 24428, fo. 57r (also Guillaume le Clerc), there is a slit with stitching in the column of writing, below the image and between lines 533 and 534 of the text. 31. Visible on the Gallica site at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55000507q/f405.image .r=Arsenal%203516; another image from this fo. is reproduced as plate 21. 32. The ex-Phillipps copy of the Long Version does not draw attention to the double page occupied by the Pelican, fos. 4v–5r, but there is a big tear across the middle of fo. 6, the verso of which coincides with the Woutre; see fig. 2. 33. “Audiens autem venator vocem eius, venit et occidit eum” (B-Is §2; also, with minor differences of wording and spelling, DC §9). 34. Observation of Sylvie Lefèvre, “Polymorphisme et métamorphose: Les mythes de la naissance dans les bestiaires,” in Métamorphose et bestiaire fantastique au Moyen Age, ed. Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: ENS, 1985), 215–46 (230); henceforth cited as Lefèvre, “Polymorphisme.” Guillaume le Clerc extends this gloss to the hunter of the Unicorn, GC 1426–30. 35. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 46–50, suggests that a number of English copies reflect contemporary English forest law by grouping together animals protected by it: the Stag, Fallow deer (dama), Roe (caprea), and Boar. 36. Clark, Book of Beasts, 51–52, 63–64. 37. A rare exception is BSB clm 6908 (Dicta Chrysostomi) where the hunter’s spear is pointing away from the beast. 38. Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #14 (234–45) supports Nigel Morgan’s dating and localization in Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #76 (124–25), ca. 1230–1240, ?Salisbury. The images of this manuscript are consultable on the British Library website, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminated manuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8797. 39. All the images in this manuscript are reproduced in Barber, Bodley 764, and most are consultable on the Bodleian Library Luna site, http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet /view/all/what/MS.+Bodl.+764. 40. Copied in S. E. England ca. 1230, Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #64 (111–12); Baxter, Bestiaries, indicates 1220–1240. This manuscript has also been digitized; see for this fo. http://www.bl.uk /manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_12_f_xiii_f003r. 41. Ronald Baxter, “A Baronial Bestiary: Heraldic Evidence for the Patronage of MS Bodley 764,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 196–200. 42. The earliest example seems to be BL MS Additional 11283. See Baxter, “A Baronial bestiary” (cited in previous endnote); and Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 136–40. 43. Cf. Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #21 (241): “An aristocratic patron is reinforced by hunting motifs.” 44. In BnF fr. 14969 (Guillaume le Clerc), the Antelope is skewered by a sword (fo. 5r) while the Unicorn has two spears though it (fo. 26v); and in BnF n.a.f. 13521, the La Clayette manuscript of Pierre de Beauvais, the Beaver on fo. 25v has been run through by the hunter’s spear. 45. Hanna, Catalogue, #178; Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #25 (244–45); Survey, vol. 5, #39 (45). 46. “Vnicornis saepe cum elephantis certamen habet et in ventre vulneratum prosternit.” 47. E.g., the image in BL MS Harley 3244, fo. 36r already cited in chapter 1, and visible at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=harley_ms_3244; for BnF lat. 3630; see n49 below. 48. Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #11 (56–57), dates this important copy ca. 1190–200, North Midlands. For Baxter, Bestiaries, 148, it is slightly earlier, 1175–85. See appendix, 160, for discussion of these Transitional manuscripts.

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49. Another shocking example is the image in BnF lat. 3630, fo. 78r (Second family) where the female Ape is likewise pierced by a hunter’s arrow before dropping either of her children. She and both her children are depicted with a sprinkling of hairs that only slightly intensifies the dappling of hair follicles on the manuscript page; the hunter’s face and hands are also bare. With blood running from her wound she turns to look at him, but he is unmoved by her stare. 50. Steel, “How to Make a Human,”18. 51. E.g., the image of dead men with Sirens in the Bestiaire d’amours Florence, Laurentiana MS Ashburnham 123, fo. 2v 52. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 146. 53. Isidore, Etymologies, XII.2.1, 251 54. “Bestiarum vocabulum proprie convenit leonibus, pardis, et tigribus, lupis, et vulpibis, canibus, et simiis, ac ceteris, quae vel ore vel unguibis saeviunt, exceptis serpentibus. Bestiae autem dictae a vi qua saeviunt.” 55. Kay, “Before the animot.” 56. “Equis vehementer infestum; nam et homines visos discerpit.” 57. Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #18 (239). 58. The Norman author uses the material from Etymologies (GC 1660–1670) to preface the Hydrus’s destruction of the Crocodile (GC 1671–1728), thereby showing fallen humans’ subjection to death (the Crocodile) from which Christ (the Hydrus) redeems them 59. Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, xli–xliv; Bianciotto, Bestiaire d’amour, 110–11. This manuscript also contains the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc, and the images can be consulted on the BnF Gallica site, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90590400/f265.image.r=francais%201444 .1angFR. 60. Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, xlv. 61. A zoomorphic pen trial or doodle at the foot of the page confirms the page’s readiness to become animal; cf. the page becoming human in fig. 1. 62. In a different context Brown, “Manuscript Thinking,” is about readers allowing themselves to be wounded by the manuscript. 63. Exceptionally some fifteenth-century paper manuscripts, such as BSB clm 5613 and 14216, open their Dicta Chrysostomi-derived text with the Unicorn. 64. Quoted from B-Isidore: “Etenim Iacob, benedicens filium suum Iuda, ait: ‘Catulus leonis Iudas filius meus, quis suscitabit eum?’” Cf Physiologus §1, “Jacob, blessing his son Juda, said ‘Juda is a lion’s whelp.’ ” 65. E.g., Pierre de Beauvais §1; Long Version §1. 66. Egerton 613 and Trinity O.2.14 both date ca. 1230–40, and Douce 132 is ca. 1240–50. See Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #129 (110–12); and, for the Trinity image, http://trin-sites-pub.trin.cam.ac.uk /manuscripts/O_2_14/manuscript.php?fullpage=1&startingpage=2. . 67. I do not know the origin of this trait. Clark, Book of Beasts, is silent on this point in her notes to this section. 68. “Ad cuius exemplum rationabiles homines respicere debent, qui non laesi irascuntur, et innocentes opprimunt, cum iubeat Christiana lex noxios dimittere liberos. Patet enim leonum misericordia exemplis assiduis, prostratis enim parcunt, captivos obvios repatriare permittunt. In viros potius quam in feminas saeviunt. Infantes non nisi in magna fame perimunt.” Clark’s notes to these lines, Book of Beasts, 120–21, identify Isidore as the major source for this information. 69. South England, late thirteenth century, according to Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #6 (228–29).

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70. Images visible only to subscribers to the online database “Parker on the web.” 71. See the magnificently reassuring image of Jacob with the Lion of Judah in Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 318, fo. 7, at http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/bbb/0318, also visible in Clark, Book of Beasts, fig. 1 72. Clark, Book of Birds, “Catalogue,” #45 (303–4). 73. “Parcere prostratis scit nobilis ira leonis. / Tu quoque fac simile, quisquis dominaris in orbe.” On these lines see Tony Hunt, “Yvain and the Lion,” in The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to A. H. Diverres, ed. P. B Grout, R. A. Lodge, C. E. Pickford, and Varty = Arthurian Studies 7 (1987): 86–98 (95). 74. Clark identifies the figure as an Ape in her entry for this manuscript, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #18 (239). Chapter Five 1. “On ne peut connaître Dieu que par miroir et en énigme, du moins ici-bas. Le miroir, c’est la créature: l’énigme, c’est l’Ecriture sacrée” (Javelet, Image et ressemblance, 228). 2. Respectively these are BL MS Royal 2 B.VII, possibly produced in London, ca. 1310–ca. 1320, and BSB gall. 16, written in Paris and illustrated in England 1303–ca. 1308: see Survey, vol. 5, #56 (64–66), and ibid, #27 (33–34). 3. Lefèvre, “Polymorphisme.” 4. “Quant Dex fist l’omme, il le fist et forma a sa samblance; dont devons avoir de ses plumes et li resanbler de plumes ou il ne nos conoistra nient plus ne ne fera nient devant qu’il nos en verra vestu, c’est a dire que nous soions vestu d’aumones, de humilité, de pitié, de pacience et de soffrance encontre nostre proisme. Dont nos conistra Dex por ses fils par ces plumes, si comme li corbaus fait ses corbellos quant il les voit enplumés et li resanbler.” 5. In the Timaeus. Aristotle quotes the lines in question in order to critique them in De anima, I.2 (404b11–16): “For ’tis by Earth we see Earth, by Water Water, / By Ether Ether divine, by Fire destructive Fire, / By Love Love, and Hate by cruel Hate.” English translation cited from The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1: 645, henceforth Aristotle, ed. Barnes. On likeness as mirror and enigma in twelfth-century Neoplatonic thought, see Peter Dronke, Fabula. Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 32–47; and for the role of likeness in the thought of Abelard and William of Conches, see ibid., 55–67. 6. For a summary of Aristotle’s critique, see Charlotte Witt, “Dialectic, Motion, and Perception: De Anima Book I,” in Essays on Aristotle’s “De anima,” ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 169–84 (181–82). 7. Rhetoric III.2; 1405a35–1405b6; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2241. 8. Rhetoric III.11; 1412a10–12; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2253. 9. Rhetoric III.4; 1406b20, and again III.11; 1412b33; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2243, 2255. 10. Rhetoric III.10–11; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2250–56. 11. Rhetoric III.11; 1412a5–6; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2253. 12. Rhetoric III.4; 1407a16–17; Aristotle, ed. Barnes, 2: 2244. 13. Lefèvre, “Polymorphisme,” 217–18, discusses vernacular examples such that Christ is the spiritual unicorn (GC 1421) or our spiritual lion (PB §1). 14. Agalma is the term Alcibiades uses in Plato’s Symposium to point to the hidden, yet fascinating object he believes to be enclosed in the depths of Socrates’ hideous body. The term is taken up by Jacques Lacan to describe the knowledge that vehicles the transference.

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15. See Kathryn Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, no. 1 (2010): n.p.; and ead., “Kissing Images, Unfurling Rolls, Measuring Wounds, Sewing Badges and Carrying Talismans: Considering Some Harley Manuscripts through the Physical Rituals they Reveal,” British Library Journal (2011), article 5. 16. See chapter 4, 91–93. 17. The textual differences between the Dicta Chrysostomi and B-Isidore chapters are minor, though the latter is longer. 18. For Baxter (Bestiaries, 39–41), the Caladrius and the three following chapters in Physiologus B signify Christ’s rejection by the Jews and the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. 19. A similar reversal obtains between the Caladrius proscribed as food because it is impure, the opposite of its excrement which is prescribed for its healing powers. 20. Compare the Eagle which judges the worthiness of its chicks by whether they can raise their eyes to the sun (DC §19, B-Is §8). 21. Such trajectories, captured within only a few lines, justify Lefèvre’s seeing metamorphosis “comme un principe structurant du texte et non, ainsi qu’il en va dans la littérature narrative, uniquement comme le noyau du récit, le sujet d’une fiction linéaire,” “Polymorphisme,” 217. 22. Clark, “Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts,” Book of Birds, 267–313, #46 (304). Henceforth this resource is cited as Clark, Book of Birds, “Catalogue.” 23. The Physiologus chapter on the Vulture involves its using a stone for an egg, an allegory of the Virgin birth (P §33), but the Second-family Vulture (SF §53), concocted from Isidore, Ambrose, and Pliny, states that Vultures are able to predict the deaths of men, and sometimes depicts the bird looking intently at a naked man. 24. E.g., in the H bestiary manuscript BnF lat. 3638A a Siren is depicted with a mirror on fo. 62r (Aviarium) and on fo. 88v (bestiary). 25. This is not the case in Transitional manuscripts where the Tiger chapter heads the additions that begin only after the B-Isidore beasts have been completed. On the Tiger and mirror, see Zambon, Alfabeto, 151–71; and Florence McCulloch, “Le Tigre au miroir: La vie d’une image de Pline à Pierre Gringore,” Revue des Sciences Humaines NS 130 (1968): 149–60. Cited below as McCulloch, “Le Tigre au miroir.” 26. Aberdeen University Library MS 24; Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #1 (223–6). As Clark shows, the Aberdeen Bestiary is closely related to Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511, which inspired a number of further copies. 27. England (?York), beginning of the thirteenth century, according to Hanna, Catalogue, #61 (81–82). Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #24 (243–44), and Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #42 (90–91) both date it 1220s. 28. “Iterum illae sphaerae obiectu sequentem retardat, nec tamen sedulitatem matris memoria fraudis excludit. Cassam versa imaginem et quasi lactatura fetum residet. Sicque pietatis suae studio decepta, et vindictam amittit et prolem.” 29. Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #5 (227–28): England, ca. 1300. See also Getty MS 100 fo. 24r; BnF lat. 3630, fo. 75v; BL MS Royal 12.C.XIX, fo. 28r; Douai, BM MS 711, fo. 2r; Morgan MS M. 890, fo. 1v. 30. Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511, consulted in Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat der Handschrift Ms. Ashmole 1511. Bestiarium aus dem Besitz der Bodleian Library Oxford (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1982). This was copied ca. 1210, most likely in S. England, Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #19 (239–40), or the North Midlands, according to Survey, vol. 4, pt. 1, #19 (65–66). See also Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.9, fo. 96r (where

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the mirror is also silver), which Survey, vol. 4, pt. 2, #144 (129–30) dates ca. 1240–50, and The Hague, Museum Meermanno MS 10.B.25, fo. 2r (where it is gold, now looking rather tarnished), that Clark, Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #11 (231) places ca. 1450. 31. “Panthera est ‘bestia minutis orbiculis superpicta, ita ut oculatis’ ex fulvo circulis nigra vel alba distinguatur varietate,” SF §4; cf. B-Is §24; the quotation is from Isidore, Etymologies, XII.ii.8 (251). 32. From Ambrose’s Hexameron, 6.4.21 (240) though a variant—without the mirrors—is recounted by Pliny. McCulloch, “Le Tigre au miroir,” 150–52, cites these two sources along with Peter Damien, but then jumps directly to the Long Version of Pierre de Beauvais, which diverges from its models since henceforth the Tiger’s fascination with her own reflection in the mirrors is what causes her to stop. (In fact this innovation comes from the Bestiaire d’amours §15 which served here as the Long Version’s model, but these texts’ relative chronology was unknown to McCulloch.) 33. See, e.g., Wilma George, “The Yale,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 423–28. 34. Baker, Version longue, 21–28, and notes to each chapter. 35. For a fuller account, see Baker, Version longue, 38–51. 36. “Toute la creature que Dex cria en terre cria il por home et pour prendre essanple de creance et de foi en eles.” 37. “Tu, hom, pren example, que tu es l’aronde.” Baker, Version longue, 43–47. 38. Cf. BL MS Harley 3244, fo. 61r, where Amos is pictured drawing a whale from life! My thanks to Karl Steel for this reference. 39. Morini, “Una nuova edizione,” 156–57. 40. Morini, “Una nuova edizione,” 162–67. On the significance of exchanges of looks in the Bestiaire d’amours, see Kay, “Medieval Bêtise,” 319–20. 41. “Por ce que figure d’ome porte alsi con une[s ensegnes de] segnorie, de tant con il est fais a la figure et a la semblance del Segnor des segnors.” 42. The syntax is equally contorted in the Bestiaire d’amours, on which Baker draws to amend this passage. 43. In support of this interpretation is the Long Version’s use elsewhere of the word semblance apparently to mean “allegorical meaning,” as in §49.1: “Une autre semblance est de colons,” “There is another allegorical meaning of the Doves.” A puzzling passage in Philippe de Thaon’s bestiary, which might be understood to say that an angry Lion “paints itself with its feet” (PT 122; “se peint od ses piez”), and which is accompanied in Oxford, Merton College 249, fo. 2r, by a picture of a man standing over a recumbent man (or image of a man?), may reflect this tradition of the Lion recognizing itself in the man’s likeness to God. 44. “Li hom si a une partie de la nature al lion, car il ne se correchera ja s’il n’est bleciés ou s’il n’a vergoingne.” 45. All but Caladrius and Eagle are adapted from the Bestiaire d’amours, see Morini, “Une nuova edizione,” 156–57. 46. “Phisiologes nos dit qu’ele a samblant a home, et chevels, et si a cors de lion et eles de serpent et coe de ceval. Si est une des plus cruels bestes qui soit; si est de tel nature qu’ele ocit le premier home qu’ele encontre devant lui. Et aprés s’en vait maintenant sor .i. aighe, si se mire ens, si voit iluec qu’el a mort son samblant et ele en demaine molt grant dolor. Et a totes les fois qu’ele se voit et mire renovele sa dolor. Ceste arpie senefie l’ame qui a mort son sanblant; car Jhesu Cris fu mors por nos pechiés, qui prist nostre sanblance. De ce doit avoir li ame grant doel.” 47. “C’est bien l’homme que l’on retrouve en face de lui-même,” Lefèvre, “Polymorphisme,” 221.

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48. If the leonine features of the Harpy recall the Long Version Lion and its aquiline ones the Eagle (§21) that finds salvation in the waters of baptism, there is no chapter on the Horse in the Long Version to complete the triad. 49. Some of the surrounding chapters contrast fallible physical sight with the insights of the heart or soul, e.g., LV §14. Skin also contributes to the thematization of identity in the chapter on the Sagittarius and the Wild Man (LV §66), where the articulation of likeness is also caught up in crossovers and aporias. 50. “L’harmonisation est possible entre tous les êtres et l’homme est au coeur de cet accord, capable de connaître et d’aimer tout. Il est, en effet, un microcosme” (Image et ressemblance, 135). 51. “Toutes les créatures sont en l’homme en vertu d’une certaine affinité: il a l’être en commun avec les pierres et la vie en commun avec les arbres, les sens avec les animaux, l’intelligence avec les anges,” ibid. He continues: “Il peut donc être le choryphée de tous, voir par eux et avec eux l’éternité, la vertu, la divinité, bref l’invisible, comme s’il était toute la création.” 52. “La vie spirituelle est la prise de conscience progressive—avec les sens, avec la raison, avec l’intelligence et la charité,—de la réalité cachée de la parenté divine de l’univers et surtout de l’homme” (Image et ressemblance, 135). 53. Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P, La Théologie au douzième siècle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 36, “L’homme, dans la Nature, est donc nature.” 54. Ibid., 34–43, esp. 38. 55. Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001) 229n24; for cosmological rotae see ibid., 40. An example is Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 372/621, fo. 1v, where God is depicted proudly pointing to some brightly colored darts boards he has just made. 56. See my introduction, p. 13 and n46. 57. Only the Salamander and Mole are found in other bestiaries, and the Mole only from the Second family on. 58. On the antique fable of the egg as an image of the universe, and its twelfth-century reworkings, see Dronke, Fabula, 79–99, particularly 82. 59. Baker, Version longue, notes to this chapter, 400. 60. The decor of these two manuscripts is closely related. Clm 2655 is dated between 1295 and 1308 and clm 6908 ca. 1250. The latter can be read online at http://daten.digitale-sammlungen .de/~db/0007/bsb00078560/images/index.html?fip=193.174.98.30&seite=161&pdfseitex=. BSB clm 16189 is a fifteenth-century paper copy of 2655 which reproduces its layout and illustrations. The Dicta bestiary is also found in the same volume as De rerum naturae in Vienna cod. 2511, a fourteenth-century Dominican compendium of natural philosophy; see Béatrice Hernad, Die gotischen Handschriften deutscher Herkunft in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek: Teil 1. Vom späten 13. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000) #118. 61. John Block Friedman, “Thomas of Cantimpré De naturis rerum Prologue, Book III and Book XIX,” in La Science de la nature: théories et pratiques = Cahiers d’études médiévales 2 (1974): 107–54 (116, 108). 62. Ibid., 109–10. 63. Stock, Myth and Science, 21–22. 64. These images have no precedent in clm 6908 and are not replicated in the paper copy clm 16189. 65. “Partes corporis humani principaliter create sunt, ut dicit Aristotiles, et posite secundum creationem et situm totius mundi. Unde Grece homo microcosmus quasi minor mundus dicitur.” Quoted from Thomas Cantimpratensis, Liber de natura rerum vol. 1, ed. H. Boese (Berlin:

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Walter de Gruyter, 1973; vol. 2 was never published), Book 1. i p. 13. Although this is the first book in the printed text, it comes last and thus immediately before the Dicta bestiary in clm 2655, which reorders the treatise placing the cosmological chapters first, then those that address aspects of the sublunar natural world, and finally the chapters on man. My warmest thanks to Dr. Nicola Lutz for verifying this for me. 66. See Yves Lefèvre, L’Elucidarium et les lucidaires: Contribution, par l’histoire d’un texte, à l’histoire des croyances religieuses en France au moyen âge, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 180 (Paris: Boccard, 1954), 371. 67. The illustration of this Long Version chapter in BnF Arsenal 3516, fo. 211r, also depicts the human microcosm as lacking genitalia. 68. In the macrocosm image on fo. 105r the creatures typical of each element are closer to those in the vernacular bestiaries: fire nourishes what look like salamanders, water provides for fish, earth for a beast and a serpent, and air is represented by unspecified golden birds. Chapter Six 1. Janice Pindar, “The Cloister and the Garden: Gendered Images of Religious Life from the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Listen Daughter: The “Speculum virginum” and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant J. Mews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001): 159–79 (159–60), hereafter cited as “The Cloister and the Garden.” Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 76–77, likewise highlights the essential role played by the mental or “inner” senses in spiritual instruction. 2. The meaning of the “inner touch” is explored by Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). On the touch between skins as foundational for psychical development, see Anzieu, Le Moi-Peau, 57–66. 3. On the misattribution of De claustro animae to Hugh of Saint-Victor, especially in Germany, see Gerhard Bauer, Claustrum Animae: Untersuchungnen zur Geschichte der Metaphor vom Herzen als Kloster (Munich: Fink, 1973), 269–81, cited below as Claustrum Animae. On misattribution to Hugh of Saint-Victor of the Aviarum, see Clark, Book of Birds, 6–7. The H bestiary was also wrongly attributed to him: Clark, Book of Beasts, 13; and Zambon, Alfabeto, 96–97. 4. Clark, Book of Birds, 2–3. 5. Clark, Book of Birds, 73–75. 6. On the bestiary pairings of the Aviarium, see Clark, Book of Birds, appendix 1 (257–59); and for an initial list of Aviarium manuscripts, Book of Birds, “Catalogue”; both need to be supplemented by Baudouin Van den Abeele, “Trente-et-un nouveaux manuscrits de L’Aviarium,” Scriptorium 57, no. 2 (2003): 253–71; henceforth Van den Abeele, “Trente-et-un nouveaux manuscrits.” 7. Some are Franciscan, e.g., Cambridge, Gonville and Caius 372/621 and the interesting BnF fr 24428 which combines a French version of the Aviarium with the bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc. On the provenance of the manuscripts groups, see Clark, Book of Birds, 40–89; and Van den Abeele, “Trente-et-un nouveaux manuscrits.” On Cistercian enthusiasm for Hugh of Fouilloy see Pindar, “The Cloister and the Garden,” 160. Yvan Gobry, Le “De claustro animae” d’Hugues de Fouilloy (Amiens: Eklitra, 1995 = Eklitra, 74), 86, queries how far Hugh’s hermeneutics are specifically Augustinian, and underlines his debt to Cîteaux, 102–6; henceforth cited as Le “De claustro.” 8. De claustro animae will be quoted from PL 176, where it occupies cols. 1017–1182. Gobry’s

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manuscript list, Le “De claustro,” 51–53, has been updated at http://www.arlima.net/ which lists 513 manuscripts in known locations (consulted April 3, 2015). The influence of De claustro on Latin, French, and English writing is shown by Christiania Whitehead, “Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious Treatises,” Medium Aevum 67, no. 1 (1998): 1–29; by Janice Pindar, “Love and Reason from Hugh of Fouilloy to the Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Changes at the Top in the Medieval Cloister Allegory,” Parergon 27, no. 1 (2010): 67–83; and on German writing by Bauer, Claustrum Animae. Other works by Hugh of Fouilloy circulating with the Aviarium and associated bestiaries, especially H, are De medicina anime, De rota, De pastoribus et ovis, and Visio cuisdam monachi. 9. For Hugh of Fouilloy’s life and works, see Gobry, Le “De claustro,” 1–35. Subsequent scholars challenge Gobry’s chronology, which identifies the Aviarium as a youthful work from the 1120s and De claustro as his most mature (Le “De claustro,” 21, 25). Clark, Book of Birds, 9, places all Hugh’s output during his tenure of positions of responsibility for young monks, and dates the Aviarium to the late 1130s or early 1140s. 10. On Richard’s Aristotelianism, see Beer, “The New Naturalism”; Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 79–91; Kay, “Medieval Bêtise.” 11. According to Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, clxxix–ccxiii, the Response is transmitted in at least two different versions and responds to one of the later copies of the Bestiaire d’amours. 12. Léopold Delisle, ed., “La Biblionomie de Richard de Fournival,” in his Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 4 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1874), 2: 518–35. 13. Kay, “Medieval Bêtise.” 14. “Aedificat animam, quae irrationabilia animalia in inferioribus ordinat, homines et volatilia in superiori parte locat, id est, motus carnales subjicit, spirituales superponit” (De claustro 3.6, PL 176:1094B). 15. Hugh’s emphasis on reproduction recalls the sexual inflection of the Dicta Chrysostomi but translates it from the carnality of the beasts into the non-carnal behavior of birds. 16. Zambon, Alfabeto, 100–111, analyzes meticulously Hugh’s treatment of the Dove. 17. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother. Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 3, esp. 106–9. Henceforth cited as Jesus as Mother. 18. “Columbam cuius pennae sunt deargentatae et posteriora dorsi eius in pallore auri pingere et per picturam simplicium mentes aedificare decrevi, ut quod simplicium animus intelligibili oculo capere vix poterat, saltem carnali discernat; et quod vix poterat auditus percipiat visus. Nec tantum volui columbam formando pingere sed etiam dictando describere, ut per scripturam demonstrem picturam; velut cui non placuerit simplicitas picturae, placeat saltem moralitas scripturae.” 19. See fos. 42v and 43r in the Aviarium section of Gonville and Caius 372 /621. 20. Clark, Book of Birds, esp. 31–34. 21. Clark, Book of Birds, 7. 22. E.g., Solterer, Master and Minerva, 81–83; Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book. The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 138–41, 164–73 (hereafter cited as Huot, From Song to Book); Sears, “Sensory Perception.” 23. BnF fr. 412, fo. 228r, discussed by Sears, “Sensory Perception.” Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, III-56 (302–8), dates this manuscript 1285, Cambrai. 24. Clark’s note to Hugh’s prologue, Book of Birds, 117, points out its similarity with that of the Bestiaire d’amours.

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25. “Toutes gens desirrent par nature a savoir,” Bestiaire d’amours, §1; Aristotle, Metaphysics, I. 1, 980a22, ed. Barnes 2:1552. 26. Kay, “Medieval Bêtise,” 313–20. 27. “Ova ergo in terra derelinquisse est natos per conversionem filios nequaquam a terrenis actibus interposito exhortationis nido suspendere” (192). 28. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 114. Her other examples of Jesus’s motherhood use human or mammalian imagery. 29. This point is made by all commentators on De claustro animae, e.g., Pindar, “The Cloister and the Garden,” 167: “His spiritual cloister, while imagined as being inside the soul, is also conceived of as a space in which the soul can move around, experiencing various forms of development”; cf. Gobry, Le “De claustro,” 70, 73, 74, 78; Jeroen W. J. Laemers, “Claustrum animae. The Community as Example for Interior Reform,” in Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, ed. István P. Bejczy and Richard G. Newhauser (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 119–30 (125), cited henceforth as Laemers, “Claustrum animae.” 30. Gobry, Le “De claustro,” 15, evokes the constant opposition in Hugh’s work between good and bad monks: “Tous les traités d’Hugues de Fouilloy ne seront qu’une série de variations sur cet unique thème. Ils trouveront leur plein épanouissement dans le plus dense et le plus développé d’entre eux: Le Cloître de l’âme.” 31. Laemers, “Claustrum animae,” 126. See also Bynum, Jesus as Mother, on the emphasis on reciprocal relationships within the cloister in the writings of regular canons (41), and on the importance of edification and mutual support within the community (48). 32. Pindar, “The Cloister and the Garden,” 165–66. 33. I do not have access to Gobry’s edition, from which he is translating here. PL 176, cols. 1116C–D, reads: “Sic canta in tympano, ut cantes in choro (Psal. CL). In tympano [C01.1116D] cantant, qui carnem mortificant. In choro cantant, qui concordiam morum servant.” 34. Gobry, Le “De claustro,” 73. 35. PL 176, c01.1106B: “Sicut enim caro animalium exterius pelle tegitur, sic animalis spiritus appetitu vanae gloriae ad exteriora se spargens, forinsecus delectatur.” 36. PL 176, col. 1101D: “Substerne fenum carnis, ut animalitas subjaceat rationi mentis.” In subsequent recastings of De claustro Reason is replaced as head of house by Love, see Pindar, “Love and Reason.” 37. See full quotation in n14 above. 38. Because of its height the Palm represents not containment but ascent. Its glosses ring the changes on converted monk, Church and soul; it also figures the tree of the Cross and it is here that the Turtledove is said to nest. 39. “Ecce quomodo passer qui prius ad montem perfidiae transmigrare consueverat, nunc, pro veritate fidei vigilans, de excelsis clamat. Qui ideo dicitur solitarius, quia a terrenis desideriis procul sit remotus.” 40. Clark, Book of Birds, 30–31. The patron is identified as a Count Thibaut, cofounder of the monastery of Saint-Laurent-du-Bois at which Hugh of Fouilloy was prior in 1152. This image dominates in what Clark dubs the Heiligenkreuz and Paris families of Aviarium manuscripts. The variant depictions of this chapter in other manuscripts are listed on http://www.abdn.ac.uk /bestiary/ in the commentary on fo. 34r, and see also Clark, Book of Birds, figs. 7a, 7c–7f, 18a, 20b, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32, 38a, 41, 45, 57b, 70, and 72. 41. The figure is also female—a nun—in Bodleian MS Douce 151 and Bodleian MS University College 120; for the latter, see Clark, Book of Birds, fig. 63, and “Catalogue,” #41 (299–300); Book of Beasts, “Catalog,” #26 (246). Clark outlines the development of the Cedar iconography, Book

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of Birds, 96–97. See also Jane Geddes, “Observations on the Aberdeen Bestiary,” Reinardus 11 (1998):7–84, cited below as Geddes, “Observations.” 42. Geddes, “Observations,” and see also http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/, commentary on fo. 34. 43. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, chap. 4. 44. Klein, Envy and Gratitude; her thesis is formulated 3–5 and elaborated passim. 45. “ Un grand crocodile dans la bouche duquel vous êtes, c’est ça la mère. On ne sait pas ce qui peut lui prendre, tout d’un coup, de refermer son clapet.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire Livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 129; cited by Chasseguet-Smirgel, Le Corps comme miroir, 46 and 95. 46. “Sicut et Iacob contra naturam colorum similitudines procuravit, nam tales fetus oves illius concipiebant, quales umbras arietum desuper ascendentium in aquarum speculo contemplabantur (Gen. 30:37–42). . . . Inde est quod quidam gravidas mulieres iubent nullos intueri turpissimos animalium vultus, ut cenophalos et simias, ne visibus occurrentes similes fetus pariant. . . . Et enim animalia in usu venerio formas extrinsecus transmittunt intus, eorumque satiata typis, rapit species eorum un propriam qualitatem.” 47. “On all other pages, there are worn dirty patches at the top and bottom corners where the reader has held the parchment to turn the page. Fo. 34r has these patches too, but uniquely has a dirty patch in the centre of the top margin, just above the illustration. This would be caused by gripping the book with one’s thumb on the page, an unnatural position for anyone except a teacher who repeatedly turned the book upside down to show to students. This suggests that the book was used for many years to instruct groups of people about this figure.” Quoted from the commentary on fo. 34, http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/. The corresponding page in Ashmole 1511 is not marked in this way. 48. “Car chieus cui ele aime ne se tient mie a li, ains le tient ele, et chelui cui ele het ne tient ele mie, ains se tient a li. Et si est bien drois . . . qu’ele perde chelui cui ele tient, et chieus qui a li se tient li demeurt.” 49. There is no correspondence between the order of these comparisons and the corresponding chapters in the edited text of any other bestiary: the Partridge is SF §§71–72 and B-Is §26; the Ostrich SF §60 and B-Is §28; the Stork is SF §57and absent from B-Is; the Hoopoe is SF §67 and B-Is §10; and the Eagle is SF §52 and B-Is §8. 50. Reciprocity provides the initial theme of the lines of troubadour poetry quoted later in BA §33. 51. Compare the Eagle, SF §52 and B-Is §8. 52. “Car li enfanters senefie le retenir d’amour si comme il a esté devant dit a le nature de le pertris, car adont fait une fame d’un home sen faon quant ele le retient a ami.” Huot, From Song to Book, 142–43, sees Richard’s use of the birth motif as a way of authorizing a lyric creativity that is as it were “born” from his lady. 53. Among French vernacular bestiaries, Philippe de Thaon condemns the Ape as diabolical (PT 1889–1914) as does Gervaise (G 361–80), and Guillaume le Clerc underlines it at more length (GC 1927–1964). Only Pierre de Beauvais deviates from the tradition by reporting that the mother monkey saves the twin she likes best, but this does not prevent him from concluding that Apes with no tails are monstrous and diabolical (PB §22). 54. This wording is found from the H-type of B-Isidore text (such as BL MS Stowe 1067) onward, being repeated in Second-family, and H redactions, and the Transitional manuscripts based on the H-type text. The Second-family wording is “simia vocantur latino sermone, eo quod multa in eis similitude rationis humanae sentitur” (SF §14). See Janson, Apes, 73–106.

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193

55. The same is true of illustrations in the H bestiary. 56. Segre’s base manuscript; see Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, xlv–xlvii. See most recently Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, # III-116 (507–12). Similarly in Bianciotto’s base, BnF fr. 25566, fo. 93v, the hunter’s spear is pointing away from the Apes. In 2200 it’s possible that the Ape on its mother’s back has its eyes open but the other two definitely have them closed—contrast the hunter. 57. The Houghton Bestiary combines a Dicta Chrysostomi chapter sequence inflected by the H redaction with the Aviarium. A similar image is found in the Bestiaire d’amour rimé, BnF fr. 1951, fo. 25r. 58. In the first of the two images in Douce 308, on fo. 100v, the lover discourses to the lady about the Ape beside them, who is still trying to carry both her children. 59. Martha Dana Rust, Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); henceforth Imaginary Worlds. 60. Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 4. 61. Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 5. 62. Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 9. 63. Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 7. 64. Henrot, Peaux d’âme, 25. In allowing that unconscious factors may inflect a reader’s responses to the page I return to Nichols’s original formulation of the manuscript matrix as “a place of radical contingencies. . . . The multiple forms of representation on the manuscript page can often provoke rupture between perception and consciousness, so that what we actually perceive may differ markedly from what poet, artist, or artisan intended to express or from what the medieval audience expected to find. In other words, the manuscript space contains gaps through which the unconscious may be glimpsed,” Nichols, “Introduction,” 8. 65. On the dynamic nature of the Skin-Ego, and its transformations in the course of individual maturation, see Anzieu, Le Moi-Peau, 271ff. and Henrot, Peaux d’âme, 40–41. 66. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?” History of Religions 53, no. 4 (May 2014): 341–68. 67. Contrast the skin of the Ape (BA §9) on fo. 175v that is painted light fawn. 68. In Bodleian MS Douce 308 there is similarly a damaged area in the bottom of the folio under the Ape that has been stitched (and patched under the Sawfish on the verso); it, too, evokes the plight of a child wrenched from its adhesion to the mother’s skin. Compare also the H bestiary, Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 100, fo. 28, where the page under the Ape has worn thin, into a hole. 69. McDougall, Théâtres du corps, 65–66; see also her case history of Georgette, Théâtres du corps, 255–92. 70. “Car li enfanters senefie le retenir d’amour” (full quotation in n52 above). 71. Clark, Book of Birds, “Catalogue,” #12 (277–78); Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, # III-85 (401–3). 72. Pictures of the Palm and Cedar are gone from the Aviarium, and many of the beasts are lacking in the bestiary. 73. H§24 (PL 177, 0073A-B): “Quid autem ossa et pellis elephantis faciant, dicam. In quocunque enim loco vel domo incensa fuerint, odor eorum expellit inde statim omnem serpentem, vel quodque animal venenosum. Sic denique mandata Dei, et pia opera faciunt. Si enim accenduntur in corde hominis, effugant omne opus veneniferum diaboli in quacunque parte.” Similar information is reiterated in H§25 (PL 177, 0074A). 74. H§25 (PL 177, 0074A): “Sic mandata Dei eum purificant et cor ejus, qui ea intra se custodit et observat, et nulla suggestio inimici eo praevalet invenire aditum.”

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75. According to Isidore, in antiquity elephants’ membranes were used as writing material: “Among the pagans, certain categories of books were made . . . not only on papyrus sheets or on parchment, but also on the intestinal membranes of elephants” (Etymologies, VI. 12.1, 141). 76. “There are two kinds of mandrake: the female, with leaves like lettuce’s . . . , and the male, with leaves like the beet’s” (Isidore, Etymologies, XVII.9.30, 351, copied at the end of H §25). 77. “Exspectans exspectavi Dominum, et respexit me, et eduxit me de lacu miseriae, et de luto faecis.” Conclusion 1. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. 2. The main reasons for sidelining the Physiologus Theobaldi are that it is more interested in breath than skin, and situates itself as song rather than as book. 3. Kay, “Before the animot,” 35, 51. 4. The few much publicized books bound with (not copied on) human skin all belong to a later period; see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/2013/05/24/bound-in-human-skin/, accessed July 27, 2015. 5. The Open, 80. 6. See Morgan, “Pictured Sermons,” and Xénia Muratova, “Les miniatures du manuscrit Fr. 14969 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris (le Bestiaire de Guillaume le Clerc) et la tradition iconographique franciscaine,” Marche romane 28 (1978): 17–25. 7. Morgan, “Pictured Sermons,” 333. 8. See the introduction. Appendix 1. Source: http://www.trismegistos.org/text/67008. 2. Baxter, Bestiaries, 29. 3. Clark, Book of Beasts, 10. 4. Source of information and digital reproduction: http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list /one/bbb/0318. 5. Francesco Sbordone, “La Tradizione manoscritta del Physiologus Latino,” Athenaeum (Pavia) n.s. 27 (1949): 246–80 (272); Eden, Theobaldus, 3, “at least as early as the ninth”; for Henkel, Studien, 29–30, it may be later, eleventh century. 6. The base manuscript used by Wilhelm in his edition—Munich, BSB clm 536—actually notes the point of this division on fo. 76r, “Explicit de animalibus. Incipit de uolucribus. De Aquila.” 7. Eden, Physiologus, 3. Baxter, Bestiaries, 148, 209, however, thinks that the oldest extant manuscript is Épinal, BM MS 58, which is twelfth-century French. 8. Site constructed and maintained by David Badke, http://bestiary.ca/. 9. Vatican, Palatinus Latinus MS 1064: see Dorothea Walz, Die historischen und philosophischen Handschriften der Codices Palatini Latini in der Vatikanischen Bibliothek (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1999), 242–43. Henceforth cited as Walz, Historischen und philosophischen Handschriften. 10. Hanna, Catalogue, no. 136 (195–200, at 199). This copy contains the same 27 chapters as in Wilhelm’s edition, plus Great Fish (cetus, inserted between Caladrius and Eagle) and Firestones

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 8 – 1 6 1

195

and Salamander (appended at the end). The other is Vienna, ONB cod. 4609 (identified in the catalogue as a Physiologus Theobaldi, but in fact a late redaction of the Dicta). 11. Walz, Historischen and philosophischen Handschriften, 255–57. 12. Ilya Dines, “The Bestiary in British Library Royal MS 2.C.XII and Its Role in Medieval Education,” Electronic British Library Journal (2014), Article 9, 2 and n. 6. 13. Eden, Physiologus, 5–7. 14. Eden, Physiologus, 9–10. 15. Eden, Physiologus, 14. 16. Eden, Physiologus, 4. 17. Baxter, Bestiaries, 167. The Corpus manuscript has lost its opening and closing chapters but otherwise follows the order of Stowe exactly. 18. On the bestiary pairings of the Aviarium, see Clark, Book of Birds, Appendix 1, 257– 59; and for an initial list of Aviarium manuscripts, Book of Birds, “Catalogue”; both need to be supplemented by Van den Abeele, “Trente-et-un nouveaux manuscrits.” 19. The “Heiligenkreuz” Aviary: see Clark, Book of Birds, “Catalogue,” no. 20 (283). 20. Clark, Book of Birds, 3, 25, maps and elaborates the areas of production of Aviarium manuscripts: they include England, Portugal, France, Italy, and Germany (esp. southeast Germany); there is also a Catalan translation; the area of production is revised east into Central Europe by Van den Abeele, “Trente-et-un nouveaux manuscrits,” 267. 21. Book of Beasts, 232. 22. Baxter, Bestiaries, 147; cf. Survey, vol. 3, no. 105 (125–26), “1170.” 23. Summary Book of Beasts, 25 24. Baxter, Bestiaries, 105; Clark, Book of Beasts, 47–49; Ilya Dines, “The Problem of the Transitional Family of Bestiaries,” Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society 24 (2011–2012), 29–52 (37); this last henceforth cited as Dines, “Problem.” 25. So named because it was seen by McCulloch as representing an intermediary stage between B-Isidore and the Second family, but is more likely to postdate the latter. 26. See the extended discussion in Baxter, Bestiaries, 100–124, and Dines, “Problem”; also Survey, vol. 3, no. 106 (126–27), “c. 1185.” 27. Clark, Book of Beasts, 260. 28. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 384/604 (see Dines, “Problem,” 36, and dated ca. 1270–1290 in Survey, 4:2, no. 171 [172–73]); and the Queen Mary and Queen Isabella Psalters which follow a Transitional visual program but contain no text. 29. “Problem,” 32. In the meantime the only printed edition is that in PL 177. 30. See above, and Clark, Book of Beasts, 11 31. Ibid., though in Book of Birds, “Catalogue,” no. 45 (303–4), Clark dates this manuscript at “ca. 1230.” 32. Clark, Book of Beasts, 11, and 12n48; but on 260 this figure reduces to nine plus excerpt collections. 33. Morini, Bestiari medievali, 289. 34. Dating from Baker, Version longue, 17–18. 35. See Mermier, Pierre de Beauvais, 26–29; Baker, Version longue, 66–69; Evdokimova, “Disposition,” 88. 36. This is its title in BnF fr. 25408, which was the basis of the 1852 edition by Célestin Hippeau (repr. Geneva, Slatkine, 1970). 37. Reinsch, Guillaume le Clerc, 15.

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38. Reinsch, Guillaume le Clerc, 13–26; Evdokimova, “Disposition,” 90–105. 39. McCulloch Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 39. A critical edition by Ilya Dines is forthcoming from Toronto University Press. 40. Esp. Rigaut de Berbezilh. See Amelia Van Vleck, “Rigaut de Berbezilh and the Wild Sound: Implications of a Lyric Bestiary,” Romanic Review 84, no. 3 (1993): 223–40. 41. Lucken, “Manuscrits”; Bianciotto, Bestiaire d’amour, 37–41. 42. Segre, Bestiaire d’amours, xxxiii–clxxv. 43. Bianciotto, Bestiaire d’amour, 69–101; and Beer, Beasts of Love, 149–69 and 189–90. 44. Baker, Version longue, 55–66; Guggenbühl, Recherches; Evdokimova, “Disposition,” 89–90. 45. Baker, Version longue, 9–40; the review of sources needs to be supplemented by Morini, “Una nuova edizione.”

Index

Black and white illustrations are indexed by page and fig. number (e.g., 55 fig. 3) and color plates by pl. and plate number (e.g. pl. 4). Aberdeen Bestiary. See manuscripts: Aberdeen, University Library MS 24 Abraham and Isaac, 89 Adam and Eve, 12, 13, 24, 26–27, 31, 35–40, 42, 49, 53, 60, 123, 145–47, 152–56, 174n58 agalma, 111 Agamben, Giorgio, 4; “anthropological machine,” 15–20, 25, 62, 68–69, 84, 86, 109, 111, 127, 150, 151; “bare life,” 89–90, 98, 106; “caesura,” 16– 17, 40, 62, 68, 127, 151; “sovereignty,” 90–107; “space of exception,” 24–25, 40, 90–91, 100, 152; “state of exception,” 90, 152. See also zoological machine Alan of Lille, 63, 165n3 Alexander, Dominic, 174n56 Alexander Neckam, 29, 171n20 Ambrose, Saint, 11, 114; De institutione virginitatis, 43; Hexameron, 1, 63–64, 187n32; Sermons, 175n10 Amos the prophet, 119, 187n38 Angrémy, Anne, 167n24 anima, “inner life,” 128–31 animal, animans, “living creature,” 2, 18, 25, 136 Anselm, Saint, 133 Ant, 26, 33 Antelope, 8, 26, 29, 55 fig. 3, 66, 93–94 Anzieu, Didier, 4; Contes à rebours, 69–85; “Skin Ego” (Le Moi-peau), 4, 15–20, 24, 62, 68, 69, 151 Ape, 29, 30, 34, 73 fig. 9, 88, 94, 97, 102–3, 106, 116, 119, 135, 137–42, 140 fig. 25, 141 fig. 26, pl. 15 apocalypse, 12, 23, 24–25, 27

Argus, 119, 120 Aristotle or pseudo-Aristotle, 7, 12, 124, 139, 185n5; De anima, 129, 185nn5–6; De animalibus, 12; De secretis secretorum, 168n44; Enigmata, 168n44; Metaphysics, 129, 190n25; Politics, 90; Rhetoric, 110 Aristotelianism, 7, 12, 123, 129–30 Ashmole Bestiary. See manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian: Ashmole 1511 Asp, 5, 6 fig. 1, 7, 78–86, 82–83 figs. 12–13, 98, 106, 118, 170n71, 180n46, pls. 12–13. See also Weasel aspidocelone. See Great Fish Augustine, Saint, 11, 28, 42–43, 44, 62, 68, 114, 178n20; Confessions, 20, 23–24, 40, 41–42, 43, 60; Contra academicos, 43–44, 175n11; De Genesi ad litteram, 38, 174n62; De Genesi contra Manicheos, 175n6; De Trinitate, 175n7; Enarratio in psalmos, 28, 171n15; On Christian Teaching, 167n35, 176n13 Augustinianism, Augustinian Order, 129 Avicenna, De anima, 129 Baker, Craig, 162, 176n30, 187nn34–35, 187n37, 188n59, 195nn34–35, 194nn44–45 balena. See Great Fish Barber, Richard, 171n12 Bauer, Gerhard, 189n3, 190n8 Baxter, Ron, 18, 160, 167n20; as Ronald Baxter, 183n41 Bear, 135, 178n28 beast, bestia, 98

198 Beaver, 3, 29, 56 fig. 4, 64, 65, 66, 74–78, 75 figs. 11– 12, 86, 91–92, 94, 95, 178n11, 178n23, 183n44; compared with Hyena, 66, 74 Beer, Jeanette, 168n43, 177n33 Benston, Kimberly W., 182n23 Benthien, Claudia, 4 Bériou, Nicole, 166n12 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, 13, 63, 123, 168n46, 173n64 Best, Stephen, 170n70 Bestiaire d’amours. See Richard de Fournival bestiaries: development of, 7–11, 149, 157–62; in French, 9–11, 149, 159, 161–62; as genre, 1–2; manuscripts and readership 12, 13–15, 29, 131–32, 172n30. See also Physiologus and individual redactions and manuscripts Bianciotto, Gabriel, 192n56 Bible, 7, 23–28 B-Isidore, 8, 10, 14, 75 fig. 12, 86, 98, 158, 159, 160, 168n44, 169n50, pl. 1; Ape, 97; Beaver & Hyena, 66, 70, 74–76; Caladrius, 112; and etymology, 31–35; Hydrus, 52; Lion, 101; Pelican, 92, 182n29; Prophet Amos, 119; and scripture, 27; Siren & Onocentaur, 17–20, 66; Weasel & Asp, 65, 78–79. See also Guillaume le Clerc; H-type of B-Isidore; Philippe de Thaon; Pierre de Beauvais; and individual manuscripts Blank, Paula, 173n39 Boar, 94, 183n35 Bonnacon, 30, 37, 39, 94, 118, 173n35 Brown, Catherine, 165n6, 184n62 Brunetto Latini, Tresor, 172n30 Bryant, Taime L., 181nn4–5, 181n8 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 130, 143, 191n31 caesura. See Agamben, Giorgio Caladrius, 29, 92, 93, 112–15, 115 figs. 21–22, 120, 127, 186nn18–19 Camel, 37, 39 Camille, Michael, 112, 166n7 Campbell, Emma, 173n51 caper. See Wild Goat caprea. See Roe deer Carruthers, Mary, 189n1 Cat, 8 Cedar, 133, 134–36, 143 centaur, 125. See also Onocentaur cetus. See Great Fish Charter of Christ, 4 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 4, 68–69, 86, 170n62, 178n22, 179n33 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 122 Chevalier au Papagau, le, 88 Cieweski, Wanda, 171n16, 177n3 Cistercian Order, Cistercians, 129, 161, 189n7

index Clark, Willene B., 11, 13, 14, 27, 160, 168n38 cock, 102, 103 codicological unconscious, 17, 142–48 Coot, 29 Copeland, Rita, 29 Cordonnier, Rémy, 165n2 Cow, 135 Crane, 120, 132 Crane, Susan, 16, 168n42 Crocodile, 3, 8, 29, 37, 44, 52–62, 55 fig. 3, 56 fig. 4, 57 fig. 5, 61 fig. 7, 64–65, 87–88, 98–101, 104 fig. 17, 136, 184n58, pl. 10, pls. 16–17 Crocota, 8, 30, 118, 172n34 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 31 D’Avray, David, 165n1 Derrida, Jacques, L’Animal que donc je suis, 24–25; invagination, 68, 86; sacrifice, 89, 181n12; sovereignty, 182n24 Dicta Chrysostomi, 8–9, 10, 13–15, 29, 65–66, 72 fig. 8, 73 fig. 9, 75 fig. 11, 86, 115 fig. 21, 125 fig. 24, 149, 157–58, 167n26, 168n44, 169n50, 176n22, 178n12, 184n63, 188n60, 190n15, pl. 11, pls. 24–25; adaptations in German, 26; Beaver, 76–77, 179n38; Caladrius, 112, 114; Eagle, 138; Hydrus, 59; Hyena, 70–72, 179n29; Lacerta, 176n19; Lion, 101; microcosm and macrocosm, 123–26; Pelican, 92, 182n29; Unicorn, 183n37; Viper, 45. See also Gervaise and individual manuscripts Dines, Ilya, 14, 160, 196n35 Dinzelbacher, Peter, 181n4 Dittmar, Pierre-Olivier, 174n55 Dog, 36, 37, 38, 39 Dorcon. See Wild Goat Douchet, Sébastien, 170n73 Dove, 26, 27, 29, 131, 133, 135, 143 Dragon, 2, 26, 37, 45, 49, 138, 145, 177n34, 178n11, pl. 3 Dronke, Peter 167n37, 168n41 Durling, Nancy Vine, 89, 166n8 Eagle, 114–15, 120, 125, 138, 182n29, 186n20, 187n45, 188n48, 192n49, 192n51 Eden, P. T., 157, 158 Eden, state of, 12, 23, 24–27, 33, 35–37, 42–48, 63. See also Adam and Eve; Elephant Elephant, 8, 26, 29, 64, 65–66, 94, 95, 135, 138, 145–47, 152–56, 154–55 figs. 27–28, 177n34, pls. 26–27 Elucidarium. See Honorius of Autun Eriugena, John Scot, 12, 167n37 etymology, 30–35, 39, 139. See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologies Evdokimova, Ludmilla, 172n28 Eve. See Adam and Eve

index fables, 33 Fallow deer, 183n35 Faraci, Dora, 167n26 Fiddyment, Sarah, 166n10 Firestones, 26, 66, 178n11 fish, 125. See also Great Fish “Four Wishes of St Martin,” fabliau of, 74, 79 Fox, 29, 135 Franciscanism, Franciscan Order, 12, 152, 189n7 Freeman, Carol, 165n7 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 4, 68, 86 Friedman, John Block, 188n61 Fritz, Jean-Marie, 180n44 gamalian, 123 Geddes, Jane, 191n41 George, Wilma, 173n35, 187n33 Gervaise, Bestiaire, 10, 15, 161, 172n30; Caladrius, 92; Hyena, 70, 77; Pelican, 192n53; Serpents, 49–50; Weasel, 79. See also manuscripts: London, BL MS Additional 28260 Goat (hircus), 27. See also Wild Goat Gobry, Yvan, 134, 169n7, 191nn29–30 Grass-Snake, 49 Great Fish (aspidocelone, balena, cetus, etc.), 6 fig. 1, 8, 32–33, 34, 98, 135 Griffin, 99, 118 Grondeux, Anne, 165n5 Guggenbühl, Claudia, 13 Guiette, Robert, 33 Guillaume le Clerc, Bestiaire, 10, 12, 15, 26–27, 73 fig. 10, 82–83 figs. 13–14, 85, 104 fig. 18, 149, 154–55 figs. 27–28, 161, 168n44, 172n28, 172n30, 180n1, 184n59, 189n7, pls. 12–13; Antelope, 183n44; Ape, 189n7; Beaver, 78; Elephant, 152–56; and etymology, 173n51; Hydrus & Crocodile, 59, 99; Hyena, 77–78, 179n39; Lion, 102; Pelican, 92, 93, 182n30; Unicorn, 183n34, 183n44; Weasel and Asp, 79–85, 180n47. See also individual manuscripts Guillaumin, J., 151, 170n2 Hanna, Ralph, 171n21 Harpy, 119, 120–22, pls. 21–23 Hassig, Debra, 15, 165n1, 169n60, 171n17 Hawk, 133 H bestiary, 9, 10, 14, 66, 115 fig. 22, 160, pl. 18, pls. 26–27; Ape, 193n68; Caladrius, 112, 114; Elephant, 145–47, 153; Lion, 103–4; Pelican, 92, 182n29; Siren, 186n24. See also individual manuscripts Heck, Christian, 165n2 Heller Roazen, Daniel, 189n2 Henkel, Nikolaus, 171n10 Henrot, Geneviève, 142, 170n63, 193nn64–65

199 Hernad, Béatrice, 188n60 Heron, 132 herring, 123 Hill, Betty, 172n30 Hippeau, Célestin, 180n50 Holsinger, Bruce, 165n7, 166n10 Honorius of Autun: Elucidarium, 111, 122–23, 124, 172n30, 189n66; Imago mundi, 167n24 Hoopoe, 5, 138, 182n27, 192n49 Horace, 15 Horse, 8, 136, 188n48 Houghton Aviary-Bestiary. See manuscripts: Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library H-type of B-Isidore, 6 fig. 1, 9, 32, 33, 56–57 figs. 4–5, 66, 158–59, 173n37, 178n11, 192n54 Hugh of Fouilloy, 14, 103, 129, 136, 169n58, 189n7, 189n8, 190n9; Aviarium, 9, 10, 13, 14, 114, 128–37, 138, 144–45, 147–48, 159, 189nn6– 7, 190n9, 191n40, pls. 26–28; De claustro animae, 129, 130, 133–35, 189nn7–8 Hugh of Saint-Victor, 12, 129, 160; De arca Noe morali, 41–42; De tribus diebus, 28 Hunt, Tony, 171n20, 185n73 Huot, Sylvia, 190n22 Hyams, Paul, 182n25 Hydrus, 3, 44, 52–62, 55–56 figs. 4–5, 61 fig. 10, 99–100, 177n39, 184n58, pl. 10 Hyena, 5, 8, 15–16, 30, 57 fig. 5, 65, 66–67, 69–78, 72 fig. 8, 73 figs. 9–10, 86, 98, 118, 172n34, 176n21, 176n23, 176n29, 176n39, 178nn11–12, 179nn25–27, pl. 11 Ibex (beast), 8, 94 Ibis (bird), 8, 98 Image du monde, 30, 172nn30–31 Imago mundi. See Honorius of Autun integumentum, involucrum, integument, 43–44, 47, 49, 52, 54, 59, 60, 62, 67–68 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 8, 9, 11, 31–36, 63, 87, 98, 123, 158, 160, 173n37, 173n40, 181n8, 187n31, 193n75, 194n76 Jaculus, 176n21 Jager, Eric, 67, 178n13 James, Montague Rhodes, 9, 12, 167n27, 167n36 Janson, H. W., 139, 173n36 Javelet, Robert, 108, 122, 171n6, 175n7 John of Garland, 171n20 Jones, Valerie, 171n17 Kay, Sarah, 165n3, 166n11, 167n25, 168n43, 170n70, 180n49 Kim, Susan M., 170n73 Klein, Melanie, 16 Kline, Naomi Reed, 188n55 Kristeva, Julia, 5

200 Lacan, Jacques, 136, 185n14, 192n45 Lacerta, 176n19 lacovie. See Great Fish Laemers, Jeroen W. J., 191n29 Lamb, 4, 25, 27, 89 Lefèvre, Sylvie, 121, 183n34 Lefèvre, Yves, 189n66 Leucrota, 118 Lion, 8, 27, 29, 32, 91, 93, 94, 98, 101–6, 104 figs. 18–19, 105 fig. 20, 119–20, 121, 125, 125 fig. 24, 135, 187n43, pl. 18 Lioness, 30, 135 Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais, 10, 13, 51 fig. 2, 61 figs. 6–7, 119–20, 149, 162, 168n45, 172n30, pls. 21–23; Beaver, 78; Harpy, 120–22; Hydrus, 59–60; Lion, 102, 118–20, 184n65; microcosm and macrocosm 123–24, 189n67; Pelican, 93, 183n32; Tieris (snake), 50; Tiger, 187n32; Viper, 59–60; Woutre, 50. See also individual manuscripts Lucken, Christopher, 28, 171n18, 172n30 Lutz, Nicola, 189n65 Man, 2, 10, 119. See also microcosm and macrocosm; Wild Man mandorla, 134, 143 mandrake, 145–47, 152, 194n76 Manticor, 99 manuscript matrix, 17, 24, 142–48, 151, 193n64 manuscripts Aberdeen, University Library MS 24 (“Aberdeen Bestiary”), 27, 116, 117, 135–37, 143, 171n13, 174n59, 179n32, 186n26, pl. 28 Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 233, 157 Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 318, 157, 185n71 Bern, Burgerbibliothek MS 611, 157 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 22, 5, 6 fig. 1, 158, 173n41, 179n27, 195n17 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 53 (“Peterborough Bestiary”), 47–48, 103, 175n68, 176n23, pls. 8–9 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS J 20, 79– 85, 172n30, pls. 12–13 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS Mclean 123, 172n30 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 109/178, 116, 117 fig. 23, 168n44 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 372/621, 103, 104 fig. 19, 174 n59, 188n55, 189n7, 190n19 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 384/604, 195n28 Cambridge, Sidney Sussex MS 100, 145–47, pls. 26–27 Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.14, 102, 168n44, 172n30, 180n41, 184n66

index Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.9, 186n30 Cambridge, University Library Ii.4.26 (“Cambridge Bestiary”), 167n27 Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library MS Typ 101 (“Houghton Bestiary”), 71–72, 73 fig. 9, 78, 139, 179n38, 193n57 Canterbury Cathedral MS Lit. D. 10, 174n60, 175n68 Chicago, Newberry Library MS 31.1, 168n44 Copenhagen, Royal Library of Denmark Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8º, 58–59, 66–67, 159, p110 Copenhagen, Royal Library of Denmark S. 1633 4°, 64, 174n60 Douai, BM MS 711, 186n29 Épinal, BM MS 58, 194n7 Florence, Laurentiana Plut. LXXVI.79, 169n50 Florence, Laurentiana MS Ashburnham 123, 184n51 The Hague, Museum Meermanno MS 10.B.25, 186n30 London, BL MS Additional 11283, 36, 160, 175n68, 183n42 London, BL MS Additional 28260, 49–50, 161, 172n30 London, BL MS Cotton Nero A.v., 54, 159, 172n30 London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.vii, 182n30 London, BL MS Egerton 613, 102, 104 fig. 18, 161, 172n30, 185n66 London, BL MS Harley 2253, 89 London, BL MS Harley 3093, 158 London, BL MS Harley 3244, 30, 175n66, 183n47, 187n38 London, BL MS Harley 4751, 36, 94, 95, 179n34 London, BL MS Royal 2.B.VII, 108, 185n2, 195n28 London, BL MS Royal 2.C.XII, 14, 161 London, BL MS Royal 12.C.XIX, 13, 168n46, 173n41, 186n29 London, BL MS Royal 12.F.XIII, 61, 95, 174n60, 179n32, 183n40 London, BL MS Sloane 3544 (“Sloane Bestiary”), 36–40, 95–96, 96 fig. 16, 174n60, 176n20, pls. 2–3 London, BL MS Stowe 1067, 33–34, 56–57 figs. 4–5, 58–59, 70, 74, 76, 158, 173n48, 179n27, 192n54 Malibu, Getty MS 100 (“Northumberland Bestiary”), 13, 37–40, 168n46, 174n59, 186n29, pls. 4–5 Malibu, Getty MS Ludwig XV.3, 158, 182n29 Malibu, Getty MS Ludwig XV.4, 75–76, 158, 169n50 Montpellier, BUM MS H 437, 59–60, 61 figs. 6–7, 78, 93, 122, 172n30, 176n28, pl. 23

index Munich, BSB clm 536, 59, 172n24, 179n29, 194n6 Munich, BSB clm 3221, 172n23 Munich, BSB clm 2655, 123–26, 125 fig. 24, 169n50, 179n28, 188n60, 188n65, pls. 24–25 Munich, BSB clm 5613, 178n12, 184n63 Munich, BSB clm 5921, 178n12 Munich, BSB clm 6908, 123, 179n28, 183n37, 188n60 Munich, BSB clm 14216, 178n12, 184n63 Munich, BSB clm 14348, 179n29 Munich, BSB clm 14693, 14–15 Munich, BSB clm 16189, 179n28, 188n60 Munich, BSB clm 19648, 178n12 Munich, BSB clm 23787, 178n12 Munich, BSB gall. 16, 108, 185n2, 195n28 New York, Morgan Library MS M. 81, 13, 116, 160, 168n46, 178n8, pl. 19 New York, Morgan Library MS M. 832, 59, 71, 72 fig. 8, 157, 172n22, 179n28, 182n29 New York, Morgan Library MS M. 890, 99, 100 fig. 17, 104–6, 105 fig. 20, 176n22, 186n29 Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 1511 (“Ashmole Bestiary”), 117, 135, 174n59, 186n27, 186n30, 192n47 Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 533, 174n60 Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 764, 27, 36, 94, 95, 103, 171n12, 183n39 Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 912, 59 Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 88A, 174n60, 176n20 Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 132, 102, 172n30, 184n66 Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 151, 191n41 Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 308, 139, 193n58, 193n68 Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 247, 18–20, 74, 75 fig. 12, 76, 173n42, pl. 1 Oxford, Bodleian MS University College 120, 191n41 Oxford, Merton College MS 249, 54–58, 55 fig. 3, 66, 94, 159, 187n43 Oxford, St John’s College MS 61, 116–17, 126, pl. 19 Oxford, St John’s College MS 136, 158 Oxford, St John’s College MS 178, 29, 96–97, 168n44, 171–2n21, pl. 14 Paris, BnF Arsenal 2691, 168n44 Paris, BnF Arsenal 3516, 93, 122–23, 162, 168n45, 172n30, 189n67, pl. 21 Paris, BnF fr. 412, 190n23 Paris, BnF fr. 902, 59 Paris, BnF fr. 1444, 100, 172n30, 180n47, 184n59 Paris, BnF fr. 1951, 193n57 Paris, BnF fr. 2168, 172n30 Paris, BnF fr. 12786, 180n47

201 Paris, BnF fr. 14964, 172n30 Paris, BnF fr. 14969, 12, 73 fig. 10, 77–78, 152– 56, 154–55 figs. 27–28, 183n44 Paris, BnF fr. 15213, 100, 139–42, 141 fig. 26, 144, pl. 17 Paris, BnF fr. 20046, 78 Paris, BnF fr. 24428, 172n30, 182n30, 189n7 Pars, BnF fr. 25408, 80–85, 82–83 figs. 13–14, 195n36 Paris, BnF fr. 25566, 50–51, 177n32, 180n47, 192n56 Paris, BnF lat. 2495B, 103–4, 160, pl. 18 Paris, BnF lat. 3630, 46–48, 87–88, 97, 175n68, 176n23, 184n49, 186n29, pls. 6–7, pl. 16 Paris, BnF lat. 3638A, 176n21, 182n29, 186n24 Paris, BnF lat. 6838B, 176n28 Paris, BnF lat. 11207, 14 Paris, BnF lat. 14429, 114–15, 115 fig. 22 Paris, BnF n.a.f. 873, 180n47 Paris, BnF n.a.f. 13521 (“La Clayette”), 92, 92 fig. 15, 161, 180n47, 183n44 Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève MS 2200, 139–42, 140 fig. 25, 144, 169n50, 192n56 St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia MS Lat. Q.v.V.I (“St. Petersburg Bestiary”), 64– 65, 97, 174n59, 178n8, 179n32, pl. 15 Tours, BM MS 312, 158, 161 Vatican MS Palatinus Latinus 1064, 157, 194n9 Vatican MS Palatinus Latinus MS 1074, 158 Vienna, ONB cod. 303, 14–15 Vienna, ONB cod. 1010, 71, 76–77, 114, 115 fig. 21, 172n22, 179n28, pl. 11 Vienna, ONB cod. 2511, 182n29, 188n60 Vienna, ONB cod. 4609, 178n12, 194n10 Virginia, private collection (ex-Phillipps 739), 50, 51 fig. 2, 121–22, 176n30, 183n31, pl. 22 Marcus, Sharon, 170n70 McCracken, Peggy, 88 McCulloch, Florence, 9, 149, 167n27, 180n46, 186n25, 187n32 McDougall, Joyce, 178n22, 193n69 microcosm and macrocosm, 5, 122–27, pls. 24–25 Millar, E. G., 13, 38 Mills, Robert, 165n4 Mittman, Asa Simon, 170n73 Mole, 36, 123, 188n57 monoceros. See Unicorn Moray eel, 63–64 Morgan, Nigel, 180n42 Morini, Luigina, 167n31 Muratova, Xénia, 35, 168n39, 173n53, 178n8, 194n6 Neoplatonism, 7, 11, 13, 38, 42, 63, 111, 122, 124, 125 Nichols, Stephen G., 24, 142, 170n3, 193n64

202 Night Owl (nicticorace, nicticorax, noctua), 26, 27 Northumberland Bestiary. See manuscripts: Malibu, Getty MS 100 O’Connor, R. J., S.J., 175n11 Onager. See Wild Ass Onocentaur, 8, 17–20, 29, 62, 65, 66, 151, pl. 1. See also Siren Origen, 11, 28, 43 Ostrich, 8, 119, 132, 138, 192n49 Ox, 37 Palm, 133, 191n38 Panther, 2, 34, 37–38, 58, 108, 111, 117–18, pl. 3 paper, 5, 178n12 papyrus, 5, 93, 113 Parandus, 118 parchment, 2–7 Pard, 98–99 Parrot, 112 Partridge, 119, 132, 138, 192n49 Peacock, 119, 120 Pelican, 26, 27, 87, 91–93, 92 fig. 15, 112 Pépin, Jean, 43, 62, 175n4 Peterborough Bestiary. See manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 53 Philippe de Thaon: Antelope, 94; Ape, 192n53; Beaver-Hyena-Weasel, 66–67, 179n39; Bestiaire, 10, 11, 15, 55 fig. 3, 149, 159, pl.10; Comput, 159, 172n30; and etymology, 33–34; Hydrus & Crocodile, 53–59; Lion, 187n43; Pelican, 182n26; and scripture, 27. See also individual manuscripts Phoenix, 8, 28 Physiologus: Beaver & Hyena, 66, 70; in Greek, 1, 7–8, 28, 87, 110, 124, 129; Hydrus, 52; in Latin, 8, 157, 158 (Physiologus B), 157 (Physiologus C), 45, 157 (Physiologus y); Lion, 101; and papyrus, 5, 93, 113; Pelican, 87, 91, 93; and scripture, 26, 27, 31; Serpent, 44–45; Siren & Onocentaur, 17–18; Unicorn, 94; Viper, 45, 65; Weasel, 65, 78–79 Physiologus Theobaldi, 14, 15, 158, 194n2 Pierre de Beauvais, Bestiaire, 10, 15, 92 fig. 15, 119, 158, 161, 172n28; Ape, 192n53; Beaver, 183n44; and etymology, 32; Hyena, 77; Lion, 101, 184n65; Mappemonde, 167n24; Pelican, 92; Weasel, 79, 180n47. See also Long Version attributed to Pierre de Beauvais; and individual manuscripts Pindar, Janice, 128, 189n1, 189n8 Plato, Timaeus, 109, 111, 177n1, 185n5. See also Neoplatonism plouvier, 123 Porphyry, 62, 178n20

index Quail, 132 Queen Isabella Psalter. See manuscripts: Munich, BSB gall. 16 Queen Mary Psalter. See manuscripts: London, BL MS Royal 2.B.VII Raven, 109, 110–11, 114, 120, 132 Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, 166n16 Reinsch, Robert, 161 Rhaban Maur, 29 Richard de Fournival, Bestiaire d’amours, 10, 12– 13, 15, 65, 128–32, 137–42, 140 fig. 25, 144–45, 147–48, 162, 169n50, 172n30, pl. 17; Ape, 137– 42; Hydrus & Crocodile, 99–100, 177n39; Lion, 102, 119; Siren, 184n51; Tiger, 187n32; Weasel, 180n47; Wolf, 50–51; Wyvern 50–52. See also individual manuscripts Rigaut de Berbezilh, 196n40 Roe deer (caprea), 94, 183n35 Rudy, Kathryn, 186n15 Rust, Martha, 142–43 sacrifice, 88–98, 103–7 Sagittarius, 119, 189n49 Salamander, 8, 26, 46, 47–48, 123, 188n57 Salisbury, Joyce E., 167n24 Saurus, 46, 48, 176n19 Sawfish (serra), 8, 66, 137, 144 Sbordone, Francesco, 196n5 Sears, Elizabeth, 168n43, 190n23 Second-family bestiary, 9, 10–11, 14, 29, 96 fig. 16, 100 fig. 17, 104 fig. 19, 105 fig. 20, 117 fig. 23, 129, 159–60, 168n44, 176n20, pls. 2, 3, 6–7, 8–9, 14, 16, 20, 28; Adam, 25, 35–40; Ape, 30, 97–98, 184n49, 192n54; Crocodile, 99, 100– 101; Elephant, 95; and etymology, 34–35; Great Fish, 34–35; Hyena, 72, 179nn26–27; and interspecies violence, 87–88, 94–101, 102–6; Last Judgment, 27; Lion, 102–6; and motherhood, 135–37; Nature, 63; Serpents, 45–48, 180n45; Tiger, 116–88; Unicorn, 94–97; Viper, 64; and wordbooks, 29–31. See also individual manuscripts Sedulius Scotus, 15 Segal, Naomi, 170n63, 178n20 Segre, Cesare, 162, 169n50, 177n31, 184nn59–60, 190n11, 192n56 Serpent, 5, 8, 44–52, 63–66, 145–46, pls. 6–9. See also individual snake species serra. See Sawfish Shannon, Laurie, 165n3 Sheep, 8, 27, 34, 39–40, 181n8 Siren, 8, 15, 17–20, 29, 62, 64, 65, 66, 98, 115, 151, 184n51, 186n24, pl. 1. See also Onocentaur

index Sloane Bestiary. See manuscripts: London, BL: MS Sloane 3544 Small, Susan, 165n4 snake. See Serpent Solterer, Helen, 190n10 Sparrow, 133, 134–35 Speculum virginum, 128 Stag, 55 fig. 3, 94, 177n34, 178n11, 183n35 Steel, Karl, 88, 170n70, 181n4 Stirnemann, Patricia, 180n42 Stock, Brian, 12, 168n41, 175nn9–11 Stones, Alison, 169n50 Stork, 132, 192n49 St. Petersburg Bestiary. See manuscripts: St. Petersburg Strubel, Armand, 167n32 surface reading, 17–20. See also integumentum, involucrum, integument suture, 4–7 Swallow, 119, 132 Third-family bestiary, 161, 168n46 Thomas of Cantimpré, De natura rerum, 123–24 Thomas of Chobham, 1, 156 Tieris, 50 Tiger, 94, 115–18, 117 fig. 23, 119, 120, 126, 135, 186n25, pls. 19, 20 Transitional bestiary, 9, 10, 13, 72–73, 97, 125, 160, 173n37, 178n8, 186n25, 192n54, pls. 4–5, 15, 19. See also individual manuscripts Turtledove, 131, 133, 191n38 Unicorn (unicornis, monoceros), 8, 29, 33–34, 65, 93–97, 96 fig. 16, 99, 183n34, pl. 14

203 Van den Abeele, Baudouin, 167n26, 189n6 Van Vleck, Amelia, 196n40 Viper, 26, 45, 49, 60, 61 fig. 6, 63–64, 65, 66, 93, 137 Vulture, 115, 186n23 Walter, Katie L., 4, 166n16 Walz, Dorothea, 157 Weasel, 29, 36, 65, 66–67, 78–86, 82–83 figs. 13–14, 178n11, 178n23, pls. 12–13. See also Asp Wetherbee, P. Winthrop, 12, 168n41 White, Lynn, Jr., 12, 25 Whitehead, Christiania, 189n8 Wild Ass, 16, 32, 72 fig. 8, pl. 11 Wild Goat (caper, dorcon), 94 Wild Man, 119, 188n49 William of Conches, 13, 185n5; Moralia dogma philosophorum (misattrib.), 169n50; Philosophia mundi, 124, 169n50 Witt, Charlotte, 185n6 Wolf, 50 Wolfe, Cary, 166n17, 171n5, 182n23 Woodpecker, 120 Woutre, 50, 51 fig. 2, 93, 120 Wyvern, 50–52 Yale, 99 Yamamoto, Dorothy, 16 Yapp, Brunsdon, 173n35 Zambon, Francesco, 12, 167n34, 171n7, 171n15, 178n9, 186n25, 190n16 Žižek, Slavoj, 4 zoological machine, 151