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Medieval Beasts and Modern Cages: The Making of Meaning in Fables and Bestiaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Arnold Clayton Henderson
Arnold Clayton Henderson*
Affiliation:
Livingston College, New Brunswick, New Jersey Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
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Abstract

Animal fables pass from country to country and century to century, but not unchanged. Because fables have explicit moralizations, the innovative medieval fabulists (Marie, Odo, and Berechiah through Henryson) help us test what authors meant by meaning and what freedoms they took with tradition. We catch them thinking aloud. As they develop social satire, play with allegory, and dramatize style, they maintain a consistent reasoning process something like what we now call structuralist, but something, too, like Augustinian exegesis. We can partially learn to read like a medieval reader, yet we find even the explicit and documented meanings too various to be caught, caged, and cataloged by our theories. With fables as with their wilder cousins, the Nun's Priest's Tale, the Bestiary of Love, and unmoralized literature, neither we nor the medieval reader can anticipate when the author will double back to surprise us. Surprise, it seems, was itself a tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 40 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 Perry, Introd., Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Ben Edwin Perry, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. xi-xvi.

Note 2 Prologue to hopes Fabules, vv. 9–14, in Part II (Secular Poems) of The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, Early English Text Society, OS 192 (1934; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 566–67.

Note 3 Arnold Clayton Henderson, “ ‘Of Heigh or Lough Estat’: Medieval Fabulists as Social Critics,” Viator, 9 (1978), 265–90; the topic is treated more broadly in “Animal Fables as Vehicles of Social Protest and Satire: Twelfth Century to Henryson,” Niederdeutsche Studien, 30 (1981). See also my “Moralized Beasts: The Development of Medieval Fable and Bestiary, Particularly from the Twelfth through the Fifteenth Centuries in England and France,” Diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1973.

Principal editions of fabulists with social content are Marie de France, Die Fabeln der Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke, Bibliotheca Normannica 6 (Halle, 1898); Recueil géneral des Isopets, ed. Julia Bastin, Société des Anciens Textes Français No. 73, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1929–30); Nicole Bozon, Les Contes moralises de Nicole Bozon, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith and Paul Meyer, Société des Anciens Textes Français No. 28 (Paris, 1889); Berechiah ben Natronai, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967)—but for biographical information, see the introduction to Hermann Gol-lancz, The Ethical Treatises of Berachya Son of Rabbi Natronai ha-Nakdan (London: David Nutt, 1902); John Lydgate, Isopes Fabules in The Minor Poems (n. 2, above); Robert Henryson, Poems and Fables, ed. Henry Harvey Wood, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958) (I have not yet used the new edition by Denton Fox); and Odo of Cheriton and John of Sheppey, both in Vol. iv of Leopold Hervieux, Fabulistes latins, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1899). Also social in part are two Latin collections related to Marie's, Robert's Romulus and the Romulus of Trier (Hervieux, ii, 549–63, 564–652), and parts of the Fabulae Rhythmicae (Hervieux, II, 714–57).

For a discussion of seigneur and vilain in Marie de France, see Hans Robert Jauss, Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1959), p. 49.

Note 4 “Haec propter illos scripta est homines fabula / qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt,” Perry, p. 193.

Note 5 The following treatments of this same fable all have social or political implications. Berechiah (n. 3, above) includes judge and bailiff among examples of “he that is stronger than his neighbor” (pp. 12–13). Marie de France (n. 3) applies the fable to feudal justice: “Ço funt li riche robeür, / li vescunte e li jugeür / de eels qu'il unt en lur justise” (fable 2). Accepting the reading seignur for robeiir, after A. Ewart and R. C. Johnston (Marie de France: Fables [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1942]), these lines mean, “rich lords, viscounts, and judges behave this way towards those under their jurisdiction.” Lydgate (n. 2) asserts that as dead lambs grace the king's table, so the poor go to heaven (MacCracken, p. 578). Henryson (n. 3) refers to mailt men, or tenant farmers (pp. 93–95). There are analogues by Odo of Cheriton and his follower, John of Sheppey, in Hervieux, iv, 197–98, 417, and in anonymous Latin collections, where the fable is made an attack on tyranni (Hervieux, ii, 565) or principes potentes who oppress pauperes (Hervieux, ii, 715).

Note 6 For Henryson's probable use of a collection like the Isopet of Lyon, see John MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 200–07. But I am arguing something different from any specific debt. I am arguing that because Henryson wrote in a tradition that considered certain forms of originality as proper, even his original inventions may be seen as nourished by that tradition of originality.

Note 7 Henryson's version of the well story is in Wood, pp. 77–84. For this non-Phaedrine and apparently Jewish-Arabic story, Henryson draws most closely on Petrus Alphonsi in some version, possibly French. The Latin is edited by Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm, Disciplina Clericalis (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1911), Exemplum 23, the English by W. H. Hulme (Western Reserve University Bulletin, NS 22, No. 3 [1919], 48–50), and the French Chastoiement d'un père à son fils by Edward D. Montgomery, Jr. (Univ. of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, No. 101 [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971], pp. 140–46). Like Henryson's version, the French has a full moon (v. 3642), where the others have a half-moon. Other principal versions, none with a moral quite like Henryson's, are these: the French Roman de Renart (Branches iv and rva) is related to the English Vox and the Wolf (ed. Bruce Dickins and R. M. Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, rev. ed. [London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956], pp. 62–70), to several German versions (Reinhart Fuchs, ed. Jakob Grimm [Berlin, 1834], pp. 54–62; Der Fuhs und der Wolf, in Grimm, pp. 356–58; and Reinke de vos, ed. Fried-rich Prien [Halle, 1887], pp. 202–04), to the later French Renart le contrefait (in A. C. M. Robert, Fables inédites, ii [Paris, 1825], 300–07), and to allusions in the Flemish (O. Delepierre, trans., and Jan Frans Willems, ed., Le Roman du Renard traduit … d'après un texte flamand du XIIe siècle [Brussels, 1837], pp. 301–02) and Caxton's The History of Reynard the Fox, ed. Donald Sands (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), Ch. xxxiii. Versions in fable, rather than epic, form include the Kalila et Dimna, in Hervieux, v, 75556, which resembles Petrus; Odo of Cheriton (Hervieux, iv, 192–93); John of Sheppey (Hervieux, iv, 441–42); Nicole Bozon (n. 3, above), pp. 150–51, and Hervieux, iv, 261; Spanish versions derived from Odo (Libro de los Exenplos, por A.B.C., ed. John Esten Keller [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1961], No. 363, pp. 280–81, and El Libro de los Gatos, ed. John Esten Keller [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1958], No. 14, pp. 55–56); Berechiah (n. 3), No. 117; and the ninth fable from “Alfonce” (i.e., Petrus Alphonsi) in Caxton's collection (1484), ed. Joseph Jacobs, as The Fables of Aesop (1889; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), ii, 27678, and ed. Robert Thomas Lenaghan, as Caxton's Aesop (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 205–07. Even this list does not exhaust the versions of this tale, and at least one of the folk versions, that retold by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus ([1880; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965], pp. 78–79) has an exchange between fox and rabbit about “de way de worril [world] goes” that even in wording echoes Henryson's image of the wheel of Fortune (vv. 241819) and Caxton's image of the world's rise and fall (History of Reynard, Ch. xxxiii)!

Note 8 Joseph Albert Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1911), pp. 81–82, refers to Holkot's sermons. See also Gerald Robert Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), p. 304, for Bromyard and pp. 311–12 for the trend generally.

Note 9 There has been quite a debate about what medieval motifs may be traced in the Nun's Priest's Tale and how seriously to use them in reading the tale's meaning. See esp. Mortimer J. Donovan, “The ‘Moralite’ of the Nun's Priest's Sermon,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 52 (1953), 498–508; Charles Dahl-berg, “Chaucer's Cock and Fox,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 277–90; and Jud-son Boyce Allen, “The Ironic Fruyt: Chauntecleer as Figura,” Studies in Philology, 66 (1969), 25–35. A late echo of the debate occurs in Nancy Dean, “Chaucerian Attitudes toward Joy with Particular Consideration of the Nun's Priest's Tale,” Medium Aevum, 44 (1975), 1–13. Robert A. Pratt presents evidence for Chaucer's combining primarily the versions in Marie de France, the Roman de Renart, and Renart le contrefait (“Three Old French Sources of the Nonnes Preestes Tale,” Speculum, 47 [1972], 422–44, 646–68).

Note 10 Kenneth Varty, Reynard the Fox: A Study of the Fox in Medieval English Art (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), pp. 54–56.

Note 11 Richart de Fourni val, Li bestiaires d'amours di maistre Richart de Fornival e li response du bestiaire, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1957).

Note 12 Gerald Robert Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933), 63–64.

Note 13 Paul Meyer, “Les Bestiaires,” Histoire littéraire de la France, xxxiv (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1914), 390; Gaston Raynaud, “Poème moralisé sur les propriétés des choses,” Romania, 14 (1885), 443–84.

Note 14 “Debemus Hebraeos ditare et /Egyptios spoliare, prava in bonum exponere laborantes,” quoted from Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au moyen âge spécialement au XIIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1886), p. 198. Taking Egyptian treasure to decorate the Tabernacle will also be Pierre Bersuire's image for his Christianizing interpretation of Ovid. See the prologue to Reductorium morale Liber XV, fol. lr, col. b 8–9, in Joseph Engels, ed., Petrus Berchorius … Werk-materiaal, iii (Utrecht: Rijksuniversiteit, 1966), 2.

Note 15 “Sed quoniam multis modis res similes rebus apparent, non putemus esse praescriptum ut quod in aliquo loco res aliqua per similitudinem significaverit, hoc earn semper significare credamus,” De Doctrina Christiana, 3.25.35, Patrologia Latina, Vol. xxxiv, Col. 78; trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., On Christian Doctrine (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), pp. 99–100.

Note 16 Toulmin Smith, pp. 150–51, and Hervieux, iv, 261.

Note 17 I translate the passage: “This beast, who sees so clearly, and who perceives from so far off his enemy who wickedly seeks him, is fitting as the example of God, for God looks from afar and sees and observes whatever people do here and there,” Le Bestiaire, ed. Robert Reinsch (Leipzig, 1892), vv. 1749–56.

Note 18 Guillaume le Clerc's description of the eagle (Reinsch, vv. 657–80) follows the First Family Latin manuscript Royal 2C.xii of the British Library and its ancestor, the Greek Physiologus B, in allowing the eagle a three-fold plunge into water, suggesting baptism. Other bestiaries may lack the motifs of threeness or baptism while still suggesting some form of spiritual renewal.

Changes in the animal lore or “legend” portion of the bestiary often seem deliberate matchings of the legend to its intended allegory: Michael Curley shows the process operating long before Guillaume in the ancestral bestiary, the Physiologus (Physiologus [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979], Introd., p. xxv et passim).

Note 19 “Quando autem ex eisdem Scripturae verbis, non unum aliquid, sed duo vel plura sentiuntur, etiam si latet quid senserit ille qui scripsit, nihil periculi est, si quodlibet eoreum congruere veritati ex aliis locis sanctarum Scripturarum doceri potest,” De Doctrina Christiana 3.27.38, Patrologia Latina, Vol. xxxiv, Col. 80 (Robertson, pp. 101–02). Cf. 1.36.41.

Note 20 Barthes, “L'Activité structuraliste,” in Essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), pp. 218, 220.

Note 21 Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” New Literary History, 3 (1972), 301–18.

Note 22 Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Bollingen Series No. 35, 2nd ed., v (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 3–30.