Wisdom of Animals, livre ebook

Throughout Western civilization, animals have decorated heraldic shields, populated medieval manuscripts, and ornamented baroque pottery. Animals have also been our companions, our correctives, and our ciphers as humanity has represented and addressed issues of authority, cultural strife, and self-awareness as theological, moral, and social beings. In The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality, Catharine Randall traces two threads of thought that consistently appear in a number of early modern French texts: how animals are used as a means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of existence; and how animals can be subjects in their own right.

In her accessible, interdisciplinary study, Randall explores the link between philosophical and theological discussions of the nature and status of animals vis-à-vis the rest of existence, particularly humans. In doing so, she provides the early modern backdrop for the more frequently studied modern and postmodern notions of animality. Randall approaches her themes by way of French confessional and devotional literature, especially the works of Michel de Montaigne, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, St. François de Sales, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant. From these, she elicits contrasting perspectives of animality: rational vs. mystical, representational vs. sacramental, religious vs. secular, and Protestant vs. Jesuit Catholic perspectives.

Animals have decorated heraldic shields, populated the pages of medieval manuscripts, woven themselves into tapestries, featured as ornamentation on baroque pottery, been formed into the fanciful deformations called gargoyles, farmed our fields, symbolized human weaknesses, lusts, and desires, and insinuated themselves into our hearts. Throughout Western civilization, animals have been our companions, our correctives, and our ciphers as humanity has represented and dealt with issues of authority, cultural strife, and the understanding of ourselves as theological, moral, and social beings. I propose to trace two threads of thought that consistently reappear in early modern texts: how animals are used as a means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of existence, and how animals can be subjects in their own right with their own minds.

Prior to the Renaissance, narratives often featured animals as symbols of human emotions. The Middle Ages catalogued miscellaneous details and stories about real and imagined animals in bestiaries. Here animals figured the limitrophe: the frontiers of things known and unknown, what could be known and what could not be known.

The Middle Ages manifested what has been called a “late-antique medley of Christian allegory and pseudo-science” for its understanding of nature and of animals, relying primarily on a text called the Physiologus, a compilation of manuscripts deemed authoritative about animals (Klingender 1971, 341). Many late medieval texts about animals organized their suppositions and arguments around proofs drawn from the Physiologus. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Physiologus was rewritten as the popular medieval Bestiarium, “the earliest medieval picture book devoted entirely to animals,” which greatly contributed to the Carolingian revival of natural science in particular (Klingender 1971, 342). Animal symbolism closely linked with the sciences was perceived, and codified, as cultural convention. This was a very fertile period for the production of a variety of imaginative literary works concerned with animals, and often animals supplied both the format and the impetus for authorship.

The medieval period also looked to Aristotle’s History of Animals, Virgil, Pliny, and other classical writers as sources of information about animal life. Preachers consulted collections of animal stories in Latin for exempla that they could use in their sermons. Compiled during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such compendia were now also read by lay people and used in secular, vernacular works of fiction.

The illustrations in medieval manuscripts in virtually every genre also referenced anecdotes about animal life and sometimes expressed a perception of animals that was more naturalistic than stereotyped and subordinated to didactic aims. Further, heraldic art began to incorporate animals systematically, drawing on the stock of symbolic meanings ascribed to members of the animal kingdom. Birds and animals became prevalent, significant features, often providing the visual component in the self-mythologizing of the individual or family represented.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, people began to make detailed observations from life about the ways animals lived, their habits and customs, and to add this new awareness to the symbolic cultural associations already formed. For example, Jacopus de Voragine’s Légende dorée shows many lifelike and naturalistic— but also anthropomorphized—actions of animals, as does Ugolino da Santa Maria’s Actus Beati Francisci with its tale of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio. In such stories, the animals encapsulate a preachment but also provide occasional comic relief and a firm experiential footing in the real world, with the intent of encouraging the devout reader to envision the saint performing his spiritual and miraculous actions in the knowable arena of daily life. Narrative applications of animalia flourished during this time.

The natural authority that animals embodied came to be construed as a necessary starting point of lessons that humans should strive to incorporate and to surpass. In this respect and others, the Renaissance initiated a great paradigm shift. Intricately rendered, true-to-life artistic representations of animals, such as Pisanello’s Head of a Horse, epitomize this period. Renaissance thinkers asked questions such as whether humans could ever know what went on in an animal’s mind, or whether an animal could comprehend what went on in a human mind. The Renaissance viewed animals primarily in two ways: in their reality sui generis, and as magistri, or teachers. Animals possessed wisdom and knowledge surpassing that of man, but from which man could draw, through imitatio and innutritio, the normative methods for treating authoritative sources. Man could learn from the animal kingdom. Animals also represented the state of the world as sixteenth-century writers and authors perceived it.

Disturbing phenomena of war or sin or crime could be described through recourse to animal metaphors (Hale 1994, 63). In the fraught context of the Wars of Religion, the disappearance of a high moral assessment of humanity, of the possibility of ethical decision making, of truthful action and compassionate treatment of one’s fellows, occasioned reflection on how to represent man to himself. With the human no longer able to offer an estimable standard or norm, writers turned to animals to express their concerns about human nature as they were experiencing it.

Animals thus provided a tool for thinking about a profoundly negative alteration in the human condition (Homo homini lupus). Animals also became the teachers for how to recuperate once-admired human traits that now seemed to be in danger of disappearing. If man was a wolf to his neighbor, the notion of “wolf” had become contaminated by the human, rather than exalted through association, and needed to be retrieved and rehabilitated to conform to the wolf’s natural characteristics rather than to the abusive connotations forced upon the animal. Animals could then illustrate, in every sense of the word, how human nature should be and how it might be restored. At the same time, animals could re-become their animal selves. Early modern writers began to explore the animal imagery that they often used in their writing.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Animals and Authority

1. Sixteenth-Century Animal Avatars in Montaigne and His Contemporaries

2. Job’s Horse and Other Creatures: Animal Analogies in Du Bartas’s Protestant Poetics

3.The Fauna of Faith: Animating Spirituality

4. Le Père Bougeant’s Heresy: Animal Societies, Languages, and Souls

Conclusion: Faith in Fauna

Notes

Bibliography

Index