(M)edieval (A)nimal (D)atabase: a Project in Progress

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(M)edieval (A)nimal (D)atabase:
a Project in Progress
Ingrid Matschinegg (Krems)
Animals are woven almost
unnoticed into the complex web
of human existence. Animals
permeate every part of our lives,
from mundane subsistence questions
to our attitudes about the
world around us. We prepare
dishes from their meat. We use
leather for shoes and wool for
clothing. Animals can reflect
prestige, and hunting them may
be a test of manhood. Animals
and their attributes appear as
symbols in religion and allegory,
in the way humans tell their stories.
In the medieval world, animals
can appear in strange mixed
forms that may often be not understandable
for today’s observers
but which were as real to
people of those times as the
chickens and cows they were surrounded
by in daily life.
Draconcopedes serpentes sunt magni et potentes:
facies virgineas habentes humanis similes,
in draconum corpus desinentes.
Credibile est huius generis illum fuisse
per quem dyabolus Evam decepit.1
(Hortus Sanitatis. Strassburg 1491:
Johannes Prüss the Older,
De animalibus. cap. xlix)
MAD has been conceived as a way of addressing the manifold
ways humans related to and depended on animals for physical and
spiritual existence in Medieval Central Europe. Above all, this database
is intended to create a truly interdisciplinary tool for research.
The time frame may begin with the end of the Roman Empire in Europe,
and in some areas data input may even extend to materials from the seventeenth
1 Draconcopedes are big and strong serpents with virginlike faces being similar to the ones of
humans; they end in the bodies of dragons. It is credible that they represent the species with
which the devil deceived Eve.
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or eighteenth century where clear continuity can be demonstrated. In the beginning
at least, Central Europe means a core area of today’s Southern Germany,
Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Transylvanian Rumania,
Croatia, Slovenia, and Northern Italy, although contributions are welcome
from anywhere.
We have envisioned a database compiled around a number of data
categories including texts, images, archaeological topographic data, artifacts,
and archaeozoological evidence. We also want to compile good
bibliographic and website databases for Central European Medieval animal
material. The following list is by no means complete but it is meant
as a beginning and basis:
• Textual data: charters, account books, cookbooks, chronicles, encyclopedia,
Latin and vernacular literature, inventories, etc.
• Image data: panel and wall-paintings, book illustrations, bestiaries,
textile patterns, stone and wood sculpture, architectural images, graffiti
and gravestones, etc.
• Archaeological topographic data: corrals, animal pens, barns, fishponds,
butcher shops and workshops, etc.
• Artifactual data: yokes, harness elements, leather objects, worked
bone, antler, ivory materials, etc.
• Archaeozoological data: Species, carcass processing, bone element
measurements, subsistence traditions, food preferences and taboos,
etc.
In 2004, the first steps were taken towards the construction of this database.2 It
was agreed to officially connect the database project with multiple projects and
institutions. These include: the Institut für Realienkunde of the Austrian Academy
of Sciences (Krems, Austria), the on-going project between CEU-Medieval
Studies and the Aquincum bioarchaeology-laboratory as well as the Economic
History project also directed from CEU-Medieval Studies; and the ELTE-Archaeology
Institute (Budapest). Other connections will hopefully be established
with the Medieval animal measurement project being developed at the University
of Siena (Italy), and already have been initiated with the Danish wall painting-
project of Axel Bolvig (University of Copenhagen) and the “Computer
Science for the Humanities” group around Manfred Thaller at the University of
Cologne.
A trial structure has been developed with which we could begin to collect
data to evaluate the usefulness of various categories of information to be pre-
2 László Bartosiewicz (Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, Institute of Archaeology), Alice
Choyke (Aquincum Museum, Budapest and Central European University, Budapest,
Department of Medieval Studies), Szandra Gyetvai (ELTE), Gerhard Jaritz (CEU-Medieval
Studies and Institut für Realienkunde, Austrian Academy of Sciences), Ingrid Matschinegg
(Institut für Realienkunde, Austrian Academy of Sciences), and Judith Rasson (CEU-Medieval
Studies) were present at these first discussions.
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sented in a draft version on the Worldwide Web. The results of this work have
been presented in a workshop at the CEU-Medieval Studies department in 2004.
In 2005, we collected many different examples (“case studies”) and database
inputs regarding the way animals were envisioned, presented and used in
Medieval Central Europe. We presented papers describing various aspects of the
database at the International Medieval Congresses at Kalamazoo (May 2005)
and Leeds (July 2005).
Great importance has to be put on the information-technological aspects
of building a collaborative database, particularly on the ways and means of organizing
the various pieces of input. Since this is work in progress, we cannot
present any final results but will consider the challenges arising during the first
steps of such a project. Its aims are
• to make available and interlink the existing knowledge on animals in
the Middle Ages, both source information and specialized knowledge;
• to facilitate broad collaborative participation which means that anybody
interested should be able to contribute.
It is an internet project only, so we do not work with anything other than digital
data and use internet based formats.
As can be probably imagined, it is quite a challenge to establish a collection
of medieval fauna in its complex heterogeneity and to transfer this knowledge
into contemporary virtual space. When searching for ways of realizing this
idea, it might be helpful to consider recent developments in the field of digital
knowledge. New digital technologies, such as Google, to name just one example,
have turned the organization of knowledge into a space of social change.3
The currently most successful digital platform of knowledge is WIKIPEDIA, a
swiftly growing network in several languages that not only allows the user to
find information but also to actively get involved in collecting and spreading it.4
WIKIs are open collections that gather heterogeneous knowledge, mostly in the
form of texts and images.5
The exchange of digital data whether for commercial purposes, charity or
for research targets in the humanities, presupposes the existence of basic technologies.
Moreover, apart from these technological standards used daily without
thought to the processes underlying them, we have to overcome other obstacles
to facilitate the exchange of knowledge online. Three such obstacles are:
• The problem of standardization: Since computers were first used in
the humanities, scholars have been trying to find a format that facilitates
the sustainable use of information facilitating their use beyond a
single and temporary project.
3 See Kai Lehmann and Michael Scheltsche, ed., Die Google-Gesellschaft. Wissen im 21.
Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005).
4 Erik Möller, Die heimliche Medienrevolution. Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die
Welt verändern (Hannover: Telepolis, 2005).
5 In order to find out whether this would be an appropriate platform for our project, we conducted
a pilot study with a group of students at Central European University. See below.
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• The structure of the data: What information do we want to include?
Are general or detailed descriptions preferred?
• Proper and good documentation of the collected information.
It is obvious from the very large number of previous projects that there will never
be one standard that can meet all demands.
The DUBLIN-CORE Metadata Initiative
Initiatives in the fields of cultural studies and cultural heritage management
institutions (such as archives, libraries and museums) led to the so-called
“Dublin Core Metadata-Standard”.6 There are several projects that work on the
basis of the Dublin Core (DC).7
In order to discover whether the DC standard is suitable for our animal
project, we carried out a pilot study working with MA-students enrolled at Medieval
Studies at the Central European University. First we asked them to gather
various material on animals in the Middle Ages. This task was intentionally
phrased broadly so that the participants had the freedom to decide what they
found relevant or interesting. For each of their finds they had to write a description
of no more than one page – listing the animals found in the source and setting
them in their cultural context. These descriptions and additional data, for
instance, digitized images, were to be collected in a digital format for further access
via internet.
Once the students completed this first task, they worked with the DC-standard.
This means that they were asked to describe their findings following the
criteria of the DC Metadata Initiative. DC prescribes a set of fifteen fields that
have to be sufficient to describe the document which may be anything, from a
historical source to a contemporary work of art or a website.
For the collection of the data we used a form accessible on the internet
(DC-DOT) that contains a useful feature facilitating later establishment of a
web-based database:8 It transfers the data by e-mail or saves them locally and, in
this process, automatically transforms them into the XML-format.9 We prepared
‘guidelines’ and instructed the participants on how to fill in the forms by using
specific examples.
This pilot initiative presented us with several problems, which need to be
resolved before such a collaborative project may be opened to the wider public:
• The problem of language: While the annotated documents can be written
in any language, there needs to be a general agreement about the
language used for the DC descriptions. Under the current circumstances,
English was the first choice.
6 See http://www.dublincore.org/.
7 See, e. g., http://www.vektor.at/download/vektor%20summary%20english.pdf (the Austrian
project “Archiving the Present”).
8 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dcdot.pl.
9 XML = “extended markup language,” one of the commonly used current exchange formats.
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• Should one use a free or controlled vocabulary? In the pilot project we
permitted a largely free vocabulary. However, it became immediately
obvious that it would be sensible to formulate some rules. This holds
true for the use of singular and plural in the object fields, for example.
Furthermore, it certainly proved necessary to use fixed lists of terms
for the defining animal field. It is also clearly necessary to provide
guidelines for the field containing the abstract of the whole data case.
• As the definitions of the DC fields are very abstract and open, this
openness offers a large number of possibilities for entering data. However,
our project aims to reach a wide range of interested people and
to motivate them to contribute their knowledge on a voluntary basis.
Therefore, we have tried not to deter them with an incomprehensible
entry form.
WIKI – a useful tool for historians?
A rather different and probably easier option for building a database is to
use the idea underlying the above-mentioned Wikipedia and to establish a WIKI
collection of material on animals in the Middle Ages. WIKIs are specific kinds
of websites that combine elements of a database-supported content management
system with a collective writing tool. They only work on the internet. Further
preconditions are:
• a large number of people, really as many as possible, prepared to write
articles on a voluntary basis;
• a number of administrators who are responsible for the content of the
specific WIKI, who formulate the thematic framework and, if necessary,
edit the incoming articles.
I tested this possibility with a group of history students in a tutorial at the
University of Vienna.10 The initial task was similar to that given to the student
group in Budapest, that is, gathering and describing information and ideas on the
topic ‘Animals in the Middle Ages’. The students had almost no problems in
handling the software (we used MEDIA WIKI).11 It is this easy use that makes
the tool so convincing. It only takes one click to publish the text on the internet
which means that one can immediately see the result of one’s work. Furthermore,
one does not have to devote any time to the design of the website or to
creating one’s own webspace. And it is relatively simple to include images and
links to other websites.
Whether WIKIs are also a suitable platform for heterogeneous collections
of knowledge, remains to be seen. They are very close in their format to books
and subscribe to an ideal of collaborative writing. That means that any existing
text can be continued or changed by anybody. While this is the key to success in
10 The tutorial dealt with “New Media in History” (summer term 2005).
11 For some results, see http://gerda.univie.ac.at/im/sose2005/wiki/index.php/Kurswiki:Portal.
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the Wikipedia, it did not work too well in our small project. This is probably because
some kind of a learning process is required before the participants of the
project overcome their fear of changing texts written by others or using these as
a basis for their own further elaborations.
As mentioned above, animals – whether, from today’s “knowledge,” real
or fantastic – were omnipresent in the Middle Ages. They are diverse research
objects that demand transdisciplinary approaches. A question that still remains
to be answered, therefore, is whether it is possible to mix information on animals
in the most diverse settings without decontextualizing them.
What does an ideal system look like?
An ideal system should facilitate the collection of data and information on
the internet. That means that it should incorporate all the practical functions of a
complex research database such as selection options by terms, dates and regions
as well as specific search functions. At the same time, entering data should be as
simple as possible (like writing a WIKI article). It should also permit the creation
of links between resources already gathered on the internet so that none of
the existing information would have to be duplicated.12
Moreover, we do not only aim at including links to existing databases but
also want to take account of the many other digital resources scattered throughout
the WWW. These were also included in our pilot study. The participants
collected a broad range of links including some extremely informative and welldesigned
web pages.13 There is already a wealth of material available on the
WWW that deals with animals in the Middle Ages. Collecting new material using
a participative approach as described above is, therefore, one aim of our
project. Gathering the existing digital resources is another aspect.
An ideal system would combine the approach of standardized and exchangeable
metadata (like Dublin Core) with a flexible and easily to apply data
management (like Wikipedia).14 We hope to offer such a possibility by fall 2006
12 To cite an example: A search for domestic animals from medieval German literature in the
Middle High German Conceptual Database (http://mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at) yields more than 7000
hits (most of them for horses but there are also quite a few dogs, pigs, cats etc). Regarding
the M(edieval) A(nimal) D(atabase) project, we have gathered the animals found in the image
database REALonline of the ‘Institut für Realienkunde’ of the Austrian Academy of
Sciences [http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/realonline/ (catalogue “Tiere”), the descriptions
currently still only in German] in a separate catalogue (altogether over 3000 animals).
13 E.g., the website on medieval bestiaries (http://www.bestiary.ca) or on a cookbook (http:
//www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/mad/resources/cookbook.htm), and several other types of sources.
See http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/mad/resources/madlinks.
14 Benjamin Burkard, Collaboration on Medieval Chartres. Wikipedia in the Humanities?
(http: //www.monasterium.net/at/tagungen/abstracts/Abstract_Burkard.pdf).
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and to be able, then, to establish an active and international MAD online-community.
15
15 See Christian Eigner, Helmut Leitner, Peter Nausner and Ursula Schneider, Online-Communities,
Weblogs und die soziale Rückeroberung des Netzes (Graz: Nausner & Nausner,
2003).
ANIMAL DIVERSITIES
Edited by
Gerhard Jaritz and Alice Choyke
MEDIUM AEVUM QUOTIDIANUM
HERAUSGEGEBEN VON GERHARD JARITZ
SONDERBAND XVI
ANIMAL DIVERSITIES
Edited by
Gerhard Jaritz and Alice Choyke
Krems 2005
GEDRUCKT MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG DER ABTEILUNG
KULTUR UND WISSENSCHAFT DES AMTES
DER NIEDERÖSTERREICHISCHEN LANDESREGIERUNG
Cover illustration:
The Beaver,
Hortus Sanitatis (Strassburg: Johannes Prüm the Older, c. 1499),
Tractatus de Animalibus, capitulum xxxi: Castor.
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
– ISBN 3-90 1094 19 9
Herausgeber: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der materiellen
Kultur des Mittelalters, Körnermarkt 13, A–3500 Krems, Österreich. Für den Inhalt verantwortlich
zeichnen die Autoren, ohne deren ausdrückliche Zustimmung jeglicher Nachdruck,
auch in Auszügen, nicht gestattet ist. – Druck: Grafisches Zentrum an der Technischen
Universität Wien, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, 1040 Wien.
Table of Contents
Preface ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7
Aleksander Pluskowski, Wolves and Sheep in Medieval Semiotics,
Iconology and Ecology: a Case Study of Multi- and Inter-disciplinary
Approaches to Human-Animal Relations in the Historical Past …………… 9
Alice M. Choyke, Kyra Lyublyanovics, László Bartosiewicz,
The Various Voices of Medieval Animal Bones ………………………………. 23
Grzegorz Żabiński, Swine for Pearls?
Animals in the Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Houses
of Henryków and Mogiła ………………………………………………. 50
Krisztina Fügedi, Bohemian Sheep, Hungarian Horses, and Polish Wild Boars:
Animals in Twelfth-Century Central European Chronicles ……………….. 66
Hilary Powell, Walking and Talking with the Animals:
the Role of Fauna in Anglo-Latin Saints’ Lives …………….……………. 89
Gerhard Jaritz, Oxen and Hogs, Monkeys and Parrots:
Using “Familiar” and “Unfamiliar” Fauna
in Late Medieval Visual Representation …..………………………………… 107
Sarah Wells, A Database of Animals in Medieval Misericords …………….. 123
Zsofia Buda, Animals and Gazing at Women:
Zoocephalic Figures in the Tripartite Mahzor ………..…………………. 136
Taxiarchis G. Kolias, Man and Animals in the Byzantine World ………..…. 165
Ingrid Matschinegg, (M)edieval (A)nimal (D)atabase:
a Project in Progress ………………………………………………..… 167
7
Preface
Over the last two decades, interests in animals and the relationship between
humans and animals in the past have increased decisively. This is also
true particularly for the research into the Middle Ages. A variety of perspectives
and approaches can be traced concerning
• the questions asked;
• the used source evidence: zooarchaeological, textual, visual;
• the embedding of the analyses into the wider fields of the study of the
history of nature, environment, economy, religion and theology, signs
and symbols, social history, and so on;
• the degrees and levels of the application of interdisciplinary and comparative
methods;
• the level of consciousness of the diversities of use and functions of
animals in medieval society, on the one hand, and of the contextualized
networks of their meanings, on the other hand.
Such a consciousness of animal diversities and, at the same time, of animal networks
has been the basis for this volume of collected essays. They originate
from a number of international research collaborations, communications, and
presentations at international meetings, such as the annual Medieval Conferences
at Kalamazoo and Leeds. All the contributors have aimed to show individual
aspects of human-animal relations and have also been interested in the
social contexts animals occur in. Therefore, the book is meant to represent Animal
Diversities but certainly also, in particular, the indispensable Animal Contexts
and Contextuality: from zooarchaeological evidence to zoocephalic females
in visual representations of Ashkenazi Jews; from the economic function of
animals in Cistercian houses to the role of their representations in Gothic misericords;
from animals in chronicles or hagiographical texts to their images at different
levels of late medieval visual public space.
Some recently initiated projects, two of them introduced in the volume,
others referred to in the contributions, will hopefully also open up possibilities
for new insights into the variety of roles and functions that were played by
and constructed for all kinds of fauna in the Middle Ages.
“Zoology of the Middle Ages” may then perhaps be seen, in general,
as one of the model fields for representing the importance of relations and connections
between the sciences and humanities, economy and theology, daily life
8
and symbolic meaning, nature and culture, intention and response, as well as
construction and perception, …
December 2005 Gerhard Jaritz
.