Wolves and Sheep in Medieval Semiotics, Iconology and Ecology

9
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
Aleksander Pluskowski (Cambridge)
Introduction
The launch of the Medieval Animal Database (MAD) at the Central European
University in Budapest represents a pioneering collaboration between archaeologists,
historians, literary historians and art-historians, with the aim of
extending communication between the disciplines and enabling individual
scholars and research teams to increasingly adopt an inter-disciplinary approach.
1 The use of multiple sources – a multi-disciplinary approach – is nothing
new in medieval studies; particularly in archaeology where many published site
reports tend to include specialist contributions on relevant written, architectural
and cartographic sources, alongside archaeological aspects. The perspective of
the specialist is essential because of the detailed insights available from an intimate
familiarity with particular materials, languages, cultural contexts and theoretical
perspectives. After all, ‘each source has its strengths, weaknesses and lacunae’.
2 As the number of focused studies increases, inter-disciplinary synthesis
becomes an increasingly feasible and realistic goal for individual research projects.
3 This differs from a multi-disciplinary approach in that it integrates multiple
sources and perspectives to answer specific research questions, rather than
presenting a series of conclusions pigeon-holed according to discipline. But why
adopt an inter-disciplinary approach? This paper aims to answer this question
with a brief case study focusing on two animals paired in human thought and
expression in medieval western Europe; wolves and sheep, exploring the evidence
for people’s ‘physical’ and ‘conceptual’ experiences of these animals in
England from the late eleventh to fifteenth century. It focuses on the problematic
1 A pilot version of the database can be found online at: http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/mad/.
2 Clark 1989, 168.
3 Pluskowski 2002.
10
relationship between traditions of imagery, both visual and verbal, and lived experience
– how we can relate the painted lamb inside the church to the increasingly
dwindling wolf packs traversing the wooded fringes of the fields outside,
and why we should even contemplate these connections. Sub-dividing human
responses between ‘physical’ and ‘conceptual’ is of course a useful but artificial
analytical tool, and the ultimate aim is to integrate the two within an understanding
of the ‘total environment’ within which humans interacted with other
species in their shared environments. Indeed, whilst this case study draws on
inter-disciplinary research into human-wolf relations in medieval northern
Europe,4 its conclusions regarding contrasts and comparisons between ‘conceptual’
and ‘physical’ realities are necessarily generic, thus illustrating the potential
value of multi-disciplinary databases in enabling more ambitious research
agendas to be pursued with increasing precision.
Wolves and sheep ‘inside the church’: medieval semiotics and iconology
The lamb (or sheep) is one of the earliest Christian symbols, appearing
from the first century in association with Christ the ‘Good Shepherd’ on catacomb
paintings and sarcophagi,5 and from the mid-fourth century as the Agnus
Dei and the Lamb of the Apocalypse; individual animals removed from a pastoral
context as visual metaphors for Christ and his passion – in one painting
even performing the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves.6 From the sixth
century, this Christological identity was emphasized by representations of the
lamb with a pierced side, blood streaming into a chalice recalling the wounds of
Christ. A sacrificial motif inherited from the Judaic tradition – indeed early
Christian writers regarded the eating of the lamb at Passover as prefiguring
Christ’s passion – the lamb became incorporated into the decorative schemes of
early Christian Basilicas, sometimes accompanied by flocks of sheep representing
the apostles,7 and invoking the Agnus Dei had become a fixed part of the Roman
Mass by the late-eighth century.8 The lamb exemplified the significance of
shepherding which permeated Christian thought and was employed as a metaphor
bridging the role of the earthly Church and its heavenly counterpart. The
Christian community/innocent was envisaged as a flock of sheep and the
Church/Christ as their shepherd, offering guidance and protection. The central
role of lambs and sheep in early Christian thought and expression ensured their
use and proliferation in the decorative schemes of stone churches, rebuilt across
Western Europe from the latter half of the eleventh century.
4 Pluskowski 2003.
5 Kinney 1992, 202.
6 Jensen 2000, 141-3.
7 Ibid.
8 Atkinson 1977, 5.
11
In England, the lamb could be found on church exteriors from tympana to corbels,
and within, featured in prominent wall paintings and altar pieces, as well as
artefacts central to religious ceremony and display, such as liturgical vessels,
altar and reliquary crosses, crosiers, furnishings such as baptismal fonts, tucked
away in the margins and even appeared as graffiti, as at Carlisle Cathedral.9
From the thirteenth century it was found in the new wave of popular artistic media
including stained glass, painted ceilings and various portable images expressing
private devotion, such as alabaster heads of John the Baptist who had
beheld Christ as ‘the lamb’.10 The Baptist was sometimes depicted with the Agnus
Dei, particularly in late medieval art, and from the mid-fourteenth century
was himself represented by the lamb in the material culture of the Hospitallers,
who employed the motif on the fifteenth-century badges recovered from excavations
in London.11 The Agnus Dei was also found on a number of late medieval
amulets, taking the form of a wax disc made in Rome from the Paschal candle
and encased in silver or gold. It was worn by (affluent) women to protect
them during pregnancy.12 This proliferation of sacred lambs in medieval English
material culture can be sampled in the catalogues produced by Zarnecki, Holt
and Holland (1984) Alexander and Binski (1987) and Marks and Williamson
(2003) covering the period 1066-1547.
To those ‘super-readers’ armed with sufficient knowledge to discern multiple
levels of meanings in individual images,13 the lamb could be envisaged as a
theologically complex symbol, and although its basic ‘naturalistic’ form was the
most frequently represented in both early and medieval Christian art, there are
occasional variants hinting at this complexity, most noticeably in the slain lamb
described in Revelation (5-6) with seven horns and seven eyes which would
open the seven seals. A complex Christological symbol where each of its individual
features could be related to the context of a particular narrative, such as
the number seven representing wholeness, it was more commonly found illustrating
Apocalyptic manuscripts, although a rare extant example of the monstrous
lamb decorating the church building in England can be found amongst the
late-fourteenth-century cycle of apocalyptic wall paintings in the chapter house
at Westminster Abbey. In both of these cases, viewing and understanding was
restricted to specific audiences and although the presence of this apocalyptic
animal in more publicly ‘accessible’ contexts such as tympana can be noted, it
appears that artisans and patrons were usually content with the basic representation
of the lamb, accompanied by some or all of its diagnostic attributes – the
chalice, flag and halo. This is not to say the role of the apocalyptic lamb in
broader medieval culture was limited – in literature it was associated with mar-
9 Pritchard 1967, 65-66.
10 Cheetham 1984, 320-1; Binski 2003, 54.
11 Mitchiner 1986, 184.
12 Cherry 2001, 157-160.
13 Matthews 2000.
12
tyrs and virgins, especially dead children, probably because Revelation 14 was
read at the Feast of the Holy Innocents.14
The primary opponent of the apocalyptic lamb (Christ) was the dragon
(Satan), but alongside this agonistic relationship the New Testament introduced
the predatory association between wolves and sheep as a metaphor for false
prophets leading Christians astray (Matthew 7:10), as well as illustrating the
mission of the apostles (Matthew 10:16) and the responsibility of the Good
Shepherd towards his flock (John 10:12), although the two animals had already
been paired in literature by Classical fabulists. Their relationship remained a
popular metaphor throughout the Middle Ages, and was often used by ecclesiastics
in sermons, commentaries or exchanges to refer to opponents of the Church
from heretics to political adversaries.15 In high medieval England this was exemplified
in accounts of Thomas Becket following his murder – he was both the
Agnus Cantuariensis, the Lamb of Canterbury,16 and ‘a worthy shepherd’
protecting his flock from wolves.17 The broad appeal of pairing wolves and
ovines is further underlined by its use in secular literature, drawing on both classical
and Biblical sources, such as Marie de France’s mid-twelfth-century fable
‘the wolf and the lamb’ and the use of the predatory relationship in the popular
thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose.18 The bestiary lupus was added to the core
menagerie drawn from the Greek Physiologus in the first third of the twelfth
century,19 and where illustrated typically represented a wolf creeping up on
sheep to highlight his role as a figura diaboli and the flock as ‘the innocent and
simple among Christ’.20 This situation would be resolved at the apocalypse, and
not simply in the victory of Christ, but in the reversion of predators back to the
peaceful world of original innocence as expressed in Isaiah 11.6 and 65:25: ‘and
the wolf shall also dwell with the lamb … . They shall not hurt nor destroy in all
my holy mountain, saith the Lord’.21 But individual wolves, let alone those
paired with sheep, are extremely difficult to find in English religious art, and
even on the Continent, motifs combining both animals such as ‘the wolf at
school’ are limited to a handful of examples.22 They are otherwise represented
by the odd scattered representation such as the thirteenth-century wolf grabbing
a sheep by the throat decorating the central portal of the west front of San
Marco, Venice, amidst other predatory vignettes (fig. 1).23 The few examples of
the isolated bestiary lupus show it biting its paw. There was no need to represent
14 Emmerson 1992, 326.
15 Pluskowski 2003, 176-7.
16 Binski 2004, 8.
17 Robertson 1875-1885, 82.
18 Pluskowski 2003, 177.
19 Baxter 1998, 88.
20 Ashmole Bestiary; Barber 1999, 78.
21 Ryken and Wilhoit 1998, 958.
22 Bagley 1993.
23 Demus 1995, 120.
13
a sheepfold since viewers familiar with the motif would certainly know that
wolves ‘punished’ their paws in this way when approaching prey; here signifying
the Devil ‘circling the sheepfold of the faithful of the Church’.24 Whilst
some representations of infernal predation were prominent in the church, such as
hellmouths in ‘doom wall’ paintings above the chancel arch, lupines appear to
have been confined to the margins.
Fig. 1: Wolf and sheep from San Marco, Venice, 13th century
(photograph by author).
Yet although wolves are rare in religious art, their persistent paring with
ovines in a range of literary contexts suggests their commonality in medieval
semiotics: the motif was recognized at all levels of society. In other cultures, the
proliferation of a particular animal or group of animals within religious or ritu-
24 Aberdeen University Library MS 24, f. 17r.
14
alistic contexts can at times be related to special ecological or economic significance.
One approach employed by those working with prehistoric societies is to
compare the iconographic prevalence of an animal with its presence, absence
and abundance in other contexts such as kitchen refuse, graves and workshops.25
Adopting a similar hermeneutic approach to medieval societies is not as straightforward
as it may seem, and this is due to the volume of material that would
have to be cross-referenced, even within relatively restricted spatial and
chronological contexts. The study of fauna poses particular problems, for archaeological,
written and artistic evidence would have to be supported by
broader environmental perspectives obtained from sources ranging from climatic
data through to legal documents. Furthermore, in order to ‘animate’ the animals
in the medieval landscape, to acknowledge their roles as agents with varying
levels of dependence on other organisms in their shared environments, including
humans, it is essential to incorporate ecological and ethological perspectives
based on modern scientific understandings. This must be combined with an appreciation
of medieval taxonomies: after all, numerous written and artistic
sources document the behaviour of animals (even if this was not their main intention)
derived from observation, perception, imagination or a combination of
all three, and one cannot simply map modern scientific paradigms onto these
systems.26 In this light, a multi-disciplinary database would be an extremely useful
tool for the developing field of medieval animal studies. This becomes increasingly
clear when exploring the relationship between the appropriation of
animals in medieval semiotics and their treatment in other, what may be termed
‘physical’ contexts.
Wolves and sheep ‘outside the church’: ecological and cultural trends
Drawing on the multiplicity of sources it becomes apparent that there is
no straightforward correlation between ‘conceptual’ and ‘physical’ realities in
medieval England, or indeed other parts of Europe, and that even within this
block of time referred to as ‘the Middle Ages’, there is discernable complexity
and diversity. Meat consumption was divided between cattle, pig and
sheep/goat, the three mammal species dominating all medieval English faunal
assemblages. On this basis alone it can be argued that the butchered remains of
these species represented fundamental elements of daily life across the country.
However, detailed analyses of animal remains from a variety of contexts, alongside
surveys of manorial records, indicate that sheep farming was only prevalent
and significant in some regions, and that sheep were primarily kept for their secondary
products, specifically wool. The Domesday survey (1086) indicates the
presence of over a million sheep in demesne flocks in England, a figure rising to
25 Cooke 2004, 125.
26 Pluskowski 2005c.
15
at least 12 million by the early fourteenth century.27 Comparative studies of urban
and rural faunal assemblages indicate that extremely young animals were
slaughtered for consumption at the farm, whilst the majority of sheep were kept
until they had produced at least two annual crops of wool, and perhaps as much
as eight before being driven into towns to be sold and slaughtered,28 converted
into meat and bone products, and sometimes even parchment.29 Sheep also appear
to have been used in ritualistic deposits – two halves of a sheep’s lower jaw
carefully placed on a horizontal beam in the foundation of a fourteenth-century
quay on the Thames at Trig Lane, draw attention to an undervalued body of data
that would benefit inter-disciplinary syntheses.30 But irrespective of post-mortem
usage, sheep were predominantly raised for wool, the chief raw fibre used
for textiles in medieval England and regional variations in its texture, colour and
quality reflected differences in climate, pasture and husbandry.31 The biogeography
of flocks – their distribution in the landscape – can be related to local environmental
as well as social factors, not all land was suitable for pastoral farming,
and some was more suited to cattle rather than sheep. And whilst herds
would be moved seasonally, sheep rearing was concentrated in the north and
west of England, regions which included wolf territories into the thirteenth century.
However, wolf attacks on livestock of any kind, let alone sheep, are rarely
recorded.
In studies of modern wolf populations, biologists have observed that
where a diverse range of wild ungulates are present, wolves will tend to ignore
livestock and focus their hunting efforts on their preferred prey.32 This observation
is being incorporated into present and future conservation strategies for
managing wolf populations in various regions of Europe, and can inform our
understanding of predator-prey relations in the Middle Ages.33 An assemblage of
roe deer bones discovered in Rawthey cave (Cumbria), and dating no later than
1300, has been interpreted as being accumulated by wolves,34 and hints at a
likely cause for the wolf’s extinction in England. Here, wolf hunting in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries was predominantly conducted by specialist
hunters, focusing on sustained efforts in royal forests (fig. 2); a trend that can be
related to royal management of wild ungulates – wolves’ natural prey – in England
from the late eleventh century.35
27 Dyer 2002, 98, 165.
28 O’Connor 1982, 24; Bond and O’Connor 1999, 416.
29 Reed 1972, 129.
30 Merrifield 1987, 118.
31 Crowfoot 1992, 15.
32 Meriggi and Lovari 1996.
33 Pluskowski 2003, 84-5.
34 Hedges et al. 1998, 440-1.
35 Pluskowski 2005a; forthcoming.
16
Fig. 2: Wolf hunting and biogeography in 13th-century England;
a synthesis of archaeological (left) and documentary (right) data.
○ Roe deer assemblage О Last reliable record
in Rawthey Cave, Cumbria; of English wolves
radiocarbon dated to 13th c. ○ Wolf depredations recorded
(not later than 1300) and inter- by Royal forest courts
preted as collected by wolves. in the 13th c.
● Only reports of wolf remains. Counties where wolf
(a single bone) from 13th-c. extermination was ordered
English contexts. by King Edward I in 1281.
Following the Norman Conquest, written and archaeological sources point
to the construction of a unique seigneurial hunting culture, developed as an expression
of Norman identity.36 Both wolves and various groups of people had
been hunting deer up to this point, but now only select individuals could indulge
in this predation – all others were designated poachers. There is no evidence that
wolf packs began depredations on livestock with the development of this new
hunting culture, indeed the enclosed park was effectively a larder for any passing
lupines, and in 1290 wolves allegedly destroyed deer in a park at Farley.37
This is not to say that wolves never attacked livestock, but effective shepherding
practices in England combined with healthy ungulate populations would have
reduced the possibility dramatically – in fact livestock were threatened not so
much by wolves as people and disease. The slaughter of entire herds is sometimes
documented during episodes of political instability, for example, in 1223
over a thousand sheep belonging to Margam Abbey were burnt by a hostile
36 Sykes 2001, 270-1.
37 Harting 1994, 30.
17
group.38 In Wyresdale (Lancashire), there are odd references to sheep losses
attributed to wolf predation but murrain was responsible for nine times as many
casualties.39 The decline of wild ungulate populations in many Continental regions
in the late medieval period, probably due to overexploitation and reflected
in late and post-medieval faunal assemblages, may have prompted increasing
depredations on livestock, in turn resulting in increasing and sustained wolf persecution.
By then, the only wolves in England were confined within the royal
‘menagerie’ in the Tower of London.40
Clearly these physical realities were accommodated within the worldview(
s) of medieval English society, but they were not clearly reflected in verbal
and material semiotics. Many representations of daily life have been noted particularly
in the margins of church buildings, and include seemingly familiar activities
such as animal husbandry and hunting.41 Some have interpreted these as
straightforward reflections of human-animal relations in local landscapes, and
others ascribe multiple meanings to these scenes ranging from the cosmological
to the fabulous. There are certainly differences between scenes of sheep-shearing
and representations of divine animals although surely all were accommodated
within a shared world view, sometimes even constructed by the same artisan
or workshop. The lamb – more often victor than victim – proliferated on
spaces and artefacts central to the mass and could be juxtaposed with scenes of
predation; the early-thirteenth-century painted nave ceiling of Peterborough cathedral
includes the Agnus Dei as well as four lions circling a fish; here most
likely employing a comparable predatory relationship – the fish representing
human souls (cf. Matthew 4:17) and the lions as the Devil ‘seeking whom he
may devour’ (Peter 5:8).42 The relationship between the two and its significance
would be conveyed with words, perhaps reinforced by the mnemonic function of
images.
Some have drawn links between the Biblical wolf and ecological realities
in Palestine during the early first millennium AD.43 These may well be related,
but its proliferation in medieval European semiotics as a predator threatening
sheep is a product of different cultural and ecological contexts, and, as has been
demonstrated in the case of medieval England, the physical landscape and its inhabitants
were not simply reflected in the social and spiritual microcosm at the
heart of every community – the church.44 We must remain sensitive to these
differences, even when acknowledging the common elements that define Christian
thought and expression. There is no simple or even consistent link between
38 Williams 1984, 16, 247.
39 Higham 2004, 115.
40 Pluskowski 2006.
41 For the most comprehensive listing of misericord motifs to date see Remnant 1969, revised
1998.
42 Binski 2003, 54.
43 Feliks 1962, 35.
44 Andrén 1999.
18
those species depicted in a church or monastery, and those experienced or exploited
in the surrounding landscape (or seascape); artists drew on ‘sight, insight
and image-making’ for their representations of the natural world.45 The lion has
been described as ‘indigenous’ to Europe because of its virtual omnipresence in
religious and heraldic art,46 but encounters with images were different to those
with living animals. Experiencing the lamb inside the church was different to
managing it in the pastoral landscape, or slaughtering it for consumption at the
farm. Nonetheless, these physical experiences informed the numerous representations
of the Annunciation to the Shepherds (Luke 2:8-15), of Christ the Good
Shepherd and perhaps even the iconic Agnus Dei. Likewise experiences (or perceptions)
of wolf depredations may have informed the iconography of predation.
47 In this respect, the appropriation of fauna within medieval religious contexts
blended contemporary reality with Biblical, historical and mythological
pasts. This manipulation of the past expressed in material culture as much as literature
is not particular to medieval societies; the Lozères department in southeast
France actively preserves and promotes within its bounds the older region
of Gévaudan, famously associated with ‘la bête’, a predator that stalked the
landscapes of the Auvergne and south Dordogne, killing (and sometimes eating)
98 people between 1764-1767. At the time the killings were popularly attributed
to wolves although this controversial identification has fuelled a popular mythology,
expressed in monuments constructed in recent decades representing
various incarnations of ‘la bête’, some more lupine than others (fig. 3). The
modern promotion of such phenomena collapses the gulf between past and present,
between physical and conceptual realities, dislodging them from their
original historical, social and ecological contexts. When approaching humananimal
relations in historical societies – observing contrasts and similarities
between how people used animals and how they thought about them – it is essential
to maintain the contextual integrity of each source, but equally essential
to recognize that only when brought together will we begin to open windows
onto multiple, contemporary experiences of animals and their shared environments.
45 Givens 2005, 173.
46 Pastoureau 1999, 23.
47 Camille 1993, 48.
19
Fig. 3: The sculpture designed by Philippe Kaeppelin celebrating
the demise of ‘la bête de Gévaudan’, Auvers, Lozères, France
(photograph by author).
However, in order to thoroughly investigate the link between the physical
and the conceptual, between the world inside and outside the church, it would be
necessary to cross-reference numerous variables on a regional basis – faunal remains,
documentary sources, environmental data, public and private iconography,
placenames and so on. Only then, would it be possible to grasp the ‘total
environment’ within which people constructed and transformed relationships
with other species. Even this brief case study has drawn on the tireless work of
numerous specialists. It illustrates the potential time and effort required to bring
all of this information together, and the enormous benefits that a multi-disciplinary
database would contribute, not only in terms of accessibility and time-saving,
but by enabling inter-regional and inter-chronological research projects to
aspire to new and more ambitious levels of precision. Such integration of
sources and perspectives must maintain a critical awareness of context; literary
topos cannot simply be blended with documentary statements or pictorial representations.
In this respect, an inter-disciplinary synthesis resembles not so much
a complete fusion of evidence as a series of observations focused on a single research
question, highlighting trends relating to specific research objectives.
20
Conclusion
Evaluating the archaeological, written and artistic sources for economic systems
in medieval Italy, Gillian Clark urged that ‘these data, must now, however be
brought together’.48 This sentiment can surely be extended beyond the study of
economics to numerous other aspects of human-animal relations.49 Specialist
and multi-disciplinary studies will continue to contribute to our understanding of
countless aspects of the natural world in the Middle Ages. Indeed, they are essential
pre-requisites for inter-disciplinary syntheses, and the Medieval Animal
Database, a range of sources which can be accessed and cross-referenced from a
single interface, is effectively a multi-disciplinary tool enabling inter-disciplinary
research agendas to be pursued. Its aim is not only to offer archaeologists,
historians and art-historians accessibility to what may be rare and unusual complementary
sources but also to stimulate their inclination to integrate these into
inter-disciplinary research agendas. The CEU database is currently focused on
Central Europe. Similar databases need to be established for other regions and,
once integrated, they will make it possible to identify and explore significant
cultural and ecological trends across Europe, providing more specific spatial and
chronological contexts for the detailed work of specialists, and dramatically expanding
our understanding of a fundamental aspect of medieval societies – the
multiple, integrated relationships between people, animals and their shared environments.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gerhard Jaritz for inviting me to present this paper at the ICMS
in 2005, and for giving me the opportunity to view and comment on the Medieval Animal
Database during its initial launch in Budapest in December 2004. I would also like to thank
Alice Choyke, László Bartosiewicz, Paul Binski and Martin Carver for their advice and
support, as well as Clare College and the Department of Archaeology, University of
Cambridge, for enabling me to both pursue and present post-doctoral inter-disciplinary
research in the field of medieval animal studies.
48 Clark 1989, 164.
49 See also Baker and Clark 1993; O’Connor 1992; Pluskowski 2002.
21
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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
.