Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts 1843846225, 9781843846222

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts

Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages ISSN: 2399-3804 (Print) ISSN: 2399-3812 (Online) Series Editor Michael D.J. Bintley Editorial Board Jennifer Neville Aleks Pluskowski Gillian Rudd Questions of nature, the environment and sustainability are increasingly important areas of scholarly enquiry in various fields. This exciting new series aims to provide a forum for new work throughout the medieval period broadly defined (c.400–1500), covering literature, history, archaeology and other allied disciplines in the humanities. Topics may range from studies of landscape to interaction with humans, from representations of “nature” in art to ecology, ecotheory, ecofeminism and ecocriticism; monographs and collections of essays are equally welcome. Proposals or enquiries may be sent directly to the series editor or to the publisher at the addresses given below. Dr Michael D.J. Bintley, Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF Previously published: 1: The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles, Corinne Dale 2: Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations, Michael J. Warren 3: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, Britton Elliott Brooks 4: The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary, Liz Herbert McAvoy

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts

Liam Lewis

D. S. BREWER

© Liam Lewis 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Liam Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2022 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 622 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 80010 449 5 (ePDF) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Illumination from the Fables by Marie de France in Recueil d'anciennes poésies françaises, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Ms-3142, f. 260r. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Design: Toni Michelle

For mum (1967–2019)

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

1. Sound Milieus: Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary

35

2. Sound Zones: Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage

69

3. Soundscape and Form-of-Life: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

99

4. Soundscape Perspectives: Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables 133 Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall

161

Bibliography

177

Index

193

ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1

The siren. Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gl. Kgl. S. 3466 8º (C, f. 37r). 53

Figure 2

The siren. Oxford, Merton College Library, MS 249 (O, f. 6r).

54

Figure 3

The chapter on the elephant. Oxford, Merton College Library, MS 249 (O, f. 6v).

64

Figure 4

The list of animal noises. Cambridge University Library, MS Gg 1.1 (G, f. 283r).

77

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A

longside the animal companions that have accompanied me on this journey through the soundscapes of medieval literatures, it is my pleasure to acknowledge the many debts I owe to others, only a few of whom I can mention here. I owe more than a huge debt of gratitude to those colleagues and friends who have advised and supported me, and in particular to those who have taken the time to read my work and think critically with me. For their tireless support at each stage of this project, I must sincerely thank Emma Campbell and Christiania Whitehead, who continually went above and beyond the expected. I am grateful to Jonathan Hsy and Emma Mason for their meticulous readings of my work and for holding the space for me when I needed it most. For commenting on some of the work that informed this project, I would like to thank Sarah Wood, Amanda Hopkins, and Miranda Griffin. I am also grateful to Thomas Hinton for his astute readings of my drafts and for being a travel companion on a long plane journey back from Toronto. To Linda Paterson I extend my thanks for inspiring me to think beyond the borders of this project and for encouraging me to sing medieval song. For sharing work and ideas on all things animal or sound related, I thank George Ttoulli, Florence Sunnen, Hervé Goerger, Karl Steel, Michael J. Warren, Robert Mills, Victoria Turner, and Charlotte Rudman. In the final stages of writing this book, I received invaluable support from colleagues at the universities of Liverpool and Oxford, including at Balliol College and St Hilda’s College, and at the University Council of Modern Languages. It has been a privilege to teach students across these institutions, as well as those at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, and my thanks go to all the enthusiastic students who I have taught in person and online. I am grateful to Charles Forsdick, Sophie Marnette, Elena Lombardi, and Charlotte Cooper-Davis for encouragement and support across my teaching and research activities in some challenging times. Rebecca Dixon has been an irreplaceable source of support, and I am grateful to her for continually putting my interests before her own. For assistance with the finishing touches to this book, I am grateful to the librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cambridge University Library, Merton College Library, Oxford, and Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen. The people closest to me deserve perhaps the most thanks of all. At every stage of this book I met challenges that sometimes only a long walk

Acknowledgements or cup of tea could fix. Although I do not say it enough, my family has been my rock and I am continually grateful for their encouragement and faith in me. To Haylie B. Swenson and Miriam O’Brien, words cannot do justice to your friendship over the years. And my final personal thanks to Louise Campion, who showed me the value of true friendship and trust, and stood with me through challenge after challenge. I cannot thank you enough for your persistent encouragement, reassurance, and guidance. Lastly, for financial assistance, I am grateful to the Wolfson Foundation for the funding that supported the initial stages of this project, and for funding conference attendance in the UK, Iceland, and the US. For additional grants related to a stimulating film project and the funding for a conference on the body in medieval literature and culture, I would like to thank the Warwick-Monash Alliance and the Warwick Humanities Research Centre.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS AND

Anglo-Norman Dictionary (The Anglo-Norman Online Hub: online source): .

Bestiaire

Philippe de Thaon, ‘Il Bestiaire di Philippe de Thaün’, in Luigina Morini (ed. and trans.), Bestiari Medievali (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1996).

Etymologies

Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Fables

Marie de France, Les Fables: Edition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, de notes et d’un glossaire, ed. Charles Brucker (Paris: Peeters, 1998).

LM Bonaventure, Legenda maior S. Francisci Assisiensis et eiusdem legenda minor (Florence: Ad Claras Aquas, 1941). MED

The Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan: online source): .

OED

Oxford English Dictionary (online source): .

Tretiz

Walter of Bibbesworth, ‘Walter de Bibbesworth: Le Tretiz’, ed. William Rothwell (Aberystwyth: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2009).

Vye

Russell, D. W. (ed.), La Vye de Seynt Fraunceys (MS Paris, BNF, Fonds Français 13505) (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002).

Introduction

T

he sounds of animals, birds, and other curious creatures who inhabit the world alongside humans offer valuable insights into how we understand the soundscapes of the world around us. Human cultures across the globe teach and nurture the beginnings of linguistic expression in relation to the grunts, gnarls, or grumbles of different species.1 Patterns of association between human and animal agents are thus developed in young children and adults through sound symbolism at the beginnings of human expression. Whether it be the bark of a dog, the moo of a cow, or the gentle ‘cluck cluck’ of a hen laying an egg, animal sounds filter cultural perceptions of our (more or less) furry and feathered friends in all aspects of our lives that are shared between species: domestication, food supply, observation and enjoyment, medicine and clothing, the list goes on. Animal sounds are therefore not just used for teaching language but participate in the human conceptualization of the natural and the cultural. It may seem surprising at first, but medieval cultures were not much different: the ‘sounds’ of lowing, howling, and blasting animal figures pop out from the margins of medieval manuscripts; the songs of birds provide a counterpoint to human singing in early lyric; students of Latin learnt their trade through lists of animal noises; medieval fables, saints’ lives, and romances are scattered with animal sounds in the wilderness, offering narrative, symbolic, and thematic signposts to protagonists and textual audiences alike. There is little thinking about sound, especially vocalized sound, in medieval literary contexts that is not in some respects relational to the sounds produced by animals. Familiar and nonfamiliar sounds offer a consistent and probing presence to medieval writers of narratives and theorists of language, in the same ways that they allow contemporary 1



Studies of this phenomenon include: Jean-Paul Brunet, ‘L’Onomatopée dans la classe de français (Onomatopoeia in the French Class)’, Canadian Modern Language Review, 45.1 (1988), pp. 139–45; Young-mee Yu Cho, ‘Sound Symbolism in Korean’, in Ho-Min Sohn (ed.), Korean Language in Culture and Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 65–73; Mutsumi Imai, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and Hiroyuki Okada, ‘Sound Symbolism Facilitates Early Verb Learning’, Cognition, 109 (2008), pp. 54–65; and Padraic Monoghan, Karen Mattock, and Peter Walker, ‘The Role of Sound Symbolism in Language Learning’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38 (2012), pp. 1152–64.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts writers and filmmakers to characterize medieval soundscapes.2 For audiences of medieval texts depicting animal sound, discourse, or language, listening to how noisy creatures communicate with their own ‘tongues’, the challenges posed by animal sound are those of representation and identification. Representations of sound invite questions about the nature of writing and reading, as well as contact between different types of community, as meaning making occurs through a balance between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic. Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts enters this conversation at a turning point in critical animal studies. It is no longer possible to disassociate medieval depictions of animals and birds entirely from the living creature; the anthropomorph and the animal trope are avenues for encounters at once symbolic, metaphoric, and material. In a similar vein, questions of animal representation cannot be limited in scope to the purely visual or textual but must also navigate sound as a phenomenon offering pause for ontological and epistemological reflection. In medieval texts, animal sounds are used to infuse the minds and mouths of human audiences in very real ways as audiences consider sounds, practice them, learn language through them, or connect them to their own auditory experience. In doing so, humans learn that, contrary to entertaining fixed distinctions about articulate and inarticulate, or rational and irrational forms of sound, animal soundscapes operate under the premise of shared communicative abilities between humans and animals, which in turn destabilizes the articulation of a clear boundary between them. The patterns of interpretation that communicative sounds create in vernacular texts are connected to the linguistic contexts in which such texts were written and circulated. In this book I focus particularly on twelfthand thirteenth-century French and English texts written in Anglo-Norman England. Post-Conquest England was a contact zone in which Latin, French, and English were the predominant written languages, coexisting in geographical and cultural spaces.3 French texts from this period, such as the collection of short tales called the Lais by the twelfth-century author

2



3

For key studies of sound in medieval literature, see Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age: Le versant épistémologique (Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2000); Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Kyte oute yugilment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise’, Exemplaria, 16.2 (2004), pp. 267–76; Peter W. Travis, ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale’, Exemplaria, 16 (2004), pp. 323–48; and Brigitte Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe: Brepols, 2005). For medieval sound in modern series, see Marie-Emmanuelle Torres, ‘Ça sonne médiévale! Du fantasme à la reconstitution sonore dans les séries’, Médiévales: Langues, Textes, Histoire, 78 (2020), pp. 29–42. Further discussion on Anglo-Norman ‘contact zones’ is provided in Chapter 2.

2

Introduction Marie de France, therefore offer a means of considering how texts produced within a multilingual environment represent encounters between species.4 One brief example from the lai Le Frêne encapsulates how sound contributes to different types of knowledge. This episode is a key transitional moment in an Anglo-Norman account of a story that begins in Brittany with two neighboring, wedded knights: on hearing the news that one of their wives is pregnant, the neighboring knight’s wife laughs and proclaims that she has never heard of a woman giving birth to two babies at the same time unless two men had been involved in the conception. Her rumor spreads around the country; however, later in the year, this same lady, who had been so vocal about her neighbor’s presumed infidelity, herself gives birth to twins. She decides that she would rather kill one of the two children than shame herself in public, but her ladies-inwaiting instead persuade her to give one of the babies to a monastery. As night falls, one of the servants leaves the town with the child and travels through the forest. She makes her way toward a church, guided on her journey by the barking of dogs and singing of cockerels: Bien loinz sur destre aveit oï chiens abaier e cos chanter: iluec purra vile trover. Cele part vet a grant espleit, u la noise des chiens oeit.5

(Le Frêne, 94, 144–8)

[Far on her right she had heard dogs barking and cockerels singing; there she would find a town. She went quickly in this direction where she heard the noise of the dogs.]

This passage leads to the abandonment of the child in the shade of an ash tree, and neatly encapsulates some of the main focal points of this book and the questions it will address. The description of the servant finding her way through the forest with only barking dogs and singing cockerels as her guides condenses some of the themes and stylistic decisions that I argue are essential to understanding how medieval texts depict animal soundscapes for interpretation. Marie de France here gives a description of animal sound in this passage that works between species in two ways: it conjures human 4



5



Marie de France was a poet who lived in England but probably came from France. Her works are written in the Francien dialect with Anglo-Norman influences. Lais de Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke and trans. Laurence Harf-Lancer (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1990). Translations from Old French into English are my own.

3

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts habitation before the servant encounters it as she moves from the forest toward the promise of a more familiar environment (here heralded by sounds of domestic animals); and it demonstrates the unfolding of the human cognitive processes by which a character might interpret such noise as meaningful.6 The expression of sound in the soundscape from Le Frêne pivots on two modes of sonic expression commonly encountered in medieval texts. Firstly, the individual sounds of barking and singing are distinguished through verbs that translate animal vocalizations into a form that can be communicated in human language, in this case the verbs abaier (to bark) and chanter (to sing). The barking of dogs and singing of cockerels in Le Frêne are at once familiar domestic sounds and indicators of an urban space revealed not by the sight of land but by the soundscape. Secondly, the text describes canine sounds using the Old French term noise, a term that suggests how such sounds are unintelligible in human linguistic terms, even if they may communicate human presence in other ways. The recognition of these sounds by the servant demonstrates that such sonic phenomena are part of a broader environment of sound, scattered with points of sonic contact that indicate the presence of animal life, but also the presence of humanity in what might at first be presumed unknown terrain. Barking and bird calls disclose a soundscape in which sound becomes meaningful through the cognitive and physical responses of the auditor within the text, and subsequently through the interpretation of this response by the audience. If, as this example demonstrates, the protagonist is guided by animal sounds that are then encountered and interpreted by the human audience of this work, this raises some questions about the representation of animal sound in medieval texts: what role does sound play in depictions of contact between domestic or wild animals, and humans? How do such soundscapes contribute to divergent forms of textual encounter and modes of interpretation? Animal soundscapes, and the meanings they generate, offer ways of navigating the networks of relation that exist between humans and animals. Taken as part of the vernacular literary culture of Anglo-Norman England, the example from Le Frêne also points toward a number of broader questions about sound and language in medieval works written in this milieu: how do other insular texts composed in the vernacular languages of medieval England treat the representation of animal sound, and what

6

For further details on Marie de France, see Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken (eds), Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 1–15. For Le Frêne see François Suard, ‘L’utilisation des éléments folkloriques dans le lai du “Frêne”’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale: Xe–XIIe siècles, 21.81 (1978), pp. 43–52.

4

Introduction comparisons are there to be made across such texts? How does the expression of animal sound as a form of language challenge or unsettle the notion that sound can be controlled and manipulated by humans (or indeed animals) for their own advantage? What effect does the expression of animal sound in medieval literature have on an often-rehearsed medieval (and modern) philosophical conceptualization of language as the domain solely of the human? These questions act as my springboards for an engagement with medieval sonic phenomena, ecologies, and acoustic interpretation. To tackle these questions, this book addresses the idea of animal soundscapes by thinking through the sounds of dogs, goats, sheep, cockerels, cuckoos, sirens, and a variety of other creatures that inhabit the pages of vernacular texts composed in Anglo-Norman England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It demonstrates how the representation of textual animals affords moments of encounter through the communicative potential of their sounds. By examining points of sonic contact in textual soundscapes, we can arrive at a better understanding of the role and function of sound and language as they are represented for interpretation in this cultural context. This book examines how texts from different genres – bestiaries, glossaries and word lists, hagiography, fables, and songs – filter the sounds of animal agents and are framed by their own historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, be they pedagogic, entertaining, moralistic, instructive, or didactic in nature. Through these filters, animal soundscapes became avenues through which medieval audiences par els meïsmes l’entendeient (‘heard’ or understood for themselves) the types of interpretation afforded by representations of sound in texts.7 In dealing with the ways sound is mediated by human language and presented for interpretation by the frameworks and interpretive structures of different texts, the discussion that follows establishes how soundscapes are part and parcel of the interpretation of animals and birds in medieval texts. Since the examples chosen for discussion are always produced by living (albeit often fictional or imaginary) animals, birds, and creatures, this book also considers encounters with animals in a broader sense, and how actual and imaginary contact between species informs the depiction of communication. Barking, crying, singing, and even speaking are animal phenomena that present ways of thinking about networks of communication between species, as well as response and interpretation to that communication. It is only by responding to and interpreting the noise of the barking dogs that the servant in Le Frêne finds her way through the woods. Without that interpretation, we would be in a different story.

7



Lais de Marie de France, Prologue, 18.

5

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Animal sound, noise, and language A focus on sound, as just one of the ways that humans have represented animals in historical sources, offers an alternative way of thinking the animal in medieval texts. Rethinking the sonic networks of relation between humans and animals requires an understanding of creatures as simultaneously referring to actual living, breathing, and noisy ones, as well as to the symbolic or allegorical elements that medieval sources attach to them. Animal sound in medieval literature poses specific challenges for interpretation because, of all aspects of animal life in the Middle Ages, it is perhaps the one that is most ephemeral. In terms of source material for studies of animals in the Middle Ages, today we are left with literary texts written on animal skins, the bones of animals and birds from archaeological digs, and portraits and sculptures of creatures in medieval art and architecture, but what remains of animal sound? As Robert Stanton evocatively puts it, ‘it is an open question whether a domesticated pig in the year 900 sounded more like a present-day pig than any English speech from 900 resembles any English spoken today’.8 Communication and encounter with the animal in medieval texts evokes sonic phenomena as much as the more widely studied physical and material qualities of animals alive and dead. Medieval texts exploit the ties and tensions that bind animals with humans, including the ability to vocalize and to communicate sounds that can be read in diverse ways. In examining animal sound and communication in texts from Anglo-Norman England, this book considers how representations of sound contribute to a broad and complex series of soundscapes in which language (and by extension, the human) is always implicated. I examine how expressions of sound and noise described in Old French texts such as Le Frêne, draw connections between species that participate in such textual soundscapes. When an animal or a bird makes noise in a medieval text, how does it signify and what is its relation to human language? If an animal communicates through speech, what then are the consequences for our understanding of encounters between humans and animals as they are constructed, reinforced, and challenged by and through sound and language? The relation of animals to language has been a major area of interest in modern studies of humanity and animality in critical theory, philosophy,



8

‘Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity and Boundary in Old English Animal Voice Catalogues’, in Alison Langdon (ed.), Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), p. 91.

6

Introduction theology, and comparative literature.9 The roots of our thinking about animal sound lie in medieval ideas about animal vocalization, which are linked to theories of sensation and consciousness, as explored by Aristotle in ‘De interpretatione’.10 Defining sound as the result of an impact and the reception of the disturbed air by another body (419b20), he links sound with hearing, which is the active production of an echo effect. Sarah Kay describes the implications of Aristotle’s conceptualization of voice as follows: If sound is a being struck that is also a sounding out, then voice too is a kind of blow, a particular way of striking air which can be done only by something animate, that is, something that has soul (420b5). Voice, that is, is a form of sound, and given that sound requires air, only animals that breathe have a voice. […] voice and the whole physiology of speech and hearing are activated by the animal soul as part of the overall functioning of sensation.11

Voice connects human and animal in a corporeal and material way. Voice as a percussive act thus connects human and animal, who rely on ‘a shared continuum of circulating air’, and marks the boundary between an animated body and the rest of the cosmos.12 For Aristotle, then, breath is the channel by which voice is produced, and it is therefore distinguished from the types of vibration caused by creatures such as insects (535b26– 536b24), although, as we shall see, medieval texts do not always hold up such distinctions. An understanding of voice as connected to the soul is contingent with a widespread interest in naming things in the Middle Ages, a process closely connected to humankind’s first utterance. Naming is used to describe and classify animals (a theme I explore in detail in the first two chapters of this book), and the process features in Genesis 2.19 when Adam names the animals: ‘And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the animals of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam For notable examples relevant to this discussion, see Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (Columbus: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 10 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 11 ‘Circulating Air: Inspiration, Voice, and Soul in Poetry and Song’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), p. 14. The passage from ‘De interpretatione’ in question is 1:25–38. See also, ‘On the Soul’, 1:641–92. For further discussion see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 73–89. 12 Kay, ‘Circulating Air’, p. 14. 9



7

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name.’13 Genesis was an important reference point for the conceptualization of human and animal identity in the way that it portrayed language because it associated Adam’s first act of naming with animals. Susan Crane has argued that this passage in Genesis ‘aligns Adam with God as a speaker, a possessor of logos or ratio, in contrast to the dumb animal’, a process that implies a distinction between man and all other species.14 This act also demonstrated man’s pre-eminence over other species, and indeed other categories of human, through his control of language.15 Adam’s idealized language in Eden is, however, corrupted by the Fall, initiated when the serpent speaks to Eve (Genesis 3.1). Humankind’s relationship to animals is altered by this cataclysmic event, and the human assertion of dominance over the community of living beings on Earth is henceforth subject to continual rethinking. What does it mean, therefore, for a human being in a Christo-centric universe to conceptualize, write, read, and possibly mimic the sounds of creatures to whom the possession of those same aspects was not unconditionally ascribed? The interpretation of the biblical scene of Adam naming the animals, and subsequently the Fall of humankind, by authorities such as Isidore of Seville in the sixth and seventh centuries, had a profound impact on how animals were categorized by scholastic writers in the High and later Middle Ages. In the Etymologies Isidore suggests that ‘Adam did not assign these names in the Latin or Greek language, or in any of the languages of foreign nations, but in […] Hebrew. In Latin they are called animals (animal) or “animate beings” (animans), because they are animated (animare) by life and moved by spirit.’16 Adam’s dominance in Genesis thus becomes bound in alternative networks of relation with animals and birds, as well as other languages, as the scene is interpreted. What happens when humans start to speak languages

13



14



15



16

Quotations from the Bible are always from the Latin Vulgate and Douay-Rheims Bible. These include translations into modern English alongside original quotations in Latin. References to the Bible throughout are also to this version. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 90. See Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallett (Paris: Galilée, 2006), pp. 15–54; Carolynn Van Dyke, ‘Names of the Beasts: Tracking the Animot in Medieval Texts’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 34 (2012), pp. 1–51; and Sarah Kay, ‘Before the Animot: Bêtise and the Zoological Machine in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries’, Yale French Studies, 127 (2015), pp. 34–51. [‘Non autem secundum Latinam linguam atque Graecam aut quarumlibet gentium barbararum nomina illa inposuit Adam, sed […] quae Hebraea nuncupatur. Latine autem animalia sive animantia dicta, quod animentur vita et moveantur spiritu.’], ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XII.i.2–3, p. 247. For the Latin, see The Latin Library (online source).

8

Introduction other than prelapsarian Hebrew is that Babel results in an increasing diversity of human languages, and thus the incomprehensibility of specific types of utterance. A parallel can be drawn between the incomprehensibility reflected in the range of animal sounds described by medieval writers in vernacular texts. The sounds of animals and birds, like those of human languages, present a bewildering range of sonic phenomena in complex soundscapes that create connections across species to emphasize communicative potential but also control and dominance. Since postlapsarian human language does not guarantee a clear differentiation of man and animal (or bird), language becomes a crucial topic of debate for medieval scholastic thinkers interested in the nature of human exceptionalism. The distinctiveness of human language is asserted in a number of ways in medieval ‘scientific’ and moralizing texts that discuss animals but, as I demonstrate in this book, vernacular languages trouble the foundations for such arguments. In an important study of zoosemiotics in medieval scholasticism Marmo Costantino, Umberto Eco, and Shona Kelly demonstrate that distinctions were made in scholastic traditions between types of vocal sound (vox) emitted spontaneously or naturally (naturaliter) and those emitted by convention (ad placitum).17 These categories of sound ran in parallel with sounds emitted by non-vocal living beings (non vox). Alongside these, some grammarians distinguished between vox discreta and vox confusa, the former capable of being transposed in writing or according to semantic convention, and the latter resisting transcription into writing.18 Vox was in many circumstances considered to be a very real, material phenomenon associated not only with speech, but also with language and writing.19 The agent’s intention to produce sound also posed a philosophical conundrum for medieval scholastic writers, as with the latratus canis.20 These issues were complicated by the status of distinct

17



18



19



20

Marmo Costantino, Umberto Eco, and Shona Kelly, On the Medieval Theory of Signs (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41. Eliza Zingesser, ‘Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania’, New Medieval Literatures, 17 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), p. 65. This is reinforced by a grammatical formulation by Marius Victorinus in the fourth century: ‘There are two forms of voice, articulated and indistinct. The articulated is that which, when heard, is understood and written and therefore explained […] The indistinct however is that which is nothing but the single sound of a voice cast out, as is the neighing of a horse, or the hissing of a snake, or clapping, hissing, or other such things’, Ars Grammatica, ed. Italo Mariotti (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1967), II.2–4, 66. See also Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum: Edito princeps secundum codices manuscriptos, ed. Helmut Boese (Berlin: W. D. Gruyter, 1973), p. 26 On the Medieval Theory of Signs, pp. 3–41. The scholars in this study draw on a number of examples for their discussion: for Peter Abelard a sound is meaningful because of the will that produces it and not for the fact that it itself

9

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts species of animal and bird, with many birds being assigned the status of ‘inarticulate for the sake of the privileged human voice’.21 Medieval scholastic thought thus provides suggestive ways of approaching the representation of animal sounds in sources from the Middle Ages. Beyond the confines of scholastic writing, while some medieval texts signal that sounds or utterances produced by animal species are guided by distinctions between human and animal sonic phenomena, others do not. Vernacular texts, especially ones with a literary flavor, are often interested in framing animal sounds in relation to human language, but they do so in different ways. For medieval audiences of vernacular texts, creatures’ names were intimately connected to their natures in etymological and conceptual terms.22 However, such connections did not always play out in biblical terms. For instance, the lai L’Aüstic, again by Marie de France, presents the act of naming the nightingale as a cross-linguistic one, as the narrator juxtaposes the Breton, French, and English names for this bird: L’Aüstic a nun, ceo m’est vis, si l’apelent en lur païs; ceo est russignol en Franceis e nihtegale en dreit Engleis.

(L’Aüstic, 210, 3–6)

[I believe it is named Aüstic, as they call it in their country. That is to say russignol in French, and ‘nightingale’ in good English.]

The complexity of sound associated with the nightingale’s name expresses the diversity inherent in the common juxtaposition of the vernacular names for this species. Such linguistic complexity reinforces a distinction between fictional human representation and actual animal sound that draws in part on a type of multilingual reflection. In this lai, the juxtaposition of the names for the nightingale draws attention to the sonic differences between languages; on a metatextual level, this feature suggests that the short lai is a form of poetic imitation, riffing on the nightingale’s impressive range of



21



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produces meaning. See Logica Ingredientibus, in B. Geyer (ed.), Peter Aberlards philosophische Schriften (Münster: Aschendorff, 1927), pp. 335–6. Roger Bacon suggested that ‘the wail of the infirm and the bark of the dog spring from an intention, an impulse of a sensitive soul which tends to express that which the animal (human or not) feels’. See Sumule dialectices, ed. R. Steele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), pp. 233–4, my emphasis. Michael Warren, Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), p. 17. For further discussion on this theme, see Susan Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 69–100; and Carolynn Van Dyke, ‘Names of the Beasts’, pp. 1–51.

10

Introduction gurgles, whistles, and trills when it sings.23 The nightingale’s many names are a point of irony about the nature of language as the bird first appears in the lai as a fiction conjured by the lady as an excuse for going to the window to meet her lover.24 Indeed, the physical bird is only present later in the short lai when the husband vengefully brings the body of a real dead nightingale to his wife. At the earlier juncture of the short prologue to this lai, therefore, Marie de France is already balancing the separation of names in vernacular languages with the sounds connected to real and imaginary nightingales. The translation of the range of sounds associated with the nightingale through the names connected to that bird, which in turn emphasize the bird’s conceptual, fictional nature, form a textual soundscape built on the plurality of linguistic expression. As the example from L’Aüstic demonstrates, medieval vernacular texts do not necessarily subscribe to a single or dualistic view of sound and language exemplified in theories of vox. Texts from Anglo-Norman England frame depictions of animal sound in relation to a variety of themes: naming and categorizing; etymology; control over language; power relations; forms of life or perspectives; and music, melody, or song. The presence of multiple languages in Anglo-Norman England (with Latin, French, and English being the most prominent) provides the social and cultural backdrop for the interpretations of vernacular texts in this book.25 Linguistic plurality complicates the idea that there exists an opposition between a singular conceptualization of ‘human language’ opposed to ‘animal sound’. In texts from this cultural context, representations of sound and speech highlight how different animals and birds trouble distinctions between sound and language. Vernacular texts such as lais, fables, and bestiaries invite modes of reading, interpretation, and occasionally imitation that draw attention to forms of utterance in diverse languages with which medieval audiences would have been increasingly familiar. Vernacular texts from this period, including those composed in Old French or multilingual texts which include both French and English, often work on the assumption that languages (human and animal) are always plural.26

23



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Warren notes an association between the name of the nightingale and the sweetness of the harp in Old and Middle English texts. See Birds in Medieval English Poetry, p. 231. This association is also discussed in my Conclusion in relation to the Tristan legend. Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken (eds), Marie de France: A Critical Companion, pp. 150–1. This book thus seeks to complement the type of discussion generated by Ardis Butterfield’s readings of cultural and linguistic contact in the later Middle Ages. See The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the notion of the plurality of England’s languages in this period, see Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Depictions of the vocalizations of animals, which are naturally plural and complex, thus add to a lively interchange between different languages and species in Anglo-Norman textual cultures.27 This book builds on studies of these cultures by focusing attention on comparisons between sounds described in Anglo-Norman texts, incorporating texts engaging in multilingualism that so far have been understudied. Key studies of medieval sound with which this book is in dialogue have come from studies of French textual cultures.28 However, the French materials for much of the literature studied in relation to the representation of animal sound have attracted limited attention compared to English and Latin texts. Those studies of French texts that do exist have focused on language, or on specific groups of creatures such as birds, leaving gaps in our understanding of the vocalizations of other animals. To take one example, Peggy McCracken proposes that the properties of animal– human transformation in the Lais by Marie de France are encapsulated in Marie’s understanding of translation. She notes that the Lais are less concerned about identifying boundaries between the human and the animal than suggesting a movement between forms of being that acknowledges the power relations present in medieval translation theory.29 Translation processes that suggest such forms of movement provide useful frameworks for understanding how power relations are captured by the translation of animal sound onto the page into languages that are themselves in unstable relation with other languages. Despite their contribution to notions of linguistic and cultural plurality, the sounds of animals and birds in Anglo-Norman texts are rarely neutral and are also used to shore up human exceptionalism. While animal soundscapes offer the potential to perform useful work undermining



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(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette (eds), The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Joceleyn Wogan Browne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 1–11. Studies of animal language in Anglo-Norman texts include discussions of animal wordlists, epic, and fable. See Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and William Sayers, ‘Animal Vocalization and Human Polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Thirteenth-Century Domestic Treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English’, Sign Systems Studies, 37.3/4 (2009), pp. 525–41. One significant exception to the focus on language rather than sound in French texts is Susan Crane’s discussion of a hunting manual, the Livre de chasse by Gaston III, count of Foix, in Animal Encounters, pp. 101–19. See Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature; Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre; pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2011); and Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, ‘Écrire le son au Moyen Age’, Ethnologie française, 20.3 (1990), pp. 319–28. ‘Translation and Animals in Marie de France’s Lais’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 46.3 (2009), pp. 206–18.

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Introduction medieval projects of anthropocentrism, the decentering of man’s control over prelapsarian language held important implications for the figure of man. Sound is used to pit the male, aristocratic perspective against other human figures, such as women, children, and peasants, who are thereby connected in various ways with the animal world in medieval texts. These latter categories, often conceptualized in subordination to man, may be deprived of language in the same ways as many animals and birds because they are not the possessors of full language and logos, or reason, in the same way as was Adam. My sources call upon the figure of man – the speaker, the reader, the singer, the gentleman, the saint – as such a male, anthropocentric reference point. Many emphasize how sound and noise, as opposed to language, encourages audiences to hear implied knowledge, sense, or understanding (entendement) in the soundscapes that enable these distinctions.30 Alongside the specific terms used to represent animal sound in medieval texts, discussed below, one final context that is fundamental to conceptualizations of animal soundscapes in medieval texts is a tension between noise and melody.31 The barking of the dog and the singing of the cockerel discussed above in relation to Le Frêne represent a common juxtaposition of animal sound and birdsong in medieval texts. This comparison is usually expressed between sounds deemed noise, such as the bark, and chant (singing), which shades into music and melody. Anglo-Norman texts depicting birdsong exhibit some of the same tensions found in scholasticism, including distinctions between the human and the avian in musical contexts in which even tuned sounds that represent birdsong in melodic form merit the status of music ‘only when they are both produced and received by an intellectually engaged rational animal’, that is, human beings.32 The medieval period witnessed a strong current of writing lyric with ‘natural’ motifs, in which ‘musical’ animal sounds could be identified as irrational compared to human ones, even when they possessed elements of melody.33 One effect of this is that medieval depictions of See entendement (from the same root as entendre, for ‘to hear, listen, or understand’), in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (Aberystwyth University, online source), henceforth AND. 31 See Elizabeth E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Frédéric Billiet, ‘Entendre les paysages sonores du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance: L’approche musicologique’, in Laurent Hablot and Laurent Vissière (eds), Les Paysages Sonores du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 19–64. 32 Leach, Sung Birds, p. 1. 33 For critical background on nature and poetry that sets the discussion for birdsong in ‘literary’ texts, see Michel Zink, Nature et poésie au Moyen Âge (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Franco Alberto Gallo, Oci: voci d’uccelli in testi medievali (Ravenna: 30

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts music or melody potentially create slippages between categories such as irrational animals and women in comparison with the conceptualization of a more rational masculine subjectivity.34 In this way, different bird calls or songs emphasize species variance while depicting such sounds as part of networks that mirror human social and cultural systems.35 Melodic or musical animal sound acts as both a narrative construct and as a set of conceptual tools for representing some types of communication between species in medieval texts. Emma Dillon considers how animals and other creatures feature as musical instruments and performers in narratives and manuscript marginalia, in texts such as the Roman de Fauvel, the Roman de Renart, and in prayer books. To take just one example, she examines an early fourteenth-century Flemish Book of Hours, in which the marginalia includes a dog and man creating ‘a noisy ensemble with a man swinging bells’, a ‘shouting head on legs’ running across the page, a ‘strange animal whose nether regions form a trumpet [which] blasts into the margins’, and two hybrid men emerging from the foliage ‘blowing on a horn and the tail of a dog (who obliges by yipping)’.36 This analysis of visual and textual depictions of sound demonstrates that the different senses are sometimes simultaneously at play in animal soundscapes. Visual representation anticipates some of the ways that the musical and non-musical bodies of animals and birds are figured as part of broader sonic environments. Thinking through sound encourages audiences and scholars to reconsider their own connections to the animal world, particularly through the shared vocal abilities of humans (in the majority), and a large number of animals and birds depicted in textual soundscapes. However, this book’s focus on sound should not drown out the importance of silence, or of the voice-less, in medieval texts and cultures. The cultivation of silence in the Middle Ages was a tradition stretching back at least to Augustine’s



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Longo, 2007); and Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Songs of Nature in Medieval Northern France: Landscape, Identity, and Environment’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 72.1 (2019), pp. 115–80. Elizabeth E. Leach discusses this theme in relation to the sexualized figure of the singing siren in medieval musicology. See ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly while the Fowler Deceives the Bird: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages’, Music and Letters, 87.2 (2006), pp. 187–211. Birdsong, such as the nightingale’s melodic strains or the cuckoo’s call, has strong associations with sexuality and gender in medieval culture, which is carried into Anglo-Norman texts. I discuss this in detail in relation to the cuckoo in Chapters Two and Four. The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 187–8. See also, Martine Clouzot, ‘Cris et musicalités des jongleurs et des fous dans les manuscrits enluminés (XIIIe–XIVe siècles)’, in Laurent Hablot and Laurent Vissière (eds), Les Paysages Sonores du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 229–41.

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Introduction Confessions.37 Silence was crucial to medieval monastic communities, but it is also fundamental for the power and pleasure of music and its reconstruction.38 Silence is also theoretically implied in processes of medieval translation and was important for legal procedures in the Middle Ages.39 Although the discussion that follows does not directly analyze the role of silence in animal soundscapes, since it is less easily conveyed in my textual sources than sound, the absence of sound nevertheless forms the backdrop against which such soundscapes are brought to life. Through textual depictions of different creatures singing, crying, barking, roaring, quacking, and so on, the sonorous qualities of Anglo-Norman texts invite readers to reflect on their own voices in ways that frame sound in networks of relation. These networks encompass connections to birdsong, the liturgy, legendary siren song, or the cuckoo’s call, rather than solely logic and grammar. The melodic elements of animal and bird vocalizations open opportunities for ways of reading, seeing, and most importantly hearing the animal in the soundscapes depicted in medieval texts, reaching beyond language and discourse as the sole avenues for sound expression. Simultaneously, the representation of animal sound, noise, and melody in Anglo-Norman texts troubles the conceptualization of language as a category that expresses the unquestioned rationality and linguistic superiority of man. With this in mind, each of the chapters that follows reflects on how depictions of animal soundscapes relate to and inform conceptualizations not only of animal sound, language, noise, singing, and musicality, but also to the ways that these invite a reconsideration of the exceptionality of the human voice.

The real and the symbolic animal A concern about animals, and especially their relationship to language, has been a theme of growing importance in scholarship over the past few decades, but notions of sound do not exist in a vacuum and there

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Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 14. See also, Peggy McCracken, ‘The Poetics of Silence in the French Middle Ages’ (Yale University: unpublished PhD Dissertation, 1989), pp. 2–5. Katarina Livljanic and Benjamin Bagby, ‘The Silence of Medieval Singers’, in Mark Everist and Thomas F. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 210–35. Tony Ward, ‘Standing Mute’, Law and Literature, 24.1 (2012), pp. 3–20; and Erin M. Goeres, ‘Sounds of Silence: The Translation of Women’s Voices from Marie de France to the Old Norse Strengleikar’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 113.3 (2014), pp. 279–307.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts are a number of key contexts that need to be raised here to frame this discussion. The vast majority of studies of medieval animals have sought to draw attention to the importance of the animal for the conceptualization of the human. Michel Pastoureau cites two key opposing ideas about animals circulating in the High Middle Ages that informed modes of reading at the conjunction of these principles: one based on the superiority of the human, the other emphasizing a conceptualization of life as a community of living beings.40 On the one hand, different species were made into symbols by the systematic opposition of man and animal due to theological, social, and legal changes to human relationships with animals in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages, with the twelfth century as a particularly distinct period for such change.41 This opposition entailed the assertion of the superiority of man (in reference to Adam) over other animals. On the other hand, this period witnessed a revival of the Aristotelian idea of a community of living beings as expressed in Aristotle’s De Anima.42 The scholastic framing of this Aristotelian idea was facilitated by the already prevalent Christian notion of community expressed in the epistle of Romans 8.21: ‘For the creature itself will be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.’43 The community of living beings, including animals, became a commonplace notion through Christian religious texts in the twelfth and

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‘L’Animal et l’historien du Moyen Âge’, in Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (eds), L’Animal exemplaire au Moyen Âge (Ve–XVe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), pp. 14–15. See also Jacques Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes dans le monde médiévale: Le bestiaire des clercs du Ve au XIIe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). See Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 8; and Irène Fabry-Tehranchi (ed.), L’Humain et l’Animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe–XVe s.)/ Human and Animal in Medieval France (12th–15th c.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), p. 8. The Aristotelian corpus on animals was translated into Latin from Arabic by Michael Scot in Toledo (Spain) around 1230. See ‘L’Animal et l’historien du Moyen Âge’, pp. 11–12. Much of this was integrated into Albert the Great’s De Animalibus a generation later. For further information see Fernand Van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1955); and C. H. Lohr, ‘The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle’, in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg, and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 80–98. The Classical inheritance for voice and sound has been explored by Maurizio Bettini in Voci: Anthropologia sonora del mondo autico (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2008). [‘Quia et ipsa creatura liberabitur a servitute corruptionis in libertatem gloriae filiorum Dei’]. I have adapted the original translation from the Latin Vulgate and Douay-Rheims Bible into modern English. For further

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Introduction thirteenth centuries and by figures such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas.44 These two opposing ideas – one of man’s superiority over animals and the other of a community of living beings – coexisted in thought, culture, and society in Anglo-Norman England and provide the theoretical context for the divergent ways sources from this period represent animals for interpretation. Medieval thinking thus insists on human exceptionalism while simultaneously making man one of the animals. While a strong consensus in ecocriticism tends to veer toward a fetishizing of animals ‘themselves’ – that is, without the human – any project on medieval animals, or more broadly nonhumans, is intimately bound up with questions of humanity.45 We need not shy away from the notion that what interests medieval literature in the animal is how it relates to humankind.46 In A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, Brigitte Resl notes that representations of animals in medieval culture are usually designed ‘to further our understanding of human nature rather than of animals themselves’.47 Resl compares historical research into human and animal relations to the work of medieval philosophers, who thought about animals in order to better understand human nature. In some respects, this book is similarly invested in understanding human nature, and humans in nature, because expressions of animal sound or the words used to describe animal communication in medieval texts are always written in human languages; we are well before the age of electronic recording, which would further open up the phenomenology of sound. Yet, medieval scribes and artists frame contact between humans and animals in ways that reveal their place in



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discussion on Western European philosophical debates on animals in the twelfth century, see Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within, pp. 1–9. For Francis of Assisi, see my discussion in Chapter 3. For Thomas Aquinas and his legacy on the status of animals, see Ryan P. McLaughlin, Christian Theology and the Status of Animals: The Dominant Tradition and its Alternatives (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 8–20. For an overview of current trends in medieval ecocriticism, see Miranda Griffin, ‘“Unusual Greenness”: Approaching Medievalist Ecomaterialism’, Exemplaria, 30.2 (2018), pp. 172–81; and Anna Lisa Taylor, ‘Where are the Wild Things? Animals in Western Medieval European History’, History Compass, 16.3 (2018), pp. 1–22. Griffin’s discussion can be read alongside Stephanie Posthumus, ‘État Present: Is Écocritique Still Possible?’, French Studies, 73.4 (2019), pp. 598–616. [‘ce qui intéresse la littérature médiévale dans l’animal, c’est ce qui touche à l’homme’], Michel Zink, ‘Le monde animal et ses représentations dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge’, in Francis Cerdan (ed.), Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 15 (Toulouse: Université de Toulouse Le-Mirail, 1984), p. 70. Translations from modern French into English are my own. Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 2.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts broad networks of relation in which animals, birds, and legendary creatures become meaningful through textual interpretation. How, then, might we interpret the animal soundscapes in medieval texts from a plurality of perspectives, most of which reference, but are not confined to, the human? Perhaps due to the textual nature of medieval animals, we are sometimes too quick to dismiss historical depictions of animals as purely symbolic or entrenched within human projects of anthropocentrism.48 Jonathan Burt takes the animal as a given in his work and reminds scholars not to overstate animals as metaphoric and iconic. Instead, he urges us to achieve ‘a more integrated view of the effects of the presence of the animal and the power of its imagery in human history’.49 In a different approach, French philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay remarks that ‘the animal is situated at the horizon of our thoughts and our languages [or tongues], saturated by signs; it lives and moves at the limit of our representations, there it flees and watches us’.50 In this articulation of the relationship between humans and animals in philosophy, de Fontenay emphasizes the difficulty of grasping the animal as a figure always on the margins of human consciousness and language. Critics have therefore drawn attention to the need for an approach to human–animal relations that engages with animal life and perspective in textual cultures. To this end, studies of animals have invested particularly in the multifarious understandings of the type of contact available between humans and animals in historical, literary, and philosophical sources. Michael J. Warren notes that recent interest in human–animal relations has emphasized ‘the eclecticism of animal meaning in pre-modern living’.51 As I have already demonstrated in reference to the lais, a focus on sound shows how sonic contact moves beyond an opposition between ‘real’ animals and their symbolic representation. It affords audiences the opportunity to consider animals and birds neither as an essence, nor as a purely symbolic



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Studies of zoological history (the evolution of animal representation over time) and zoosemiotics (the examination of the symbolic properties of animal species), provide the foundations for anthropological and intersectional approaches to the study of the animal. See Dan Sperber, ‘Pourquoi l’animal est bon à penser symboliquement’, L’Homme (1983), pp. 117–35. Jean-Marie Fritz notes that ‘le discours sur l’animal au Moyen Age est toujours aussi un discours anthropologique’ (‘the discourse on the animal in the Middle Ages is always also an anthropological discourse’), Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age, pp. 178–81. ‘The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation’, Society and Animals, 9 (2001), p. 203. [‘c’est à l’horizon de nos pensées et de nos langues que se tient l’animal, saturé de signes; c’est à la limite de nos représentations qu’il vit et se meut, qu’il s’enfuit et nous regarde’], La Silence des bêtes: la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998), p. 18. Birds in Medieval English Poetry, p. 2.

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Introduction presence in medieval writing, but as figures of encounter that enjoin audiences to identify and interpret their sounds. The study of animal soundscapes in Anglo-Norman texts offers a significant vantage on the question of humanity’s relationship to animal species. There is a growing trend in medieval scholarship toward studies of animal voices and languages, and the ways these are connected to utterance. Several shorter-length studies have taken critically informed approaches to the interpretation of animal language, although questions of sound in particular have not received adequate critical attention. In a study on animal–human bilingualism, Jonathan Hsy reveals the complexity of ‘zoo-anthro-linguistic soundscapes’ (the representation of animal sounds through human language in textual environments of sound) across texts from a range of genres and languages.52 Examining examples of lists resembling the Latin voces variae animantium catalog texts, which depict animal sounds in the fashion of subject followed by third-person indicative verb, Hsy suggests that such wordlists ‘stylize animal sounds and enact diverse modes of animal mimicry’, encoding intra-species communication in ways that may blur human linguistic boundaries.53 Hsy’s attention to the communicative possibilities that such lists generate for cross-species encounters has influenced a number of other articles on animal vocalization. These include studies by Stanton and Warren, each of whom underline how texts perform translation between animal sounds and their expression in human languages in insular medieval texts.54 While remaining sensitive to the numerous ways that animal creatures were meaningful in medieval cultures, we can begin to move beyond a vision of the Middle Ages that would reduce medieval animals and birds to static carriers of meaning saturated with human symbolism. Recent studies seeking to achieve this range from examinations of cultural history or comparative literature to philosophical and epistemological



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‘Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts’, in Catherine Batt and René Tixier (eds), Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, The Medieval Translator, 14 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018), p. 565. Ibid., pp. 565 and 570–6. Robert Stanton, ‘Mimicry, Subjectivity, and Embodied Voice in Anglo-Saxon Bird Riddles’, in Irith Ruth Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 29–41; and Michael J. Warren, ‘“Kek kek”: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 38.1 (2016), pp. 109–32. Emma Gorst has discussed similar themes in ‘Interspecies Mimicry: Birdsong in Chaucer’s “Maunciple’s Tale” and The Parliament of Fowls’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), pp. 137–54. See also, Karl Steel, ‘Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 1 (2010), pp. 187–93.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts studies of animal representation.55 They have been influenced by thinking in medieval posthumanism and new materialism, which have sought to demonstrate how medieval sources represent relations between humans and animals in ways that engage discursively with issues of supremacy, dominance, and hierarchy, as well as metaphor and translation.56 Building on the consensus of scholarship that seeks to uncover the traces of actual animals alongside their figurative counterparts, critics of medieval texts have introduced ways of thinking about animals that are grounded in perspective and language. These studies raise the question of the extent to which we can glimpse the ‘living animal’ in medieval sources. For Crane, the animal is present in literary texts in ways that exceed the boundaries of heraldic and spiritual symbolism. Animals can be studied effectively by connecting written representations to perspectives ‘from natural science, animal training, husbandry, and historical studies’, as well as by treating language ‘not as a transparent window on the real, but by concentrating on the peculiar obscurities and revelations inherent in turns of phrase, narrative strategies, and formal conventions’.57 Warren’s study of birds in medieval English literature proposes that real, lived experience with these creatures informed the cultural, literary, and metaphorical representations of birds in ways that compelled audiences to think about actual birds alongside the avian literary motifs of flight and voice.58 While zoosemiotics were a fundamental aspect of the depictions of animals in medieval literature and art, animal figuration is therefore connected to living creatures and contact with animals and birds in ways that emphasize cohabitation, encounter, and communication. Medieval texts often represent animals in ways that encourage audiences to hold multiple interpretive possibilities

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57 58

Sarah Kay has demonstrated how animals may intervene in the reading process of manuscripts. See Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). See Peggy McCracken and Karl Steel (eds), ‘The Animal Turn: Into the Sea with the Fish-knights of Perceforest’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 2.1 (2011), pp. 88–100, and Peter W. Travis, ‘Aesop’s Symposium of Animal Tongues’ in the same issue, pp. 33–49; Irène Fabry-Tehranchi (ed.), L’Humain et l’Animal, p. 11; Jeffrey J. Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012); and Pamela Gravestock, ‘Did Imaginary Animals Exist?’, in Debra Hassig (ed.), The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 119–35. For further studies on related themes, see Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peggy McCracken, ‘Translation and Animals’, pp. 206–18, and In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011). Animal Encounters, p. 5. Birds in Medieval English Poetry, p. 15.

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Introduction in their minds.59 In this context, the animal gains the ability to bite back at modern scholarship and to reassert itself as the subject of critical epistemological and affective enquiry.

Noisy animal soundscapes: terminology and theory I have sought to refer to animals using a range of terms that are appropriate to animals, birds, and legendary creatures in their medieval textual and cultural contexts. At the same time, I draw on the vocabularies of posthumanism, critical animal studies, and translation studies to establish connections between modern and medieval approaches to interpreting animal figures. Where possible, my choice of modern terminology to describe animals is connected to the usages found in medieval texts. In many medieval Latin texts, such as Pliny’s Natural History or Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the term animal is used to refer to all breathing, moving, living beings, human and animal; in contrast, the terms brutum, fera, and pecus are used for animals, wild animals, and cattle respectively.60 The Latin terminology for animals and birds is relevant to some of the source material for my discussion. In the passage from Genesis discussed above, in which Adam names the animals, there is a distinction between animals of the earth and birds of the heavens: animantibus terrae, et universis volatilibus caeli. The term ‘animal’ in modern contexts is widely used in English and French to refer to all other living beings apart from humans (and sometimes including humans). In the former manifestation of the term, it reinforces a binary that opposes the figure of the human and the animal.61 Vernacular languages in the Middle Ages used other terms for animals and birds, such as the Old French and Middle English beste for animal creatures that roamed the earth. Birds were distinguished from beasts

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Crane remarks that medieval writers ‘had no animal experience, however physically immediate, that they did not apprehend cognitively as it unfolded’, Animal Encounters, p. 1. See also Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 157–62. Brigitte Resl, A Cultural History of Animals, p. 9; and Karl Steel, How to Make a Human, pp. 19–20. For Pliny, see Natural History, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), VIII.1, pp. 2–3. For Isidore of Seville, see The Etymologies, I.vii.5, p. 42. Laurie Shannon claims that the term ‘animal’ does not occur often in English until the end of the sixteenth century, although ‘animal’ was used in Middle English to refer to anything possessing a soul, as in Latin. See ‘The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human’, PMLA, 124 (2009), pp. 472–9.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts using separate terms: the Old French oisel and Middle English brid.62 On the one hand, when referring to this array of creatures as a collective grouping distinct from humankind, the term ‘animal’ can have the unfortunate consequence of framing other-than-human species in terms of lack and in comparison to human status.63 The word ‘beast’, on the other hand, continually raises questions of power relations in postcolonial contexts that lie beyond the scope of this book.64 With this in mind I refer to animals with the modern English terms, ‘animals’ and ‘birds’, rather than ‘beasts’ and ‘birds’. In discussions of texts that have a specific theological focus, I use the term ‘creatures’ in acknowledgement of the biblical notion of creation I discussed above. I use the modern English term ‘species’ as a way of identifying different types of animal, but this word is used cautiously so as not to create confusion with Latin terminology, and to avoid framing the terms of the discussion through excessive reference to post-Darwinian scientific terminology.65 So far in this Introduction, I have used a number of terms to refer to the representation of the vocalizations of animals, birds, and creatures in medieval texts, including ‘sound’, ‘noise’, and ‘language’. The meanings of these terms should not be taken for granted and thus require some explanation. The term ‘language’ is itself a disputed term that signals a number of meanings in modern English including, but not limited to: a system of spoken or written communication used by a particular people, or community; the vocal sounds by which animals and birds communicate and any other signals used by animals to communicate; the style of literary composition; and the power or faculty of speech.66 The term ‘language’ in modern English

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66

See ‘beste’ and ‘oisel’ in AND, and ‘best(e)’ and ‘brid’ in the Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, online source), henceforth MED. Warren discusses avian terminology for birds in detail in the Introduction to Birds in Medieval English Poetry, pp. 1–6. My book does not include detailed discussion of fish, which are not frequently depicted in my source material, let alone featured producing sounds. For the term ‘animal’ as a philosophical problem, see Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis, pp. 15–54. For examples of relevant research in this area, see Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Tyler D. Parry and Charlton W. Yingling, ‘Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas’, Past & Present, 246.1 (2020), pp. 69–108. The source material in the latter includes many examples of the word ‘beast’ used to articulate racist sentiment. The Old French term ‘espece’ could be used to as a noun in the Middle Ages for ‘sort, kind’, or ‘species’ in theological contexts. See AND, ‘espece’. See ‘language, n. (and int.)’, 1a/b, 2c, and 4 in Oxford English Dictionary (online source), henceforth OED. Definition 6 includes ‘the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way’.

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Introduction thus signals human and animal modes of communication and the ability to participate in such forms of communication. In Anglo-Norman contexts, the French term langage may be used to represent one or more of these meanings simultaneously. To take one example, the term langage is used in comparison to noise in the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth, discussed in Chapter 2. This is a juxtaposition that draws a distinction between the words (langage) used to describe different animal species and those used to depict their sounds (noise). In Old French and Middle English literature, language is also contrasted with the jargun of birds, a term discussed at greater length in Chapters Three and Four. The types of communication and vocalization encompassed by medieval notions of language will be explored further in individual chapters. The term ‘sound’, like ‘language’, is also one that encompasses a range of meanings in modern English, referring, as a noun or verb, to the sonic phenomena produced by different species, peoples, instruments, and environments.67 Brigitte Cazelles observes that the Old French noun son (sound), was an objective term emphasizing the production of sound compared to the more subjective noise, which suggests a physical or emotional response to hearing a sound. Cazelles argues that Old French literary texts connect noise to embodied sensory experience in ways that contrast distinctly with the modern use of ‘noise’ in English to describe a disagreeable or undesirable auditory experience. In highlighting the role of sonic expression and ‘acoustemology’ (joining ‘acoustic’ with ‘epistemology’) to signal ways of hearing and interpreting Old French texts, Cazelles draws attention to how noise is represented through language: ‘its occurrence in the soundscapes of early French literature evokes a synesthetic type of perturbation which tends to have a noxious effect, consistent with the origin of a word whose possible roots include the Latin nausea (“seasickness”; French “nausée”), nocere (“to harm”; French “nuire”), and noxia (“nuisance”)’.68 From the thirteenth century, the term noise was used in Middle English literature to suggest a loud or unpleasant sound, a perturbation, or a rumor.69 Cazelle’s observation that sound tends toward objectivity whereas noise veers into subjective experience holds water for discussions of soundscapes more broadly. However, in the context of animal soundscapes, such a clear distinction cannot be easily maintained as animal sound shades into, or mirrors, human language. Animal soundscapes

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69

OED, ‘sound’, n. 3 and v. 1. Soundscape in Early French Literature, p. 20. For a vivid analysis of ‘acoustemology’, see Thorsten Gieser, ‘Sensing and Knowing Noise: An Acoustemology of the Chainsaw’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 27.2 (2019), pp. 50–61. MED, ‘noise’.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts are discernible in medieval texts in ways that are not purely objective, and they may also be expressed in indirect or mediated ways. Noise may even be a frightening but useful phenomenon, as with the barking of the dogs in Le Frêne. In my own discussion, I use the word ‘sound’ to describe the vocalizations of animals and birds in a general sense, and ‘noise’ to refer to moments in texts in which sounds have unsettling or nonsensical effects. I also refer to sound as ‘noise’ at particular moments when the Old French noise is used in texts to qualify types of sound, sometimes in order to anticipate particular modes of sonic production and acoustic reception. The soundscapes of medieval texts are filled with specific expressions of animal vocalized sound, which come with their own vocabularies. The barking and singing in the episode from Le Frêne that opened this introduction is just one illustration of this general point. Anglo-Norman texts refer to animal vocalizations using a wide range of terms, which may sometimes be associated with particular animals and birds (for example, the dog’s ‘bark’ or the duck’s ‘quack’). At the same time, however, other texts describe animal vocalizations using vocabularies that overlap with the sound-making abilities of humans (the cri or cry, singing, speaking, or communicating through jargun). Rather than reinforcing the distinction between language and sound, many medieval literary texts place animal sounds in networks that emphasize their affinity with human language and sound-making. My own vocabulary to describe such sounds reflects the flexibility with which different techniques were used. Animal soundscapes illustrate the difficulty of clearly distinguishing sonic phenomena not produced by humans from human sound production. Indeed, one of the claims of this book is that sonic phenomena associated with animals in medieval texts are always implicated in interpretation and communication between species and languages. In this book I seek to move away from thinking about sound in purely linguistic terms. One of the conceptual tools that enables this is the ‘soundscape’, a term that offers a way of displacing the centrality of language in an analysis of humanity’s relationship to the broader nonhuman environment. I take this term from the work of musicologist R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and environmentalist who has famously argued that the general soundscape of a society can be read as an indicator of the social conditions which produce that environment.70 He notes that ‘a soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen’, and it is this distinction that informs his project to record and analyze the sounds of different soundscapes.71 The term ‘soundscape’ has now become a commonplace

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The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977). Schafer, ‘The Soundscape’, in Jonathan Sterne (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 99–101, original italics.

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Introduction in sound studies and can be found referring broadly or specifically to the sounds that contribute to the production of discrete and defined environments of sound presented in texts as well as in physical environments such as woodlands or urban spaces. The conceptualization of sounds in texts as forming different soundscapes also draws attention to the connections between expressions of sound and the portrayal of space, the word ‘soundscape’ deriving from ‘landscape’. In particular, Schafer’s interest in acoustic ecology, which is focused primarily on recording birdsong, has highlighted the different methods we use to record sounds over time. However, a focus on recording does not capitalize on the potential of the soundscape as a concept for considering diverse modes of interaction, recording, and communication that include animal agents, as well as human ones, in different historical contexts. The term ‘soundscape’ has been subjected to rigorous critical study by scholars, who have noted that the scapes of soundscapes imply a visual metaphor for sound, which reinforces the sense of sight as the human’s primary sense for controlling the environment.72 The visual problem is particularly acute in French contexts, in which the term soundscape is translated as paysage sonore (sound, or sonorous, landscape).73 Neither is Schafer’s interest in the quantification of sound well-adapted to medieval ways of recording. In contrast, Cazelles uses the term to describe the qualities of soundscapes of narration in medieval texts which foreground language ‘of an often prelinguistic or nonlinguistic character’.74 My own use of the term, like that of Cazelles, focuses on how Anglo-Norman texts represent as well as produce soundscapes. The ways animal soundscapes create the conditions for culturally informed interpretations of sound offer a counterpoint to Schafer’s effort to record the sounds of specific environments, and raise further theoretical questions: how can medieval texts record the sounds of animals

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See Timothy Ingold, ‘Against Soundscape’, in Angus Carlyle (ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), pp. 10–13; and Ari Y. Kelman, ‘Rethinking the Soundscape: A Critical Genealogy of a Key Term in Sound Studies’, The Senses and Society, 5.2 (2015), pp. 212–34. Kelman calls the term ‘soundscape’ a vexing one: ‘one of the most useful and vexing terms offered to date has been Schafer’s “soundscape”. […] a “soundscape” seems to offer a way of describing the relationship between sound and place. It evokes the sonic counterpart of a landscape in which one sees trees or buildings, but hears wind, birds, or traffic. But what is a soundscape? Where is it? How is it bound or defined?’, p. 215. François Noudelmann, Penser avec les oreilles (Paris: Max Milo Éditions, 2019), p. 14. Robert Barbanti offers further reflection on landscapes of sound in ‘Listening to the Landscape for an Ecosophic Aesthetic’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), pp. 62–78. For the notion of the ‘paysage sonore’ in medieval French studies, see Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre. Soundscape in Early French Literature, p. 18, n. 52.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts and birds? How can we analyze these sounds, many of which express sonic phenomena in ways that shade into human forms of expression? As a theoretical tool, the soundscape is helpful in my discussion for considering the nonlinguistic evocation of ecologies that include humans, while not being restricted to them. What it is not is a ‘recording’ of sound in the modern sense. However, this is precisely what enables us to consider the soundscapes of medieval texts as meaningful in other ways. Sound in these works is about communication and the evocation of the environment as well as the representation of the animal in relation to the human. As many of my readings suggest, the soundscape offers a guiding principle for analyzing how sounds are recorded and interpreted in texts, but it does not act as a definitive rulebook for interpreting sonic phenomena more broadly. This book takes animal soundscapes as its starting point, but in the first two chapters I demonstrate how alternative terms for describing sonic environments are more appropriate to different types of medieval text. Terms such as the ‘sound milieu’ and ‘sound zone’ offer ways to delve deeply into specific aspects of sound that are eclipsed by the soundscape’s spatial focus, including relationality between agents, the ‘intimacy of sound’, sound as an event, form of energy or ‘emergence’, and the musicality of sound.75 Sarah Kay and François Noudelmann have drawn attention to one of the principal concerns of scholars working in sound studies, which is to resist ‘the dissolution of material sounding into its conceptual counterpart, and open our ears again to the profane realities of sound and noise’.76 They ask how we can situate ourselves within distinct sound milieus in order to pass beyond simple description and toward a reading of sounds as on an orchestral score, intersecting with ‘gender, race, and class, with an urban or rural setting’ and challenging anthropocentricism to demand responsibility for what animals might also hear and understand.77 By using new terms for the soundscapes of non-narrative texts, I emphasize the importance of taking into account the source of sounds, the media through which they are carried, and the ways that they are received and interpreted – a full phenomenology of sound. Alongside the terminology for soundscapes employed in my discussion, the work of several contemporary scholars working in studies of ecology and philosophy has contributed to the theoretical terminology I employ to interpret the sonic phenomena of animal soundscapes. I will briefly outline here how their work has influenced my own, leaving more detailed discussion of individual points for later chapters. In using

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Makis Solomos, ‘From Sound to Sound Space, Sound Environment, Soundscape, Sound Milieu or Ambiance…’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), pp. 95–109. ‘Introduction: Soundings and Soundscapes’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), pp. 1–9. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

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Introduction the theoretical readings of animal sounds developed in modern critical theory to think about sound in medieval literature, it is not my intention to simply ‘apply’ theory to medieval texts in anachronistic ways. Rather, I seek to create a dialogue between medieval and modern ways of conceptualizing animal sound. This dialogue is conducive to thinking about how medieval texts challenge modern ideologies, as well as how such texts may be understood using modern and contemporary methodologies. The first theorist who has had an influential effect on the theoretical direction of my thinking is companion-species theorist, biologist, and feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Haraway’s reconsideration of companion species theory in When Species Meet provides a key stimulus for the project as a whole. She argues that ‘too much weight has been loaded onto questions and idioms of language in considering the doings of the great variety of animals and people alike’.78 This overemphasis has made humans incapable of considering other species beyond the fixed frameworks of their own languages. In order to counteract this theoretical problem, Haraway’s work explores ways of thinking about humans and animals that emphasize their materiality and the semiotically connected networks of contact and relation in which they exist. She stresses that moments of encounter between species can never be simple, as philosophy and zoosemiotics have suggested they are.79 In contrast to overly simplistic accounts of cross-species encounter, Haraway proposes that any point of contact between agents from different species will be conceptually tangled, pushing simultaneously toward divergent interpretations of that contact.80 I suggest that Haraway’s reflection on the animal may be adapted to thinking about how Anglo-Norman texts represent animals and their sounds. Although communicated through languages such as French, English, or Latin, animal soundscapes nevertheless point toward communication between species based on the expression of more ambiguous forms of sound. The crisscrossed and overlapping networks of animal encounters examined by Haraway are explored in a different way in the work of Vicky Hearne, who considers how encounters between humans and domesticated animals – dogs, cats, horses, even zoo animals – produce different meanings according to the contrasting perspectives of species.81 Though Haraway and Hearne offer suggestive ways of thinking about communication as more than simply linguistic, neither scholar pays any serious attention to sound as a crucial mode of contact between humans and

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When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 234. This theme is discussed in detail by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 99–125. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (London: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 30–57. Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts animals. Instead, their discussions give primacy to sight, smell, and touch as key factors in such contact. In medieval texts, the sounds of animals pass through human languages as these are written on the manuscript page. Animal soundscapes always have a linguistic, and by association sonic, dimension. What I take from Haraway and Hearne is the importance of questioning the dominance of language as a framework for human and animal encounter, and of attending to the multiple networks of relation, often contingent on gendered power relations, that such encounters generate between humans and other species. These networks include linguistic and sonic communication, and have important consequences for the types of perspectives that animal soundscapes afford in Anglo-Norman texts. Finally, in thinking through the power dynamics of communication and representation in medieval soundscapes, my interpretation of animal sounds has been informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s Homo Sacer project considers how life qualifies, or fails to qualify, as human in competing political and cultural contexts. The Open makes an attempt to answer this question by discussing how a distinction between the human and the animal has shaped ‘the conception of human political life as an attempt to surpass animal existence’.82 The crux of Agamben’s argument is that such a distinction between human and animal is based on a process of human decision-making as humans create an ‘intimate caesura’ between human and animal located within ‘man’ himself. Agamben argues that such a division within man is the product of two evolving ‘anthropological machines’: one modern which excludes the animal within the human; the other pre-modern which figures the animal in human form.83 These anthropological machines create spaces of exception in which the caesura of human and animal is repeatedly revised. Agamben’s work is useful for the theoretical steer of this book because it provides a way of thinking about the broader implications of attempts to establish or destabilize the categories of human and animal in the Middle Ages, particularly when it comes to questions of power and sovereignty. His work enables a more precise consideration of how animal sounds participate in the revision of distinctions between humans and animals by calling into question the distinctiveness and exclusivity of human language:



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Emma Campbell, ‘Political Animals: Human/Animal Life in Bisclavret and Yonec’, Exemplaria, 25.2 (2013), p. 97. For Giorgio Agamben, see The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). The Open, pp. 13–16 and 33–8. Agamben considers voice and silence in his earlier work Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 54–65.

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Introduction What distinguishes man from animal is language, but this is not a natural given already inherent in the psychophysical structure of man; it is, rather, a historical production which, as such, can be properly assigned neither to man nor to animal. If this element is taken away, the difference between man and animal vanishes.84

Agamben’s concept of the ‘anthropological machine’ is useful to interrogate the ways that sounds disrupt a simple opposition between man and animal. The line drawn between humans and animals is also one that distinguishes overlapping forms of life in which both humans and animals may participate.85 As the passage above suggests, more attention needs to be applied to the historical contingency of sounds in discussions that ask how soundscapes themselves are produced. All of the primary texts in the chapters of this book were composed or translated in Anglo-Norman England from the early twelfth century to the later thirteenth century. They are all written in French (sometimes also in English). I take a comparative approach to texts from different genres – bestiaries, treatises, saints’ lives, and fables – in order to compare and contrast the representation of animal soundscapes in texts from different social and cultural milieus, and with varied purposes. My primary texts, the Bestiaire by Philippe de Thaon, the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth, an anonymous Life of Saint Francis, and the Fables by Marie de France, are all in different respects translations or adaptations of texts, either Latin or English, and they thus offer a snapshot of writing about animals at the beginnings of French as a literary language in England. I focus on the geographical area of England because the kinds of language contact found in Anglo-Norman texts raise questions of sound and language that have a bearing on the depiction and interpretation of animal soundscapes. Multilingualism in Anglo-Norman England also raises questions of linguistic intelligibility that are about more than a simple distinction between humans and animals. I trace and study the representation of the sounds of animals and birds in texts written in French and in English in order to highlight the linguistic complexity of some animal sounds and to explore questions of representation that may be specific to these texts. It is neither my intention to give an account of the historical evolution of the vocabularies used to express animal sounds, nor to provide a systematic overview of the ways that animals and birds are represented in medieval



84 85

The Open, p. 36. Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts texts.86 Questions of the historical evolution of terms for animal sounds are of course raised at various points in my discussion, but this book is less interested in providing descriptive accounts of animal sounds than in analyzing the function and effect of such sounds in specific contexts. Since the relationship between humans and animals is always to some extent open to reinterpretation in the moments of contact between species depicted in medieval texts, I have found it less important to classify what are assumed to be ‘fixed’ representations of sound and more important to attend to the conditions that enable the sounds or noises of humans, animals, and birds to signal multiple, often competing or overlapping, interpretations. My comparative approach enables me to consider how different types of text negotiate human and animal sonic encounter in particular ways, to certain, generically specific ends. In this way, I consider how genre informs the representation and function of animal sound in medieval texts, even if I am not aiming to identify particular genres with distinctive soundscapes that would apply to all expressions of sound in other texts from those genres. My methodology differs in important respects from the approaches to animal communication taken by scholars working in medieval animal studies. A number of scholars have pointed to the theme of animal language as one that opens up debate to discursive issues on the connections between humans and animals. For instance, in the Introduction to a recent collection on animal languages in the Middle Ages, Alison Langdon observes that ‘talking animals abound in medieval texts’.87 This volume brings a new perspective on previous studies, seeking to challenge assumptions of a reflexive anthropocentrism that laid the foundations for attitudes toward animals in this period by emphasizing the role of language in challenging anticipated distinctions between humans and other animals. As with my own analyses, Animal Languages in the Middle Ages is invested in an attentiveness to the real, living creature represented in medieval texts and to a ‘discourse with animals in something approaching their own terms’, including ‘gesture, touch, olfaction, posture, and other forms of embodied expression’.88 A number of chapters from this volume accordingly discuss the types of language used by humans to communicate with animals and birds, or elements of embodied animal expression that may be interpreted as a form of animal language.89 In contrast to this, I take noisy animals and birds, rather than talking animals, as my starting points to consider

86

89 87 88

My approach to sound complements more systematic studies of animal sounds in medieval literature and of the development of such sounds over time. For instance, Jean-Marie Fritz’s work offers a picture of how sounds are considered across medieval textual cultures. See Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age, p. 17. Animal Languages in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), p. 1. Ibid., p. 4. See Stanton, ‘Bark Like a Man’, pp. 91–112.

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Introduction how language is figured in broader soundscapes. My approach is instead to begin with sound and move to language from that specific vantage.90 I therefore emphasize how sound becomes implicated in communication not only with the human, but also between different species themselves, sometimes in ways that bypass human figures altogether. Finally, a word on the structure of this book. Broadly speaking, the first two chapters interrogate the complexity of sound representation, and indeed the ‘soundscape’ as a critical tool in non-narrative texts, that is, a bestiary and a treatise on language. These texts represent animal sound in ways that simultaneously reinforce and undermine conservative modes of interpretation as French is explored in Anglo-Norman textual cultures as a ‘literary’ language. Following this, the final two chapters embrace the full force of the soundscape as a theoretical tool in texts that convey animal sound in different types of narrative – a saint’s life and shorter fables. Readers will therefore encounter, in order of the chapters: forms of animal sound described in deliberately ambiguous ways in the bestiary; sounds in strong relation to human languages in the treatise; sounds directed by a famous medieval saint; and finally, the perspectives offered by distinguishing sound from animal discourse. In doing so, readers will gain a sense of the dynamics of sound as it underpins the functioning of language, rather than the other way round. In Chapter 1, I consider the early twelfth-century French Bestiaire by the earliest Anglo-Norman poet Philippe de Thaon. This text constructs multiple sound milieus associated with its chapters on various creatures. The sounds made by bestiary creatures, insofar as they are part of the literal depictions of their natures, are subject to established traditions of description and allegorical interpretation in this bestiary, inviting audiences to memorize and understand the meanings of creatures’ behaviors. Beginning with the lion’s cri (cry), I establish how the bestiary uses sound to establish modes of interpretation in the chapters on the lion and the siren. My emphasis on these scenes as sound milieus, rather than soundscapes, acknowledges the importance of networks of relation between agents in the bestiary, which the soundscape’s spatial and visual focus do not adequately highlight. This bestiary, at the beginnings of French in Anglo-Norman England, frames animal sounds with the act of remembering different languages and ancient meaning. I thus emphasize how the sounds of animals, alongside creatures such as the mandrake, are part

90

One key study of animal discourse in medieval texts is Jan M. Ziolkowski’s Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750–1150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). This should be set alongside Mann’s From Aesop to Reynard as foundational studies of the ways that animals are figured using human speech in texts from this period.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts of the interpretation of the natural world as memorable and meaningful, while also having the potential to disrupt fixed modes of interpretation.91 My second chapter examines the mid-thirteenth-century multilingual Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth, in which the types of words used to describe the qualities and sounds of animals and birds are incorporated into mnemonic lists for pedagogy. I examine the Tretiz as a sound zone: that is, a space of encounter between two or more languages and/ or species that frames points of contact within social and cultural networks constructed on asymmetrical relations of power. In the context of Anglo-Norman England, the textual sound zone is situated within a broader geographical, linguistic, and cultural contact zone that encompassed the three primary languages of England during this period: Latin, French, and English. The noises of animals pass through these languages, and also contribute to the development of specific linguistic subjectivities based on language acquisition. Man’s imitation of the wolf’s howling, or the owl’s hooting, in French and English works to form masculine, aristocratic subjectivities through the subordination of the animal. The words describing the sounds of animals and birds in this sound zone thus bolster a type of masculine subjectivity based on dominance and the creation of hierarchies that affirm the superiority of young gentlemen. Simultaneously, the language used to classify those animals and birds, and the words used to describe animal nonsensical sounds, are shown to be a fiction for these young gentlemen, or a series of decisions that are open to interpretation as they learn to mimic those very sounds. In Chapter 3, I discuss a late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Life of St Francis of Assisi – the Vye de Seynt Fraunceys, which is based on the orthodox version of Francis’ Life by Bonaventure. Taking my cue from Agamben’s The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, I suggest that the bleating of sheep and the singing of birds in the soundscapes of this Life express creaturely sound as orchestrated by the saint, thus associating bleating and birdsong with preaching and the singing of the liturgy. The communities formed by Francis’ sacramental project of shared worship demonstrate that sounds such as the sheep bleating at the altar, or the cricket that sings to Francis, are important signifiers for the depiction of different categories of life. Francis himself epitomizes a form-of-life that is exemplary, this is, a life to which other creatures and humans might aspire from their own bare form-of-life. By tutoring the animals and birds to praise, Francis becomes a preacher who can communicate in the pulpit but also the woods and fields. Through interaction with the saint, sheep and birds move up the created order, from a bare life in which bleating and birdsong express their essential

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I discuss the characteristics of creatures that may not be familiar to modern audiences, such as the siren and mandrake, in detail in Chapter 1.

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Introduction ability to praise God, toward a state in which their sounds become steeped in close interaction with Francis’ own form-of-life. My final chapter on the Fables by Marie de France (composed in the twelfth century and popular in the thirteenth) brings my focus to texts notorious for depicting animals speaking and talking to each other. Contrary to the texts discussed in earlier chapters, in which animals make noises and sounds that contrast (and sometimes intersect) with human language, the Fables represent animals and birds explicitly appropriating forms of utterance marked as human. Fables are bound in anthropocentric frameworks of interpretation that encourage readers to interpret human social and political systems in the figures and behaviors of animals and birds. However, the juxtaposition of animal sounds with utterance resembling human discourse invites a reconsideration of perspective and point of view in the animal soundscapes of individual fables. The sounds emitted by muzzles, for example, mirror human social, religious, and legal constructs such as the common law process of the hue and cry. They also offer a way of thinking through encounters between humans and animals based on domestication. The perspectives offered by mouths, muzzles, and beaks bridge the conceptual divide between humans and animals, situating animal sound on a continuum with human language. This book is thus an attempt to understand the linguistic, cultural, and ideological networks of relation that inform the depiction of animal soundscapes across a range of texts composed in Anglo-Norman England, both in narrative terms and for audience interpretation. It argues that points of contact and encounter, be they based on literary representation, the proximity of sound and language, or sonic encounters between human and animal, are implicated in networks of communication that disrupt fixed interpretations of text, language, and identity. Sonic contact between humans, animals, birds, and legendary creatures produces the conditions for a critical reassessment of divides between rational humans with language and irrational animals without. I contend that animal soundscapes challenge anthropocentric circuits of interpretation through the ways they teach readers about their own humanity or animality. Crying, roaring, barking, bleating, and singing have the potential to trouble human exceptionalism as well as to produce or reinforce it. In encouraging readers and audiences to reflect on their languages, animal sounds evoke the movement between categories of human and animal, and of animal and bird, by communicating the perspectives of beings with different vocal apparatuses. Such forms of movement and communication suggest that sonic contact in the soundscapes of medieval texts ultimately provides some of the most transformative depictions of contact and communication between species.

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1 Sound Milieus: Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary

M

edieval bestiaries are noisy texts. Creatures in Latin versions of the Physiologus, and in French bestiaries from the second half of the twelfth century onward, contribute to a tapestry of sound in these texts. This tapestry is a network of related sonic phenomena expressing the cries, brays, and songs that animals and birds produce. Although readers have often highlighted the visual appeal rather than the sonic qualities of bestiary soundscapes, creatures in illuminated Latin and French bestiaries do not just appeal to the visual sense.1 If we listen to bestiaries, we hear a number of sounds that situate creatures in relation to other creatures and to humans: the panther roars and emits a sweet smell to entice its prey; the chicks of the partridge recognize their estranged biological parents by their calls; the wild ass brays, signaling the arrival of the equinox. Creatures cry and sing, establishing literal relationships between themselves and others, while emitting sounds that suggest meanings for readers to use as spurs for meditation and memorization. Bestiaries interpret animal sounds in ways that frequently identify such phenomena with central tenets of Christian Scripture or moralizations. In this way they follow patterns of medieval thinking about animals that have influenced the popular interpretation of animal behavior ever since.2 The

1



2



See Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Other studies that have emphasized the visual appeal of bestiaries include: Christian Heck and Rémy Cordonnier et al. (eds), The Grand Medieval Bestiary: Animals in Illuminated Manuscripts (New York: Abbeville Press, 2012); Debra Hassig (ed.), The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Sarah Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). Other than in art history and literary criticism, bestiaries have inspired a range of analytical enquiries, including: in architecture, as in John R. Allen, Norman Sculpture and the Mediaeval Bestiaries (London: Whiting and Co., 1887); in natural history, as in Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckworth, 1991); and in literary history, as in Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), and Willene B. Clark and Meredith T. McMunn

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Bible was subject to a four-fold model of interpretation from the third and fourth centuries onward, and bestiaries generally imitated this in applying literal, allegorical, tropological (or moral), and eschatological interpretations to the creatures and stones that feature in their pages.3 These layers of interpretation included references to Christ and his Church, drawing on episodes of biblical history. The bestiaries reorganized chapters of the late antique Physiologus and integrated supplementary material, such as etymologies and observational explanations for animal behaviors, thus giving the texts a broad appeal as compendia of all sorts of knowledge about the animate world. The collation of various types of knowledge in these texts emphasized the interpretation of the names and natures of creatures as examples of ‘visible, temporal phenomena that could point toward invisible, eternal realities’.4 As such, the roar of the panther represents Christ’s incarnation drawing his followers to him, the calls of the partridge those of Mother Church, and the bray of the wild ass the lament of the devil when he loses the converted.5 Taken as a whole, animal soundscapes in bestiaries thus invite readers or listeners to imagine an array of natural phenomena, and to bring to mind encounters with real and imaginary creatures. Alongside the literal or narrative sounds of creatures, bestiaries represent the sounds of animal names and their etymologies through modes of interpretation that cross the boundaries between nature and culture, human and animal, and different languages.6 Readers of these texts may have been monastic or lay, and vernacular bestiaries have a particular role to play in the learning of human languages. Mary Carruthers observes



3



4



5



6

(eds), Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1989). The exegetical interpretations are inherited from the Physiologus (c. fourth century onward). See Physiologus, ed. and trans. Michael J. Curley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. ix; and Physiologos: Le bestiaire des bestiaires, ed. and trans. Arnaud Zucker (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2004), pp. 19–20. For the exegetical senses, see: Kay, Animal Skins, pp. 7–13; Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Literary Genre and Animal Symbolism’, in L. A. J. R. Houwen (ed.), Animals and the Symbolic in Art and Literature (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1977), pp. 1–23; Willene B. Clark (ed.), A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary: Commentary, Art, Text and Translation (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), p. 22; and Emma Campbell, ‘Sound and Vision: Bruno Latour and the Languages of Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire’, Romanic Review, 111.1 (2020), pp. 128–50. Sarah Kay, ‘Post-human Philology and the Ends of Time in Medieval Bestiaries’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 5.4 (2014), p. 475. Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 149, 152, and 145 respectively. For related themes, see Sarah Kay, ‘Rigaut de Berbezilh, the Physiologus Theobaldi, and the Opening of Animal Inspiration’, Reinardus: Yearbook of the International Reynard Society, 28 (2016), 81–99.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary that what the bestiary taught medieval readers was ‘the systematic forming of “pictures” that would stick in the memory and could be used, like rebuses, homophonies, imagines rerum, and other sorts of notae, to mark information’.7 As an exercise in retaining the significations of sounds and words related to animals, creatures’ vocalizations are often linked to the expression of their names in vernacular bestiaries, and thus to human languages. The development of the bestiary as a genre included the translation of Latin versions of the Physiologus into vernacular languages such as Old French, a process through which the interpretation of animals and the sounds they were thought to make were carried over into languages other than Latin. The bestiary I focus on here is the twelfth-century verse Bestiaire (c. 1121–35) by the Anglo-Norman writer Philippe de Thaon.8 Philippe is the earliest French-language author whose name and work have come down to us, and precious little is known about him. He wrote a Comput (a poetic guide to the metrical science of computus, or calendrical writing), and possibly a translation of Sibylline prophecies known as Le Livre de Sibile.9 His bestiary is transmitted in three manuscripts, which bind the Bestiaire with texts from a range of genres. In the oldest and longest version of the Bestiaire, coming to a total of 3194 lines, the bestiary is dedicated to Adeliza de Louvain, who became the second wife of King Henry I of England in 1121.10 7



8



9





10

Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 160. My primary source for the Bestiaire is the edition provided by Luigina Morini in ‘Il Bestiaire di Philippe de Thaün’, in Bestiari Medievali (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1996). All line numbers are taken from this text and will be indicated in parentheses following quotations. Page numbers are provided for Latin rubrics. All translations from this text are my own. A more conservative edition is offered in Bestiaire, ed. Ian Short (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2018) (Plain Texts, 20). For further information on Philippe de Thaon, see M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 18–26; Rupert T. Pickens, ‘The Literary Activity of Philippe de Thaün’, Romance Notes, 12 (1970), pp. 208–12; and Thomas O’Donnell, ‘The Gloss to Philippe de Thaon’s Comput and the French of England’s Beginnings’, in Thelma Fenster and Carolyn P. Collette (eds), The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), p. 15. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. V. (L). The first part of this manuscript contains the Bestiaire and the Comput and dates from the second half of the twelfth century. The MS was at one point owned by the Cistercian Holmcultram Abbey in Cumbria. In another later version, Oxford, Merton College Library, MS 249 (O), Philippe’s Bestiaire is rededicated to Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204). The only surviving Continental copy is now in Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gl. Kgl. S. 3466 8o (C). For general information, see Maria Careri, Christina Ruby, and Ian Short (eds), Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au XIIe siècle (Rome: Viella, 2011).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The arrangement of the Bestiaire, which hierarchically lists animals (mostly quadrupeds and reptiles), then birds, followed by stones, is comparable to the Latin Dicta Chrysostomi, although the subjects are closer to the B-Isidore bestiary format, incorporating extracts from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.11 To add to its credentials as a work composed by the earliest Anglo-Norman poet, the Bestiaire is also the earliest extant version of a bestiary in French, thus offering a snapshot of the early vernacularization of the Physiologus tradition.12 Interactions with bestiary texts in general produce a reflection on the nature of the human that passes through a tactile encounter with animality.13 The Bestiaire is multimedia in nature, drawing on sensory perception – sight, sound, and touch – to generate meaning between text and illustrations, and between codex and reader. It is also multilingual, incorporating Latin rubrics that enjoin the reader to visualize the creatures depicted in the text or in accompanying illustrations. The rubrics emphasize the act of visualization by inviting readers to see the image of the creature described, whether or not illustrations actually feature in the manuscripts.14 This process involves a transition from French back to Latin, and the memorization of meaning across different languages.15 The rubrics are particularly evident in sections discussing the lion and the mandrake, which make cross-linguistic contact part of a more complex series of sonic relations between audiences and bestiary creatures. As I show below, the chapter on the lion is written predominantly in French but contains a number of Latin rubrics introducing such subjects as the meaning of the lion’s name, the lion killing the ass, a description of the lion’s tail, how the lion is depicted above man in an illustration, the relationship between the lion, the cockerel, and the cart, and brief explanations of the canonical hours encapsulated in the cockerel’s crowing. The text thus depicts See Kay, Animal Skins, p. 159; Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users, pp. 148 and 209; and Theobaldus, Theobaldi ‘Physiologus’, ed. P. T. Eden (Leiden: Brill, 1972), p. 3. 12 Fragments of an Old English version of the Physiologus survive. See Albert S. Cook, and James H. Pitman (eds), The Old English Physiologus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1821). A complete Middle English version of the Physiologus survives in one manuscript. See Hanneke Wirtjes (ed.), The Middle English Physiologus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 13 Kay has demonstrated how seeing or touching bestiary manuscripts with punctures or holes in the parchment creates a symbiotic loop through which the human reader is enjoined to consider their own skin and the bestiary page. See ‘Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on Folios 61v–62r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20’, Exemplaria, 26.2/3 (2014), pp. 127–47. 14 Illustrations are present in two of the three manuscripts that transmit the text: C and O. Spaces are left for images in L, but they were never executed. 15 Morini, Bestiari Medievali, pp. 114–28.

11

38

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary bestiary creatures for interpretation and memorization in ways that emphasize the multiplicity of forms of representation, including visionary and multilingual modes. When animals, birds, and humans make sound in the Bestiaire, it is usually vocalized sound. These sounds are encapsulated in three key forms of vocalization that will be fully explored in this chapter: the depiction of creatures crying through the French noun cri or verb crier; the expression of animal names through etymological association; and singing. Some sounds are therefore nonlinguistic but communicative, while others rely on close attention to language itself and its connection to animals and birds across the spectrum of bestiary creatures. To take two examples, when the antelope finds itself trapped in a bush by its curved horns, it cries out, unwittingly informing the human hunter of its presence (787–92), and the asp avoids enchantment from the damnable sound of a human magician by pressing one ear to the ground and covering the other with its tail (1615–80). These encounters between bestiary agents communicate the danger of sounds for the creatures involved. Other chapters of the Bestiaire discussing legendary or hybrid creatures, such as sirens, incorporate depictions of singing and sound-making that pose a danger to human auditors. A few birds of the skies, such as the nicticorax and the phoenix, sing in ways that emphasize the allegorical value of such sonic phenomena. They are items of memorization, meditation, and warning – memoria as praxis.16 The sounds of bestiary creatures are instrumental in expressing relations between bestiary agents, as well as how such connections provide keys for specific types of memorization and interpretation.17 The memory of animal sound is related to the learning of languages, and produces communicative encounters between creatures, including humans. My purpose in this chapter is to show that in texts such as the Bestiaire, the depiction of animal soundscapes composed of nonlinguistic or prelinguistic expressions such as crying, braying, and singing is just as important for bestiary interpretation as the visual impression left by bestiary creatures. However, to speak of individual soundscapes for specific bestiary creatures is not necessarily a true reflection of how sound works in these texts. While the notion of the ‘soundscape’ is useful for thinking about the range of vocalizations in bestiaries as a corpus, the scapes of soundscapes refer back to a visual metaphor – the landscape – and to the practice of recording the sounds present in any given environment at any given



16



17

Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 15. See also Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age: Le versant épistémologique (Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2000), pp. 23–34. Fritz, Paysages Sonores, pp. 193–209.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts time.18 Bestiaries are not accurate recordings of the sonic environments in which the texts were produced or conceptualized, such as medieval monastic workshops, farmyards, or hunting grounds. Likewise, the Bestiaire features creatures that, in contrast to domestic or native beasts and birds, were exotic for medieval readers in Anglo-Norman England. The sounds attributed to them are therefore significant less for their realism than for the ways they generate certain responses and meanings within the sonic environments in which they interact with other agents. Above all, sound is evoked as a literal and literary presence instigating figurative meanings through allegorical interpretation. Thinking of sound in terms of relations, rather than scapes, encourages a deeper reflection on how humans and animals speak to each other in ways that do not mimic modern notions of recording. By considering sound relations in the Bestiaire in terms of sound milieus rather than soundscapes, I disentangle some of the communicative relations that might be overlooked by using the latter term. Drawing on Uexküll’s notion of umwelt (‘worldaround’, also translated as ‘milieu’), the sound milieu more accurately describes the immersive in-betweenness (‘mi-lieu’) of sounds, emphasizing what produces sound, who hears the sound, and the emergence of a vibration that establishes a relationship between different agents.19 In the Bestiaire sound expresses relationality, both literal and figurative, which highlights power relations. In the examples I have chosen from the Bestiaire, notably the chapters on the lion, the siren, and the mandrake, the sound milieus within which these creatures interact with humans or other species generate affective responses that reinforce the connections between literal and figurative meanings. Through the act of hearing or listening to the cries, brays, or singing of bestiary creatures, these sounds reveal the relations of encounter associated with them and the importance of sonic phenomena for ideas of memory, identity, and encounter produced in relation to the animal. I examine in what follows how different sound milieus in bestiary chapters connect sound with encounter and memorization, offering audiences access to literal and eschatological forms of knowledge, while revealing that sound milieus are sites for the expression of relation, alongside audience interpretation and response.



18



19

A full discussion of this theoretical problem can be found in the Introduction, pp. 24–6. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 29. My conceptualization of sound milieus is influenced by Makis Solomos, who discusses the sound milieu, and terminology for sound, in ‘From Sound to Sound Space, Sound Environment, Soundscape, Sound Milieu or Ambiance…’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), p. 103.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary The lion’s sound milieu The Old French noun cri is the most common word describing sound in the Bestiaire. The same word is used widely in modern French to express a range of sonic phenomena – a cry, shout, scream, shriek, clamor, proclamation, roar, and so on. The cri is important in French for describing sounds that bypass simple oppositions between noun and verb, or the dichotomy of articulate and inarticulate. The cri is situated in embodied forms of sonic expression and interpretation, ‘operating in words and ideas, by the way it breathes life into, and intensifies, verbal flow’.20 In much the same way that the cri in modern French might express a piercing sound, loud speech, a collective opinion, or the cry of an animal, the medieval senses of this word express sound as an affective phenomenon, not constrained to human language, that must be heard and interpreted. The cri is often used jointly with Old French verbs, such as faire (to do), geter (to throw) or lever (to raise). A cri can thus be made, fabricated, hurled out, or brought about in another form. Where the cri acts as a sonic marker in Old French texts, it creates networks of relationality and draws attention to sounds creating relations between subjects and objects. The cri in the Bestiaire is crucial to understanding how sound milieus trigger modes of memorization and interpretation. The term encompasses a broad range of sounds in this bestiary that are specific to particular creatures. By extension, these sounds become associated with the figurative meanings developed in the sound milieus of different chapters of the bestiary. Various animals, birds, hybrid creatures, and objects are described as emitting a cri in response to events or actions prompted by themselves or other creatures. The noun ‘cri’ as a sonic descriptor for vocalization is included in descriptions in the following episodes, some of which have already been mentioned: the sounds of the cart and the lion in the chapter on the lion (224 and 381); the roar of the panther (480); the cry of the antelope (789); the screech of the mandrake (1593); the braying of the onager or wild ass (1846, described a few lines earlier with the verb rechaner, ‘to bray’); as well as the cries of the phoenix (2271), and the hoopoe (2604). The verbal equivalent, crier, features in the chapters on the lion (367), antelope (788), onager (1877), perdrix (1981), and nicticorax, or night raven (2795). The first occurrence of cri in the Bestiaire is in the first chapter, where it is used to describe the roar of the lion and the sound of the wheels of a

20

[‘dans les mots et les idées, par sa manière de souffler, d’intensifier le flux verbal’], François Noudelmann, Penser avec les oreilles (Paris: Max Milo Éditions, 2019), p. 86. See also Alain Marc, Écrire le cri: Sade, Bataille, Maïkowski (Orléans: L’Écarlate, 2000).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts cart.21 These sounds are connected in both episodes to the expression of the lion’s emotional state. In the first instance, the lioness gives birth to a dead cub, after which the lion arrives and cries out, an action described through the related verb crier: tant veit entur e crie | que al terz jur vent a vie (he goes around and cries so much that on the third day [the cub] comes to life, 367–8). An extra statement explaining the eschatological significance of this sound is provided, in which the cry is now the noun cri: Par le cri del leün la vertud Deu pernum par quei resuscitad Crist enfern despuillat.

(Bestiaire, 381–4)

[By the cry of the lion we understand the strength of God, through which he came back to life; Christ harrowed Hell.]

The interpretation of the cry of the lion as the strength of God, linked to the Harrowing of Hell, associates this sound with New Testament motifs that would have been familiar to Philippe’s audience. Elsewhere detailed reference is made to the basic tenets of Christian Scripture, including to Solomon (527), Jeremiah (1186), and Deuteronomy (2148). This wide-reaching biblical framework provides the context for the literal details of the lion’s vocalization, namely the anguish expressed at the sight of his dead cubs. The Bestiaire demonstrates that the power of the cri lies in the overlap of multiple interpretations, in which layers of literal and allegorical meaning are superimposed. Hearing the anguished cry of the lion is thus a moment of affective encounter between the human reader and the bestiary lion, one that conjures both the emotional root of the sound and its scriptural significance in ways that readers can interpret and learn to understand. The lion’s cry forms a sound milieu that brings human readers and bestiary creatures into intellectual and imaginative relation, highlighting how a single sound expresses the enmeshment of creaturely distress and the embodied suffering of Christ. This form of relationality is not limited to the lion. The same chapter presents the white cockerel, who the lion fears alongside the sound of the cart, as another part of a complex network of interpretation, connecting a visual metaphor for a noisy fowl with emotion and the demonstration of prophetic knowledge in the French verse and the Latin rubrics that cut across the text. This linguistic divergence demonstrates how sonic markers in the Bestiaire are not limited to one human language, but instead map out connections across

21

For further information on the lion, see McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 137.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary linguistic registers. In the Latin rubrics the infamously noisy cockerel signifies sanctos Dei (holy God), and in the French verse the cockerel represents the humes de sainte vie (men of holy life) who predict Christ’s death in Gethsemane: Li leüns blanc coc crent de char le cri ki en vent; e si ad itel sort que a uilz uvert dort. E iceo entendez es furmes que veez. Hic pingitur leo et quomodo album gallum et strepitum plaustri pavet. Leo iste Cristum significat et gallus sanctos Dei, et plaustrum evangelistas. Li blanc coc signefie humes de sainte vie ki ainz que Deu fu mort annuncierent sa mort que il forment cremait sulunc que hom estait.

(Bestiaire, 223–34)

[The lion fears the white cockerel and the cry that comes from the cart. And he also has this characteristic: he sleeps with his eyes open. Understand (lit. ‘hear’) this by the form that you see. Here is depicted the lion and in the same manner the white cockerel and the noise of the cart. This lion signifies Christ, the cockerel holy men of God, and the cart the evangelists. The white cockerel signifies holy men who, before he died, announced God’s death, which he very much feared as he was a man.]

A movement between French and Latin interpretations of the same sound marker establishes how the sounds of the cockerel and the cart reach across literal and figurative senses, in the same way as the lion’s cri. The sense of hearing is prevalent in the French verse as the verb entendre (to hear or understand) connects aurality with interpretation. After associating the cockerel’s song with St Peter, the passage extolls the virtues of the monastic liturgy, listing matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and ending with silencium (glossed in French as silence, 297–8). While this call to contemplation invites readers to follow suit, there is nothing silent about the sound milieu as it is defined in this section. The allegories that accompany the cockerel’s crowing introduce strong doctrinal messages that resonate on various levels. The cockerel’s crowing causes the fear of the lion (the literal sense), signifies the dread of human sinners who fear God (the moral message), and conveys the anxiety of Christ who feared the experience of death in human form (the eschatological reading). 43

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The juxtaposition of Latin and French interpretations of the cri adds to the complexity of this sound milieu by articulating bestiary interpretations through two audibly distinct languages. Hearing and memorizing sounds and their meanings in French and Latin offers readers the possibility of learning vocabulary, rhyme, and basic poetic structure, as well as reminding readers of important components of religious life. The sound of the cart in the same passage as the cockerel gives rise to another series of interpretations based on the signification of its own cri. Taking this sonic marker away from the avian realm and toward technology, the four wheels of the cart evoke a chariot and signify the four evangelists, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, thus implying the mobility of the gospels. This cri is also involved in a process of translation from the Latin strepitum (noise). The lion’s fear of the cart’s sound is identified with the suffering of Christ at the moment of his crucifixion: li criz signefie | la mort del fiz Marie (the cry signifies the death of the son of Mary, 321–2). The lion’s suffering, through the expression of its fear, thus only makes sense once the audience of the text has understood the literal description of the cart and joined this to the allegorical and eschatological interpretations in both languages. The cri brings an animate object to life, simultaneously evoking the memory of the story of Christ through a mnemonic device. The use of a very narrow range of sonic markers to describe a variety of sounds in the chapter on the lion is an illustration of the capaciousness of sounds as they are presented in the Bestiaire. A narrow terminology for the sounds of the lion, the cockerel, the cart, and even the evangelists, contrasts with the specificity of sound markers in the Latin traditions that informed French bestiaries. In the Theobaldi Physiologus the father lion rouses his cubs with a roar: sed dans rugitum pater eius suscitat illum (then his father wakes him with a roar, and in this way he comes to life, 7). However, the Latin B-Isidore version of the Physiologus describes the lion breathing into the faces of his cubs: donec veniens pater eius die tercio insufflet in faciem eius et vivificet eum (until the father, coming to them on the third day, breathes on their faces and revives them).22 Finally, in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies the lion is described as roaring or growling: fremitu vel rugitu.23 The cri in Philippe’s Bestiaire confuses different associations for the lion’s roar rather than offering referential precision. This may be explained by the fact that Philippe’s French is at a relatively early stage of development as a written language, but also by the applicability

22 23

‘Il “Fisiologo” latino: “versio” Bis’, in Morini, Bestiari Medievali, p. 12. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XII.ii.5, p. 251. For all Latin quotations from this source, see The Latin Library (online source).

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary of the cri to describe a range of sounds through a single syllable. The cri draws no necessary distinction between different categories of human, animal, or object sound. It associates the cries of living creatures such as the lion with the sounds of the cart and, implicitly, with the cries of human beings, dead or alive. The relevant distinctions are made not only on the level of literal sound, but through the various interpretations of sounds, inviting audiences to remember that it signifies the strength of God when Christ harrowed Hell (the cry of the lion), the holy men who prophesied Christ’s death (the crowing of the cockerel), and the evangelists (the creaking of the cart). In this way, the bestiary’s project is an ambitious one, as it calls on readers to do much of the interpretive work between episodes, which are disconnected in the precise descriptions of the source material. The lion holds pride of place at the beginning of this bestiary, a placement that emphasizes his role as King of Beasts.24 Sonic markers in the Bestiaire such as the cri are juxtaposed with etymological enquiry in this first chapter as distinct ways of drawing attention to thinking, and memorizing, through the ears. Emphasizing the importance of etymology, the Bestiaire observes that ceo que en griu est leün | en fraunceis ‘rei’ ad num (that which is lion in Greek has the name of ‘king’ in French, 25–6). Here, as elsewhere in Philippe’s bestiary, etymological analysis is part of an enquiry into how language and the sounds of words convey truth, an enquiry that applies to the full diversity of God’s creation. To name a lion in French is to gain access to the memory of the natural history of the ancients. The bestiary leaves a small gap of interpretation here, not embarking on the detailed etymological analysis given in texts such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. Instead, the text posits a residue of resonant sonic meaning over time, where a Greek word for lion now means ‘king’ in French. Clarity is not Phillipe’s concern; rather the etymology serves as a way of remembering one’s Greek. It simultaneously confirms that the meanings of animal names resound across the ages, and perhaps foreshadow the story of Christ, a king in his own right. Linguistic meaning is highlighted in the initial address of the Bestiaire in the Prologue preceding the chapter on the lion, which forges similar connections between an ancient language and the name of the text’s dedicatee. It does so while depicting the text as vocalized by a human author and heard by a human audience. In this case the language is Hebrew.

24

By way of comparison, the lion king Noble is the ruling sovereign in the continental Roman de Renart. See Gabriel Bianciotto, Naoyuki Fukumoto, Noboru Harano, and Satoru Suzuki (eds), Le Roman de Renart (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005). The lion is also ruler of the animal kingdom in the Fables by Marie de France, discussed below in Chapter 4.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The act of listening is therefore connected to spiritual improvement and a return to prelapsarian perfection. The Prologue begins with a statement in Latin emphasizing that the patron’s name, Aliz (Adeliza), comes from Hebrew, and means ‘praise’.25 It then enjoins the reader to listen to her name carefully in French: Aliz si nons est, loënge de Dé est; en ebreu, en verté, est Aliz laus de Dé.

(Bestiaire, 15–18)

[‘Aliz’ is her name, that is ‘praise of God’; for in Hebrew, truly, ‘Aliz’ is ‘praise of God’.]

The etymological thinking here draws out multilingual connections between sound and translation from the ancient language of Hebrew, a language given special value because of its associations with Judeo-Christian Scripture, into French, possibly for the first time. To hear the French name ‘Aliz’ is to remember an ancient language, and to better understand the loenge (praise, glory, or jubilation) that it connotes. The interpretation of the queen’s name encapsulates the primary purpose of the bestiary, which is the understanding of God’s creation through an informed reading of its creatures, and the memorization of various words, images, and messages associated with them. The reader hears a name and remembers its meaning. In this way, the dedicatee’s name establishes a connection to Hebrew that is interrogated further in relation to Latin and French. These languages are shown to continue to signify the types of knowledge and divine truths available to humans when they shared primal innocence with the other creatures in Eden, although now the route to meaning is convoluted rather than linear.26 Descriptions of names translate the meanings of an animal king and a human queen into meaningful language at this early juncture in the text. As a form of marking sounds that humans may imitate, etymological analysis focuses the human capacity to name God’s creation, beginning with Adeliza and moving to the lion. Readers thus glimpse a sovereign truth made visible and aural through the sounds of words. The Bestiaire carefully juxtaposes this rational and logical form of sonic marker with the affective

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26

[‘Est nomen vere quod recte cumvenit ex re. Hebraice dictum est. Aelis laus est Dei’], Morini, Bestiari medievali, p. 112. A pertinent discussion of this theme is offered by Susan Crane in Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 69–100. See my discussion of this theme in the Introduction, pp. 7–9.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary and embodied forms expressed in sounds such as the cri. The primary difference between naming something and describing its literal sound is that the types of sounds emitted by animals such as the lion, or objects like the cart, may bypass direct reference to human grammatical or linguistic structures. Etymological enquiry cannot achieve this in the same way. By emphasizing sounds as nonlinguistic, as well as linguistic, phenomena, signifying in alternative ways, the lion’s cri and its name become sonic markers that reach out across the four conventional modes of bestiary interpretation. In doing so, these markers cement into the reader’s memory concrete items of knowledge, references, and connections between bestiary creatures and their meanings. They define the lion’s sound milieu as multilingual and relational in ways that reveal how simple expressions, such as the cri, encapsulate a medieval epistemological understanding of embodiment and affective relations between animals, objects, and humans.

Siren song as absent referent Singing acts as a counterpoint to sonic markers like the cri and etymological analyses, because the musical or melodic action it describes places sound in a different context to the cries of creatures such as the lion. After the cri and crier, the second most frequent word describing sound in the Bestiaire is the Old French verb canter (to sing). This is another term that encompasses both human and animal sound-making, and contains the residue of nonlinguistic sound. Primarily used to describe the vocalizations of avian and hybrid figures, the bestiary features creatures singing in ways that link bird-like qualities with music and melodic expression. Canter describes the vocal action of the cockerel (249), the serena (siren, 1362), and the nicticorax bird singing through a storm (2798). The siren is an important case study for this discussion on sound because, in contrast to the sounds of the lion, the cockerel, and the cart discussed above, her song is dangerous for human listeners. What happens to a bestiary sound that is marked as an aural threat to those who hear it? How do such sounds bring into question the bestiary’s strategy for identifying sonic phenomena as items for memorization? Siren song in the Bestiaire is not a stimulus for human spiritual rejuvenation but the cause of literal and allegorical suffering because it lures sailors to their deaths. The disturbing quality of the siren’s song is that it produces a stupor in those who hear it, and thus deprives them of their cognitive capacities. In response to this, the conventional senses of bestiary interpretation do not function in the same ways as those seen at work in the chapter on the lion. Whereas the various sonic markers for the lion’s sound 47

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts and name emphasize a positive eschatological interpretation that readers might themselves emulate, the bestiary interprets the siren’s nature without reference to Scripture. Instead, the implication is that humans, particularly sailors, should avoid her. The interpretation of the siren’s song is rendered more complex by the illustrations that accompany Philippe’s text in some manuscripts, because the images frame the siren as a sexualized creature in ways that seem to override her sonic prowess. In order to understand this process I draw on the work of Carol Adams, who uncovers the cloaking of the violence inherent in patriarchal gender systems that are founded on the erasure of agency through an obsession with misogyny and masculinity: ‘through the function of the absent referent, Western culture constantly renders the material reality of violence into controlled and controllable metaphors’.27 The erasure of sound in bestiary illustrations works in comparable ways to the erasure of female agency in Adams’ discussion of meat eating, as bestiary illustrations deprive the siren of her most alluring, identifiable, and powerful characteristic: her voice. Siren song is a motif that can be traced back to Classical texts. The Physiologus reinterprets it in exoticized terms, describing sirens as monstra maris (monsters of the sea), and depicting them causing shipwreck and peril for sailors through the overpowering sweetness of their voices.28 The hybridity of the siren is also a standard feature of writing about these creatures. Even before the full development of the Latin and French bestiary traditions in the twelfth century, sirens provided food-for-thought for medieval scholars interested in connections between creatures and music. To take a key example, Isidore of Seville imagined a soundscape constituting a trio of mythical musical sirens, explaining in his Etymologies that they represent prostitutes: People imagine three sirens who were part maidens, part birds, having wings and talons; one of them would make music with her voice, the second with a flute, and the third with a lyre. They would draw sailors, enticed by the song, into shipwreck. In truth, however, they were harlots, who, because they would seduce passers-by into destitution, were imagined as bringing shipwreck upon them. They were said to have had wings and talons because sexual desire both flies and wounds.29

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28 29

The Sexual Politics of Meat, 3rd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 22. According to Adams, meat-eating in modern society is encased in acts that protect the conscience of the meat-eater (usually men in her case studies), while rendering women as absent referents closely aligned with animals. Theobaldi ‘Physiologus’, p. 60. [‘Sirenas tres fingunt fuisse ex parte virgines, ex parte volucres, habientes alas et ungulas: quarum una voce, altera tibiis, tertia lyra canebant. Quae inlectos navigantes sub cantu in naufragium trahebant. Secundum veritatem autem meretrices fuerunt, quae transeuntes quoniam deducebant ad egestatem, his

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary This passage underscores the depiction of sirens as sexual predators with three distinct types of musical sound: musica harmonica (made by the voice), musica organica (made by blowing), and musica ritmica (made by the impulse of the fingers). These distinctions were commonly used in medieval music theory, and implicitly support the tripartite conceptualization of sirens.30 In medieval treatises on music, the type of sirens described by Isidore were noted for their role at the beginnings of music itself, musica being named from moys, water, and sicox, wind: ‘music was discovered by certain Greeks from the reverberation of wind and water in a certain hollow rock situated a long way off at sea, in which the Sirens were thought to be’.31 The polyphonic trio of sirens stands as a striking expression of sexual, bodily, and aural desire, a trope that demonstrates how ‘medieval writers often marked beautiful but immoral music as feminine’.32 Debra Hassig further suggests that these female hybrids become creatures whose relationship with sound and noise lends them power over earthly and heavenly life and death, represented as it is through the sounds that they make.33 In Philippe’s Bestiaire the siren is a deadly creature with human form from the head to navel. She has the feet of a falcon and the tail of a fish, although different manuscripts contain illustrations that render some of these features ambiguous.34 In terms of sound, whereas the lion’s cri draws attention to its emotional state in parallel to the dread experienced by Christ, the depiction of the siren’s song establishes a contrasting image



30



31



32



33 34

fictae sunt inferre naufragia. Alas autem habuisse et ungulas, quia amor et volat et vulnerate’], The Etymologies, XI.iii.30–1, p. 245. The eleventh-century music theorist Aribo Scholasticus likewise defined music in relation to these mythical hybrid figures, noting that sirens lured mariners onto the rocks ‘by the mixture of harmonic, organic, and rhythmic music’, Aribo, De musica, ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1951), pp. 36–7. St Emmeram Anonymous, De musica mensurata: The Anonymous of St. Emmeram, ed. and trans. Jeremy Yudkin (Indiana: Bloomington, 1990), pp. 66–7. Elizabeth E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 239 and 267, and ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly while the Fowler Deceives the Bird: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages’, Music and Letters, 87.2 (2006), pp. 187–211; and Kay, Animal Skins, pp. 15–21. Medieval Bestiaries, p. 114. For further discussion of sirens in medieval texts, see McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 167; Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, pp. 104–15; and Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, ‘La Sirène et l’(Ono)centaure dans le Physiologus grec et latin et dans quelques bestiaires: le texte et l’image’, in Baudouin Van den Abeele (ed.), Bestiaires médiévaux: nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 2005), pp. 169–70.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts that highlights apprehensions about music, song, and feminine sexuality. The description of the siren in the Bestiaire begins with the noisy image of how she sings through a storm. She is a single creature, rather than part of a trio. The ‘music’ that she makes falls into the category of vox harmonica, being produced by the vocal apparatus, and not by instruments. Her song is described as singing and weeping (from the verbs canter and plurer), which reinforces her agency as a creature whose power far surpasses human abilities: Serena en mer ante, cuntre tempeste cante e plure en bel tens, itels est sis talens; e de femme ad faiture entresque a la ceinture, e les pez de falcun e cue de peissun. Quant se volt dejuër dunc chante alt e cler; si dunc l’ot notuniers ki najant vait par mers, la nef met en ubli, senes est endormi.

(Bestiaire, 1361–74)

[The siren dwells in the sea, sings over a storm, and weeps in good weather; such is her desire. She has the figure of a woman up to the waist, and the feet of a falcon, and the tail of a fish. When she wants to amuse herself, she sings high and clear. In this way the sailors, rowing on the sea, hear it. They forget about the boat and immediately are asleep.]

The siren is a powerful manipulator of her sound milieu as she controls the function of sound in the narrative of her behavior. She exercises the potential to cause great human suffering to those who hear her singing. The depiction of the siren’s song in this bestiary therefore contributes to a sound milieu in which humans are in no way the dominant species. Her song evokes the potential human suffering that is the effect of a moment of encounter between human and legendary creature, making the satisfaction of aural pleasure a threat to male subjectivity; the sailors hear it ‘high and clear’, instantly forgetting their boat and falling asleep. Their potential suffering is evoked through the implication that they will forget their journey, or teleological purpose, and once asleep, be easily drowned or controlled by the siren. The Bestiaire anticipates this reversal of control in the networks of relation between humans and creatures and attempts to redirect the song of the siren away from human ears (and eyes) in various ways. 50

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary Even before this bestiary provides its own interpretation of the siren’s ‘nature’, the text begins to draw readers away from the ambiguities associated with song and toward the safer certainty of the visual arena. The description of the siren’s behavior and characteristics is followed by a call to the reader to hold the significance of this creature’s nature in mind before reading the bestiary’s interpretation: Aiez en remembrance, | ceo est signefiance (Keep this in mind, this is the meaning, 1375–6). This call to memory is followed by a Latin rubric that appeals not to sound, but to sight: Hic serena pingitur et facies eius ut mulieris usque ad umbilicum, pennas et pedes volucris habens et caudam piscis (Here the siren is depicted, how she is like a woman to the navel, having the wings and feet of a bird, and the tail of a fish). As in the chapter on the lion, the rubric here promotes a multilingual and multisensory interpretation of the creature depicted by offering a summary of the French verse. The words carry the same description as the French verse and provide readers with key vocabulary in Latin with which to situate their reading of the French text. By repeating the description of the siren’s form, the text also accentuates her visual characteristics, despite her most alluring and dangerous quality being her song. Although the siren’s song is a powerful sonic marker, it does not carry the same scriptural associations as the cri in the chapter on the lion. Rather than remembering the story of Christ through sound, readers of the Bestiaire may recognize their own abilities to sing in the depiction of the siren. Given the siren’s humanoid form, the association is hardly disturbing, but the moralization the bestiary reinforces presumes that humans should avoid the temptations of sweet song. The text channels interpretation of this sound away from eschatological concerns and potential Scriptural parallels. Instead, the song is interpreted in negative moralizing and allegorical terms: just as the siren sings, the allegorical figure richesce (Splendor, 1404) corrupts men and strangles them. If the sailors manage to escape, the siren laments the loss of human prey. Likewise, Splendor is said to weep when men give their own power and abundant riches to God, rather than to her. The siren weeps and laments in good weather; in the same way, when man gives wealth away and disparages it in favor of God, then a good hour has come and Splendor weeps (1411–12). The aural appeal of the siren’s song, a musical form connected to sexual desire, is thus equated with the lure of earthly riches and a sexualized power over men. In this moralization the text is careful to mask the effects of human encounters with sirens, preventing the effects of the song reaching beyond the confines of the text’s literal description. The negative moralization of the siren’s song is one way that the text dampens the power of her enticing voice in the sound milieu and instead emphasizes the optic agency of man, the strongest of his senses, and perhaps the least susceptible to ruse. In manuscripts of the Bestiaire that contain 51

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts illustrations, the visual depictions of the siren assert a human form of control over the siren by depicting her with her mouth closed. This act of representation deprives her of her voice, which becomes an absent referent, negated by the illustration sequence. In this way, the text explores the same types of assimilation of violence and power as the metaphors observed by Adams in her discussion of meat-eating: ‘the interaction between physical oppression and the dependence on metaphors that rely on the absent referent indicates that we distance ourselves from whatever is different by equating it with something we have already objectified’.35 The ‘difference’ of sound as an uncontrollable phenomenon presents a similar challenge to illustrators of this Bestiaire, in whose work sound becomes an absent referent. The siren in C is depicted in traditional fashion with dangling breasts, a fish tail, and talons for feet.36 Around her are two trees and two leaping fish, suggesting the aquatic nature of her domain. The tripartite symbols in this image – three marine creatures including the siren herself, and the three branches on each of the trees – are artistic ‘errors’, blending the image of the siren with the allegorical interpretation that forms part of the preceding chapter on the salamander in this manuscript.37 The raised hand gesture of the siren is a typical feature of this assertive creature in bestiary texts.38 However, contrary to what might be expected for a notoriously sonorous siren, her mouth is closed, or only slightly ajar, meaning her most striking and recognizable characteristic is not referenced in the visual imagery. Instead of drawing attention to the voice that gives her power over humans, the illustration accentuates her sexualized body, reasserting a patriarchal form of control. The siren’s body is sexualized pictorially to the extent that the focus of interpretation turns toward her physical body rather than her sonic abilities. The siren’s song thus becomes an absent referent in the hermeneutic framework of the text, which emphasizes her optically sexual and hybrid appeal rather than fully identifying her position across the four exegetical senses. The cloaking of the siren’s sonic nature, and the portrayal of her song as an absent referent in this illustration, eclipses her visual appeal and suggests that her sound has potentially disruptive qualities that need to be contained by different modes of textual and visual representation.

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37 38

The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 23. In a large number of manuscript illuminations in Latin and French bestiaries, the siren is depicted as a sexualized marine figure alongside a boat in which humans either attempt to cover their ears or have already succumbed to slumber. See, for example, London, British Library, MS Harley 4751, f. 47v, and Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Kk. 4. 25, f. 77r. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 49, n. 15. Compare with plates in Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries; and Heck and Cordonnier, The Grand Medieval Bestiary, pp. 546–9.

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Figure 1. The siren in the Bestiaire by Philippe de Thaon. Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gl. Kgl. S. 3466 8º (C), f. 37r. Reproduced by permission.

Figure 2. The siren (right) in the Bestiaire by Philippe de Thaon. Oxford, Merton College Library, MS 249 (O), f. 6r. Reproduced by kind permission of The Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford.

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary As the manuscript described above visually emphasizes sight as the operative sense, so it draws attention to the siren’s hybridity, which reinforces her proximity to, and distance from, the figure of the human. This version of the bestiary thus reverses the control of sound that is so explicitly in the siren’s favor in the literal description of her singing. In a discussion of the iconography of sirens in the oldest English B-Isidore manuscript from the early twelfth century, Kay suggests that medieval visual representations of sirens anticipate a response from the reader that includes sexual desire, as 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’.39 This observation holds true for the siren in manuscript C of Philippe’s Bestiaire. Likewise, in O (Figure 2) a siren features as a human from the waist upwards but as a fish below. She too is represented with her mouth firmly shut. Evidently aquatic in nature, she swims toward the edge of the page, and her tail extends back into the space below the chapter on the salamander, and above that on the siren. The liminal space in which she dwells echoes the way the text isolates her voice. While her physical appearance remains enticingly mysterious, her true nature as a powerful songstress is instead replaced with the allure of a lengthy tail. The siren in O gazes absently toward the right-hand edge of the folio. This places her between the frame of the text and the empty space beyond the page, and therefore beyond direct communication with the audience of the text. As the text deprives the siren’s voice of religious meaning, it encourages an interpretation of her song that makes her a morally negative example. Unlike the lion, whose literal cri is eloquently interpreted in the Bestiaire through Christian allegory, the audience is supposed to listen to what the siren means, but not hear what she sings. Through this alternative model, the audience of the text has to bridge two competing depictions, remembering that the siren is a sonically luring creature even when her mouth looks closed. In the illustrations in C and O, the sirens are not depicted participating in the sound milieu. Readers are thus protected from the lures of aural attraction, perhaps because song is more ambiguous than sexual desire stimulated by the visual sense.40 Nevertheless, siren song remains an elusive textual motif, hinted at but contained to protect audiences who might not be able to cover up their ears or eyes in time. The very absence of its referential position draws attention to the importance of shutting off the

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Animal Skins, p. 19. John Morson connects the Bestiaire with putative Cistercian orders, for whom such themes may have been of interest. See ‘The English Cistercians and the Bestiary’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 39 (1956), pp. 146–70. For a short commentary on Morson’s argument, see Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts, p. 94.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts lure of her song. By association, readers also memorize the meaning of a sound that, paradoxically, they cannot hear. As a sonic marker, this sound triggers reflexes in the bestiary’s interpretive strategy, stimulating textual and visual impulses for the redirection of sonic and sexual appeal back into the control of the human reader. The Bestiaire develops a multimodal framework for interpreting the siren, calling on readers to memorize the literal and moral meanings of her form. Unlike manuscripts of the Bestiaire containing illustrations, the oldest version leaves only a gap where such an illustration may have appeared (L, f. 58v). Without an illustration of the siren as absent referent, she is the undisputed dominant agent of the sound milieu. In contrast, illustrations evoke physical forms of femininity and hybridity that are presented as alluring to audiences of the text in ways that override the appeal of her voice in the narrative. These illustrations enjoin the reader or viewer of the folio to rethink the agentive relationships in which the siren sings, warning them not to put themselves into the sailors’ shoes. Through this process audiences learn to remember that while the true message is the text’s moralization, there are other things to learn here too regarding the ways that relations between real and imaginary creatures might play out. The memory of the siren’s destructive force, and the association between her form and the human body, serves as a reminder of the perils of the sound milieu, in which relationality is not intrinsically under human control, but negotiated through the senses.

Mandrakes at the limits of interpretation Both the lion and siren share a common point of reference with humans – they emit sound through the recognizable vocal apparatuses of muzzle and mouth. In this regard, their literal vocalizations mirror human voice, regardless of how they are interpreted by the text. Vocalizations may thus express a terrestrial form of embodied expression (the literal sense), while concurrently signaling the redemption of Christ, as in the lion’s cri, or allegorical figures such as Splendor, as with the siren’s song. However, there is one creature in the Bestiaire whose plant-like, but humanoid form brings into question the mirroring processes that have so far underscored bestiary sound milieus. This is the mandrake, which emits a cri when uprooted from the earth, giving rise to a noise that defies interpretation in all but the literal sense. The absence of allegorical or moral interpretive criteria given for the mandrake exposes the limits of the text’s interpretation of creaturely sound, restraining the mandrake’s cri to its acoustic properties, and reinforcing a singular mode of literal interpretation through explanatory rubrics in Latin. 56

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary The mandrake thus represents a dichotomy in bestiary interpretation: of a sound that overflows with remembered meaning, but which must be shut off from human ears in the present in order to be understood. The figure of the mandrake in medieval texts is based either on plants from the genus mandragora, a member of the nightshade family, or from other species, such as the poisonous bryonia alba. The properties of the plant are generally confused between bestiaries, rendering identification with a single species impossible across this corpus. Nevertheless, the legendary plant held an important place in the imaginations of writers throughout the Middle Ages, featuring extensively in ancient texts and medieval herbals.41 The mandrake is named mandragora because it has apples that smell sweet and are the size of filberts. In Latin it is called ‘earth apple’ and ‘the poets call it man-shaped because the root has the form of a man’.42 The mandrake does not have its own chapter in the Bestiaire; instead, it is mentioned twice in the chapter on the elephant that follows the siren. Although not allegorized as such, the mandrake is obliquely associated with Paradise and functional sexuality because its first appearance describes the reluctance of the female elephant to mate until the male brings her the mandrake from Paradise en orïent (in the East).43 In this passage the mandrake serves a miraculous purpose in enabling the female elephant to conceive. Although sound is not at play here, the passage holds important keys to understanding what the mandrake is and how it might be interpreted. The mandrake features for a second time at the end of the same chapter, in a passage describing its humanoid form, and how to harvest it for medicinal purposes. A Latin rubric introduces the latter scenario: De mandragora et ejus natura, et quid valet et quomodo cognoscitur (Of the mandrake and its nature, and of its strength, and how to acquire knowledge of it, p. 192). The French description of the mandrake’s form follows the traditional interpretation of the mandrake roots, of which it has two: one male and one female. The female root has leaves like a lettuce, and the

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42 43

See McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, pp. 117–19; Charles B. Randolph, ‘The Mandragora of the Ancients in Folk-lore and Medicine’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 40 (1905), pp. 489–537; and George Druce, ‘The Elephant in Medieval Legend and Art’, Journal of the Royal Archaeological Institute, 76 (1919), pp. 40–51. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 116. Bestiaire, 1423. The chapter on the elephant includes descriptions of the birth of the elephant calf in a pool of water to protect it from the dragon, signifying the devil (1439–50), and the burning of elephant skin and bones to expel serpents from any place (1517–24). For further context, see McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, pp. 115–19; Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, pp. 129–31; and Michel Pastoureau, Bestiaires du Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2011), pp. 82–5.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts male root has ‘leaves’ like a beet, and also a beast’s, an obscure reference to the shape of male genitals.44 Following this description, the Bestiaire introduces another rubric: Homo qui eam vult colligere (The man who wants to harvest it, p. 194). The text then narrates a notorious scene in which the mandrake cries when uprooted from the ground. Many French bestiaries make no mention of the mandrake’s cri in their own depictions of bestiary soundscapes, describing only its physical form and properties.45 In the Bestiaire, this is an episode that unites ambiguity of form with ambiguity of sound and moral meaning because humans harvest the mandrake par engin (by ruse, 1579). Since the cri the mandrake emits is deadly for those who hear it, a human must starve a dog for three days and fasten the dog to the mandrake with a rope. When the human stands far away and shows the dog some bread, the latter pulls and uproots the mandrake, instantly dying when it hears the cri.46 The cunning human, however, knows to shut out the sound by closing off his ears: Li chens a sai trarat la racine rumperat, e un cri geterat; li chens mort en charat pur le cri qu’il orat. Tel vertu cel herbe ad: ren ne la pot oïr sempres n’estoce murrir;

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46

Bestiaire, 1569–80. This is a slight adaptation of the description of the mandrake in the Etymologies by Isidore of Seville, which describe the mandrake as having a root that resembles the human form: huius species duae: femina, foliis lactucae similibus, mala generans in similitudinem prunarum; masculus vero foliis betae similibus (there are two kinds of mandrake: the female, with leaves like lettuce’s, producing fruit similar to plums, and the male with leaves like the beet’s), XVII. ix.30, p. 351. For further discussion, see Kay, Animal Skins, pp. 145–7. The Bestiaire attributed to Pierre de Beauvais, for example, includes the elephants’ consumption of the mandrake for conception, but does not describe the harvest by humans. See Pierre de Beauvais, Le Bestiaire: version longue attribuée à Pierre de Beauvais, ed. Craig Baker (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010), pp. 220–2. Dogs are not generally incorporated into the scheme of bestiary chapters until the tradition develops further from the Physiologus format. The Latin Second-Family bestiary of the second half of the twelfth century does include the dog (see Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts, pp. 145–8), as well as a range of domesticated mammals, such as horses and cats. McCulloch notes that the only French illustration of the dog tied to the mandrake root is in a manuscript of Guillaume le Clerc’s thirteenth-century Bestiaire divin. See McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, pp. 116–18. For the text, see Le Bestiaire divin de Guillaume Clerc de Normandie, ed. C. Hippeau (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970).

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary e se li hom le oait eneslepas murreit. Pur ceo deit estuper ses orailes, guarder que il ne oi le cri, qu’il ne morge altresi cum li chens ferat ki le cri en orat.

(Bestiaire, 1591–1606)

[The dog pulls and uproots the plant, which lets out a cry. The dog falls dead because of the cry it hears. Such a power has this herb: no one can hear it without immediately dying. And if man were to hear it, he would die straight away. For this reason, he must close off his ears, to protect them so that he does not hear the cry, and so that he does not die in the same way as the dog, who hears the cry.]

The sound marker used four times to describe the mandrake’s screech is the cri, the same word used to describe the lion’s roar in the bestiary’s first chapter. However, at this mid-point in the text, and in contrast to the positive layering of meaning for the lion’s cri, the meaning of the mandrake’s cry is left undecided. The summary of the mandrake’s medicinal properties is limited to a mere six lines, which signal only the literal fact that whoever has the root of the plant is successful in medicine and can cure any illness apart from death itself: Ki ad ceste racine | mult valt a medicine (Whoever has this root is great in medicine, 1607–8). A Latin rubric preceding the description of the mandrake’s medicinal qualities in French anticipates this observation: Radix mandragore contra omnes infirmitates valet (The root of the mandrake is strong against all illness, p. 194). The repetition of this observation in both Latin and French reinforces the importance of the mandrake’s medicinal value and its potential interest to audiences of the Bestiaire, while anchoring the interpretation well within the literal world of the bestiary. When used in a medical context the mandrake thus acts as a powerful cure for human illness. The strength of this power is indicated in the depiction of the mandrake by the equally powerful cri that it emits, which kills instantaneously. As I observed in relation to the chapter on the lion, the cri can be used as a sonic marker for animate objects like the cart the lion fears, which is extensively allegorized as the four evangelists. Yet, in relation to the mandrake, opportunities for similar allegorical or eschatological interpretation are deliberately missed, such as the fact that one type of mandrake is found by elephants in Paradise, or that the dog is starved for a symbolic three days before being tied to the plant. There are multiple reasons for the absence of such interpretations. The mandrake’s status in this bestiary 59

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts is as an addition to the chapter on the elephants, which are already allegorized as Adam and Eve, and Philippe’s sources may have similarly given little attention to the plant.47 Rather, its meaning is implied in relation to biblical figures. Likewise, medieval authors may have been well aware of the hypothetical nature of the mandrake. No other plant in nature emits a screeching sound, and writers such as Philippe may have found it more reasonable to emphasize ambiguity when translating material about a creature resembling a plant in a text ostensibly more concerned with the natures of animate animals and birds. The mandrake’s indefinite status makes it an ideal case study, alongside the siren, for thinking about the ways that relationality in the sound milieus of this bestiary exceeds the confines of conventional interpretive schemata. The mandrake’s cry creates a rare bestiary sound milieu in which a nonhuman creature is left almost completely outside the bounds of spiritual or moral interpretation in the Bestiaire. Despite the lack of explicit allegorization, the inclusion of Latin rubrics in the description of the mandrake introduces a cross-linguistic aspect to the harvesting scene, which echoes the language switching found in the chapters on the lion and siren and frames the harvest in terms of multilingual interpretation. The Latin rubrics in the chapter on the lion are part of the process of reading the eschatological meaning of the lion’s nature, indeed reinforcing the attention to sound through a second language. However, while the mandrake’s physical and medicinal properties are reinforced in both Latin and French in this chapter, the Latin rubrics make no mention of the sound the mandrake produces when uprooted. This further lack of representation for the sound milieu indicates that the type of interpretation anticipated by the text is subjective in nature, rather than handed down from Classical texts or Scripture. Instead, French is used to describe the creature’s cri, and to leave potential interpretation hanging, a strategy that plays out through vernacular expression. The struggle to define and interpret man in relation to the animal, or non-man, was of acute interest to medieval writers.48 Through the description of how to harvest the mandrake and the trickery and suffering such

47



48

The B-Isidore bestiary only refers to the mandrake’s physical properties, including its use as an anesthetic. See Morini, Bestiary medievali, pp. 82–4. I use the gendered noun here advisedly. For further discussion, see Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (eds), L’Animal exemplaire au Moyen Âge (Ve–XVe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999); Pieter De Leemans and Matthew Klemm, ‘Animals and Anthropology in Medieval Philosophy’, in Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 153–77; Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 103–66; and Emma Campbell, ‘Political Animals: Human/Animal Life in Bisclavret and Yonec’, Exemplaria, 25.2 (2013), p. 97.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary harvesting entails, the mandrake’s cri connects the plant, the dog, and the human in a contingent sound milieu positioned in relation to the chapter on the elephant in which it is contained. Although the elephant is not directly related to sound-making in this bestiary, it demonstrates an understanding on a par with humans as the text describes the creature as beste entendable (an intelligent animal, 1419). This key adjective is related to the verb entendre, ‘to hear’. Likewise, the elephant is described in terms that ascribe consciousness to it, having entendement | e grant remenbrement (intelligence and great memory, 1539–40).49 The relational network that emerges between mandrake and human in the literal sense of bestiary interpretation is thus framed by a connection to intelligence and understanding, two key ingredients that highlight the importance of nonhuman consciousness and memory for the production of meaning in the text. The mandrake is a creature that sits between the distinction of animate and inanimate. Its form mimics parts of the human body, and human readers might see in this form a mirroring of their own capacity to think and to know, just as the siren encourages them to consider their own ability to sing. The cri it produces thus falls into a similar space in-between human and nonhuman vocalization. In terms defined by Giorgio Agamben, the mandrake could thus be an example of a pre-modern ‘anthropological machine’ of Western thought, in which the ‘non-man’, here the mandrake, is produced through the humanization of a nonhuman animal.50 The mandrake is not alone in this process; it features in pre-modern thought alongside the ‘enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human or humanoid form’.51 Bestiary creatures are not neat expressions of the anthropological machine, but they do draw on this principle of

49



50



51

The French term entendable is potentially a translation from the B-Isidore, which describes the elephant as intellectu autem et memoria multem valent (intelligent while moreover very strong in memory), Morini, Bestiary medievali, p. 82. Similar turns of phrase in Latin bestiaries reference the neo-platonic term intelligibilem (understandable or perceivable) used in Christian exegesis. See Clarke, A Medieval Book of Beasts, p. 129, n. 56; and Curley, Physiologus, p. xiv. In the Physiologus, elephant understanding is demonstrated through a hunting scene in which the elephants save one of their kin from the traps of a human hunter. This also occurs in the Second-Family bestiary, but is not found in Philippe’s Bestiaire. See A Medieval Book of Beasts, p. 128. In contrast, the ‘anthropological machine’ at work in modern philosophy excludes a human being from itself as ‘not (yet) human’, by animalizing the human and isolating the nonhuman within the human. This leads to the ‘apeman’, the Jew as ‘non-man produced within man’, or the néomort as the ‘animal separated within the human body itself’. See Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 37. Ibid.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts humanization. The allegorical impulse behind animal interpretation in the Bestiaire is a humanizing one, but depictions of animals, alongside the etymologies behind their names, also emphasize their literal behaviors as if the text were in part a modern natural history. These components of the bestiary indicate that they are constituent parts of a cosmology that sits on multiple layers of interpretation at once. The siren, for example, is not purely a humanization of the animal. She is visibly both human and fish but also an agent of a musical power, of which she is potentially the source, that is abstracted by illustrators of the text. Since the mandrake lacks the bestiary’s traditional scheme for interpretation, a lacuna is opened that exposes the anthropological machine by focusing attention on relationships between the mandrake and other agents. These relationships offer a humanization of the mandrake’s form and sound, while also troubling this process through ambiguous meaning. Provoked from a sedentary state to one that mirrors animate, and thus human, life, the mandrake contributes to a sound milieu and demonstrates its vertu (power or strength), which is that no one can hear it without immediately dying. As such it reveals an ability to produce a noxious sound far exceeding human abilities, but which nevertheless is emitted from a body that is humanized. Alongside physical form, it is the sound of the mandrake which is its most defining feature. When uprooted it must suffer the will of human ruse, itself defined on human terms in this episode, and fill the sound milieu as it dies. In the passage above, the cri is clearly one effect of the uprooting process; the mandrake’s first breath in the open air is also its dying scream. The sonic marker that communicates the mandrake’s cry thus exemplifies the in-betweeness of human and animal expression as a form of bare life, or a ‘life exposed to death’, a life that is not entendable.52 The cri works in parallel with hybridity of form to demonstrate how the effects of sound as a vibration between incomprehensible but related agents can be anticipated by humans. By remembering that the sound is harmful, the human can shut off his ears (estuper ses orailes) and separate himself from the relational terms of the sound milieu, which he himself has set up. In a context in which the behaviors of creatures are usually interpreted by the text itself, the absence of interpretation here suggests that the mandrake’s cri, although not quite a voice, is intended to signify without signification: ‘a pure meaning that says nothing’.53 In order to disentangle some of the theoretical implications of the representation of the mandrake’s cri, I draw

52



53

Ibid., p. 38; and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 59.

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Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary here on Agamben’s discussion of Hegel’s notion of naming, in which the latter observes that language is the ‘voice of consciousness’, and that consciousness exists in language, which is articulated voice. We can read the term ‘animal’ here as the mandrake itself: In this articulation of the ‘empty’ animal voice, each sound acquires meaning, and exists as a name, as an immediate nonexistence of itself and of the thing named. […] the articulation appears, that is, as a process of differentiation, of interruption and preservation of the animal voice. But why does this articulation of the animal voice transform it into the voice of consciousness, into memory and language?54

Agamben could have been writing about the mandrake, a creature whose sound exists as a name, that is, the noun cri signifies a sound, but which nevertheless represents an emptiness. This sound, reminiscent of the cries of a baby following its first breath, serves only to interrupt the notion of nonhuman voice and consciousness that might almost have been ascribed to the creature. The mandrake can cry, but it cannot say; it can articulate, but cannot remember, because once uprooted from the womb of the earth it is already dead. The conceptualization of the mandrake’s cri as articulating nothing is mirrored on the level of interpretation suggested by the form of the bestiary. The chapter on the mandrake foregrounds physical rather than spiritual benefit. The cri is an obstacle to the latter, instead revealing the troubling hierarchies of power and exploitation embedded in the sound milieu. By exposing the suffering and inequality inherent within the sound milieu, readers are faced with a telling unjustness in which the deadly cri functions as the mandrake’s protest as it is brought out of the earth. Alongside the mandrake itself, the difference between human and canine responses to sound in the episode of mandrake harvest reveal how suffering and power relations are embedded into the manipulation of the sound milieu. In the mandrake-harvest scene, the human is the only figure who has the foresight and the strength to cover his ears to avoid hearing the cri. He is therefore the only being to survive the harvest. In this scene the display of human cognitive power demonstrated through the manipulation of the dog reveals the human’s ability to remember the effects, if not the meaning, of sound, and to anticipate these effects through the control of the sound milieu. Whereas the siren used her song to lure sailors to their deaths, here the human uses bread to tempt the dog and pull up the mandrake root in the process. The ability to use one’s understanding (entendement) to protect oneself from manipulative or dangerous sounds in these episodes depends firstly on the capacity to foresee the dangers they pose, and secondly on the will to

54

Ibid., p. 44

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Figure 3. The chapter on the elephant in the Bestiaire by Philippe de Thaon, featuring the scene of the Fall with mandrakes, MS 249 (O), f. 6v. Reproduced by kind permission of The Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford.

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary protect oneself from the suffering such sounds might inflict. The text is attentive to this moment as one that expresses the human’s clear understanding of his manipulation of the sound milieu, for if man were to hear it, he too would immediately die. The episode of mandrake harvest can be placed in the wider context of the Bestiaire, in which other humans and creatures cover their ears to avoid hearing sounds. These episodes highlight unequal negotiations of power and the manipulation of sound, occasionally revealing situations in which nonhumans trump humans in this respect. This is the case with the asp covering its ears with its own tail to avoid the sound of the human magician, mentioned above. The asp knows it must do so in order to anticipate the human magician, demonstrating a consciousness and memory not always ascribed to animals in medieval texts. In a similar way, after reading the bestiary, a human understands that he must close off his ears in anticipation of siren song. In contrast, in the mandrake episode the text comments that the dog died because it could not shut off its ears from the mandrake’s cri. The dog’s death, like that of the mandrake, is left hanging on this literal interpretation about a failure of memory. A closer look at the way the mandrake is depicted in the illustration sequence in O uncovers some of the further complexities of the unequal networks of power relations with which audiences are familiarized through this episode. The roots of the mandrake are featured in the illustration of Eve and Adam in O (Figure 3). We know that these are depictions of mandrakes because the female root takes the form of lettuce leaves to the right of Eve’s head, and the male root next to Adam’s head resembles the shape of male genitalia like those of an animal. In this illustration sequence, the male and female mandrake roots occupy a position that forms the frame for a depiction of the Fall, but the roots of the mandrake are separated from the biblical scene by a thick red border. This visual depiction highlights the links between the mandrake roots and the human sexual organs, and therefore echoes the plant’s aphrodisiac qualities. The mandrakes are juxtaposed with the apple from the Tree of Knowledge with which Adam and Eve fell from grace in the Garden of Eden, and which was the cause of human suffering. In much the same way as the siren’s song is masked by her visual depiction in manuscripts of the Bestiaire, the form of the mandrake is shown, but it is deprived of the possible associations that would confirm its own consciousness or power. Rather than a symbol of temptation or of healing, the mandrake is presented visually in the liminal space on the edge of the Garden of Eden, neither fully incorporated within the garden nor fully present in the real world – another example of its bare existence. The mandrake remains unable to fully participate in the bestiary’s program of religious development. 65

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The illustration sequence deliberately placing the mandrake outside the prelapsarian framework in which the first humans contemplate the Tree of Knowledge confirms that this creature provides an uncertain foundation for figurative meaning. Are these mandrakes the same plant that is uprooted by the human in the scene of mandrake harvest? If so, do mandrakes represent an esoteric form of medicine that is best left in the spiritual, rather than the physical, world? Depictions of mandrakes in the Bestiaire raise a number of questions concerning the physical and sonic qualities of creatures and the types of relationships established by sonic encounters in bestiary sound milieus, but there is little attempt in the text to offer answers to these questions. What is at stake in the episode of mandrake harvest in the Bestiaire is not only the relationships of humans and bestiary creatures as they are depicted in a terrestrial setting, but also the function of Christian hermeneutics in a text that conventionally seeks to explain the spiritual implications of natural phenomena. The familiar allegorical pattern of the bestiary is interrupted by the cri and the circumstances that give rise to that sound. In the sound milieu in which this cri reverberates, it thus becomes a point of ambiguous sonic encounter that emphasizes the dangers of sonic cohabitation with other creatures. The powers of sound, and the suffering that such sounds may cause, are presented as an inevitable consequence of living in networks of relation, in which sound as a nonlinguistic force is open to manipulation by humans and animals who understand, at the expense of other creatures who inhabit the same world.

Conclusion I began this chapter by making a case for reading animal behavior in bestiaries as forming sound milieus rather than soundscapes. As a theoretical framework, the sound milieu encourages us to conceptualize sound as forming networks of relationality between agents, and to interrogate the ways that sounds form or disrupt relations between them. In my first example from the Bestiaire this is brought to light through the lion’s cri, which is placed neatly into the four exegetical senses, while the cri of the cart demonstrates that sonic phenomena are not restricted to living organisms. In other chapters of the text, the puzzle of interpretation for sound is less complete. The song of the siren and the cry of the mandrake reveal how patterns of sound may be manipulated by bestiary animals and humans, and further by illustrators of these texts, and how singing or crying collapses a distinction between human and animal even as manuscripts themselves may offer competing representations and interpretive 66

Memory and Sound in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiary strategies. Simultaneously, the sounds of human words and names are considered in relation to their etymological roots, encompassing discussion of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. French exists together with these other languages, mirroring how animal sounds exist in relation to human languages as memories of pre- or non-linguistic expressions of distress or power. Philippe’s project at the beginnings of the appearance of the French of England as a written language thus frames animal sounds with the acts of remembering ancient meaning while memorizing the meaning of animal behavior. Sound nevertheless remains ambiguous in some cases, inviting a reflection on what it means to articulate a sound, or to express a vocalization that exhibits consciousness.

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2 Sound Zones: Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage

I

n the thirteenth century an English knight called Walter of Bibbesworth composed a ‘treatise’ on language that ostensibly teaches the French language and English vocabulary to medieval aristocratic readers, especially children. Beginning with the French vocabulary for midwifery, childbirth, and youth, the verse text presents an array of topics relating to the natural world and agriculture. These include extended sections on husbandry and estate management, a list of agricultural procedures, including the verbs for ploughing, sowing, weeding, kneading, and brewing, and the French for the woods, fields, pastures, gardens, flowers, and fruits.1 The treatise includes two sections that provide specific indications for how to pronounce words related to the animal kingdom. One gives the vocabulary for collective groups of animals and birds, just as modern speakers of English might say a ‘swarm’ of bees, a ‘pack’ of wolves, or a ‘murder’ of crows. Another catalogs the sounds animals make in French with glosses of certain words in Middle English, written either beside the lines or above the words they translate. Drawing on grammatical knowledge and vocabularies in French and English, this list demonstrates that audiences of the text, who might be grasping how to speak or write in at least two human languages, can simultaneously master nonhuman noises: Vache mugist, gruue groule, Leoun rougist, coudre croule, Chivaule henist, alouwe chaunte, Columbe gerist e coke chaunte

1



2



cow lowes crane crekez romies hasil quakez neyez larke croukes2 (Tretiz, 250–3)

Bibbesworth also composed a tençon or debate poem with the Earl of Lincoln, Henry de Lacy, during the time of the 1270 Crusade in which the former took part, and a poem, ‘Amours m’ount si enchaunté’, which displays a similar attraction to wordplay as seen in the Tretiz. See Thomas Hinton, ‘Language, Morality, and Wordplay in Thirteenth-Century Anglo-French: The Poetry of Walter de Bibbesworth’, New Medieval Literatures, 19 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 89–90. Walter of Bibbesworth, ‘Walter de Bibbesworth: Le Tretiz’, ed. William Rothwell (Aberystwyth: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2009), p. 11. All in-text

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts [Cow (cow) moos (moos), crane (crane) crows (crows), lion roars (roars), hazel-tree (hazel) shakes (trembles), horse whinnies (neighs), lark (lark) sings, dove coos (croaks) and cockerel sings.]

The list of animal sounds in the Tretiz is the first example of such a list to be written in any European vernacular. It has been the subject of extensive investigations on Anglo-French language-learning and vocabulary associated with medieval estates.3 The list follows a formula common to medieval Latin nominalia and catalogs of animal sounds, termed by modern scholars voces animantium, which may have been a key resource for young students of Latin.4 The Latin lists present the sounds of animals with subjects followed by third-person verbs usually derived from the substantive: ouis balat, canis latrat, lupus ululate, sus grunnit, bos mugit (sheep bleats, dog barks, wolf howls, pig grunts, cow moos), and so on.5 These texts present the Latin verbs for animal sounds and consequently register them in terms of human linguistic and grammatical conventions, often suggestive of pedagogical debates between a master and a student.6 Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz contains some articles that are clear



3 4



5



6

references to the Tretiz are to line numbers from the edition of MS G (Cambridge University Library Gg. 1. 1.) in this edition, which also contains an edition of MS T, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 0.2.21. Translations from French and Middle English are my own, with some adaptations from William Sayers, ‘Animal Vocalization and Human Polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Thirteenth-Century Domestic Treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English’, Sign System Studies, 37.3/4 (2009), pp. 525–41. See, for example, Sayers, ‘Animal Vocalization and Human Polyglossia’, p. 525. For voces animantium, see Wilhelm Wackernagel, Voces variae animantium: Ein Beitrag zur Naturkunde und zue Geschichte der Sprache, 2nd edn (Basel: Bahnmaier, 1869); and Maurizio Bettini, Voci: Anthropologia sonora del mondo autico (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2008), pp. 29–45. See also: D. Thomas Benediktson, ‘Polemius Silvius’ Voces Variae Animancium and Related Catalogues of Animal Sounds’, Mnemosyne, 53.1 (2000), pp. 71–9, and ‘Cambridge University Library L1 1 14, f. 46R–V: A Late Medieval Natural Scientist at Work’, Neophilologus, 86 (2002), pp. 171–7. Early studies and collections of these lists include: C. E. Finch, ‘Suetonius’ Catalogue of Animal Sounds in Codex Vat. Lat. 6018’, American Journal of Philology, 90.4 (1969), pp. 459–63; Manuel C. Diaz y Diaz, ‘Sobre las series de voces de animales’, in John J. O’Meara and Bernd Naumann (eds), Latin Script and Letters A.D. 400–900: Festschrift Presented to Ludwig Bieler on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), pp. 148–55; and V. M. Lagorio, ‘Three More Vatican Manuscripts of Suetonius’s Catalogue of Animal Sounds’, Scriptorium, 35 (1981), pp. 61–2. These entries form the beginning of a Latin Polemius catalog. See Benediktson, ‘Polemius Silvius’ Voces Variae Animancium’, p. 74. Robert Stanton, ‘Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity, and Boundary in Old English Animal Voice Catalogues’, in Alison Langdon (ed.), Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), p. 92.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage derivations from Latin traditions, suggesting a connection between Latin pedagogy and an interest in the multilingualism of animal sounds.7 Medieval catalogs of animal noises emphasize the capacities inherent in human languages to ‘translate’ the sounds of different species, thereby establishing comparisons between human and animal modes of expression. They also demonstrate the importance of lists and animal imagery for language learning processes. The mastery of languages through lists of animal sounds relies on the lists themselves representing ‘a sonic database of relatively stable natural phenomena’, which could be relied upon as referencing the human voice with the vocal capacities of different species.8 However, while elements of the animal sounds lists in the Tretiz resemble Latin catalogs, the French Tretiz engages the poetic features of two languages – French and English – rather than one, to stress how the words used to describe animal sounds are themselves subject to interpretation in vernacular contexts.9 Since the Tretiz already straddles the categories of poetry, grammar, and vocabulary list, differentiating between latinitas and vernacular languages, it comes as little surprise to learn that the text posits that human languages are always plural, just as animal sounds are plural and complex. Alongside the theme of linguistic proliferation, the Tretiz reinforces a pattern of thinking about language as uncooked or in need of training. The Prologue suggests the work was designed to shape the speech of young gentlemen who needed both French and English to run their estates. In one early fourteenth-century copy of the work the treatise is addressed to a patron, Dyonise de Mountechensi, for aprise de langage (the learning of language).10 However, the text is envisioned to teach language not to the For example: ovis balat/berbiz baleie; lupus ululat/lou hule; sus grunnit/troye groundile; bod mugit/buf mugit, etc. See Thomas Hinton, ‘Animals on the Page: Voces animantium’ in ‘The Latinity of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz: Sources and Analogues’ (forthcoming). 8 Stanton, ‘Bark Like a Man’, p. 92. See also, Jonathan Hsy, ‘Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts’, in Catherine Batt and René Tixier (eds), Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis, The Medieval Translator, 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 563–73. 9 Thomas Hinton, ‘Anglo-French in the Thirteenth Century: A Reappraisal of Walter de Bibbesworth’s “Tretiz”’, Modern Language Review, 112 (2017), p. 862; ‘Language, Morality, and Wordplay’, pp. 89–120; and ‘Animals on the Page: Voces animantium’. See also, Sayers, ‘Animal Vocalization and Human Polyglossia’, p. 534. 10 MS G, Prologue, f. 276v. G holds many popular and influential religious, romance, and didactic texts, including: Urbain le Courtois; The Fifteen Signs of the Day of Judgment; a version of the prose Prophecies of Merlin; Penitential Psalms in Latin and French; the Physionomiae; extracts from the Legenda Aurea; proverbs; and Auctoritates. The Prologue survives in five of the sixteen 7



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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts patroness herself, but rather for children to learn how to parler e en respundre qe nuls gentils homme coveint saver (speak and to answer, which every gentleman needs to know, p. 1). The adjective gentils here signals that the desired politesse of these children is accompanied by appropriately refined and courteous speech.11 Likewise, a narratorial interjection before the list of animals in the Tretiz calls for children, presumably future masters of the fictional estate, to listen (entendre, 216) to the meaning of the text in order to speak properly. The narrator thus nurtures the theme of social refinement through appropriate language training, chiefly, although not exclusively, through the ears.12 The types of English and French words that a young gentleman might encounter on a medieval estate are fictionalized through representational strategies based on sound and wordplay, and not just in relation to animals. The Tretiz invests heavily in addressing the reader or listener’s linguistic skills, with ‘switches between textual description, lists, word games such as riddles, and basic characterization’ speaking to ‘the encyclopedic spirit of the thirteenth century and the impetus to accrete ever increasing quantities of text around a central core’, which in this case is the loose narratorial frame that guides children around an imaginary estate to ‘teach’ them the words for things.13 To this end, the narrator draws attention to grammatical and thematic features, such as differences between personal and possessive pronouns (25–7), synonyms in French for concepts that can be expressed by the same word in English (310–25), the differences between homonyms beginning with aspirated or non-aspirated ‘h’ sounds (555–9), the studious talk of clerks and women’s speech (613–19, 732–6) and the gossiping and sniveling of boys (1077–80). The sounds of animals and birds similarly pass through language and are used to demonstrate multilingual thinking as a way of bypassing a human tendency to try to fix linguistic meaning. In the process they trigger and inform certain forms of linguistic subjectivity. Balancing expressions of animal sounds in multiple vernacular languages with the formation of linguistic subjectivity, the Tretiz raises important questions for this study on animal soundscapes and textual sound. The Tretiz encourages its audiences to think about the extent to which the sounds on the page reflect those of actual species. However, I take this observation



11 12



13

manuscripts of this Tretiz. The five manuscripts refering to Dyonise as patroness are ACGY8, using the sigla designated in Le traité de Walter de Bibbesworth sur la langue française, ed. Annie Owen (Paris: Les Presses universitaires, 1929), and (for Y) Hinton, ‘Anglo-French in the Thirteenth Century’, pp. 857–8. AND, ‘gentil’. Entendre in Old French carries meanings that link hearing and listening to understanding. See Introduction, p. 13. Hinton, ‘Language, Morality, and Wordplay’, p. 104.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage further by addressing the ways that such sounds are presented for human imitation. What types of sounds are depicted, anticipated, and interpreted by the Tretiz? What is the effect of representing these sounds for human voices to emulate, or conversely, of thinking about human speech and language through the prism of animal sound? By reinforcing the expressive capacities of human voices through the articulation of sounds that are not human, and framing the text as an ‘investigation of language’, I trace how the Tretiz develops an intricate series of interpretive ‘sound zones’ through which the human breath is allowed to move and to practice utterance.14 These zones encapsulate a material and embodied understanding of sound and language, one that is conceptually disorganized and embedded in multiple forms of dominance and oppression based on class, gender, and species hierarchies. This is particularly evident when Middle English glosses accompany the columns of French verse. The term ‘sound zone’ used in this chapter to describe sonic representation in the Tretiz is a reworking of the ‘contact zone’, used by linguists to describe spatial areas in which different cultures come into contact. This term was initially coined by Mary L. Pratt to describe spaces of colonial encounter ‘in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’.15 Jonathan Hsy has adapted the term in his work on multilingualism in medieval England and the meeting of peoples and tongues in medieval cross-cultural encounters, in which the contact zone imbues ‘the phenomenon of language contact with an important spatializing force, drawing attention to how languages mix and commingle within particular geographical and social environments’.16 The meeting of the English and French languages was fundamental to the production and subsequent interpretation of texts like the Tretiz, which attend to the sounds of language and build meaning on the accretion of sounds alongside, and perhaps more than, traditional narrative structures. From this vantage, it is possible to describe medieval texts like the Tretiz as being written, read, or heard within their own historically and culturally situated sound

14



15



16

For the Tretiz as an ‘investigation of language’, see Hinton, ‘Anglo-French in the Thirteenth Century’, p. 863. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. There are associations to be made here with Donna Haraway’s work on cross-species companionship in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 216. Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), p. 4. See also, Emily Dolmans, Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England from the Gesta Herwardi to Richard Coer de Lyon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 1–3.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts zones. By adapting the ‘zone’ from contact perspectives to sound awareness, I grant the types of movement in sound zones the further capacity to reflect and intervene in the culture that produced those zones. In this way, the sound zone also differs from the soundscape, which does not presume the agency of sound or its role in asymmetrical power relations. The Tretiz is not only the product of the sound zone in which it was written and circulated, it also acts as a zone which forms human vocal subjectivity in relation to representations of animal vocalization, many of which emphasize conflict between languages and the ideas associated with different animals. By adapting the sound zone to focus on sound rather than space, this discussion attunes the Tretiz to current debates on sound’s material and linguistic components.17 The sound zone is therefore a textual space in which animal sounds, such as the mooing of the cow or the singing of the lark, reference not only the production of sound by a narrative agent, but also the linguistic and cultural environment in which that sound zone was produced. There is another distinction to be made here between the sound zone, which frames sound with language, and the optics of the soundscape or the relationality of the sound milieu, discussed in relation to Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire in Chapter 1. The soundscape and sound milieu do not presume language as we experience it day-today as a point of contact between the human and the animal. In contrast, reading a text as a sound zone reinforces how the sounds of language are a primary point of contact between human and animal, representing an expansive model of semiotic meaning that defies some medieval attempts to restore linguistic coherence to fallen language.18 Only by thinking closely about these different forms of sound in post-conquest England are we able to understand the asymmetrical relations of power anticipated in the sound zones depicting animals and birds.

Man’s speech and animal noise The most striking representation of animal sound in the Tretiz features in a passage that rewrites the voces animantium tradition in French and English. A rubric in MS G defines the thematic interest of the passage as the naturele noise (natural or innate noise) of animals and birds, and the passage is one

17



18

See Makis Solomos, ‘From Sound to Sound Space, Sound Environment, Soundscape, Sound Milieu or Ambiance…’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), pp. 95–109. See Augustine of Hippo, ‘De doctrina christiana’, in D. W. Robertson (trans.), On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1981), p. 87. Cazelles discusses Babel and linguistic perversion in Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe: Brepols, 2005), pp. 34–6.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage of the most densely glossed sections of the Tretiz. The rubric posits that the noises made by animals, as they are represented on the page, are naturele in the sense that they arise from the animals and birds themselves, hinting at echoic and onomatopoeic forms of representation. The term naturele also suggests that the sounds represented on the page are natural in the sense that their semiotic capacity is expansive, rather than reductive: sounds can signify as much or as little as the subject reading or listening to them can interpret.19 This attests to a strong contemporary interest in the linguistic equivalents for expressions of vocalized sound by different animals and birds, forming a sound zone in which French and English meet under the guiding principles of original Latin word lists. Unlike Latin catalogs, however, the list of animal noises in the Tretiz stands out for the way it reveals the capacity of animal noise to communicate different species’ ability to vocalize, and how different languages interpret these sounds. By listing the verbs describing the noise of animals and birds, starting with man and bear, and moving through familiar and domestic animals and plants, the Tretiz attempts to linguistically define and represent imitations of animal noises. While the rubric suggests that the natural or inherent noises of various species form a discrete category of grammatical knowledge, the theme of noise also introduces conceptual disorderliness that echoes an earlier reference to language in the treatise as enabling the speaker to descorder en variaunce (to cause discord in variation, 110): Ore de la naturele noise des toutes manere des bestes. Ore oiez naturément Des bestes le diversement, Checun de eus e checune, Solum ki sa nature doune. Home parle, ourse braie berre Ki a demesure se desraie. Vache mugist, gruue groule, cow lowes crane crekez Leoun rougist, coudre croule, romies hasil quakez Chivaule henist, alouwe chaunte, neyez larke Columbe gerist e coke chaunte, croukes Chate mimoune, cerpent cifle, mewith cisses Asne rezane, cine recifle, roreth suan cisses Louwe oule, chein baie, wolfe yollez berkes E home e beste sovent afraye. fereth (Tretiz, 244–58)

19

For further implications of the adjective naturele in this text, see Liam Lewis, ‘Quacktrap: Glosses and Multilingual Animal Contact in the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth’, in Victoria Turner and Vincent Debiais (eds), Les Mots au Moyen Âge / Words in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 161–79.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts [Now of the innate noise of all types of animals. Now listen to the diversity of animals, each and every one as is granted by their nature. Man speaks, bear (bear), which acts excessively wildly, roars. Cow (cow) moos (lows), crane (crane) squawks (crakes), lion roars (roars), hazel-tree (hazel) shakes (trembles), horse whinnies (neighs), lark (lark) sings, dove coos (croaks), and cock sings, cat mews (mews), snake hisses (hisses), ass brays (roars), swan (swan) re-hisses (hisses), wolf (wolf) howls (yells), dog barks (barks), and often frightens (frightens) man and animal.]

Noise is defined in this list as vocal action, spoken or produced by animals and humans. This representation of noise invites audiences to consider the relationship between vocalization, intention, and bi- or multilingualism. Acting as an aide-memoire for the acquisition, study, and practice of vocabulary, the Tretiz equates the sounds of French and English with animal sounds, creating ‘an intimate partnership that bridges species boundaries and language difference’.20 This contrasts with some medieval scholastic and grammatical theories on sound. In theoretical discussions, inarticulate noises such as those made by animals in possession of a soul were considered to manifest something more than symptomatic responses to exterior or interior stimuli, although what exactly these sounds articulated remained unclear and open for debate.21 In the Tretiz, animal noises become articulate as they parallel the human faculty of speech in the sound zone: home parle (man speaks). Lists of animal noises thus invite potential imitation by human audiences through the representation of nonhuman sounds as speech-like in human terms.22 Human speech, the Tretiz suggests, is both particular to man and akin to bestial noise. The inclusion of man in the first few lines of the subsequent list of nonhuman noises complicates the formation of male, aristocratic subjectivity posited as the purpose of the Tretiz. The itemization of noises begins with the figure of man followed by the bear, establishing a pattern of species juxtaposition that conveys a variety of different animal noises. Considering that the Prologue defines the audience of the text in relation to young readers and gentlemen, it is safe to assume here that the man opposed to the figure of the bear refers to an exclusive category of prospective gentlemen, as well as referring to humankind more generally. The double-hemistich pattern thus suggests that human language is composed of the same types of noises that are made by animals and birds, and conversely that animals and birds use noise in similar ways to human beings. This ‘double vision’ inspired by the representation of animal noise conveys how the Tretiz as a Hsy, ‘Between Species’, p. 578. See Marmo Costantino, Umberto Eco, and Shona Kelly, On the Medieval Theory of Signs (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41. I discuss examples of these theories, such as the latratus canis, in more detail in the Introduction, pp. 8–10. 22 Hsy, ‘Between Species’, pp. 571–3. 20 21

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Figure 4. The beginning of the list of animal noises in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz, MS Gg 1.1 (G), f. 283r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts sound zone can incorporate competing perspectives on sound and language in ways that reflect the asymmetrical power relations between French and English in Anglo-Norman England. The attention to the sounds of words themselves lends the Tretiz a quality that reaches beyond literal translation and attests to the capacity of animal noises to function as, and even to mimic, distinct languages.23 Interactions between French words and English glosses lay bare the dynamics of the sound zone in the Tretiz through which man’s speech, itself an entry in the list alongside other species, is shown to be a type of noise on a par with the vocalizations of animals and birds. In terms of vernacular languages, the English glosses in the list above draw attention to linguistic difference and the plurality of noises operative in the sound zone. English glosses introduce end-rhyme into almost complete couplets to create patterns resembling the traditional couplets of the French verse below (as in Fig. 4), notably in the pairing of the onomatopoeic crekez with quakez, and the repetition of cisses. Likewise, rhyming in the language of gloss lends a poetic quality to the English, one which is already present in the metrical French. The repetition of the English cisses to accommodate the meanings inherent in the French phrases cerpent cifle (snake hisses) and cine recifle (swan hisses) reinforces the alliterative English syllable –cis and the French –cif as operative partners. These syllabic sounds are crucial to understanding the function of voice in this sound zone; by drawing attention to linguistic similarity and variation in spoken and written languages that are themselves in close contact, the text cuts across lexical and poetic meanings in both vernacular languages. English and French thus influence each other in ways that mirror the humans producing animal noise as language fit for a gentleman. On top of the distinction between English and French, the Latin derivations of a number of these items raise the possibility that three languages might be actualized in the sound zone by readers whose memories of encountering and learning the equivalent voces list would have been jogged by reading or hearing the text. Animal noise forms a sound zone that reveals how human language as a category is destabilized when put into dialogue with other types of sound. The destabilization occurs on a conceptual and grammatical level and is reinforced in the small micro-narratives that appear throughout the list. For example, the inclusion of the shaking hazel-tree upsets any clean distinctions about the nature of noise, and by proxy language, as requiring an animate body and the ability to breathe. This reflects the Latin tradition from which the list may in places be derived. The Polemius Silvius list which Bibbesworth appears to be mimicking includes inanimate objects

23

Sayers observes that Bibbesworth is concerned with ‘the shiftiness of language, its elusive, mercurial and polysemous quality’, ‘Animal Vocalization and Human Polyglossia’, p. 531.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage as a sub-category, including crackling fire and running water.24 The Tretiz, of course, mixes animate and inanimate elements together, as well as positing an auditor. On the level of sound perception, man is presented in the Tretiz as the producer of his own noise, but also as an auditor of the sounds of the hunt, which induce an affective response in the figure of man: wolf howls, dog barks, and often frightens man (home) and animal (beste).25 Man is therefore both the speaking subject that defines the terms of sound production at the top of the list, and the fear-inspired auditor of lupine and canine vocalizations produced in the textual sound zone just a few lines further down the same list. The ways young gentlemen are expected to learn French through the imitation of animal noises, such as wolf howling, demonstrates how figurative depictions of animals fuse real and imaginary sonic encounter. The howling of wolves and barking of dogs are figured by the couplet that juxtaposes the dog’s bark and man’s fear. It simultaneously evokes hunting activities, this despite the fact that encounters with actual wolves in Britain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were already rare.26 Although wolves were culled by professional wolf-hunters known as luparii, they were sometimes introduced into game parks to be hunted rather than to control numbers of herbivores, with important conceptual implications for human dominance over ecology: ‘the degradation of wolves’ status from feared predator to poacher to prey – and, at that, inedible prey – suggests that such hunts functioned primarily to reaffirm the human, and particularly the elite, position as masters of violence’.27 This would seem appropriate for the depiction of wolf howling in the sound zone created by the Tretiz. However, the invitation to mimic howling in order to perfect one’s French potentially reverses a position of human dominance over



24



25



26



27

[‘ignis crepitat, cursus aquarium murmurat’] (fire crackles, running water murmurs), Benediktson, ‘Polemius Silvius’ Voces Variae Animancium’, p. 74. The word beste (257) may refer to cattle, who fear barking and howling, or wolves themselves, who were the prey of medieval hunters. Susan Crane has demonstrated that the bark is critical for cross-species communication between hounds and humans, creating meaning for humans in intricate connection with hunting horns and human hunting cries. See Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 112–13. Records of wolves in medieval England seem generally to be confined to the Welsh Border counties and the Northern regions of Britain, with little record surviving from the early medieval period. See Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside: The Classic History of Britain’s Landscape, Flora and Fauna (London: Phoenix Press, 1986), p. 35. Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011), p. 63.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts lupine species at the same time that it asserts such a position, because it involves the human imitating the wolf’s form of communication. Considering the dwindling presence of wolves in medieval Britain, in thirteenth-century England actual wolves were perhaps best identified and rendered present by their manifestation in stories, both from folk memory and in elite literatures, and the proximity of certain forms of human utterance to the sound of howling. The French verb for howl in the Tretiz is ouler, more commonly written huler or heuler, which emulates the sound of wolf howling through a culturally specific form of onomatopoeia, as does the Middle English gloss yollez, from the verb houlen.28 The text portrays two species that experienced an antagonistic relationship in medieval Western Europe: humans as hunters and wolves as prey. This noise depicted through human language in the animal sound list stresses the proximity of howling to human utterance; howling is particularly evocative of the human voice’s connection to strong and prominent expirations of breath.29 In doing so, it creates a network of relations between real sounds and aural and oral fiction. The treatise sound zone thus counterbalances the absence of wolves from the English landscape, due to hunting and extermination, with sonic presence in the form of human imitation of howling. Alongside howling, references to singing in the Tretiz evoke the songs of humans and birds in models that invite a similar reflection to that inspired by depictions of howling. One passage draws on a familiar medieval trope: a comparison between the singing of the owl and the nightingale. This comparison engenders an immersive effect for the conceptualization of human singing and bird song in the sound zone.30 In a section following the rubric, Ore le fraunceis des oyseaus dé bois (Now the French for the birds of the woods), the narrator introduces the image of singing birds to portray a quasi-pastoral scene. Unlike some of the comparisons between animal noise and human actions in the Tretiz, the encounter with the nightingale in this sound zone is communicated through language by the sound of the bird’s name in French and English.31 The narrator invites the reader to go playing in the woods where the nightingale sings:

28



29

30



31

For another example, see Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1995), which recounts Tristan entering the gate of a palace and being shouted at by young boys as if he were a wolf: ‘Veez le fol! hu! hu! hu! hu!’ (‘Look at the madman! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu!’, 250), p. 223. I discuss the verb huer in further detail in Chapter 4, pp. 138–48. Chaunter became a common noun for singers and occasionally songbirds in Middle English in the later Middle Ages. See OED, ‘chant, v’. I discuss the same juxtaposition of English and French names for the nightingale in relation to Marie de France’s lai L’Aüstic in the Introduction, pp. 10–12.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage Quant du verger avom le chois, Aloms ore juer a boys Ou la russinole, þe nichtingale, Meuz chaunte ki houswan en sale. E meuz chaunte mauviz en busson Ki ne fet chauf sorriz en meisoun.

houle þrostel bosc (Tretiz, 711–16)

[When we have the choice of going to the orchard, let us go play in the woods, where the nightingale, þe nichtingale, sings better than the owl (owl/hoots) in the hall. And the thrush (thrush) sings better in the bush (bush) than bats do in the house.]

Alongside the depiction of avian hierarchies, the russinole, ‘glossed’ in-text with the English þe nichtingale, conveys the acoustic experience of hearing this species’ name in two languages, and perhaps attests to the audience’s experience of trying out the bird’s names themselves. Another important aspect of birdsong in this passage is that it emphasizes that song is not an expression of neutral, meaningless sound. Despite the conceptual noisiness of this passage on figurative and multilingual levels, the real question is who sings better than whom? The scene is competitive in nature, simultaneously evoking a cacophony of bird calls in a dawn chorus and an ensemble of human voices, all of which perhaps echo the children’s games in the woods. The reader or listener must decipher a chain of birds introduced through a conventional hierarchy of birdsong, to distinguish the relative value of the song of the nightingale, who sings better than the owl, and culminating in the thrush, who sings better than the bats.32 The contact made available by depictions of singing across the whole treatise is not limited to birds, but also extends in playful ways to the donkey and the peacock (819–20). The representations of singing birds thus express clear examples of specific types of asymmetrical sonic contact available in a sound zone that references multiple languages and species. Although the sound zone in the Tretiz relies on a friction between languages for the generation of meaning, the call of the owl in the passage above demonstrates that meaning may also pass through nonlinguistic forms of bird sound. The owl’s hoot merges the two vernaculars, troubling distinctions between human and bird in ways that resonate with the human imitation of wolf howling. The treatise gives the Anglo-Norman noun huan for ‘owl’ in an unusual form with a ‘w’: houswan.33 It is glossed

32



33

Bats were often grouped with birds in medieval taxonomies. See Willene B. Clark (ed.), A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary: Commentary, Art, Text and Translation (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), p. 182. This reading varies between manuscripts: huan (BP); huhan (T); but huwan (CY4), oweyn (O) and haw (MS b is damaged so the end of word is

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts in English with the noun houle, also an English verb for ‘hoot’. Although this gloss features above the noun houswan in the French text, it is also possible to read the gloss in this particular manuscript as a description of the owl’s hoot because the English houle can be read as a noun and a verb. The semantic flexibility of the interlinear gloss in our main source text creates the conditions for the line to be read multilingually, by fusing the syntax of English and French: Ou la russinole, þe nichtingale, | Meuz chaunte ki houswan houle en sale (Where the nightingale, þe nichtingale, sings better than the owl [hoots] in the hall).34 Read in alternative ways, these interpretive possibilities suggest that the hoot of the owl, like the howl of the wolf, bridges a divide between English and French syntax and vocabulary. The potential human mimicry of the owl and the wolf encourages audiences of the Tretiz to pay attention to the nonlinguistic aspects of the sound zone that are framed by comparisons of languages and species. It also suggests that audiences must learn how to recognize the distinctiveness of their own voices through terms other than purely linguistic ones. For a young gentleman to learn how to hoot, and thus to produce the same noise as the owl, which is simultaneously that bird’s name, is for him to exercise a form of mastery over the fictional sound zone that teaches dominance and the ability to manipulate the sounds of different languages. At the same time, by hooting, the human imitator expresses a position in the hierarchy of sound that is inferior to the song of the lark. In this sound zone, the young gentleman is therefore at once superior in human language and inferior in nonlinguistic communication. He is thus positioned at a bridge between linguistic and species divides that is conceptually discordant, with the potential to reverse any fixed interpretation.

Language and difference The multilingual representation of animal vocalizations, alongside the names of animals, leads to competing interpretations of the values of animal sounds. For audiences who are learning how to speak, and perhaps when to laugh, through animal imagery, the Tretiz provides a fictional and mnemonic framework for comparisons of linguistic and nonlinguistic sound. Such comparisons become more conceptually complex, however, when



34

illegible). A appears to read either ‘vayre’ or ‘uayne’, suggesting the scribe may not have recognized the word; ‘vayre’ is the reading given by both the Wright and Owen editions. My particular thanks to Thomas Hinton for noting these variations. In other manuscripts, such as A, the gloss becomes an hule, which renders the reading less flexible.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage the text deliberately riffs on tropes based on cultural, rather than species, difference. Tracing the ways these themes are dealt with in the context of English–French relations and species imitation, it becomes clear that the treatise does more than simply represent the sounds of animals. Key passages from the Tretiz heighten the theme of cultural and social relativism by drawing specific attention to linguistic difference and adjustment. These additions to a sound zone already brimming with noise broaden the perspective of the text’s depiction of animal sounds to include cultural references to French and France, as well as highlighting assumptions about the value of different types of sounds. Such distinctions demonstrate that sound in this sound zone is always bound with ideas of value and cultural difference that might be useful for young gentlemen to learn. The Tretiz thus offers a snapshot of the types of ideas about sonic value circulating in multilingual medieval England, as well as demonstrating how textual depictions of sound prefigure the formation of such ideas. English glosses in the Tretiz create the rare conditions for interpreting this medieval text as a sound zone. Why only certain words are glossed in English, while others form part of a complex poetic system, is open for debate. Certain English words in the Tretiz may well have been familiar to speakers of French or readers of Anglo-Norman texts, but instances of complete line translation into English glosses suggests the value of thinking in two languages simultaneously. This is the case in the list of animal noises, as when the focus turns to the toad and frog, followed by the snake and various animals used for farming.35 The passage is notable for its close attention to alliteration, internal assonance, and rhyme, which is mirrored in the English glosses: Crapaut coaule, reyne gaille, Collure proprement regaille. Purcel gerist, cengler releie, Cheverau cherist e tor torreie.

tode crodeth frogge snake gris wineth boor yelleth kide muteres bole yelleth (Tretiz, 273–6)

[The toad (toad) croaks (croaks), the frog (frog) pipes, the adder (snake) properly also hisses. The piglet (piglet) squeals (whines), the boar (boar) grunts (yells), the kid (kid) bleats (bleats) and the bull (bull) bellows (yells).]

35

Full line translation is particularly evident in another manuscript version, T, in a passage describing the wren: Kar meuz wut le retel [þe wrenne] | Envirouner le trestel [þe stouk] | Ke un tret de vyhel [fiþele] | Hou la note de fristel. [floute] | [Levere is þe wrenne aboute þe stouk renne þen þe fiþel draut hor þe floute craft] (The wren prefers running/flying around a stook of corn than the saw of a fiddle or blast from a flute, 561–4). For further information on bilingualism as a ‘spur to creative versification’, see Hinton, ‘Walter de Bibbesworth’s “Tretiz”’, p. 876.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts As tools for imitation by human voices, the English glosses in this passage demonstrate that thinking about animals is culturally and linguistically specific, and likewise multifaceted. The repetition of the English word yelleth, for two distinct but rhyming French words, releie and torreie, could at first sight convey a sense of the poverty of English compared to French as a more expressive transnational lingua franca. However, on closer inspection, patterns in glossing reveal this to be a peculiar form of multilingual poetics; the repetition of the English gloss mimics the repetitive structures of French rhyme in the preceding couplet, in which the suffix –re is added to the French word gaille (pipes/hisses) to distinguish the noise of the frog from the snake. By contrasting competing perspectives on the sonic phenomena of the animal world in two languages, the sound zone in which French and English operate reveals the importance of multilingual thinking for the expression of overlapping forms of linguistic identity. One passage from the treatise evokes linguistic comparisons by inserting two English terms related to bees, including indefinite articles and English syntax, into a highly sound-focused description of the hive: La rouche server deit des ees, Dount nous veom voler les dees, E un par sei singulerement An hony bee est proprement, E proprement un dé dees ees En engleis est a suarme of bees. E c’est une brecche de mel nomé Ki en la rouche funt les ees de gré.

bees swarmes

honny come (Tretiz, 1045–52)

[The hive will bring forth bees (bees) whose swarms (swarms) we see flying. One on its own is rightly called a honey bee, and a group of these bees is called in English a swarm of bees; and that which the bees make willingly in the hive is called honeycomb (honeycomb).]

This description of the beehive is a prime example of how reading the treatise as a sound zone encourages audiences to switch between competing languages and balance linguistic expression in French and English. As part of the juxtaposition of languages, linguistic difference is effaced, revealing how languages in a sound zone must continually jostle for position. The rhyme in the first couplet is not repeated in the interlinear glosses, bees and swarmes. Instead, English phrases including the word bee are inserted directly into the French verse, although with adapted spelling to make the English words ‘fit’ the aspect of the French versification, as with the word suarme without a ‘w’.36

36

This is not the same across all manuscripts. The passage also occurs in COY, where the word is swarm.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage The same occurs in the first rhyming couplet. Whereas the original sound of the Anglo-Norman ees differs from the pronunciation of the English bees, the text flattens out this sonic difference through orthographic similarity. Not all passages of the Tretiz dealing with animals efface sonic difference. The list of animal noises introduced above includes a section on cackling hens that highlights how different medieval communities place competing values on the interpretation of sound. These communities include the Anglo-Norman cultural setting that informed the text’s composition as well as those fictional estates being depicted. The passage highlights how the words for hens are significantly different in English and French, but that expressions even from different French cultural milieus can indeed teach us more: Ausint diez li geline patile kakeles Quant pouné ad en gardin ou en vile, leyth Car de Fraunce ai tele estile Ki geline huppé poune et patile. a henne coppet leith and kakeles E ki trop se avaunce sanz resoun A la geline est compaignoun, Ki plus se avaunce pur un eof Ki sa arure ne fet li boef. (Tretiz, 279–86) [You similarly say that the hen clucks (cackles) when it has laid (laid) an egg in the garden or on the estate grounds, for the usage in France is that a cackling hen lays and clucks (a cackler hen lays and cackles). And a person who is too boastful without good cause is akin to the hen, who boasts more over one egg than does the ox over its day’s ploughing.]

The second-person address that begins this passage raises an immediate question concerning who is supposed to reap the rewards of the moral message instigated by competing linguistic expressions. This is key to understanding the text’s projected audience. The two single glosses are verbs rather than nouns, words conveying action rather than listing objects. Alongside a relative lack of English glosses, this section of the list is therefore less useful for a potential student of English or French mining the list for vocabulary than it would be for a speaker or reader who already knows French. The latter might include audiences interested in the pleasurable experience of recognizing two languages in the same sound zone, including Francophone children and adults who might benefit from the fablesque moral lesson of the proud, cackling hen companion. Descriptions of the amusing juxtaposition of English and French words for the cackling hen thus contribute to the formation of linguistic subjectivity and socialization in a multilingual milieu that offers clear comparisons between cultures. 85

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The Tretiz reinforces the play inherent in the juxtaposition of idiom in different languages sharing the same cultural and textual spaces. It achieves this through single interlinear glosses as well as, occasionally, entire phrases of English expression. In the case of the latter, the text specifically references how dialects of medieval French could be distinguished according to the place in which that type of French was spoken. It does so by acknowledging the usage of French from Fraunce. The unusual aspect of this passage is that the English gloss for an observation about French from Fraunce features as an entire line resembling in its own fashion an idiomatic medieval English expression: a henne coppet leith and kakeles. The line of English sits at an ambiguous junction between a translation from the French of a different place, not Anglo-Norman England but continental France, and the representation of a common saying in English. Likewise, it is unclear whether the French explanation following the English idiom is a clarification of the French equivalent or of the underlying assumptions of an English idiomatic expression the moral values of which need explaining. The irony of this passage is that it is cultural, rather than biological, difference that inflects the differing interpretations of the hen’s ‘cluck cluck’, which becomes the sonic marker of companionship for the worthy human. What a listener hears in an animal sound is therefore entirely dependent on their cultural and linguistic education. Comparisons of dialect and cultural difference are a phenomenon familiar to readers of medieval literature produced after the Norman Conquest of England and through to the Hundred Year’s War.37 References to continental France in the Tretiz further highlight the importance of representing the competing sounds of English and French in cultural zones other than Anglo-Norman England. In another instance of this, the Tretiz places English vocabulary for animals considered vermin onto a specific continental geographical location. The passage suggests that the weasel is worth more to rid the narrator’s barn of rats than all the moles de ci ki a Paris (from here to Paris, 815). The narrator then offers another species comparison that reintroduces the values associated with birdsong, remarking that he would thus prefer char de cerf ou de feoun | Ki chaunt de asne ou de poun (meat of deer or fawn than song of donkey or peacock, 819–20). The passage emphasizes linguistic difference by offering a transition from talk about vermin, obliquely associated with Paris, to the contrasting utilitarian value of animals. Asserting an ironic first-person perspective, the narrator now makes a nonsensical comparison between eating game and hearing the song, chaunt, of the



37

This theme is explored in detail by Ardis Butterfield in The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially pp. 36–102.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage donkey or peacock, two creatures certainly well-known for their sounds, but not much appreciated for their ‘song’. The geographical marker, ‘from here to Paris’, highlights the cultural transmission of concepts across the Channel and the conceptualization of a type of French (and English) spoken by ‘us’ and ‘them’. The focus of the imaginary scene evoked by the reference to Paris is not on the moles’ production of sound but rather on the passage’s contribution to a sound zone in which the sounds of languages are scrutinized in relation to animal imagery. The types of association the Tretiz generates between language and place are mapped onto the animal kingdom, where some animals are useful for humans to think with while others produce sounds that do not fit into an eloquent depiction of estate life. The comparison between animal imagery associated with Paris and the debatable description of the donkey and peacock’s sounds as ‘song’ also offers the possibility of a comparison between the types of sounds produced by speakers of Anglo-Norman and continental French.38 What this means for a reader of the Tretiz is that they too can learn how to participate in such cultural commentary from the perspective of vernacular languages and dialects. The theme of mastering language frames discussion of sound in the Tretiz, and demonstrates that contact between languages, like contact between species, is never free from the power dynamics that accompany linguistic encounter in sound zones. This theme is particularly prominent in a final example of moral judgment cast on the vocalization of the cuckoo. The call of the cuckoo emphasizes the value of a bird sound as the text scorns the cuckoo in another recognizable and common trope: Le chaunt de kokel est recous, E si n’est guers delicious. Poynt serreit si riotuse Si sun chaunt fu graciouse. E plus est oi en oriol Ki la noise l’orkoil.

kockou

wodewale (Tretiz, 797–802)

[The song of the cuckoo (cuckoo) is raucous and is hardly refined. It would not be at all contentious if its song was more charming. And it is heard more in the chamber than the noise of the golden oriole (woodlark).]

The narrator’s judgment here involves applying the standards of an elite literary tradition concerning different types of birdsong and poetic form

38

Similar comparisons are made in more direct ways in other texts from the period, such as the Roman de Renart, or the fabliau Des Deus Anglois et de l’Anel, which both feature characters mispronouncing Latin, English, or French. See Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, pp. 70–4, and 78–86.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts to the mundane, but no less entertaining, aspects of life on a medieval estate. The Tretiz makes a very clear moral judgment about the sound of both the cuckoo and the golden oriole, a judgment based on the literary and musical motif of the cuckoo’s song as monotonous, aesthetically displeasing, and a signifier of false love.39 The passage reinforces the latter interpretation of kockou as the metaphorical signal for adulterous trysts which take place in the lady’s bedroom (oriole), a theme introduced earlier in the Tretiz.40 The passage seems to draw explicit attention to the value of sound, which is noise, as the length of the lines depletes before it arrives at a final statement concerning the golden oriole. As with the nightingale, the reaffirmation of the cuckoo’s sound in two languages, this time glossed separately in English, serves to emphasize the tangible and aesthetic qualities of imitating birds through their sounds and through the act of naming different species. The depiction of cuckoo calling is multilingual in two ways: it works between English and French, and it identifies the difference between a naming noun and the nonlinguistic onomatopoeic expression of sound: cuckoo calling. The lack of significant difference between French kokel and English kockou creates further possibilities for audiences to experiment with the vocalizations of the cuckoo in different languages, without necessarily making decisions about which sound is ‘correct’. This model of interpretation acts as another example of how the Tretiz demonstrates that language signifies animal sounds in plural ways, both in the context of naming and in the identification of actual sound. Among many examples of taxonomy, hierarchy, and cultural separation in the Tretiz, even the act of singing is not a neutral one. Comparisons between different types of birdsong translate sound from the ornithological to the human worlds, reinforcing a hierarchy of moral and aesthetic value based on mirroring. The ways that birdsong mirrors human singing, and therefore human social systems, contrasts with the types of nonsensical sounds that feature in the list of animal noise with which this chapter began because birdsong is implicitly connected to singing, rather than non-melodic vocalizations. Despite differences in the types of sounds

39



40

I draw here on Elizabeth E. Leach’s analysis of similar sounds in musical examples. See Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 154. The interpretation based on cuckolding is highlighted by Rothwell in ‘Walter de Bibbesworth: Le Tretiz’, p. 36, n. 9. This passage can be compared to the same section in T, which, having just described the sound of the cuckoo, concludes that: Plus est delyt en l’oriol [de la chaumbre] | Escoter la noyse del oriol [wodewale] (It is more enjoyable to sit in your chamber listening to the golden oriole, 599–600). This is more straightforward than the passage in G. For the earlier passage describing the embraces between women, squires, and clerics that take place in the bedchamber (oriole), see 613–19.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage produced by animals and birds, however, both onomatopoeic sounds and expressions of melodic birdsong are elements of complex networks of relation in the sound zone. A young, aspiring gentleman reading the text learns to recognize when to laugh at examples of species vocalization, when to imitate the sounds of particular animals and birds (and when not too, based on hierarchies of nonhuman sound), and how to spot friction produced by the meeting of different languages and cultures in competing expressions of sounds related to animals and birds.

Naming the subject in the sound zone The Tretiz is invested in the representation of animal sounds through the juxtaposition of English and French, but these are framed by a broader interest in the qualities of sounds used to describe other aspects of the natural world. A passage deserving closer attention is a list of collective nouns for different species, which complements the list of animal vocalizations by presenting the act of naming and qualifying species as conducive to acquiring and learning French and English. This list is twenty-nine lines long and recounts the names humans use to designate groups of animals and birds, beginning with a herde of deer and an erde of cranes (223, 224). It quickly evolves to include in its litany the names for groups of humans, including a fouleie (throng, 228) of peasants and a compagnie (company, 240) of women, as well as objects such as a masse of silver (233). The list of nouns is framed by a narratorial interjection inviting young children to listen so that they will be able to speak correctly. This list too has all the marks of a thirteenth-century sound zone in which French and English are in close dialogue. English glosses even comment on and destabilize the meanings of French words: Ore le fraunceis des bestes e oyseus chescune asemblé par son naturele langage. Beaus duz enfanz, pur ben aprendre En fraunceis devez entendre Ki de chescune manere asemblé Des bestes ki Deus ad formé E des oyseaus ensement Coveint parler proprement. Primes ou cerfs sunt assemblé hertes Une herde est apelé, E des gruwes ausi une herde, cranes E des grives sauns ‘h’ eerde; Nyé de feisauntz, cové de partriz, partriz Dameie des alouues, trippe de berbiz; larkes

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Harras dist hom des poleins; coltes Grant fouleie dist hom des vileins, cherles Soundre des porckes, sundre des esturneus, Bovee des herouns, pipee des oyseauz. smale briddes (Tretiz, 215–30) [Now the French of the animals and the birds, each one gathered by its natural language. Good, sweet children, in order to learn well in French you must hear in what manner each of the animals created by God, and likewise the birds, is assembled, and how to talk about them appropriately. Firstly, where deer (harts) are gathered it is called a herd, and also a herd with cranes (cranes), and with fieldfare erde without the ‘h’; a nye of pheasants, a covey of partridges (partridges), a bevy of larks (larks), a flock of sheep; a ‘rag’ says man of foals (colts); a ‘throng’ says man of peasants (serfs), a sounder of swine, a ‘sunder’ of starlings, a siege of herons, a flock of birds (small birds).]

The collective nouns used to describe groups of animals and birds, and by extension the act of pronouncing the names of species, are presented as a means of asserting an unstable form of control over language. Naming groups of animals and birds allows humans to distinguish between, and to control, different species through the assumption that they can be identified and managed through language. Man’s dominance is juxtaposed with species-specific properties of animals and birds as the text provokes disdain or humor in the network of relations between human readers and various human, animal, and material agents. The words coveint parler proprement (how to talk about [them] appropriately), which introduce the list above, can be translated in numerous ways. The prepositional phrase parler de (to talk about) indicates the act of dealing with or treating a subject, as in a written document. Parler also carries strong associations with speech and discourse, pronouncements, or expressing oneself verbally.41 It is possible therefore to read the line as referring to the pronunciation of animal names as well as the conceptual treatment of animal collective nouns. Naming also allows the reader or listener to speak properly, even if this is merely a fiction of orality. Through this process young boys learn how to speak as gentlemen, and thus as masters of the estate. This connection is particularly clear following the interjection of the narrator, who addresses the list to beauz duz enfants (good, sweet children), who are presumably the young gentlemen

41

For the various translations of parler, see AND, ‘parler’, 1. MS T includes the same insistence on parler with a similar focus on hearing the distinctions between words: Cheres enfaunz, hore entendez | Aprés diner ke cy orrez. De checune assemblee diversement | Vous covent parler proprement (Now hear this, dear children, after dinner listen very closely to this: how you pronounce/talk about each different group appropriately, Tretiz, 182–3).

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage indicated by the Prologue discussed above. These children are instructed to listen (entendre) carefully to what is being said about the groupings of animals and birds in French, a language associated with the ruling elite. However, as English glosses begin to creep into the passage, it becomes evident that control in the sound zone is a multilingual concern; linguistic control is dependent on the learning of two languages the fictional children addressees do not yet completely master. The representation of sound in the list of collective nouns is not built on the direct mirroring of human and animal vocalization, as is the list of animal noise that follows in G. Instead, the premise of the list is a fictional learning environment. The language-learning process includes not only how to properly talk about the meanings of sounds, but also presumably how to properly pronounce words related to the natural world. One prominent example of this features in the passage recounting the collective group word for deer in French: a herde. The same word is used for groups of cranes and fieldfare, although with altered forms. The treatise articulates the importance of the correct aspiration of the letter ‘h’ in nouns associated with these animals. The reader must distinguish between collective nouns based on how they are spoken and breathed, alongside how they are written: E des gruwes (cranes) ausi une herde, | E des grives sauns ‘h’ eerde (and also a herd with cranes [cranes], and with fieldfare eerde without the ‘h’, 223–4). The ‘homophones’ herde (herd) and eerde (flock or mutation), if they are indeed supposed to sound the same, thus create a confusing triple pun for the reader or listener. Due to the written nature of the Tretiz, there is an argument to suggest that we are here only dealing with an orthographic distinction. However, by connecting the list to the preceding rubric, which presents the act of speaking as the purpose, sound is implicitly brought into the frame for interpretation.42 The homophony or pseudo-homophony in this passage demonstrates that the words used to describe groups of animals and birds are themselves human constructs and subject to the material embodiment of sound as it is released from the human mouth.

42

The complex loop of linguistic association in the passage above is not present in all versions of the Tretiz. MS T flattens the meanings in G by presenting identical spellings for ‘herd’: Hou cerfs sount assembleez | Une herde est apelez. | De grues une herde, [cranes] | De gryves ausy herde [ffeldefares] (Where deer are gathered it is called a herd. A herd of cranes, also a herd of fieldfare, Tretiz, 186–9). It is possible that a discrepancy between aspirated and non-aspirated sounds here reflects alternative pronunciations of the same word that stem from the mixture of Germanic origins of this noun, including the Old English heord, and Old Low German herda (OED). See ‘harde’ in Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialects du IXe au XVe siècle (New York: Kraus, Reprint Corp., 1961). The AND includes both nouns under the same entry, ‘erde, eerde, herde’, suggesting that the sonic discrepancy here may be a false or rare one.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The juxtaposition of the words for ‘herd’ exposes the absence of the aspirated sound in eerde to describe the group of fieldfare, and emphasizes that language and sound are subject to manipulation and interpretation both in written and spoken form. In this way the text makes very precise written and aural distinctions between terms that might otherwise be confused or overlooked in the process of learning French. Rather than drawing a clear binary distinction between human and animal (as modernity might expect), the Tretiz presents different types of life on a continuum. This means that part of the way it asserts the dominance of ‘man’ is to convey the superiority of the nobleman over other kinds of animals and human beings. The ability to understand, imitate, and even enjoy the different modes of expression conceptualized as naturele langage in this section of the Tretiz presumes a certain male, aristocratic audience, and shapes the superior positioning of that audience. Scholars have connected the pedagogic concerns of such passages of the Tretiz with the preparation of young children for land ownership.43 Land owners in the Middle Ages would likewise require a broad range of knowledge on estate management, including domestication, farming, agriculture, hunting, and using animals and birds for pastimes.44 However, despite the premise that the list is for children, the level of linguistic complexity explored in the passage presumes that the audience of the text already has a good grasp of both written and spoken French. While the treatise uses the formation of young, male, aristocratic learners of French as a reference point for envisioning a world that such audiences may eventually control through their own perfected use of two vernacular languages, this does not necessarily preclude other groups from placing themselves into that fictional position. The child audience is therefore a rhetorical position that bears an oblique relation to reality, which would probably have included mediation by an adult audience, such as the patron Dyonise de Mountechensi. The acoustic enjoyment for audiences of this text is in the representation of the abundance of life in more than one language, and the ability of readers to place themselves in the role of the aspiring gentleman being guided

43



44

See William Rothwell, ‘The Teaching of French in Medieval England’, The Modern Language Review, 63.1 (1968), pp. 37–46; Karen K. Jambeck, ‘The Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth: Cultivating the Vernacular’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 159–84; and Adam Fijałkowski, ‘Die voces variae animantium in der Unterrichtstradition des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit’, Das Sein der Dauer (2008), pp. 447–69. See Esther Pascua, ‘From Forest to Farm to Town: Domestic Animals from ca. 1000 to ca. 1450’, in Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 81–102.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage through the different animals. To aid this process, the language for animals and birds in this sound zone is innately subject to visual and aural interpretation. Written and spoken language in this list draw attention to the ways audiences may have conceptualized animals through alternative forms of communication that were not necessarily taught or learned simultaneously. The likelihood that the text was read aloud is a tantalizing one for a study on sound, particularly as the imitation or ‘performance’ of specific words such as herde and erde provides a similar model to the sonic profusion of the natural world provided in the list of animal noise. Readers and listeners of the text might grasp different messages based on their skills in these areas. In a spoken context, the question of whether to aspirate or not aspirate the beginning of a word such as herde draws attention to the material properties of language. Aspiration, breath, and the imitation of the sounds of words are linked to the functional properties of words describing life that form the types of gentlemanly subject purportedly reading and interpreting the text. In this way, a gentleman who can grasp both the spoken and written nuances of animal words and sounds can place himself at a superior vantage than other groups of humans depicted in the treatise. There is an important distinction to be made between the types of power structures and hierarchies associated with the depiction of nobles, aristocrats, and landowners who might read or listen to the Tretiz, and the vileins who are pulled into the list of animals in the sound zone. The Tretiz includes among the list of collective nouns for animals and birds the grant fouleie (big throng) of vileins, signifying peasants and possibly tenants, with implications of baseness and wickedness. Vileins is glossed as cherles in Middle English (228) to designate groups of humans who are sub-categories of the type of humanity represented by the young child from the Prologue itself who will grow up to be gentils homme. The humanity of hom (man, 227) who memorizes or speaks the list is thus in fact a discrete category encompassing only the highest echelons of social class and gender. The peasant, by estate and class unable to access the education required to laugh at the treatise’s play on language, is siphoned off from the category of mankind. The taxonomies that separate man from other groups of humans and animals in the Tretiz are clearly expressed in passages that draw on wordplay associated with the langage of animals and birds. Considering the rubric pitches these nouns as describing bestes e oyseus (animals and birds), it could even be suggested that the throng of peasants represents a tongue-in-cheek vision of lower social classes as a different bestial species from the human reader.45

45

Other manuscripts include collective nouns at this juncture that are directed at more elite groups. For example, MS C collapses the distinctions I am proposing by giving route for squires, townsfolk, rascals, and oxen, under the category of bruit de baorouns (the noise of men, f. 4vb).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts This is a human animal that does not have the same access to knowledge and linguistic control as the fictional young gentleman. Alongside vileins, groups of young women (puceles) or ladies (dames) are similarly depicted in close association with the world of animal-related nouns and sounds. This depiction forces a gendered split in the conceptualization of aristocratic human subjectivity. Upper-class women are included under the umbrella terms of puceles and dames in passages that poke fun at the similarities between terms applied to women and birds: Luire de faucouns, luyre de puceles. Mes pucele ceo set saunz juper Les gentils faucouns aluirer. Eschele dist home de bataille. Foysun dist home de vif aumaille. Des dames dist hom compaignie, E des ouwes ne chaungez mie, Car de bone franceis nient le deit. Ly mestre baudiment l’oustreit.

houting

(Tretiz, 235–43)

[A cast of falcons, a bevy of young women. A young woman knows how to lure the peregrine falcon without calling out (shouting). Man says ‘a battalion’ of troops; man says ‘a herd’ of living cattle. Of ladies, man says ‘a company’, and for geese you change nothing, because in good French one should change nothing; the schoolmaster would gaily allow it.]

Mastery of French is again the main conceit of this passage, brought into relief by the naming hom of line 240, which can be taken as both ‘man’ and the collective subject pronoun ‘on’ in Old French. Such mastery is connected not only to the control of language but also to control over the fictional estate, including falcons and geese, as well as authority over women, children, battalions of men, and cattle. Described as a luyre de puceles (a bevy of young women), groups of women in the list are associated with medieval falconry because the collective nouns that describe them and the falcons are the same: luyre.46 Wordplay in French is also being used to collapse the distinction between women and geese in a passage surprisingly free of glosses, making the collective nouns used for both groups the same: compaignie. This expression contains ‘a male gibe’ that draws explicit comparisons between

46

For details on medieval falconry, see: Susan Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 120–36; Robin S. Oggins, The Kings and Their Hawks: Falconry in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and An Smets and Baudouin Van den Abeele, ‘Medieval Hunting’, in Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 59–80.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage women and geese by suggesting that, despite physical differences, the words used to describe them are fortuitously the same.47 The process of naming groups of women alongside animals establishes the fictional male speaking subject’s dominance over both the ladies and the geese in question. There may be a link here to the case of the ‘Winchester Goose’, a term used to designate London prostitutes in the sixteenth century, perhaps with older origins.48 Misogynistic humor and categorization are thus presented as part of the language learning process for little gentlemen who should learn how to speak French well. The treatise presents the learning of such tropes as a composite part of acquiring French, and therefore of learning how to become a gentleman. The ‘mestre’ of the passage above, most likely a male schoolmaster or perhaps even the narrator, gleefully approves of the linguistic joke on the homonym compaignie. He too is complicit in this process, which involves them both laughing at the associations between groups of animals and birds, soldiers, and aristocratic women. The Tretiz includes another joke about the associations that language reinforces between women and the animal world. Bringing this discussion full circle, this passage features in the section on animal noise, and highlights the imitative qualities of sheep bleating on the fictional estate. In this short passage, bleating acts as a spur for thinking about ladies dancing, monetary concerns and, perhaps, poetic fatigue: Berbiz baleie, dame bale, Espicer prent ces mers de bale. Par trop veiller home baal. A sun serjaunt sa chose baille.

szep bleteth hoppeth bagge gones (Tretiz, 287–90)

[Sheep (sheep) bleats (bleats), lady dances (dances), the grocer takes his goods by the bale (bag). If awake for too long, man yawns (yawns). He hands over to his squire.]

The sound of the sheep’s bleat here is a simple and recognizable one containing another implicit comparison between women and animals. The dancing of ladies is tied to the sheep’s vocalization in the same way that the man’s speech act was tied to the bear’s roar at the beginning of the list of animal noise. What is different in this case is that, rather than man’s speaking as the counterpoint around which animal and bird noises are interpreted, it is the lady’s action that becomes the motif for the young reader or listener to learn. The English rhymes reinforce a connection between the vocal bleating (bleteth) and the physical dancing (hoppeth),

47 48

Rothwell, Tretiz, p. 11, n. 1. Hinton, ‘Animals on the Page: Voces animantium’.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts further linking these inherent or naturele activities through nonsensical, but poetic, contraction. The association of the dancing of ladies with the bleating of sheep contains potential elements of humor that mock the agents performing those actions, through which audiences made of predominantly young boys might learn how to distinguish themselves from women, animals, and birds. The juxtaposition of the sheep’s vocalization with another physical activity, the man’s yawn, suggests a humorous connection between the muzzle of the sheep and the mouth of the man, perhaps also conveying that the narrator himself is growing tired of the incessant wordplay and word association! The sheep’s bleat bears strong resonance in both French and English with the actual sound that sheep make, commonly rendered ‘baaah’ in contemporary English non-verbal onomatopoeia.49 It is difficult to read this extract without, at the very least, linking the sounds indicated by the syllable –ba, which form a strong sonic anchor for the French verse, with the sounds encountered in the field. The syllable –ba is repeated five times (six if the English gloss bagge is included) in the space of four lines, connecting the action of bleating with that of dancing (bale), yawning (baal), and handing over a job (baille). The repetition also links these actions with the grocer’s bag (French bale; English bagge). The multiple associations reinforced through shared performances of vocalization demonstrate that the noises of sheep create networks of relation between agents and objects that spread out into other aspects of medieval estate life. These networks allow audiences to consider their own place among other human and animal agents, highlighting forms of asymmetrical power present in the sound zone. Inside the sound zone, subtle jibes at women and geese in French may work along similar lines to the homophony of the herde, expressing the fact that the sounds of languages communicate intersubjective tension built on images or reflections of multiple realities signaled by sound rather than innate, physical truths. Reading the Tretiz as a sound zone necessarily entails a certain contradiction: while words are presented as semiotically profusive, they simultaneously generate the conditions for identifying, classifying, and controlling different species on a fictional estate (including other categories of human being). The instrument of control, language, is itself unstable. That the reader may be required to make decisions about linguistic dominance when reading or imitating words from the Tretiz reveals that the text is a sound zone in which audience subjectivity is formed by the tensions arising between two languages. However, these linguistic and sonic tensions have very real consequences for the ways that audiences of the

49

I discuss the sound of the sheep’s bleat, and the symbolism of sheep, in further detail in Chapter 3, pp. 112–19.

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Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage treatise might conceptualize their own relationship with other human and animal subjects. Moments of humor concerning linguistic superiority are therefore based on shaky foundations because the humor encapsulated in the juxtaposition of women and geese, alongside the sounds of these words, points to the fact that language does not communicate a stable concept of linguistic subjectivity. By reading passages that contain noises of animals and birds, or the words used to describe them, the type of reader identified as the postulated audience of the text learns that bleating evokes ladies dancing, that man uses the same words to describe women and geese, and that groups from different social classes can be distinguished from each other. The reader or listener learns these associations all the while paying close attention to the networks of sound made possible by word association, homophony, rhyme, and aspiration. The contact between French and English glosses (whether above the words they translate or in the French verse itself) contributes to the subtle recognition of linguistic and cultural difference, and the creation of human forms of dominance and hierarchy in power dynamics that reflect the cultural setting of Anglo-Norman England in which the text was produced. Movement between languages is connected to expressions of anthropocentric power and control over class and gender. Crucially, though, these associations are subjective experiences formulated by those learning the langage and the noise connected to animals, which might also work in reverse to destabilize man’s presumed authority.

Conclusion The assertion of man’s authority through multilingual imitation in the Tretiz is at once fundamental for the formation of young Anglo-Norman and English gentlemen and posited as a fictional process that can be rehearsed in the sound zone. Reading animal sounds as part of a sound zone affords the possibility of connecting these phenomena with the linguistic and cultural tensions of post-conquest Anglo-Norman England, in which movement between Latin, English, and French was essential for the development of linguistic subjectivity, itself dependent on culturally specific models of education. Language acquisition is at the forefront of these moments of contact, but inevitably engenders asymmetrical power relations that privilege certain kinds of human dominance marked by the treatise as male and aristocratic, and pitched in competitive relation to other animal, class, and gender divides. However, if a man imitates a wolf howling or an owl hooting in French or English, he is at once confirming his ability to exercise control over, and manipulate, animal sound, while 97

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts revealing that his own vocalizations resemble the sounds of other species. By framing sound as supple, the Tretiz offers the possibility of eliding cultural difference and of showing language, which is so important for who or what gets to be described as man, to be a fiction. The treatise suggests there is no fixed way of representing and reproducing the sounds connected to animals and birds, and that decisions for judging their noises in terms of human value systems are therefore always open to interpretation

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3 Soundscape and Form-of-Life: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human. Just as happens when we fall in love with someone, whenever he would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise. Pope Francis, Laudato si’

I

n the second encyclical of his papacy, Pope Francis draws on the legacy of his namesake, Francis of Assisi, who has been described as ‘one of the most attractive and best-loved saints of all time’, to make a case for a Christian imperative to care for the earth, a common home to all God’s creatures.1 When Saint Francis saw the marvels of animals or the beauty of natural phenomena, his instinctive reaction was one of song, an act of praise for the Creator. Song and sound are central to this saint’s expression of praise in the medieval story of his life, and this theme is evident in the number of his encounters with noisy animals and birds. His human interaction with animal sound offers sometimes contradictory models for the purpose of vocal expression, which nevertheless set a precedent for Christian thinking across the ages. In narratives of his Life from the Middle Ages, sound and silence are set against a backdrop of religious and literary reform, and a new model of mendicancy in which the saint moves through different soundscapes to preach to the people and creatures there present, many of which are already expressing praise in their own, sometimes instinctive, ways. As Pope Francis highlights in his encyclical, in a number of instances inspired by models from early hagiography, Saint Francis observes the instinctive praise of different creatures. However, his interactions with 1



Holy See, ‘Encyclical Letter Laudato si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home’ (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), p. 10. For Saint Francis of Assisi, see David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 205.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts them also demonstrate that he has a vital role to play in directing their praise to a different level of existence. The story of Francis of Assisi has been considered by some scholars as an early precursor to Western environmental thought.2 His environmental and ecological associations have been a growing focus of his cult since he became patron saint of ecologists in 1990.3 Francis (c. 1181–1226) was born John, but called Francesco, meaning ‘the Frenchman’, because his mother was Provençal and he was born while his father was in France.4 As a young man he assisted his father in running a cloth-merchant business in Assisi, a small town and commune in the Province of Perugia in Italy. Francis purportedly received his spiritual vocation while at the semi-derelict church of San Damiano, about two kilometers outside Assisi. His religious journey included the rebuilding of a derelict church with his own hands, expeditions to Morocco and Egypt, and the foundation of the Order of Friars Minor. He called creatures and natural phenomena ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, and legend has it that he persuaded a wolf to stop attacking villagers in Gubbio in exchange for food. Two years after his death in 1226, he was canonized by Pope Gregory IX and was buried in the church of St Giorgio in Assisi. His relics were later translated to the new Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, which was decorated with Giotto’s famous frescoes, many of which depict the saint interacting with the environment and with animals and birds.5

2



3



4 5

Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, p. 204. See also Edward A. Armstrong, Saint Francis, Nature Mystic: The Derivation and Significance of the Nature Stories in the Franciscan Legend (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Roger D. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Lisa J. Kiser, ‘Animal Economies: The Lives of St. Francis in Their Medieval Contexts’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 11.1 (2004), p. 121; and Timothy Johnson, ‘Francis and Creation’, in Michael J. P. Robson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 143. See Rodger M. Payne, ‘The Wolf in the Forest: St. Francis and the Italian Eremitical Tradition’, in Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey (eds), Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 64. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, p. 203. Biographies of Francis’ life abound. Early biographies include the iconic Vie de S. François d’Assise by Paul Sabatier (Paris: Fischbacher, 1899), perhaps the most influential of all the modern biographies. Other examples include: Chiara Frugoni, Francis of Assisi: A Life (New York: Continuum, 1998); Donald Spoto, The Reluctant Saint (New York: Viking, 2000); James Cowan’s quest biography, Francis: A Saint’s Way (Liguori: Triumph, 2001); Adrian House, Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life (Mahwah: Hidden Spring Press, 2001); Valerie Martin, Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (New York: Vintage

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi The development of Francis into a figure representing the connection between humans and the environment was an important aspect of his life as presented in medieval hagiography.6 The sources for the Lives of St Francis form a literary tradition in which the ecological aspects of his life played an important role. Many writings attributed to Francis still exist today, including correspondences and exhortations to observe the Gospel, and particularly those that made it into the Franciscan liturgy, such as his celebrated Canticle of the Creatures, sometimes called Canticle of Brother Sun.7 In contrast to contemporary intellectual Neoplatonic attitudes toward creation, this text offers a simple, spontaneous, and mystical vision of praise to God for the created world and astronomical phenomena, through which the ordinary human can directly address God by praising the creatures and the elements:8 Altissimo omnipotente bon Signore, tue so le laude la gloria e l’onore e onne benedizione. A te solo, Altissimo, se confano e nullo omo è digno te mentovare. Laudato sie, mi Signore, cun tutte le tue creature, spezialmente messer lo frate Sole, lo qual è iorno, e allumini noi per lui.9 (Il Cantico di Frate Sole, 1–7) [Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, all praise, glory, honor, and blessings are yours. To you alone, most high, do they belong, and no man is worthy to pronounce your name. Be praised, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who brings the day, and you give light to us through him.]

Aside from the simplicity and directness of this prayer’s address to the Creator, the most lively and vivid encounters between Francis and animals are found in the sources that recount his life and miracles. The first Vita Prima Press, 2002); and Augustine Thompson, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 6 For an overview of the early tradition, see Susan Crane, ‘Francis of Assisi on Protecting, Obeying, and Worshiping with Animals’, Exemplaria, 33.4 (forthcoming). 7 An overview is provided by Michael J. P. Robson in ‘The Writings of Francis’, in Michael J. P. Robson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 34–49. 8 Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, p. 90. 9 Original text from Vittore Branca, ‘Il Cantico di Frate Sole’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 41 (1948), pp. 62–79. Translation adapted from Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, p. 101. For other texts written by Francis, see Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short (eds), Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1 ‘The Saint’ (London: New City Press, 1999).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts was written in Latin by the Italian friar Thomas of Celano in 1228, the year of Francis’ canonization.10 As time passed, disagreements concerning the Rule and the Life of St Francis began to emerge within the Order of Friars Minor, resolved partially by a new orthodox version of the Life by Bonaventure.11 Compared to earlier documents, which focused on chronological and historical accounts of Francis’ life, Bonaventure’s Legenda maior (henceforth LM) reformulated the story of Francis in impersonal terms, dehumanizing the figure of the saint and placing him within a framework of ascetic and mystical devotion rather than primarily the initiator of an Order.12 This framework placed his interactions with animals and birds in relation to other important themes that characterized his Life, such as poverty, mendicancy, and preaching. The structure of the LM was carried over into an Anglo-Norman translation of the Life, the Vye de Seynt Fraunceys, datable to 1273–5, which offers an important insight into the early vernacular expression of Francis’ message in England. Probably translated by a learned Franciscan, the Vye is the unique witness of the Anglo-Norman translation based on the LM and contains fifteen chapters recounting a broadly chronological account of Francis’ life, but separated into themes, such as his conversion to God, the confirmation of the Rule for the Order, how creatures gave him comfort, his poverty, and his canonization.13

10



11



12



13

André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 195. For further details on the Rule, see Stephen J. P. Van Dijk, ‘Liturgy of the Franciscan Rules’, Franciscan Studies, 12.3/4 (1952), pp. 241–62; William J. Short, ‘The Rule and the Life of the Friars Minor’, in Michael J. P. Robson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 50–67; and Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 65–72. André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, p. 200; the disagreements concerning the Order can be separated into two categories: those who saw in the figure of Francis as ‘Poverello’ an ‘evangelical catalyst for human history’ (the Fraticelli or ‘Spirituals’), and those who were convinced that Francis’ principal aim had been the reform of Christianity, through the Order of Friars Minor, into an effective ecclesiastical institution organized by the ‘pastoral objectives given to it by the papacy’ (the Relaxati or ‘Conventuals’), p. 195. For LM, see Legenda maior S. Francisci Assisiensis et eiusdem legenda minor (Florence: Ad Claras Aquas, 1941). Further references to this text will follow quotations. La Vye de Seynt Fraunceys (MS Paris, BNF, Fonds Français 13505), ed. D. W. Russell (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002), p. 29. References to passages of this text include a chapter number in numerals and a section number, followed by line numbers. A Table of Contents precedes the text on pp. 37–9. All translations from Old French are my own. For the potential author, see p. 27. The text is written in an insular thirteenth-century hand and may be connected to libraries in the prosperous abbeys or priories of South England or Normandy.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi The Vye depicts Francis in his original Italian context, but the translation into Anglo-Norman French uses similar lexical and stylistic features to describe animal sounds as those discussed in the first two chapters of this book. What distinguishes the Vye from the texts discussed so far in terms of animal soundscapes is that the sounds of animals and birds here contribute to the formation of a long narrative structure in which Francis moves from place to place and they are highly indicative of Francis’ religious progression. Episodes describing Francis’ interactions with different creatures, especially those in which he imitates an animal directive to preach, may explain popular medieval and modern beliefs that he expressed a tenderness toward animals and birds that demonstrated his dedication to Christ and his ‘practical compassion for all Creation’.14 There are further complexities to interpreting the soundscapes of the text, which draw on the geographical imperative of the soundscape, from landscape, as Francis moves through urban and rural contexts.15 Close attention to turns of phrase, vocabularies, and expression in the vernacular in accounts relating the bleating of sheep, the famous Sermon to the Birds, and Francis’ death, allow for a conceptualization of soundscapes as more than simple recordings of sonic environments in the Vye. Rather, the soundscape becomes a crucial tool for distinguishing different types of religious life, themselves defined in relation to access to sound, language, and understanding. The Vye distinguishes between saintly preaching and animal sound-making in certain environments, but this distinction does not depend on the traditional medieval motif of a strict division of humanity and the rest of creation. Neither does sound in the text fully communicate the popular belief that Francis nurtured an unconditional ability to praise in all of creation.16 Francis encourages and guides but also manipulates the different sounds in the soundscapes through which he moves, while the text simultaneously suggests a coherence of sound, a totality implied in the praise of all creatures that fit the Christian message. This broader conceptualization of sound is why the term soundscape, in the sense that it was coined by R. Murray Schafer as Armstrong, Saint Francis, Nature Mystic, p. 7. For detailed discussion on the term ‘soundscape’, see the Introduction, pp. 24–7. See also: R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977); Brigitte Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature (Tempe: Brepols, 2005); Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre: pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2011); and Makis Solomos, who discusses terminology for sound in ‘From Sound to Sound Space, Sound Environment, Soundscape, Sound Milieu or Ambiance…’, Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), p. 103. 16 One episode, infrequently cited by scholars seeking to use Francis as a support for a figure of compassion, features the saint cursing a sow that has eaten a lamb, the symbol of Christ. See LM, XIII.6. 14 15

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts a recording of an evolutionary process, is well-suited to the Vye, despite modern critics’ contention with the term.17 Human and animal encounter in the Vye is multifaceted, a complexity thrown into relief by the different ways animal and bird sounds are depicted as part of distinct projects for the saint. Many of Francis’ interactions with creatures in his Life focus on sonority and how sounds can be interpreted, manipulated, and harnessed for the spiritual development of humans and animals in a theological framework. These episodes demonstrate how sounds qualify certain forms of earthly and spiritual existence, in contrast to more traditional binary distinctions between human and nonhuman, or rational and irrational. In literary terms, the Vye introduces classificatory systems of being that are distinct from previous models, such as the negotiations between human life and the wild at the ‘Edenic’ saintly hermitage, or the companionship afforded to the desert fathers by animals.18 Interactions with animals in the soundscapes of Francis’ Life are more relevant to an increasingly urbanized society in which domestication and cohabitation played a key role in new models for interaction. These systems are made clear through the depiction of animal production of sound in the presence of a saint who deliberately moves through soundscapes to preach to, and sometimes with, all of God’s creation. In what follows, I demonstrate how the soundscapes of the Vye focus attention on the sonic and geographical aspects of Francis’ religious journey, inviting reflection on different forms of life. The Anglo-Norman version of the life maps out the original Perugian context of many of his encounters with animals and birds onto a new cultural context through the translation of his interactions with these creatures. By drawing out parallels between Francis’ pedagogy and acts of praise earlier in his Life, and his famous sermons to the birds later on, I demonstrate how episodes from the Vye highlight the extent to which the identification of different types of worship through vocalized sound is essential to the differentiation of distinct forms of religious life. The soundscapes of this text thus invite reflection on animal sound and understanding in relation to, rather than in contrast to, human voice and language, a reflection that provides the foundations for both symbolic and literal forms of life through the narrative form.



17 18

See Makis Solomos, ‘From Sound to Sound Space’, pp. 99–104. Dominic Alexander discusses examples of these in Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008). For the saintly hermitage trope, see chapters six and seven, pp. 113–51. For the desert fathers, see chapters two and three, pp. 20–56.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Sound’s allure Animal sound is depicted in a number of episodes in the Vye that focus on different creatures, as in a surprising interaction with a cricket in a fig tree outside Francis’ cell. This example is used to introduce the theme of animal sound as a spur to spiritual practice for friars. Francis marvels at the moving songs of the Lord’s servant, the cricket, which encourage him to sing God’s praises more frequently: Sun chaunt ne est pas de graunt duçur – Iloc chaunta de jur en jur; Fraunceys ke oy sun chaunçun Tut le turna a devociun. (Vye, VIII.9, 3785–8) [Her song is not very sweet. There she sang each day. When Francis heard the song, he was turned immediately to devotion.]

The singing of the cricket, and the saintly control of her song exercised by Francis, is characteristic of one of the ways that creaturely sound is connected to human worship in this text – as instruction to praise. One day, Francis calls the cricket to him and she flies to his hand. The saint addresses her as his sister and instructs her to sing and praise God the Creator: Chauntez, ma soer, e Deu loez! (Sing, my sister, and praise God!, 3795). The cricket obeys in what becomes an extension of her instinctive behavior, until Francis commands her to return to the fig tree. For eight days she comes back to him, singing at his bidding, before he gives her permission to leave after having cheered all the friars with her singing. The cricket’s act of singing draws attention to how the sonic phenomena of the smallest of creatures can communicate spiritual perfection. The soundscape establishes shared worship as central to the expression of praise. As Francis calls the cricket to him, he establishes a type of contact with her that reveals the inherent similarities between their acts of worship in their shared soundscape outside his cell. This contact is based on the expression of sound and the communication of praise through singing. The noun chaunter features nine times over the space of twenty-nine lines to interpret the cricket’s sound as working in parallel to human vocalized song, and to emphasize a semantic interest in the act of singing and music-making more generally. Likewise, the interpretation of the cricket’s sound as song highlights the blurred boundary between thaumaturgy and what might be considered the natural behavior of a

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts cricket; crickets and cicadas are well known for producing an almost incessant stream of sound at certain times of the year.19 Rather than positing two categories of praise, one for the human and the other for the animal, the soundscapes of the Vye reveal how creatures sing and participate in worship alongside their human counterparts. Singing is a particularly important theme in the context of Franciscan hagiography, which formed a key corpus for friars who, unlike monks, were encouraged to sing God’s praises and preach in public. To highlight this conceptual difference, the Vye demonstrates that crickets, alongside mendicant friars, sing their own praises to God in the open among other worshipers. Their song expresses a non-anthropocentric spiritual truth that forms an axis by which Francis directs the worship of the friars. Francis recognizes the effort that the little cricket makes as a way of prompting the same effort from his companions. After eight days of listening to her sing, he decides she should be given respite and that the brothers will take over, following her example: A chef des oyt jurs Fraunceys dist A ses compaygnuns: ‘Donums respyt A nostre soer ke s’en pusse aler, Ke sy se aforce de nus solacer, A Deu loer taunt de espace Nus ad sumuns, ore eyt grace De departyr a sa devyse.’ (Vye, VIII.9, 3807–13) [At the end of eight days Francis said to his companions: ‘Let us give respite to our sister, that she may go her own way, and so that if by cheering us she summoned us to praise God so many times, now may she be allowed to leave as she pleases.’]

Francis and the cricket share a mutual and symbiotic connection that enhances the laudatory pursuits of saint, cricket, and community. His command over her song encourages her to participate in spiritual expression through praise of a shared Creator, an act of worship that spurs Francis and his brothers to their own praise. This is contrasted with the cessation of sound, which provides respite and opportunity for new subjects to vocalize praise.



19

For LM, see VIII.9, p. 71. Further references to this text will appear following quotations. While I drew attention to the association of the French verb chaunter with descriptions of birdsong in medieval glossaries in Chapter 2, the Vye draws on similar associations, clarifying that even though the cricket is not a bird, she does indeed still sing (Vye: ‘chaunter’, LM: ‘canere’).

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Animal vocalization is one of the primary conduits for the expression of a particularly Franciscan understanding of the world in the Vye because it balances animals’ natural behaviors with a plausible but at the same time miraculous expression of sound. The communal nature of this soundscape is a significant development from the type of Edenic model for saints found in depictions of interactions between saints and animals around medieval saintly hermitages. In this model, animal figures come to the aid of isolated saints engaged in self-purification. Such is the case in the well-known Life of Saint Cuthbert, when Cuthbert interacts with sea animals on the beach, or when a horse nibbles the thatch of his roof.20 In contrast, the words spoken by Francis in the Vye enjoin the friars to participate in sound-making alongside their nonhuman brothers and sisters, reinforcing the mendicant model on which he encouraged friars to preach to their fellow humans.21 His words conceptualize a movement away from figuring saintly interaction alongside miraculous animal behavior, and toward the recognition of the mystical capacities of otherwise mundane behavioral characteristics as evidence of spontaneous praise to the Creator. When Francis encourages the cricket and other animals to vocalize praise, he develops the role of such sounds in the context of Christian, and indeed Franciscan, theology. In this context, distinctions between more or less devout ways of living in the world are paramount for audiences of the text to understand how to worship. Animal soundscapes thus represent a significant new model for showing believers the way. Giorgio Agamben points to the development of distinctions about types of life into two key concepts in the Middle Ages: zoë and bios. These concepts distinguish a ‘bare’ life from a ‘qualified’ or virtuous form-of-life See Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 80–1 and 70–1 (I.6). For further discussion, see Pierre Boglioni, ‘Les animaux dans l’hagiographie monastique’, in Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (eds.), L’animal exemplaire au Moyen Age (Ve–XVe siècle) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), pp. 51–70; and Susan Crane Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 26–31. 21 There is some precedent for saints instructing other humans to preach in the context of animal worship, as when Saint Brendan instructs his brothers to sing as loudly as they can to deliberately disturb the fish at the bottom of the ocean. However, the literary genre of this text is quite distinct, as a quest narrative developing themes from the Irish immrama and stories of the Celtic merveilleux. See Benedeit, ‘The Anglo-Norman Version’, in W. R. J. Barron and Glyn S. Burgess (eds), The Voyage of St Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), p. 90, 1031–62; and Liam Lewis, ‘Noise on the Ocean Before “Pollution”: The Voyage of Saint Brendan’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 29.3 (forthcoming, 2022). 20

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts respectively and communicate ideas that were in circulation in the thirteenth century, and which underpinned the Franciscan Rule.22 Forms of life were of interest to influential Franciscan scholars, including Bonaventure, who composed the source for the Vye. They provide a way of understanding why animal sound is depicted in the context of shared worship in the Vye and help explain the effects of this representation for potential audiences of the text. Forms of life are explored in the writings of the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Angelo Clareno, who was a founder of one of the groups of Franciscan Fraticelli. In one text, Clareno comments on a distinction between two discrete kinds of form-of-life proposed by Francis. He attributes the term bios to the form-of-life exhibited by saints, and compares this to zoë, which indicates nonhuman life (including vegetative life) more generally: Life is called among the Greeks zoë and this is used for both vegetative and animal life, while among them bios is written for the virtuous behavior of the saints. Always and everywhere in the Rule and in the histories of all the saints this word ‘life’ is used to mean holy behavior and the perfect carrying out of the virtues.23

In this passage Clareno draws a clear distinction between the Classical concepts of zoë and bios, which can be mapped onto Franciscan theology in different ways. The former reveals at its most extreme point an existence outside of human and divine law.24 In the context of Greek or Roman cultures zoë, ‘bare life’, is the term attributed to a life so bereft of value that it can be killed but not sacrificed; that is to say, life becomes so valueless that the notion of sacrifice is impossible. In the thirteenth century, Franciscanism itself became a powerful expression of a type of bare life that was ‘beyond the law’, and therefore beyond the reaches of legal sovereignty in Western European contexts.25 On the other hand, bios describes a virtuous and moral life that contrasts with zoë; this is a moral life lived by saints The Highest Poverty, pp. 105–8, and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–12. 23 [Vita vero apud Graecos dicitur zoi et pro vita vegetativa et animali imponitur, vios vero apud eos pro virtuosa sanctorum conversatione tantum scribitur. Ita et nunc in regula et in omnibus sanctorum historiis hoc nomen vita pro sancta conversatione et perfecta virtutum operatione accipitur.], Expositio regulae fratrum minorum auctore Angelo Clareno, ed. L. Oliger (Grottaferrata: Quaracchi, 1912), p. 140. Translation from Agamben, The Highest Poverty, p. 106, my emphasis. 24 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 1. 25 This is a statement that is true to varying extent for the majority of medieval religious orders. See Mar Rosas Tosàs, ‘Life Under and Beyond the Law: Biopolitics, Franciscanism, Liturgy’, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 20.2 (2015), p. 171.

22

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and exemplified by Francis’ Life. Bios thus acts as the aspirational anchor for friars in the context of Franciscan hagiography, such as in the Vye, but what does this have to do with the cricket’s song directed by Francis? The attainment of the status of bios is relevant to the human capacity for salvation, the portrayal of which is of fundamental importance to the saint’s life. An idealized form-of-life expressed as bios is found in the writings that supported forms of worship and forms of living in the Order of Friars Minor. This form-of-life (forma vitæ) is based on the philosophy of the Franciscan Rule common to Franciscan friars, in which their daily activities were framed and interpreted in the manner of the Gospels, forming a sequence for them to emulate and imitate, a concept of which Bonaventure was well aware as he composed the LM.26 The question remains, however, as to how such aspirational attainment applies to the animal’s capacity for the same type of salvation, a question that was by no means settled in thirteenth-century theology, and was interrogated in literary texts from the period.27 Questions were posed about animal resurrection, baptism, and sin, in a philosophical context that emphasized animals as irrational beings.28 Yet, there is a tension between the Classical concept of bare life for nonhuman beings and Francis’ own conceptualization of creatures such as the cricket and the elements as stated in the Canticle of the Creatures. While these debates play out on the intellectual scene of the later Middle Ages, the movement between zoë and bios in the Vye is revealed by the shared human and animal capacity to understand and ability to vocalize praise.



26



27



28

The notion of the Rule as life is explored by Agamben: ‘as Francis never tired of mentioning, what is in question in the “rule and life” is not so much a formal teaching, but even and above all a sequence or following […]. It is not a matter so much of applying a form (or norm) to life, but of living according to that form, that is of a life that, in its sequence, makes itself that very form, coincides with it’, The Highest Poverty, p. 99. In terms of Bonaventure’s understanding of forma vitæ, Agamben notes that under the guidance of Francis ‘the Church was to be renewed […] in three ways: by the form-of-life, the rule, and the doctrine of Christ which he would provide’, The Highest Poverty, p. 103. For the distinction between the Thomist and Franciscan philosophies on the status of the animal, see C. W. Hume, The Status of Animals in the Christian Religion, 2nd edn (London: The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, 1957), pp. 27–30. For a literary angle and the contrast to the Paulist view, see Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 92–108 and 221–32. Similar distinctions are expressed by Aristotle, although to the detriment of the status of animals: ‘Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech’, The Politics, trans. T. A Sinclair and Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 60.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The Franciscan forma vitæ is based on the opposition of bare and sacred forms of human worship that presume abilities such as vocalization. While many of the Franciscan writings Agamben studies neither directly incorporate nor make space for nonhuman form-of-life, the Vye brings animals and birds to the heart of the question. The relationship between saint, animals, and birds in the Vye is based on the movement between zoë and bios, rather than on an adherence to one form-of-life or another. By figuring Francis in direct communication with a little cricket, the Vye reveals a more complex understanding of the world than that to which Agamben points. What emerges from vernacular materials like the Vye is a broader view of the sonic entanglement of human and animal life, which nonetheless engages with the concepts of zoë and bios not as fixed points, but as malleable aspects of a scale of existences. Creatures like the little cricket thus move across this scale at different stages of their journeys, which are brought into relief when they are in the saint’s presence. The association between the actions of the friars and those of the cricket discussed above sets the scene for the participation of each in a form-oflife newly inspired by the cricket’s song. Vocal activity (or, in the case of the cricket, sound that emulates vocal sonic phenomena) is one of the key bridges between the two because it reinforces a shared capacity to praise God, based on different forms of existence in the world. Francis has the ability to identify and respond to the cricket’s song and to render this sound meaningful for his own community of worshippers. Sound thereby becomes a point of shared worship between species that indicates a way for spiritual migration toward bios. But it is not just crickets that convey this movement. Cricket singing establishes an association between friars and other creatures that is carried forward in the numerous soundscapes in which Francis interacts with other creatures, defining through such interactions a particular form-of-life specific to a Franciscan understanding of the world and of praise. Francis’ direction of the cricket’s song demonstrates his personal progression toward bios and his later efforts at bringing his earthly brothers and sisters with him. Although the Vye is not a strictly chronological account of the saint’s life, the episode with the cricket echoes an earlier narrative in which a speaking crucifix effects a physical and emotional change in Francis, demonstrating that the vocalizations of living creatures are placed in a broader soundscape incorporating material objects as well as animate species. Toward the beginning of the Vye, Francis is described making his way to the dilapidated church of San Damiano outside Assisi, where the voice

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi of God speaks to him through a crucifix that hangs in the church.29 The crucifix calls his name three times and instructs him to ‘alez | E ma mesun reparaylez’ (‘go and repair my house’, II.1, 443–4). In this passage, Francis’ reaction to the voice emphasizes the miraculous connection between the material crucifix and the immaterial voice of God. The exact nature of the voice is left open to interpretation, described simply as being de graunt vertu (of great power, 450), and as effecting within the saint an emotional change: En sey senti une eschaunge | Merviluse e mult estraunge (He felt a change in himself, marvelous and very strange, 451–2). This passage problematizes the exact nature of voice; like the bestiary cart that frightens the lion discussed in Chapter 1, the sound of the crucifix effects a material change that pulls Francis in the direction of an emotional state in which he can experience the divine mystery. As singing crickets and speaking crucifixes attest, this medieval hagiography does not neatly distinguish between human, animal, and object sounds, all of which are depicted interacting with each other in textual soundscapes. The relationship between bare and qualified forms of life offers an instructive way of thinking about the sounds of creatures in that context. In a linear reading of the text as a single narrative, most animals initially partake in a theologically neutral earthly existence (zoë), before moving through a form of quasi-human understanding, and finally, by means of contact with a saint, toward a qualified, exemplary form-oflife associated with the quasi-Edenic sphere of the saint (bios). However, human and animal subjectivities in the Vye do not always map onto the forms of life identified with a simple binary of zoë or bios. The interplay between saintly and communal forms of praise, and between physically plausible vocalizations and symbolic interpretations of those sounds, means that animals and birds in this text are not merely demonstrating obedience to the saint. They move between bare and qualified states of existence rather than remaining attached to one or other of the two categories in question. Animals’ instinctive behaviors thus render the process of moving toward bios circular rather than linear. Animals and birds act as spurs for Francis’ own spiritual contemplation and share the act of worship with him for short periods of time before they are given respite as the text explores the evolution of the status of humans and other creatures.

29

Other episodes in the Vye depict sonorous objects causing transformative change, as in those in which Francis is taken severely ill. On one occasion, he is allowed by his fellow friars to sleep with a feather pillow to ease his condition, but the devil gets into the pillow and disturbs him. The pillow is taken away, and the sound of God’s voice restores him (V.2, 1959–84). In a similar episode, one day, when Francis is ill, he wishes to hear music and angels come to play for him with a mysterious harp and melodye (V.11, 2356–64).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Bleating in communal praise The Vye develops motifs for religious improvement in relation to animals throughout the narration of Francis’ life, but the most significant episodes featuring animal vocalization are clustered in Chapter Eight, which recounts his affectionate piety. The contents of the Vye describes Chapter Eight as recounting Francis’ kindness and the great tenderness creatures showed to him.30 The chapter includes the episode with the cricket, described above, which precedes the depiction of birds, en chaunçun de lur jargun (singing in their own language, 3855), on Francis’ arrival outside his cell at La Verna. These episodes are juxtaposed with a short narrative recounting how a falcon got into the habit of signaling the time for Francis to rise for the divine office: de sun soun | E de sun cry le fyst syngne (by its sound and its cry it made a sign, 3864–5). When Francis becomes ill the same falcon makes his noise later in the day to give Francis time to rest, in an act the text describes as revealing mestrye (power or authority, 3875), an ambiguous noun that seems to refer simultaneously to the mastery of the bird by both Francis and God. The clustering of these examples demonstrates that animal and bird vocalizations are incorporated directly into the Christian semiotics explored by the narrative of the saint’s life, in which some creatures direct Francis’ religious activities in the same way that he directs those of the friars. Just like the cricket, sheep and lambs respond according to the saint’s instruction, using their voices to communicate a form-of-life shared by humans and sheep alike. Worship is shown to be a shared activity in which most creatures participate in Chapter Eight of the Vye. The chapter incorporates sheep into the Franciscan soundscape of worship by revealing how their bleats define acoustic environments in which vocalization and praise are inextricably linked. The bleating of sheep and lambs provides the sonorous anchor for the development of a religious mode of contemplation in which interaction with these domesticated animals constitutes an encouragement toward a more conscious form of religious existence as well as a naturalization of the fraternal forma vitæ. Humans and sheep move up the created order together toward bios when they bleat or sing in proximity to Francis or in emulation of his teachings. The inclusion of the sheep’s bleating in the rhythm of the liturgical day emphasizes an understanding of Franciscan daily practice in harmony with, and in continuity with, the natural order.



30

The themes of each chapter are given as chapter titles in Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, ed. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978). For Chapter Eight, see p. 250.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi In the first of the episodes depicting sheep in the Vye, Francis’ actions test the theoretical boundary between human and animal that underpins thirteenth-century intellectual projects of anthropocentrism built on the idea of having or not having language, such as the assertion of dominance by humans over animals in legal and theological texts.31 Francis pushes at the limits of such projects by training the sheep to bleat the canonical hours, highlighting the importance of a shared act of communal worship.32 He arrives at the church of St Mary of the Portiuncula and happens upon a sheep that he admonishes to praise God. She does so by bleating the canonical hours before the altar of the Virgin, an action that attaches the sheep to a liturgical as well as an agricultural temporality. Francis takes it upon himself to instruct the sheep in matters of praising God while carefully avoiding causing offence to other friars. When the sheep arrives at the church, she follows Francis’ teachings and bleats at the altar: La ouaille tynt ben sa aprise, E quant l’em chauntast en la eglyse Ele y ala e devaunt le auter Nostre Dame soleyt braer. (Vye, VIII.7, 3649–52) [The sheep learnt her lesson well, and when men were singing in the church, she would go and bleat before the altar of Our Lady.]

The Vye depicts the sheep learning a lesson from Francis and using her own bleating as a form of praise that mirrors the singing of the friars. This is no simple depiction of an irrational animal merely mimicking human sound. Rather, the sheep demonstrates mental capacities that align her with the saint and perhaps echo Saint Augustine’s reflections on animal memory.33 Her actions similarly suggest that sheep may exhibit behavior more appropriate to bios than that exhibited by the friars themselves. It is no wonder, then, that Francis takes particular care to not cause offence to

31



32



33

See Alison Langdon, ‘Introduction’, in Alison Langdon (ed.), Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 1–7. There is biblical precedent for this idea, as in the epistle of Romans, 8.21: ‘Quia et ipsa creatura liberabitur a servitute corruptionis in libertatem gloriae filiorum Dei’ (For the creature itself will be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God). ‘Beasts and birds also have a memory. Otherwise, they could not rediscover their dens and nests, and much else that they are habitually accustomed to […]. So I will also ascend beyond memory to touch him who “set me apart from quadrupeds and made me wiser than the birds of heaven” (Job 35:II)’, Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 194–5.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts the community of Franciscan friars as his thaumaturgy unravels long-held distinctions that bolster human exceptionalism: Ben se gardast, ke en nule manere | Ne feist offense ne molest’ a frere (he exercised caution so that he would in no way offend or annoy the brothers, 3647–9). The association between bleating and praising God (underscored in this passage by the singing of the friars) troubles distinctions such as the one operative in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville between human language and the sounds of livestock. The lamb is connected to sonic expression in De animalibus, in which Isidore records that the sheep’s bleat is one of its distinguishing features because the lamb is able to recognize the bleating of its parent even in a large field of sheep: Although the Greeks name the lamb (agnus) from ἅγνος (‘holy’) as if it were sacred, Latin speakers think that it has this name because it recognizes (agnoscere) its mother before other animals, to the extent that even if it has strayed within a large herd, it immediately recognizes the voice of its parent by its bleat.34

Isidore of Seville makes a distinction between human and sheep vocalizations, and its interpretation by different linguistic communities, that contrasts with the sounds of sheep and lambs as they are expressed in the Vye. The lamb in the Etymologies is introduced by a statement that would seem to draw a distinction between human language and domestic animal sounds based on a linguistic lack: Pecus dicimus omne quod humana lingua et effigie caret (We call any animal that lacks human language and form ‘livestock’, XII.5). The lamb, although understanding the bleating of its parents, lacks a capacity for communication that is consequently reserved for humans. Even if the lamb comprehends sound in its own way, the distinction between the human and livestock is maintained at this juncture in the Etymologies. While the Etymologies explore traditional distinctions between human and animal, Isidore nevertheless observes that lambs are drawn to their parents by the sound of their vocalizations, drawing parallels between this example of auditory recognition and the way human worshippers are drawn to worship the Father. In contrast, bleating in the Vye brings sheep toward a qualified form-of-life which entails the sheep’s shared ability to praise God under the direction of Francis. Bleating is therefore framed not in terms of lack, but in

34

[‘Agnum quamquam et Graeci vocent “apo tou agnou”, quasi pium, Latini autem ideo hoc nomen habere putant, eo quod prae ceteris animantibus matrem agnoscat; adeo ut etiam si in magno grege erraverit, statim balatu recognoscat vocem parentis’], The Etymologies, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XII.xii, p. 247. For all Latin quotations from this source, see The Latin Library (online source). See also Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 136.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi terms of a common language of religious expression and worship. Sheep are thus bound to forms of social and religious exchange in which their bleating encourages humans to imitate a domesticated, humble, and community-focused style of praise. The sheep’s bleating before the altar demonstrates that animals, just like human worshippers, can navigate the complex system of different forms of life while in the presence of the saint or under his instruction, rather than simply responding to exterior stimuli. In the Middle Ages, sheep were theologically meaningful insofar as they were associated with the Lamb of God. The image of Christ as a lamb is a familiar trope, the power of which cannot be overestimated in medieval hagiography and other religious texts.35 The Christian hermeneutics of sheep and lambs had its roots in biblical analogies, especially the parables of Christ.36 The Lamb of God, Agnus Dei, is a title for Christ that appears in the Gospel of John 1:29, and which is key to the liturgy and celebration of Mass. The Book of Revelation also refers to Christ as ‘Lamb’ on multiple occasions (for example, 5:6, 7:14, and 17:14). Indeed, many saints venerated during the Middle Ages, such as Agnes (deriving from the Latin agnus for lamb), Catherine, Clement, and John the Baptist, are portrayed interacting with, or in symbolic association with, lambs to serve as reminders of their relationship with Christ. Images of creatures worshipping or praising God are common tropes in medieval hagiography more broadly. The idea that the obedience, reverence, and contrition shown by animals and birds puts human sinners to shame provides popular source material for hagiographers.37 To take one example, Jerome’s Saint Anthony reproaches humans because their religious observance falls below even the standards of beasts: ‘the beasts speak of Christ and you worship monsters instead of God’.38 In the Vye the reverence of sheep and lambs similarly acts as a reproach to sinners, and even to the devout, but there is more at stake here than a veiled criticism of friars who fall short of the standards of religious devotion that define the Franciscan form-of-life. The ability of Francis’ sheep to bleat (Vye: braer; LM: balatus, p. 68), and to worship Christ, dismantles any easy distinction

35



36 37



38

See Claude Bremond, ‘Le bestiaire de Jacques de Vitry’, in Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (eds), L’Animal exemplaire au Moyen Âge (Ve–XVe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), p. 114. For an extensive survey and analysis of lambs in biblical and patristic writings, see Franz Nikolasch, Das Lamm als Christussymbol in den Schriften der Väter (Vienna: Herder, 1963). McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 324. Dominic Alexander discusses examples of these in Saints and Animals, pp. 14–19. See also Susan Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 24–41. Jerome of Stridon (Saint Jerome), Vita Pauli Eremitae, VIII.24, in Helen Waddell (trans.), The Desert Fathers (London: Constable, 1936), p. 33.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts between human and animal forms of worship. It encourages comparison between the friars and the sheep that emphasizes a shared soundscape, even though sharing worship or coexistence with sheep are ideas that may not have sat entirely comfortably with those friars. A distinction made between different forms of worship, to which praising God through singing or bleating is fundamental, translates into the categories of zoë and bios and reveals what may be at stake in the transgression of conservative categories of life. The definition of bios as a ‘holy life’ exemplified by saints, as expressed by the friar Clareno, may go some way to explaining the acceptance of the sheep’s bleating into liturgy in the Vye. Like the friar’s singing, the sheep’s behavior exemplifies the religious devotion to which the friars aspired, sound being a key conduit for this type of religious expression. That the friars aspire to such form-of-life suggests that bios is not to be understood as an integral or essential type of saintly existence, but rather as a life that depends on a succession of spiritual choices and behaviors that may be adopted and imitated by humans and animals alike. The implicit association between sheep bleating and the singing of the friars reveals a divinely inspired form-of-life connecting saint and sheep, to the possible exclusion of the friars, who have yet to learn the behaviors that would grant them access to it. Rather than using form-of-life to reinforce social and religious exclusion, the text develops the sheep’s behavior to participate in the performance of a type of exemplary behavior encapsulated in the idea of bios as formof-life: ‘Forma vitæ designates in [a] sense a way of life that, insofar as it strictly adheres to a form or model from which it cannot be separated, is thus constituted as an example’.39 The exemplarity of the sheep’s bleating at the altar draws attention to the similarities between vocal sounds from the animal world and the singing of friars, offering the sheep both as an example of religious perfection to be imitated by the friars and as a warning to those same friars who might skirt their duties. Through proximity and interaction with Francis, the sheep moves from a bare life devoid of any particular religious understanding, through a process of learning, and toward an existence in which she actively participates in a form of worship closely associated with the liturgy. Such a miraculous development in the sheep’s nature reveals a medieval Christian conceptualization of bios that is distinct from this concept’s deployment elsewhere in discussions of life’s exclusion from the Greek polis.40 At the same time, the bleating of the sheep reveals the miracle of an actual sheep participating in religious life, for the miraculous nature of her behavior holds little weight unless Agamben, The Highest Poverty, p. 95. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 1–12.

39 40

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi the audience of the text truly believes that these are the activities of a real, living sheep who met the saint. The contrary, but parallel, interpretation of the miraculous element of the sheep’s bleat is that she only participates in human form-of-life through miracle itself; it is only by the subversion of the natural created order that bios becomes available to her. These interpretations of the same episode are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they enjoin readers of the Vye to conceptualize mimicry, imitation, and miracle as fundamental components of the same soundscape. The Vye juxtaposes the spatially located behavior of the bleating sheep in the church with another episode, directly following, which places greater emphasis on the mixing of religious and social imagery with temporality, and foreshadows the episode with the noisy falcon discussed above. The episode highlights the role of the lamb’s bleating in an urban context when Francis gives a lamb to Lady Jacoba of Setesoli in Rome. The lamb acts as a kind of liturgical alarm clock for Lady Jacoba, bleating to wake her up in the mornings if she is late for church, and at various points throughout the canonical day: Kaunt ele targast au lever Matyn, le ayngnel soleyt braer, De ses corneles la dame enpeynt E taunt cum pout, la destreynt E en contenaunce de sa enprise La sumunt de haster a la eglise. Issi devint le ayngnel sun mestre, La dame a gré le soleyt pestre. Le Seyngnur pur ceo le cherist E le ama e joye en fist. (Vye, VIII.7, 3671–80) [When she was slow to get up early in the morning, the lamb would bleat. With his little horns he would nudge the lady and, as he was taught to do, he urged her to hurry to church. In this the lamb became her master and the lady willingly fed him. She cherished him on the account of the Lord and loved him and was glad of him.]

The lamb is incorporated into Lady Jacoba’s social and religious life so that he transforms her spiritual practice; his bleats and small nudges urge her on to a form-of-life that is more in keeping with bios. So too, the religious routine that the lamb defines with his bleats mirrors the training of the lamb itself. The lamb adapts to Francis’ instruction, and in so doing demonstrates that domestic relationships are part of the communication of spiritual truth. Contact between sheep and lady accentuates the theme of communal worship previously explored in relation to the friars; both the lady and the lamb move up from zoë into an existence more closely 117

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts resembling the bios exhibited by the saint and falcon just a few lines later. Moreover, the lamb’s bleating further demonstrates that participation in bios is not purely the domain of the human in the Franciscan worldview depicted in the Vye. It is here harnessed for the perfection of Lady Jacoba’s religious routine, in which the lamb is mestre (master), and is therefore cherished by God. Because of their mundane and spiritual significances, sheep represent examples of how creatures in hagiography can move fluidly between categories of bare life (zoë) and a more qualified form-of-life (bios). This may be explained in part by the socio-economic and religious symbolism of sheep in the Middle Ages.41 They played an important role in agriculture, as well as in economic life and in urban Italian trade, which paralleled the importance of this particular animal in Anglo-Norman England. The expansion of the Order of Friars Minor in thirteenth-century Western Europe also coincided with a rapid increase in the number of sheep in medieval farm economies.42 It is therefore not surprising that a number of episodes in the Vye involve the saint encountering this species, on occasion even ‘rescuing’ sheep that would otherwise have been sold or slaughtered (VII.7, XIII.6, and IX.8). The relationships between humans and sheep in the Life of St Francis resemble a gift economy that replaces the monetary practices of mercantile life.43 In episodes of the Vye that draw attention to the bleating of lambs and sheep, the gift economy goes beyond purely human forms of gift-giving. Francis and the sheep share with each other the gifts of communal worship through their mutual participation in, and contribution to, the same soundscape. Sheep in Chapter Eight of the Vye bleat in ways that can be interpreted by Franciscan friars or readers of the text alike. Some of these sounds draw attention to the mundane qualities of the lives of animals as their instinctive behaviors are harnessed by Francis to communicate shared praise. They thus reinforce the capacity of bleating to reveal signs from God, while simultaneously demonstrating how sounds are implicated in the increasingly urban soundscapes through which Francis moves: his cell at La Verna, the church of St Mary of the Portiuncula, or the city of Rome. Whichever category of sound textual depictions of sheep vocalization

41 42



43

Kiser, ‘Animal Economies’, p. 123. Esther Pascua, ‘From Forest to Farm to Town: Domestic Animals from ca. 1000 to ca. 1450’, in Brigitte Resl (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, vol. 2 (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 92. In one episode, Lisa Kiser explains, ‘the merchant gives (rather than sells) the sheep to Francis, allowing Francis to give the sheep to the nuns and the nuns to give the tunic [made from the sheep’s wool] to Francis in return’. See ‘Silencing the Lambs: Economics, Ethics, and Animal Life in Medieval Franciscan Hagiography’, Modern Philology, 108.3 (2011), p. 329.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi fall into, the examples discussed above illustrate how Francis manages to direct the vocalizations of his brothers and sisters, human and animal, toward praise of their Creator, thus shifting them up the created order from zoë to bios, while not negating the physical and instinctive aspects of creaturely behavior and existence. The revelations that come from hearing the sounds of worldly creatures represent an acoustemological perspective that is particularly relevant to a type of Franciscan spirituality in which the work and the plan of the Creator is disclosed through the mystery of the mundane world, and through shared worship.

Birds and bare life In the Vye, birds are shown, like sheep, to participate actively in the revelation of religious truths through their own form of instinctive praise, whether or not they are in the presence of the saint. Birdsong demonstrates that birds in many ways already exhibit behaviors that mirror Francis’s praise of God, unlike the sheep and the lamb who have to be taught how to bleat in a way that suits the Franciscan community. Conversely, birds’ jargun, noyse, and chaunt provoke Francis to contribute to the soundscape of the text himself in ways that point to and accentuate the birds’ natural form of praise, that is, one that emanates from zoë, or bare life. The act of singing marks a continuity of human and bird vocal expression in the Vye. One early example of human singing appears in Chapter Two of the text: having just given up his worldly belongings, and about to be ambushed by a gang of thieves, Francis unwittingly makes his way through the Umbrian forest singing and praising God in French: E loa Deu en haute voyz, | En fraunceys chaunta en alaunt (He praised God aloud, singing in French as he went, 656–7). The audible qualities of birdsong are communicated through a designated vocabulary that resonates with the lexis used to describe Francis’ French song. The Old French words jargun, noise, crier, and chaunter describe different types of sounds made by birds who meet Francis in the Vye. Birdsong in the Vye is metaphorical and textual, but it also reflects the tendency of actual songbirds to sing at dawn and dusk. Though birdsong is integral to the expression of bare life in the soundscapes of the text, one of the key avian motifs developed in the Vye is Francis instructing groups of birds to remain quiet while he and his friars praise God, thus replacing birdsong with their own form of human praise. The unusual effect of this is that birds are portrayed as stimuli for human bios but also as distractions from the very form-of-life they inspire in the friars. This presentation of sound thus offers a counterpoint to modern 119

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts representations of Francis as a saint who communes in superficial ways with the natural world rather than subtly controlling or commanding it. In contrast, later episodes of the Vye discussed below depict Francis interacting with birds in ways that connect his nature mysticism with his own spoken word, and thus to the logos of his own voice, as the birds listen and respond to him singing the hours or preaching. These two processes, one of controlling sound and the other of emphasizing the logos of voice, are conducive to the development of Francis as a mendicant friar figure who preaches to the public in the latter part of his life. One episode in which processes of controlling sound become apparent is an episode immediately preceding that in which Francis interacts with the singing cricket in Chapter Eight. As Francis hears birdsong (le chaunt) among the reeds in a marsh near Venice, he wishes to join the birds in praising God, remarking that they are already praising the Creator in their own way: ‘Nos soeurs oyseus lur Creatur | Loent’ (‘Our sisters the birds praise their Creator’, 3753–4). Despite the suggestion here that the birds are expressing a form of praise, Francis silences them because they are too noisy for the friars to praise in their own human way. Multiple layers of human and avian sonority and interpretation thus come into play: instinctive and natural behavior, human logical reasoning, and communal, shared praise. Francis and his companion friar enter the flock of birds who are making a commotion and the former interrupts them: E lur noyse esteyt si graunde, Les oyseus taunt cryerent, Ke les freres desturberent Ke au servise ke voleyent rendre A Deu ne poeyent ben attendre. Fraunceys lur dist: ‘Ore cessez, Mes sorurs oyseus, e reposez.’ (Vye, VIII.9, 3760–6) [And their noise was so great, the birds made such a racket, that the friars were disturbed such that they could not yet perform the service that they wanted to give to God. Francis said to them: ‘Now stop and rest, my sisters the birds.’]

The lexical choices used to depict human and bird songs in the Vye have a significant impact on possible interpretations of Francis as a saintly figure. The sounds of the marsh birds are described not only as chaunt (song), but also as noyse (noise), the intensity of which is indicated through the verb cryer (lit. to cry or shout). These lexical choices do not necessarily distinguish an avian form of noise from a human one. In Anglo-Norman texts

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi humans might, too, produce chaunt and noyse, or emit a cry.44 This episode is not therefore drawing on traditional theological distinctions between vox (voice) as rational or irrational, or as linguistic or otherwise.45 Neither does the affectionate address to the birds that follows their noisemaking imply a relationship based on strict, unidirectional dominance. The vocabulary does, however, suggest that the birds are not fully focused on the act of praise. Noise and shouting out loud certainly convey an energetic marsh scene, but this must be tamed by Francis, who calms the birds and replaces noyse with his own refined form of praise – the singing of the hours. References to the temporality of singing highlight how the instinctive praise performed by birds is only periodically overruled by human singing. The Vye also draws on the lexis of cortesia and literary tropes to demonstrate how Francis gives the birds leave to take up their own natural song again once the act of praise has been performed: Fraunceys kaunt ses ures out dist, Cungé lur dona saunz respist. Lur chaunt repristrent saunz delay, Ben plust a Franceys ceo duz lay. (Vye, VIII.9, 3771–4) [When Francis had said his hours, he gave them leave without delay. They took up their song again without hesitation. This sweet lay pleased Francis greatly.]

The Vye exhibits a tension between the interpretation of birdsong as an act of praise in itself, which pleases Francis, and the latter’s exertion of control over avian sound and participation in worship. This tension emphasizes both the mundane quality of the birds’ chattering and the similarities between birdsong and courtly relationships expressed in contemporary literary works. Using the bare life of birds as an example, this passage places Francis in musical and literary frameworks of reference that allow him to interact with the mundane world readers would have been familiar with. The distinctiveness of birdsong in this passage is due partly to birdsong’s complex relationship with the liberal discipline of musica, and thus to debates over the rationality of song that provided a platform for



44



45

I demonstrate the conceptual effects of describing animal and bird vocalizations with the words noyse and cry in the first two chapters, pp. 44–5, 69, 74–82, and 87–8. For further reference, see Liam Lewis, ‘Quacktrap: Glosses and Multilingual Animal Contact in the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth’, in Victoria Turner and Vincent Debiais (eds), Les Mots au Moyen Âge – Words in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 161–79. Medieval theories of vox are outlined in the Introduction, pp. 6–10.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts debate in medieval musicology.46 Birdsong in the Vye similarly complicates Francis’ relation to the natural world by offering a model based not solely on tropes of companionship or domination found in hagiography more generally, but also on a theological model of cortesia that draws on intersubjective relations in romance and lyric.47 The sounds produced by Francis, the friar, and the birds articulate the presence of a soundscape in which birdsong is replaced with liturgical chant, which is in turn replaced once more with birdsong. This allows for a subtle exchange between types of praise and form-of-life that is entirely in keeping with the Franciscan emphasis on the daily repetition of salvific song. Birdsong in the Vye is identified as a valid and effective form of praise, albeit expressed originally from zoë, that mirrors Francis’ own from bios. The birds are associated with zoë by virtue of the fact that they are on the threshold of human life, a mode of being brought into relief by the interpretation of their noise as song, a qualification rendering it in some way comprehensible. Nevertheless, the parallels between the birds’ singing and the saint’s praises complicate matters by suggesting that the movement from zoë to bios is not direct and permanent but rather a temporary phenomenon. Medieval saints quite commonly exercise control over the natural world, but Francis’ form of control is unusually focused on the boundaries, or lack of them, that vocalized sound creates in the soundscapes through which he physically moves. In contrast to the representation of sound in other types of text, such as bestiaries or treatises, the movement of a specific character into different locations, such as a marsh or a church, evokes a connection between place and type of sound. The birdsong represented in the episode with the Venetian marsh birds is striking for its emphasis on parallel forms of praise between human and avian, between theological boundaries based on form-of-life, and between urban and rural. At the same time, the story of Francis crosses geographical boundaries. In the Anglo-Norman Vye, this attention to sound and place is further reinforced by the text’s participation in the translation of an Italian saint’s Life for a French or English audience. In this way, the jargun of birds highlights avian sound as a cultural and religious lingua franca. Encounters with birdsong thus reveal that bios is available to a wide range of avian agents beyond the confines of stone walls, if only for a short time, a powerful concept at the very core of Francis’ vision of mendicancy.

See Elizabeth E. Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 11–20. 47 Armstrong, Saint Francis, Nature Mystic, p. 21; and Sorrel, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, pp. 69–75.

46

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi Birds and qualified existence In early chapters of the Vye, which are concerned with the conceptualization of a saintly form-of-life, birdsong acts as a bridge between animal sound and human language. However, birdsong also brings the theological importance of silence into relief later in two famous episodes: Francis’ ‘Sermon to the Birds’ at Bevagna, and the ‘Stilling of the Swallows’ at Alviano. These episodes occur toward the end of the Vye in Chapter Twelve, a chapter recounting the benefits the saint brought about by preaching. These scenes work differently to that recounting the marsh birds near Venice, as birds now express a form-of-life more in keeping with permanent models for bios. This chapter precedes that in which Francis receives the stigmata. Placed at a crucial junction in the Vye, these episodes have shaped the interpretation of Francis as a champion for the environment, due not least to the ways he interacts with birds expressing evolved forms of zoë and bios. Birdsong is central to the expression of these states of existence in the soundscapes of the text. Moreover, these later avian encounters emphasize that birds already sing their praises to the Creator instinctively, without the need to be taught how to adapt vocalized expression. The enormous importance of Francis’ preaching to birds in the Franciscan tradition provides a central axis around which these themes are articulated. The famous ‘Sermon to the Birds’ is a popular example of environmental thinking in Franciscan hagiography, and in the Vye this scene is immediately preceded by a consultation between Francis and the holy virgin Clare, in which Clare confirms Francis’ right to preach as ordained by God. The themes of preaching, understanding, and parallel forms of worship, are crucial to understanding the progression of the saint’s preaching activities in this episode. At the height of his interactions with birds in the Vye, Francis operates within the textual soundscape to demonstrate how birdsong is an instinctive form of praise from zoë, now to be mirrored in his own sermon, and reflective of his status in bios. Rather than depicting the saint directing the praise of animals and birds, this episode foregrounds Francis as a preacher to God’s attentive creatures before all else. The ‘Sermon to the Birds’ was made famous in the visual arts by the painting of the scene in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, and the oil on panel St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata by Giotto di Bondone.48

48

Giotto di Bondone, St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds, c. 1290–1300, oil on panel, 3.13 × 1.63 m, Musée du Louvre, Paris. For further details on the Basilica, see Joachim Poeschke, Die Kirche San Francesco in Assisi und ihre Wandmalereien (München: Hirmer Verlag München, 1985), plates 44, 129, and 171; and Elvio Lunghi, The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi (Antella: SCALA Group, 1996), p. 83.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Giotto depicts the sermon in one of the scenes of the predella, the other two of which depict the dream of Pope Innocent III and the approval of the Franciscan Rule. Above, Francis receives the stigmata on Mount Alverno. In these visual depictions of the scene, Francis stoops down and gestures toward neatly arranged birds on the ground as several birds fly through the air, thus complicating the characterization of preaching as a ‘bridge between divine and human’.49 In the sermon scene as described in the Vye below, many of the birds are featured with open beaks, in a paradoxical physical gesture that indicates the silence of the birds. Preaching in these sources of Francis’ Life is an act that crosses conceptual divides between species, neatly conveying the types of love for creatures that Francis expressed in his Canticle of the Creatures, and for which he is remembered today in none other than a papal encyclical. This famous scene reveals how soundscapes, which emphasize the sounds present in particular environments, can incorporate more than just anthropogenic noise. What the Vye stresses more so than the paintings, is that soundscapes can be qualified by the ways that specific vocabularies are used to direct modes of understanding those environments of sound. The ‘Sermon to the Birds’ appears in the Vye during Francis’s visit to the Italian town of Bevagna.50 In contrast to the marsh scene, the saint happens upon a group of birds that look at him attentively but silently, aussy cum eussent entendement (as if they had understanding, 5164). Francis addresses them directly, and in response they incline their heads toward him as he preaches. The transition from firstly speaking to the birds, then to preaching to them, may have seemed bizarre or even heretical to some medieval readers, but it provides a thematic bridge to the Franciscan practice of preaching to crowds. Reaching beyond the pulpit into the exterior environment, preaching is shown to be of value to birds as well as people, a theme that highlights the Franciscan interest in promoting preaching as a means to salvation beyond church walls. It also highlights the continuity of sound in urban soundscapes as the birds now listen to Francis:



49



50

Claire M. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 1. For prominent examples of scholarship on Francis and the ‘Sermon to the Birds’, see Alexander, Saints and Animals, pp. 169–80; Armstrong, Saint Francis, Nature Mystic, pp. 42–100; Hume, The Status of Animals, pp. 24–8; Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, pp. 59–68, and ‘Tradition and Innovation, Harmony and Hierarchy in St. Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds’, Franciscan Studies, 43 (1983), pp. 396–407; and Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 67–8.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi ‘Mes freres oyseaus, le Creatur Ben devez loer e fere honur A ly ke vus ne seufre estre nu, De bone plume vus a vestu. Penne vus dune a voler Haut e bas, a vostre voler. Le pur eyr avez en bandun Saunz rente doner ou autre doun, Saunz vostre sucyté e cure, E il vus purveyt e trove puture.’ (Vye, XII.3, 5179–88) [‘My dear brother birds, you truly should praise and give honor to the Creator, to him who, by clothing you in good feathers, does not suffer you to be naked. Wings he has given you to fly high and low at your will. You have the pure air at your disposal, without payment or any other gift to give, without a care in the world, and he looks after you and provides food.’]

The attentive behavior of the birds in this passage mirrors that of the marsh birds in Venice, who likewise stay silent when Francis is preaching, but this time they are waiting silently for him to speak. Birds in this episode thus demonstrate their respect for the redeeming qualities of the saint’s presence and for his preaching. They listen to him with reysun (reason, 5189) and with beaks open, unmoving until given the sign of the cross and Francis’ blessing. The word reysun (LM: ‘loqueretur’, p. 99) emphasizes the intellectual nature of the sermon to the birds and demonstrates that they recognize Francis’ discourse as containing elements of logical argumentation. This miraculous event encapsulates how the latter part of Francis’ Life reinforces his instinctive affinity with the creatures of the world, and the capacity of the birds to intuitively understand his sermon without recourse to being taught. Through their silent participation in the sermon as active listeners, the birds implicitly express a position of bios, temporarily at least, demonstrating elements of the form-of-life embodied by Francis. They are attentive to, and seem to understand, the spiritual truth spoken by the saint. Their understanding is reinforced in a passage devoted to the lexis of preaching, and by the fact that they seem to have entendement (from the same root as entendre, ‘to hear’ or ‘to understand’), a word that describes the birds’ attention both before and after Francis’ sermon.51 The miraculous nature of the event relies on the recognition that this type of spiritual behavior, usually reserved for devout humans, is here opened out to other creatures by the

51

For the second instance of this line, see 5191. I discuss entendement in more detail in the Introduction, p. 13.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts presence of the saint and by his control of the soundscape. The portrayal of birds exhibiting the same reasoning as human listeners demonstrates why a binary distinction between ‘rational’ humans and ‘irrational’ animals would not fully explain the type of interaction between the saint and the birds in the Vye. Rather like his lessons for the sheep and lambs, Francis’ preaching in a soundscape shared with the birds, and the recognition of understanding on their part, reveals how the birds participate in parallel forms of worship through the conduits of their sound and silence. While the ‘Sermon to the Birds’ conveys a clear vision of idealized relation between humans and birds, the control of birdsong elsewhere in the Vye is conceptually more complicated than a simple transition from zoë to bios would suggest. The episode commonly referred to as the ‘Stilling of the Swallows’ features directly after the ‘Sermon to the Birds’, and depicts Francis taking it upon himself to address the swallows directly in the village of Alviano in order to quiet them and give them a rest, in much the same way as he calls for the cricket to be given a respite from her singing: ‘Mes soers arundes, ore est assez, Ben est tens ke vus reposez, Lessez ore vostre jargun, Escutez desormés au sermun.’ (Vye, XII.4, 5225–8) [‘My sisters the swallows, that is enough now, it is high time for you to rest. Leave aside your chattering and listen now to the sermon.’]

Francis demonstrates in his sermon to the swallows that there is a distinction between their jargun and his sermun (sermon), which parallels a distinction between zoë and bios. The swallow song is at least partially intelligible to Francis, a theme reflected in the language the text uses to describe such sound. In Old French the noun jargun is used widely to convey the chit-chat of birds. Jargun may be used to describe foreign and incomprehensible languages, foolish talk, nonsense, birdsong, or twittering.52 Swallows emit a high chip and gurgle sound, suggesting overlapping textual and material influences on the scene as the Vye depicts it in relation to other avian and animal sounds described as jargun. In this passage, the

52

Jargun may indicate babil, bavardage, gazouillement, and langage en général (babbling, chatting, chirping/gurgling, and language in general), or even hinnissement de cheval (the whinnying of the horse). See ‘jargon’ in Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialects du IXe au XVe siècle (New York: Kraus, Reprint Corp., 1961). Ardis Butterfield discusses the use of ‘jargon’ in medieval Anglo-French texts in the context of a French language understood by some but not others in medieval England. See The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 73.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi word jargun strikes a chord with the description discussed above of the background noise created by birds around the saint’s cell at La Verna: en chaunçun de lur jargun (singing in their own language, 3855).53 This attention to sound and language reinforces distinctions between forms of life by combining the words jargun and sermun as a couplet. The former conveys a type of sound specific to birds in their bare or instinctive existence, whereas the latter transforms vocal expression into a qualified form-oflife representative in this case of adherence to the Franciscan Rule. The distinction here is not between rational and irrational vocalization, since both terms represent forms of communication. The end-rhymes instead reinforce the mundane and everyday qualities of the swallow song (here representative of existence in zoë), compared to a higher, spiritually focused form-of-life encapsulated in the sermon. The jargun of the birds becomes associated with the mobility of communication across species boundaries as the birds welcome Francis to preach using their own idiom. This type of communication builds on the strong precedent for depicting birdsong using turns of phrase and a lexicon that situate such sounds in relation to language and ambiguous understanding. The evolution of movement between forms of life is traced through the vocabulary of the passage, suggesting that the sermon given by Francis briefly replaces the swallow song with human praise in the soundscape, reaching beyond the anthropocentric bounds of the human in the process. While it is possible to read this scene as one that is comparatively free of the kind of Christian zoomorphic symbolism mobilized in the depictions of mammals elsewhere in the text, when birds of different kinds are pulled into the orbit of Christian semiotics, it is the transformation of the ways singing and speaking are described that highlights a movement from zoë toward bios. This transformation is both the symptom of a human-induced change and the medium for the communication of a kind of existence made available by the shift from song to sermon, a shift also depicted in the evolution of the thematic focus of the text as a whole toward the figure of Francis as preacher.



53

The association made between swallows and chattiness is one that was recorded in the Etymologies: ‘erundo dicta, quod cibos non sumat residens, sed in aere capiat escas et edat; garrula avis, per tortuosos orbes et flexuosos circuitus pervolans, et in nidis construendis educandisque fetibus sollertissima’ (the swallow [erundo, i.e. hirundo] is so named because it does not take food when it has alighted, but seizes and eats its food in the air [aer]. It is a garrulous bird, flying around in convoluted loops and twisted circles, and it is very clever at constructing its nests and raising its young), XII.vii. 70, p. 268, my emphasis. Florence McCulloch demonstrates that a literary tradition on swallows dates back as far as Pliny and Aristotle. See Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, pp. 174–5.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Contact with the saint is shown to accentuate the intuitive forms of praise that birds express in their instinctive vocalizations and behaviors. The depiction of shared worship resonates with how Bonaventure understands creatures’ songs as expressing ‘a sacrament mediating the presence of God in a tangible fashion’ through vestige, image, or similitude, and in particular through melody.54 Indeed, from an early stage in his career Bonaventure was reassessing why Christians should love creatures in the world, eventually resolving conflicting opinions in the Order of Friars Minor.55 The LM and the Vye reflect these interests and present birdsong as part of expressive soundscapes communicating praise of God in zoë and bios. Francis’ role in this environment is to interact with birds and guide their already pseudo-linguistic utterance into a form-of-life that harnesses the expressive and spiritual potential of such ecologies. The theological underpinning for Francis’ interaction with birdsong in this episode sets a precedent for interpreting the soundscapes of the text as emanating from the material world itself, and in particular from the sounds the songbirds make. Descriptions of bird sounds in the ‘Stilling of the Swallows’ episode reflect a sacramental approach to ecology, in which the sacred quality of the cosmos itself is the main focus. It is up to readers to interpret the natural world as the primary symbolic disclosure of God.56 The material and acoustic worlds are understood as praising the Creator in harmony with the friars, a proposition also supported by Francis in his Canticle of the Creatures, discussed above. In the Vye, Francis’ own praise channels the expression of mundane sound into a more direct form of bios. However, Francis made it clear in his tuition of the sheep that inviting creatures into worship contexts should not cause offense to human religious. What conceptual problems does a sacramental approach to birdsong therefore pose for the saint’s preaching to the birds? One of the results of Francis’ avian preaching activities is that the model he develops for a transition between forms of life spills out beyond the

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55 56

Breviloquium, ed. Dominic Monti (Saint Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005), XII.3, p. 97. Timothy Johnson notes that ‘Francis heard the chorus of creation, and Bonaventure composed his theological reflections with a keen ear for this melody. […] Bonaventure uses the musical motif to explain the course of the cosmos. Just as a person is unable to appreciate the loveliness of song without following it from the beginning to end, so too the beauty of the world is imperceptible to those who do not understand how divine wisdom generates, orders, and governs the universe. Close attention to the natural world allows humanity to heed the praise that arises from every being, both animate and inanimate, for all creatures sing of their Creator’, ‘Francis and Creation’, pp. 152–3. Johnson, ‘Francis and Creation’, pp. 150–1. John F. Haught, ‘Christianity and Ecology’, in Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 273.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi confines of his own Order. Word of Francis’ miraculous sermon to the swallows travels fast and the Vye recounts how a diligent student in the city of Parma is distracted from his work by the chattering of a swallow: Kar une arunde sist enprés | Ke fyst graunt noyse saunz entrelés (For a swallow just nearby made such an incessant noise, 5245–6). Because of the noyse de ses jarguns (noise of its chattering, 5247) the student complains to his friends, informing them that this swallow must have been one of those Francis quietened at the sermon. The student takes it upon himself to address the swallow in good faith, telling the bird to be quiet in the name of Francis: ‘Cessez e a may saunz respyt Venez;’ e ele a sa meyn se myst Si tost cum ele oy le nun, A ly vynt, ne plus fist soun. Le clerk le dona pus fraunchise Ke s’envolast a sa devyse. De la arunde plus ne oy Mes de la aventure s’enjoy.

(Vye, XII.5, 5255–62)

[‘Stop and come to me at once.’ And as soon as she heard the name she came down to him and sat on his hand, making not a sound. The clerk immediately set her free, and she flew away of her own accord. He heard no more from the swallow but was amazed by what happened.]

This short encounter between a student and one of the swallows that met Francis earlier tests the precedent that Francis sets for miraculous interactions between humans and birds. The resonance of Francis’ sermon has stretched beyond the soundscapes in which Francis himself resides, and the student mimics the type of interaction for which Francis has set the precedent. Simply speaking the name of the saint now triggers the cessation of the swallow’s jarguns, thus allowing the student to concentrate on his lesçun (reading or exemplum, 5243). By maintaining silence, the swallow allows the student to study harder, possibly on religious instruction, thus moving him ever closer to a more virtuous form-of-life based on a sacramental interpretation of the soundscape they both inhabit. What initially reads as an assertion of human dominance over the swallow changes when set into the broader context explored by Chapter Twelve of the Vye. The accumulation of connections between birdsong and the singing of the liturgical hours throughout the Vye culminates in the moment of Francis’ death in Chapter Fourteen, when his interactions with birds are brought to a climax. As Francis lies naked in the church of St Mary of the Portiuncula, suffering from prolonged physical illness due in part to his receiving the stigmata, his death is punctuated by specific sounds. These include Psalm 141, spoken aloud by Francis, and summarized as Voce mea (6104), and a miraculous call 129

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts by the aged Brother Augustine for Francis to wait for him as he too dies. The silence of death then fills the air, accompanied by the image of a shining cloud, taken from the Book of Revelation 14:14 and used to depict the saint’s ascent to heaven. The final episode of this chapter adds ornithological sonority with a depiction of larks. At Francis’ death, these birds come to circle around the roof of the house and whirl around with unusual joy: Longement sur la mesun | E noyse firent de lur chaunçun (For a long time they noisily sang on top of the building, 6159–60). The text describes Francis as the herald of the creatures because he had taken pleasure in their respectful, benevolent singing during his life. The motif of Francis as a sumuneur (summoner, 6163) for all God’s creatures reinforces the importance of his posthumous role in encouraging the continued praise of humans and birds in the soundscapes they share. The praise directed toward the Creator by Francis throughout the text is replaced at the moment of his death by noisy birdsong, which paradoxically indicates the absence of the saint’s voice and, by extension, of human praise. The larks take up the act of praising God, once performed by Francis, according to their own instinctive patterns of praise. This vocal expression is a last effort by the birds to acknowledge the saint’s passing with honur e curteysye (honor and courtesy, 6166).57 The birds sing around the building that holds his body, filling the soundscape with the praise Francis would have been performing were he still alive. This motif also accompanies the shining cloud as the motif of angels taking the saint’s soul to heaven; in many medieval saints’ lives, someone with or close to a saint sees such a vision. With all the elements of the death scene, one further question arises at this final stage of the hagiography: are the birds now imitating Francis’ own praise, and thus his forma vitæ in bios, or expressing their own sacramental form-of-life in zoë? Throughout the Vye Francis pays attention to preaching and instructing his friars in the singing of the liturgical hours. The text echoes this in his interactions with various creatures. At certain points in the text, these creatures join in with human religious and learn the ropes of praising God. At other points, Francis deliberately silences animals and birds in order to preach himself. In such scenarios, Francis shows animals and birds the way toward a form-of-life in which their instinctive praise is qualified by his own. Yet, in the final scene of his death, the return of the larks to an instinctive form of praise that now has a specific symbolic focus reinforces the notion that the power of Francis’ contact with the birds continues even after his death

57

In a Middle English version of the Life from the South English Legendaries, from the late thirteenth century, the larks are described as singing against their own natures: Agen kunde hi songe there (Against their nature they sang there), ‘The Life of Saint Francis in the South English Legendary’, in E. George Whatley, Anne B. Thompson, and Robert K. Upchurch (eds), Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), 481.

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The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi as distinctions based on forms of life seem to dissolve before our eyes and ears. The birds arrive and fly around the site of the saint’s death, suggesting that praises Francis encouraged while alive will be perpetuated by the birds of the Umbrian countryside. In depicting the larks as such, the Vye attaches a symbolic weight to noyse and reveals the movement of creatures from life in zoë to bios, and possibly back again, as the hagiographic depiction of bios relies on a continuous level of sustained praise to the Creator, be it from the mouths of humans or the beaks of birds.

Conclusion In the words of Pope Francis, St Francis of Assisi ‘draws all other creatures into his praise’, bringing animals and birds into contact with a virtuous form-of-life in keeping with his own. Yet this process is not identical for all creatures in the Vye. For some animals, such as sheep, Francis must demonstrate how to praise the Creator in order to fit in with the Franciscan community. In the cases of the cricket and different types of bird, these creatures already praise the Creator using their own voices, testing the types of distinctions that divide humans and animals in some Classical and patristic writings. The Vye is less concerned with demonstrating the presence of a distinction between rational humans and irrational creatures, and more invested in the plurality of vocalization and modes of capturing animal attention and understanding. Francis capitalizes on creatures’ instinctive behaviors characteristic of zoë (bare life), revealing modes of understanding that are parallel with human abilities, and he brings creatures toward bios as a qualified form-of-life. By accompanying animals and birds through these stages he establishes himself as the epitome of a new form of preacher who takes his sermons out of the pulpit and into the woods and fields. The Vye thus offers a capacious, sacramental experience of praise that encapsulates one of the principles of Franciscanism – that friars should travel and preach – while extending the capacity to worship and give praise to the creatures that Francis meets in the soundscapes through which he moves.

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4 Soundscape Perspectives: Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables

I

n the fable tradition short stories about animals, usually accompanied by pithy morals, convey the perspectives of different animals, birds, and inanimate objects by making these agents speak to one another, or to humans. To take an example, in one fable the dog and the wolf converse and exchange pleasantries using human language as the dog naively explains the benefits of the chain around his neck to the wolf, but in another sense they are both chained by the human language they use to speak.1 Fabulous animals and birds also make sounds that are placed in dialogue with, and in relation to, forms of utterance that directly mirror human language and discourse. Fables represent animal protagonists in a space in-between sound and language. These protagonists contribute to soundscapes in which meanings attached to the sounds of ecology and life are constantly open to reinterpretation. The muzzles of animals and the beaks of birds become points of reference to the human mouth in ways that highlight patterns of anthropomorphic representation, while troubling the distinction between human and animal. Fables have the capacity to expose divergent human and animal points of view, and to create new ones when speech and utterance are contrasted with sound. The word ‘fable’ itself poses a significant problem for understanding how medieval authors conceptualized the categories of sound and language in relation to such texts. The fables as a genre can be described as didactic, fictional narratives with at least one distinctly stated moral lesson. The moral of each short tale is usually placed after it (an epimythium) but may also feature before it (a promythium), or within the tale itself.2 However, this somewhat restrictive notion of what constitutes 1



2



Les Fables: Edition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, de notes et d’un glossaire, ed. Charles Brucker (Paris: Peeters, 1998), 26, ‘Le Loup et le Chien’, pp. 136–9. All quotations from the Fables by Marie de France are taken from this edition. In-text quotations are followed by the number of the fable from this edition, and line numbers. Translations from Old French are my own. Most likely emerging from etiological myths concerning animals and birds, the fable tradition was widespread, incorporated not only in Western European literary traditions, but also in those from the Middle East and India. See

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts a fable is testimony to modern perspectives on a genre that has continued to be reproduced to the present day. The Etymologies by Isidore of Seville describe fables instead according to their relationship to the spoken word, noting that ‘poets named “fables” (fabula) from “speaking” (fari), because they are not actual events that took place, but were only invented in words’. According to Isidore, ‘the conversation of imaginary dumb animals among themselves may be recognized as a mirror image of the life of humans’.3 Isidore adds that there are two types of fable: the Aesopian, in which ‘dumb animals’ or inanimate things converse among themselves, and Libystican, in which humans are imagined conversing with animals. Readers familiar with distinctions such as these would thus have come to the genre with an attention to language, utterance, and speech. If the speech of animals and inanimate objects forms the sine qua non of fables as a medieval genre, animal sound can play an important role in the translation of Classical texts and the decentering of fixed conceptualizations of language. The ways that mouths, muzzles, and beaks communicate perspectives and points of view in the earliest extant fables in the French of England have stark consequences for the conceptualization of language as the exclusive domain of the human. This is particularly clear in the vernacular fable tradition of Anglo-Norman England, written in the languages that readers may have spoken themselves. Marie de France, who drew on the Latin and English fable traditions in her composition of the Fables in the twelfth century, wrote a collection of over a hundred short, pithy tales, usually concerning animals and birds, and which are extant, at least in part, in no less than thirty-three manuscripts.4 In the Epilogue to this collection, Marie names herself as the author who put the hitherto lost fables of King Alfred into French rhyme (jeo l’ai rimee en franceis, 18)



3



4

Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 21. [‘Fabulas poetae a fando nominaverunt, quia non sunt res factae, sed tantum loquendo fictae. Quae ideo sunt inductae, ut fictorum mutorum animalium inter se conloquio imago quaedam vitae hominum nosceretur’], The Etymologies, ed. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I.xi.1, p. 66. For all Latin quotations from this source, see The Latin Library (online source). For the dating of manuscripts of Marie’s Fables, see Françoise Vielliard, ‘Sur la tradition manuscrite des Fables de Marie de France’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 147 (1989), pp. 371–97. Notable texts with which the Fables are bound include: saints’ lives (Royal Library of Belgium, MS 10295-10304); texts by authors such as Gautier le Leu (Nottingham University Library, MS WLC/ LM/6), Baudouin Condé (BnF, MS fr. 1446), Rutebeuf (BnF, MS fr. 1593, and Arsenal, MS 3124), and Chrétien de Troyes (BnF, MS fr. 12603); the bestiary by Guillaume le Clerc (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 132, and BnF, MSS fr. 2168, fr. 24428, and fr. 25406); and fabliaux in a high percentage of manuscripts.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables for a certain Count Guillaume. In most cases, the individual fables are followed by moralistic messages designed to interpret or re-interpret the moral already encoded in the short tales, a format that mirrors the Aesopic tradition from which Marie’s fables derive.5 In contrast to bestiaries, which acknowledge animals’ capacity to deceive nonlinguistically, as when the lion covers its tracks to outwit the hunter, fables focus on forms of deception instigated for the most part by language.6 Commenting on Marie’s French Fables, Howard Bloch remarks that ‘in a semantic heritage reaching back to late antiquity, the Old French word fable is synonymous with a lie, with ruse, or with fiction, its meaning doubling that of truffe, risée, mensonge, merveille, fantosme, bourde, or gabet’.7 It is certainly true that human language in Marie’s Fables is bound up with power and agency. A suspicion of language is an important part of the thematic content and structure of the Fables as conversation between animals contributes to the formation of political and social ties between protagonists, as well as to narrative tension and resolution. Marie notes in the Prologue that the Fables draw on a long tradition of exposing humanity’s ability to deceive (enginner, 16) through language, a tradition instigated by the Classical philosophers, who escriveient | les bons pruverbes qu’il oieient (put into writing the proverbs they heard, 7–8). The interrogation of language and ruse, alongside the presence of morals and proverbs, made fables attractive to teachers and students in the Middle Ages.8 Linguistic deception plays a key role in the representation of relationships between different species in the Fables. Hierarchy, mistrust, and a moralizing narratorial voice disclose situations not based on simple lies, but rather revealing attempts to undermine the literal function of language. Animals take on stereotypical roles, such as the lion and eagle as sovereigns of their respective kingdoms, the wolf and fox as tricksters, and humans as usually dumb or unwitting, but there is room for maneuver and for subjective decision-making. This is the case in examples featuring wolves, such as in the infamous fable ‘The Priest and the Wolf’, in Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, p. 21. For Aesop, see The Fables of Aesop as First Printed by W. Caxton in 1484, ed. J. Jacobs, 2 vols (London: Nutt, 1889). 6 For a discussion of the lion in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire, see Chapter 1 of this book, pp. 41–7. 7 The Anonymous Marie de France (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 111. 8 From the eleventh century onward the familiarity of speaking animal protagonists contributed to the genre’s popularity in the schoolroom, with many new translations and adaptations by authors such as Ademar of Chabannes and Egbert of Liège. Mann notes that Egbert purportedly composed these texts ‘in order to give young scholars edifying material to recite in place of the popular songs they customarily sang when their teachers were out of the room’, From Aesop to Reynard, p. 90. 5

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts which a priest attempts to teach a wolf his ABCs, but the wolf can only respond with ‘Aignel!’ (‘Sheep!’, 81, 12), or in ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, when the wolf tricks the lamb into becoming his dinner. In the latter, the wolf persuades the lamb that the lamb disturbs the water from which they both drink (the lamb is downstream from the wolf). The lamb questions the wolf’s logic, to which the simple reply: ‘Ja me fez tu ore cuntrere | e chose que ne deussez fere.’ (‘Now you contradict me; that is something you should not do!’ 2, 27–8). The wolf eats the lamb, and the moral describes how rich, heartless seigneurs accuse those within their power in the same vein. An example of a fable with avian protagonists similarly highlights a mistrust of hierarchical demands, as the nightingale respectfully refuses to sing for the goshawk before the larger bird moves to a branch further away. The nightingale reasons that his song would be more beautiful from afar, and that the other birds would be witnesses: ‘Jeo chantereie mut plus bel; | ceo seivent tuit cist autre oisel.’ (‘I would sing much better; all these other birds know the truth in that’, 66, 11–12). Here, the moral explicitly remarks on the fact that many people cannot speak (parler, 15) when they are afraid, even if they would otherwise be well-spoken. Direct speech is a key element of animal representation in these texts, which both fables above display using examples of quadrupeds and birds. Not all readers agree on how we should interpret animal perspective or point of view in the Fables. Some argue that the fables decenter human perspectives; however, most critics maintain that the fables are fundamentally anthropocentric.9 What at first seems to be the presentation of an animal’s own perspective in fact serves as an underlying support for the reaffirmation of human sovereignty over the animal. To take one example, in her work on animal sovereignty, Peggy McCracken stops short of extending the same type of world-forming capacities to animals in fables that she finds in medieval French saints’ lives and romances, noting that fables do not offer the same kinds of insights into an animal’s perspective as other texts.10 She remarks that ‘even the most critical anthropomor

9



10

Susan Crane has noted that the trouble with fable is ‘above all that the form invites little thought on creatures other than human’. However, she points out that while fables press animals into human shapes, they also trouble the relation between animals and the apologues, which deflect attention ‘from the human and back toward the pleasure of imagining proximity to other animals’, Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 43–4. By ‘world-forming’, I mean that sounds in literary texts can communicate a range of perspectives, even those that are other-than-human, that invite reflection on ways of experiencing the world that push beyond the confines of human subjective experience. Vicki Hearne suggests that the content and even the form of a poem can communicate the ‘world-forming’ capabilities of nonhuman agents, while indicating that these are somewhat restrained by

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables phism brought to bear on fables is unlikely to find much to say about the animal’s view of its own world, or how it experiences its environment, or what matters to an animal in its own existence’.11 A similar reflection on fabulous animal identity is offered by Jacques Derrida who, in his seminal work L’animal que donc je suis, notes that: We know the history of fabulization and how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man.12

The Fables are in many respects deeply invested in such anthropocentric logic. The Middle Ages witnessed a strong assertion of dominance over animals and birds by humans that is reflected in certain textual traditions.13 However, as I argue below, these texts can also be read in ways that do foreground the perspective of animal protagonists. Certain fables present a reversal of the anticipated form of utterance from muzzles or beaks; as well as speaking, some animals bark, and birds communicate through their calls. It is at such moments that the fables associate animals and birds with the instinctive characteristics of their species as these were understood in the Middle Ages. I suggest that the Fables are therefore far from a simple collection of stories that buttress human identity through comparison with the animal. Through depictions of animal utterance some medieval fables participate in a decidedly non-anthropomorphic inclusion of animal phenomenology. An attention to the representation and imitation of sound as well as language thus allows for a new vantage on animal perspective.



11



12



13

human language. See Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), p. 4. Peggy McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 9 and 65. The themes of perspective and animacy in relation to nonhumans have been discussed more broadly by Mel Chen in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect (London: Duke University Press, 2012). See in particular Part II, in which Chen identifies that ‘the exclusion of animals from the realm of language is, historically, a relatively recent and uneven phenomenon’, pp. 91–2. [‘L’affabulation, on en connaît l’histoire, reste un apprivoisement anthropomorphique, un assujettissement moralisateur, une domestication. Toujours un discours de l’homme; sur l’homme; voire sur l’animalité de l’homme, mais pour l’homme, et en l’homme.’], p. 60. Translation by David Wills in The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 37, original italics. I discuss some examples of these in the Introduction, pp. 15–21. For futher discussion, see Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 1–27.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The first part of this chapter examines how animal speech disrupts the status quo while animal sounds or noises restore harmony following such disruptions. Rather than drawing the same distinctions between human language and animal sound discussed above, I suggest a more flexible interplay between mouth and muzzle. This approach insists on the blurred boundary between the organs humans and animals use for speaking and eating. The juxtaposition of utterance and sound in certain fables emphasizes the muddling of the functions of mouths (as orifices used symbolically for speaking) and muzzles (as orifices primarily associated with killing and eating).14 A small but significant number of fables depict moments in which animals – a wolf, a billy goat, a fox, a cockerel – are depicted manipulating sound to achieve their own ends, either to prey on others or to save themselves. These texts emphasize the importance of animal perspective by depicting animals resorting to their own muzzles, and to their own vocalizations, to solve situations that have been complicated by mouths or mouth-muzzles. In the final section, I draw parallels between the sounds emitted from the muzzle with those from the beak to consider alternative and ambiguous sounds in animal soundscapes.

The hue and cry perspective A key subset of Marie de France’s Fables presents sound as a disruptive communication tool, demonstrating that the agencies at play in these narrative texts do not always ensue directly from utterances that are easily identifiable as human speech. These fables use animal sounds and utterances to portray the points of view of different human and animal agents and to consider the nature and limits of social contracts from an ostensibly animal perspective, breaking away from more conservative patterns of meaning-making and moralization in the genre. The entangled natures of animal sound and speech are especially noticeable in three of the Fables which feature dogs. These fables offer multiple perspectives identified with a variety of different muzzles: lupine and vulpine figures are depicted speaking, while dogs are primarily associated with the sound

14

Sarah Kay draws attention to similar tensions in different versions of the ‘Wolf at School’ fable from the Latin Romulus LBG collection, in which a wolf is made to learn elementary Latin, but can only say agnus. See ‘As in Heart, So in Mouth: Translating the Scandal of Wolfish Desire from Fables to Peire Vidal’, French Studies, 69.1 (2015), pp. 1–13. See also Alison Langdon, ‘“Dites le mei, si ferez bien”: Fallen Language and Animal Communication in Bisclavret’, in Alison Langdon (ed.), Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 160–1.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables of barking. The first of these tales is ‘The Wolf and the Billy Goat’, which illustrates how human political and religious systems are to some degree mirrored through animal sounds. This text depicts a situation in which a goat tries to save himself from the clutches of a wolf by reasoning with him that he should be spared from being eaten.15 The wolf has been hunting the billy goat for a whole year and, finally having found him, refuses to grant the billy goat a reprieve (terme, 93, 27). The billy goat attempts to find a solution couched in the same language as that used by the wolf, suggesting that he say a mass for both himself and the wolf, delivered from the top of a nearby hill. The reluctant wolf finds this argument persuasive, and he concedes in a passage that introduces the play of power and dominance through direct discourse: ‘Tu n’averas ja de mei merci, kar ne te puis terme doner que jeo te veie vif aler.’ – ‘Jeo ne quer terme’, dist li bucs, ‘fors tant que jeo die pur vus une messë, autre pur mei, sur cel tertre ke jo la vei. Tutes les bestes qui l’orrunt, quë as bois u as viles sunt, ferunt pur nus a Deu preere.’ Li lus l’otreie en teu manere.

(Fables, 93, 26–36)

[‘You will never obtain mercy from me, because I cannot grant you a reprieve and see you leave alive.’ ‘I do not seek a reprieve’, said the billy goat, ‘except to say one mass for you and another for myself, on this high hill that I see there. All the animals who hear it, in the woods and the villages, will say a prayer to God for us.’ According to these conditions, the wolf conceded.]

The conversation between the two protagonists is a battle of wits to determine whether or not the goat will get eaten; the wolf attempts to persuade the goat to give up his life as the goat seeks to reason his way out of the situation. The language of this passage communicates the wolf’s dominance over the billy goat through the use of pronouns, which linguistically signal the status of each animal and their decision to converse in

15

According to Brucker, the source for this fable is unknown, but it may be derived from the Romuli Anglici cunctis exortae fabulae. See the abridged version provided by Léopold Hervieux in Les Fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Âge, vol. 2, 72, ‘De Capra et Lupo’ (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), p. 613. It may also be derived from the Romuli Anglici Nonnullis, an edition of which is also provided in Les Fabulistes latins, 2, p. 550.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts dialogue. The billy goat addresses the wolf with the formal vus while the wolf indicates his superiority over the goat by using the informal tu. These are hierarchical modes of address that are maintained throughout the passage. Human modes of expression thus on some level already translate animal perspectives: the use of vus and tu is a linguistic expression of the relationship between predator and prey. This relationship is ultimately what dictates how dialogue between the two animals unfolds. The rhetoric used by the billy goat and the wolf is both a linguistic representation of animal predatory relationships and a humanization of this relationship in terms drawn from the medieval social world. Formal language and expression peppers the linguistic battle between the two animals, who draw on political, legal, and ecclesiastical terminology, and thus accentuate the extent to which their social interaction is humanized. Both the wolf and the goat talk of a terme and concession, and the fable portrays them indulging in logical, rational argument.16 Following this, the fable delves into the anthropomorphic representation of the wolf and the billy goat in the scenario of the latter performing mass. The appeal to merci (mercy) and preere (prayer), words that reflect religious terminology, shifts the debate from a legal setting toward a spiritual conclusion. The clear anthropomorphism of this scene is disrupted, however, at the introduction of sound in parallel to formalized linguistic utterance. A contrast between direct discourse and sound is evident in the passage that follows the promise of the billy goat to say his prayer. The goat, having encouraged the wolf to take his mind off his belly and to consider the spiritual benefit of a mass held on top of the hill, climbs to the summit alone. On reaching the hilltop the goat cries out loud (leva en haut sun cri, 93, 42), summoning the local shepherds who live in the surrounding villages. The linguistic tensions that represented the predator/prey relationship are then briefly abandoned as a more dynamic, action-driven narrative style takes its place, emphasizing the riotous arrival of the shepherds and their dogs: Le lu virent, si l’escrierent, de tutes parz les chens hüerent; le lu unt pris e deciré.

(Fables, 93, 47–9)

[They saw the wolf and shouted out to him. From all around the dogs came howling. They seized the wolf and tore him to pieces.]



16

The verb otreier for the wolf’s concession has a history of use in legal contexts, including for a short time in the English language. See ‘otreier’, v.a., and v.n, in AND.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables The billy goat’s cry introduces an abrupt shift in pace and tone alongside the expression of nonlinguistic animal sound.17 What had been a polite conversation has now transformed dramatically into a hunting scene over the space of a few lines. This intensification of the fable soundscape is indicated not only by the action, but also by the language used to describe that action, which consequently describes sound: the verbs escrier (to cry out) and huër (to howl) indicate the communicative sounds of the shepherds and their dogs, sounds which form the response to the billy goat’s original ‘cri’. The verbs used to describe the barking of the dogs are associated with both the production of vocal sound and the appetites of the hunt. Whereas the fable began with the expression of the wolf’s appetite, by the end of the tale the tables have turned, and it is the appetite of the hunting dogs that is sated, restoring the function of animal muzzles to killing and consumption, rather than speech. The text thus juxtaposes the wolf’s predation, couched in feudal language, with the confusion of animal sound. The difference between the wolf’s manipulative speech and the instinctive barking of the dogs maps onto a difference in appetite: whereas the wolf wants to feed on the goat for sustenance, the dogs’ appetite is focused on killing and tearing to pieces in the heat of the chase. The terms escrierent and hüerent, introduced at the mid-point of the fable, thus mark an important transition in the text as communal justice takes over from tangled political language and toward a more acute representation of canine perspective. The direct consequence of taking justice into the common arena and of placing this justice into the muzzles of the hunting dogs is clear – the predatory wolf is torn to pieces. The juxtaposition of the verbs escrier and huër in the Fables posits a direct equivalence with a common legal process, suggesting a parallel between the pack hunt and the hunt for a criminal as a way of interpreting the dynamics of this scene. The terms in question evoke the common English law process by which legal bystanders were summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal who had been seen committing a crime: the hue and cry.18 The hue and cry allowed victims of a crime ‘to summon their neighbors to pursue suspected criminals’, and ‘was one of the oldest and most communally

17



18

The noisy arrival of the dogs features in the Romulus Anglici Cunctis and the Romuli Anglici Nonnullis. See Les Fabulistes latins, pp. 613 and 550. The OED suggests that this phrase derives from the Anglo-Norman expression hu e cri, noting that ‘there is some ground to think that hue as distinct from cri originally meant inarticulate sound, including that of a horn or trumpet as well as of the voice’. See ‘hue and cry, n’. The MED provides examples of the expression ‘hue and cry’ dating from the mid-thirteenth century. See ‘heu(e) (n. 2)’. The AND provides examples from legal texts, including faire le hu et cri (to make the hue and cry). See ‘hu, hue, etc.’

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts based systems of policing in England’.19 With roots in England’s tenth-century Germanic legal institutions, the practice continued to be encouraged by the Normans, with parliament rolls recording such events well into the fifteenth century. The depiction of dogs performing these sounds thereby connects canine representation in this fable with the legal process, rendering the dogs themselves agents of communal justice. In contrast to the earlier dialogue between the wolf and the goat, depicted through spoken direct discourse (highly suggestive of the human mouth), the moment of the hue and cry depends on the nonlinguistic sounds of muzzles. The verbs huër and escrier form a connection between collective action and other sonic phenomena such as rioting and hunting in the fable of the wolf and the billy goat. This is a remarkably similar depiction of sound as is suggested by Christopher Fletcher in a discussion on medieval political noise: ‘contemporary writers viewed collective action in towns as a mixture of news and noise swelling into the clamor of the crowds and finally into violence’.20 The hue was a legal accusation that also brought gender stereotypes into the legal process. The role of women in raising the hue and cry was subject to scrutiny, and the responsibility that a woman undertook if courts decided that they had disrupted the public peace and made a false accusation was not to be underestimated: ‘if the jury and personal pledging were male institutions, the hue and cry belonged to women’.21 In the Fables it is not men and women who raise the cry, but animals, and more specifically, goats that might be preyed upon. The fable therefore forms a connection between the collective noise of predatory animals (the hunting pack) and the human mob in pursuit of a criminal. The ensuing sound coming from the muzzles of the dogs echoes the policing status of the hue and cry as the hunting dogs arrive on the scene in order to rescue the goat from the clutches of the wolf. Despite the resolution that comes about through the hue and the cry in this episode of the fable, the utterance of the wolf persists as he continues to speak. As the wolf is being torn apart by the dogs, he calls to the billy goat

19



20



21

Samantha Sagui, ‘The Hue and Cry in Medieval English Towns’, Historical Research, 87.236 (2014), p. 179. Literary authors including Chaucer and John Gower use terms such as ‘murmur’, ‘clamour’, ‘cry’, and ‘noise’ in descriptions of political discontent. See Christopher Fletcher, ‘News, Noise, and the Nature of Politics in Late Medieval English Provincial Towns’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2007), p. 261. Anne Reiber DeWindt and Edwin Brezette DeWindt, Ramsey: The Lives of an English Fenland Town, 1200–1600 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp. 74–5 and 236–8. Samantha Sagui notes that the hue and cry became increasingly connected to women’s political expression over the centuries, remarking that this ‘may have increased distrust of the hue and encouraged the elite to intensify their oversight of it’. See ‘The Hue and Cry in Medieval English Towns’, p. 193.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables once more in an address that seems to display a comical detachment from the realities of his situation and his surprise at being unnaturally duped: ‘Frere’, fet il, ‘bien sai e vei malement avez prié pur mei: bien poi entendre par le cri que ceo ert preere de enemi. Mut est mauveise ta pramesse, unces mes n’oï peiur messe.’

(Fables, 93, 51–6)

[‘Brother’, he said, ‘I see and know well that you have said your prayer for me badly. By the cry I can understand that this is the prayer of an enemy. Your promise is very bad; never have I heard a worse mass.’]

Even as he is being torn to pieces, the wolf pinpoints a distinction between different forms of utterance which, crucially, he now understands (entendre). At this point he describes the type of noise emitted by the goat – the cri – but continues to read the situation literally, rather than appreciating the irony of the goat’s ‘mass’ that readers of this text will certainly pick up on, namely that the mass performed by a goat can only be one communicated through bleats. The goat remarks on this in his segue to the epimithium, in which he tells the wolf that he did indeed pray for him, but by thinking of himself instead of the wolf (57–64). The moral of the epimythium subverts reader expectations somewhat by criticizing people who believe that others must pray for them while abandoning those to whom they make promises: si parolent le plus pur eus (they speak especially for themselves, 69). There is no critique of the relationship between animals. Rather, the moral revisits the themes of utterance and fidelity. The connection between animal sound and meaning making is fundamental to understanding the status of the hue and the cry in this fable and the way it mirrors human communication. Direct and indirect discourse between human protagonists in medieval literature can be situated on a continuum ‘between external speech, inner speech, thoughts and attitudes’.22 However, these texts do not just depict discourse between human protagonists. Animal speech offers a direct parallel to human utterance, but animal sounds form their own species-specific channels of communication on a broader continuum, which incorporates the material but elusive perspective of the animal. Howling and barking are positioned as sonic phenomena in contrast to direct and indirect ‘human’ discourse,

22

Sophie Marnette, Speech and Thought Presentation in French (Philadelphia: John Benjamins B. V., 2005), p. 50. Marnette discusses related themes in Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: une approche linguistique (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts which would typically be produced by a human mouth. The category of sound, rather than discourse or language, thus allows us to identify different forms of sonic communication between various animals, incorporating sounds that represent or signify in other-than-human ways. Whereas speaking is reminiscent of human activity even when coming from the mouths of non-domesticated quadrupeds, the crying and howling of dogs is a nonlinguistic vocal signal directed at alerting the shepherds to the presence of the wolf. Communication therefore works in more than one direction: between the wolf and the billy goat, between the billy goat and the shepherds, and between the dogs and the shepherds. Howling, crying, or as these terms also obliquely suggest, barking, are therefore at once comprehensible and unsettlingly other-than-human; they neither emerge solely from the realm of human semantics nor from that of animal behavior. Instead, the sounds identified with the hue and cry can be understood as drawing on the perspective of the mouth as well as of the muzzle. The howling and crying emitted by the muzzles of hunting dogs in this fable restores harmony following the opening conflict between a domesticated mammal (the billy goat) and a wild animal (the wolf). The replacement of humanizing dialogue with the sound of the hunt (the hue and cry) is also a replacement of the hierarchy of predator/prey associated with a non-domesticated animal (the wolf) and the hierarchies of man, who comes to the aid of the goat accompanied by the hunting dogs. The further irony of this process is that, just as the textual soundscape conveys the transition from a more human perspective from dialogue to barking, the human reader loses direct insight into an animal worldview and instead must navigate nonlinguistic, abstracted sound. Human dominion over animals and the natural order is thus protected and disturbed as the domesticated dogs are brought forward to bring communal justice to the situation. A similar parallel between mouth and muzzle is operative in another fable, ‘The Fox and the Cockerel’, which was famously re-used in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale.23 This fable begins with a cockerel singing on a farm. A fox soon comes along and addresses the cockerel with sweet words (beaus diz, 60, 4), noting in particular that the cockerel has a clear singing voice (clere voiz, 7), surpassing even that of the cockerel’s own father. The fox soon displays his duplicity when he recommends that the cockerel would sing better with his eyes closed. As the cockerel closes his eyes and begins

23

See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Marie’s source for this fable is unknown, but it may be derived from the Romuli Anglici cunctis. See Les Fabulistes latins, 50, ‘De Gallo et Vulpe’, pp. 598–9.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables to sing, the fox seizes him and makes for the forest. It is at this point that the shepherds and their dogs join the chase, an action again signaled by the verb hüer in the third person present indicative: Par mi un champ, u il passa, curent aprés tut li pastur; li chiens le hüent tut entur: veit le gupil, ki le cok tient; mar le guaina si par eus vient!

(Fables, 60, 16–20)

[In a field which he passed by all the shepherds ran after him; the dogs howled at him from all around: here is the fox, who takes the cockerel; woe is to him who comes close to them!]

This scene seems to reflect the dynamics of hunting scenarios, in which barking and howling are used to locate and track prey and communicate this information to other dogs and hunters.24 As in the fable ‘The Wolf and the Billy Goat’, the dogs’ howling raises the hue and acts as a signal to the shepherds, who only then see the fox in question from the impersonal collective viewpoint, just as if these characters were participating in an actual fox hunt. The use of the verb hüer communicates a moment mid-fable in which the narrative perspective slips between the vocal activity of dogs and that of the human shepherd. Directly following this moment, the cockerel wittily suggests to the fox that he should open his mouth and shout out (escrie) to the dogs and shepherds to confirm that the cockerel belongs to him, and that the fox will therefore never release him. This is another point at which the verbs hüer and escrier combine in a single fable to mirror the hue and cry. The fox follows the advice of the cockerel, but soon realizes his error as the cockerel jumps from his mouth and escapes. From that moment, the words of the cockerel are depicted through utterance, whereas the fox’s thoughts are presented ambiguously as either inner thoughts or indirect speech: ‘Va’, fet li cocs, ‘si lur escrie que sui tuens, ne me larras mie.’ Li gupil volt parler en haut, e li cocs de sa buche saut; sur un haut fust s’en est muntez. Quant li gupilz s’est reguardez, mut par se tient enfantillé



24

The same chase scene in the Romuli Anglici Cunctis reads: ‘Aderant forte pastores in campo, qui Vulpem profugam canibus et clamoribus insequebantur.’ See Les Fabulistes latins, 50, p. 599.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts que li cocs l’ad si enginné; de maltalent e de dreit’ ire la buche cumence a maudire, ke parole quant devereit taire. Li cocs respunt: ‘Si dei jeo faire: maudire l’oil ki volt cluiner quant il deit guarder e guaiter que mal ne vienge a sun seignur.’ Ceo funt li fol: tut li plusur parolent quant deivent taiser, teisent quant il deivent parler.

(Fables, 60, 21–38)

[‘Go’ said the cockerel, ‘shout out to them that I belong to you; that you will never let go of me.’ The fox went to speak out loud, and the cockerel jumped out of his mouth. He jumped onto a high branch. When the fox understood what had happened, he felt very silly that the cockerel had tricked him in such a way. With irritation and a frank anger, he began to curse his mouth, which speaks when it should keep quiet. The cockerel responded: ‘This is what I should do: curse the eye that shuts when it should safeguard and watch out so that its lord suffers no harm.’ The foolish act in this way: most speak when they should shut up and shut up when they should speak.]

The fable ends with a double moral message: one from the mouth (or beak) of the cockerel himself and one situated as part of the formalized epimythium. The ambiguity of speech and thought presentation in this passage has important consequences for the resolution of the fable, as it blurs the distinction between the thoughts of the fox and the cockerel alongside the moral of the tale. This potentially places the epimythium into the mouth of the cockerel as a final irony. In ‘The Wolf and the Billy Goat’ the barking of the dogs that came to the billy goat’s rescue is described using both the verbs hüer and crier. By contrast, in this passage from ‘The Fox and the Cockerel’, the dog howls (hüent) to the fox, but it is the perpetrator of the crime – the fox – who cries out (escrie) back to the dogs as agents of justice, in what becomes a call and response framework. The curse the fox places on his own mouth, which simultaneously communicates his own rash decision and deceit, then provides the stimulus for the cockerel’s moralization. This offers a parallel moral based on a different part of the body than the mouth or the muzzle, namely the eye that should keep watch for its lord. In line with the moral that the foolish speak when they should be quiet and are quiet when they should speak, both the fox and the cockerel exhibit behaviors that are expressions of carelessness. The fox follows the advice of the cockerel and loses his prey, and the cockerel gives in to pride about his singing, 146

Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables which is how he finds himself in the clutches of the fox in the first place. The fox and the cockerel are thus both embroiled in mistakes that involve various slippages between sound, song, and language. One implication of the concluding moral of this fable is that the fox should use his muzzle for killing and eating rather than speaking. Indeed, his mistake is presented as the process of succumbing to a type of human communication (parler). This mistake contrasts with what the cockerel anticipated when he asked the fox to cry out (escrie) and therefore unwittingly complete the raising of the hue and cry on himself. The fox, trespassing onto the realm of human utterance, and therefore of duplicity, thus brings his own doom upon himself through nonlinguistic utterance. This makes narrative sense as the fox is duped by an act of speaking that parallels his own trick on the cockerel at the beginning of the fable. However, it is also possible to read the cockerel’s initial song in the fable as the cockerel’s own mistake; were he to have used language to combat the fox at the beginning of the fable, he may have had a chance at duping the fox earlier on in much the same way as the billy goat duped the wolf. The fable thus contrasts the perspectives afforded by nonlinguistic utterance – the cockerel singing and displaying his narcissism, and the fox raising the hue and cry on himself – with the proverbial messages of the epimythium, which communicate possible human social and moral points of view. The slippage between these different types of voice reveals that fable animals and birds can move between different human and nonhuman communicative worlds. Their mistakes are crucial to the consideration of the fable soundscape as one which allows for a brief excursion into the worldview, and perhaps the mind, of the animal and bird. The howling of dogs in both fables discussed above introduces two different perspectives that reveal how natural justice works. ‘The Wolf and the Billy Goat’ presents a purely canine perspective from the point of view of the dogs themselves (a perspective identified with the muzzle), whose job it is to protect human property and hunt the perpetrators of crimes. In ‘The Fox and the Cockerel’ a mouth-muzzle perspective is presented as the sound from the muzzles of the dogs directed toward the shepherds, whose own human mouths join the hue and cry in an allusion to how the medieval legal procedure was considered to function in practice. The hue and cry in the Fables thus communicates canine perspectives while simultaneously drawing on ambiguous forms of human policing that rely on noise and confusion rather than direct or logical communication. Drawing on a slippage of human mouths and canine muzzles, these fables put into question the nature of utterance and its ability to communicate false ideas or alternative points of view. In this way, it is possible to read the expression of animal sound in these individual fables 147

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts as world-forming, as it communicates different subjective and narrative perspectives that go beyond a purely human point of view, while nonetheless being contiguous with it. Placing the hue and cry into the muzzles of dogs, goats, wolves, and foxes confuses human and animal sonic phenomena, showing how fable animals and birds transgress the bounds of human language and blur perspectives; the vulpine and lupine perspectives on consumption overlap with a human perspective on rhetoric and morality as animal speech aims to generate the conditions for catching and consuming prey. In contrast, a canine perspective, depicted through the hunting dogs, remains linguistically closed off from the reader and connected to the ‘natural’ legal retribution inherent in the hue and cry. In a way that contradicts the purely anthropocentric reading that some readers identify as common to medieval fables, these texts demonstrate how the world-forming capacities of some of the Fables develop the ambiguities of animal and human perspectives, rather than restricting depictions of animal sounds solely to reflections of human behavior and morality.

The power of a bark Canine perspective in the Fables is not limited to expressions that mirror the legal process of the hue and cry. Dogs feature among a range of quadruped characters, many of whom, including the lion, the fox, or the wolf, are much more infamous and prominent than canine figures. Yet, canine perspective expressed through barking is essential to understanding how the Fables draw links between utterance and noise in relation to domestication and rhetorical power. Barking is an ambiguous sonic marker because it is not easy for humans to accurately reproduce such sounds with their own mouths, hence its frequent description in forms such as the Old French verb aboyer. Through abstraction, canine perspective may thus shade into a human one in ways that contrast with the dogs depicted making the hue and cry in the discussion above. The utterance that comes from the dog’s muzzle may be a bark, but it also mirrors human speech, a juxtaposition that highlights how the perspective of the mouth-muzzle conveys overlapping human and canine points of view. In the fable ‘The Thief and the Dog’, a human thief seeks to rob a shepherd and brings some bread to appease the shepherd’s guard dog.25 The dog and the thief engage in a dialogue in which the thief tries to persuade the dog to take the bread. The implication of this is that the dog would take the

25

The source for this fable is probably Romulus Nilantii, ‘De Fure Nocturno et Cane Secucto’. See Les Fabulistes latins, 3, pp. 527–8. It could also be derived from the Romuli Anglici cunctis, Les Fabulistes latins, 21, ‘De Fure et Cane’, p. 579.

148

Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables bread in exchange for remaining silent. The dog, however, noticing a flaw in the thief’s proposition, engages him in a quasi-philosophical argument: Li chiens li dit: ‘Amis, pur quei prenderai jeo cest pain de tei? Jeo nel te puis reguerduner në a tun eos le pain guarder!’ Li lere dist: ‘Jeo n’en quer rien. Mangez le pein, e sil retien!’

(Fables, 20, 7–12)

[The dog said to him: ‘Friend, why would I take this bread from you? I can neither pay you back, nor guard the bread for your own profit.’ The robber said: ‘I ask for nothing. Eat the bread; and hold back!’]

In a gesture that reaffirms the intellectual superiority of the dog over the human in this passage, the dog proceeds to offer a reasoned argument explaining his refusal to take the bread from the thief. The dispute is amusingly mind-over-matter as the dog claims that he is well aware of the thief’s intentions to keep him quiet with bread so that the thief can steal the shepherd’s sheep: Li chiens respunt: ‘N’en voil nïent! Jeo sai tresbien a escïent que ma buche veus estuper que jeo ne puisse mot suner, si embleriez noz berbiz quant li berkers est endormiz. Trahi avereie mun seignur que m’ad nurri desque a cest jur; malement avereit enpleié qu’il m’ad nurri e afeité, si par ma garde aveit perdu ceo dunt il m’ad lung tens peü. Et tu meismes m’en harreies e pur treïtre me tendreies. Ne voil tun pain issi guainer.’ E dunc comencet abaier. (Fables, 20, 13–28) [The dog responded: ‘I do not want any of it. I know, well and truly, that you want me to keep my mouth shut, so that I cannot make a sound. Then you would take our sheep when the shepherd is asleep. I would have betrayed my lord, who has fed me up until this day. To have nourished and raised me would have been of no profit to him if, because of my neglect, he had lost the goods that he had for so long left

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts in my negligent charge. And you also would hate me and take me for a traitor. For this reason, I do not want to take your bread.’ And then he began to bark.]

Unlike the hunting dogs in the fables discussed earlier, this guard dog refuses to satisfy his appetite in a move that initially seems to prioritize the rhetorical function of the mouth over the eating and barking function of the muzzle. This is reinforced on a lexical level by the description of the dog’s vocalization as the sounding of a word (mot suner) in comparison to more confusing descriptions of noise. The dog claims that, were he to allow the thief to take the sheep, he would be neglecting his duty, and in juridical terms, would be taken for a treïtre (traitor). The juridical language in this passage accompanies a series of images that reinforce the feudal values of loyalty, truth, and fidelity toward one’s overlord. This rhetorical dialogue chimes with the type of language used in ‘The Wolf and the Billy Goat’, through which the goat persuades the wolf to grant him a reprieve. Another similarity between these fables is that the reasoning behind the guard dog’s utterance is rigorously structured around the control and protection of human goods and bound in the logic of the dog’s domestic responsibilities to his human owner: actions have consequences, not just for you but also for me, the dog seems to say. The first twenty-seven lines of this fable contribute to a gradual increase of narrative tension based on a dialogue exchange between the two protagonists as well as the unusual eloquence of the guard dog. In a passage that draws attention to the hushed soundscape of the fable, the dog reinforces that his primary function is precisely to make sound, which is exactly what the thief is trying to stifle. Due to the logical structures upon which the dog’s argument is based, the utterance of the dog in this passage is rhetorically superior to that of the human thief. This is particularly clear as the sixteen-line passage engages in rhetorical parody. Highlighting his knowledge of literary formulae, the dog addresses the thief as ‘Amis’ in a style reminiscent of lyric poetry or captatio benevolentiae. The argument maintained by the dog acts as a form of imitation – an imitation of human rhetoric as well as a parody of the university practice of disputatio – notably in his efforts at persuasion. The guard dog also combines mental images of future actions that might be possible, alongside emotive language that appeals to human emotion, as in words such as treïtre.26 Likewise, elements of the phrasing, such as polysyllabic words (reguerduner) and formal phrases extending through enjambment over the

26

See Douglas Kelly, ‘The Medieval Art of Poetry and Prose: The Scope of Instruction and the Uses of Models’, in Scott D. Troyan (ed.), Medieval Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1–14; and Martin Camargo, Essays on Medieval Rhetoric (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 21–34.

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables octosyllabic line, enhance the formal, poetic qualities of the guard dog’s utterance. In contrast, the thief is depicted as ignorant of logical argument, perhaps due to a lack of schooling in rhetoric and to the surprise of being confronted in such a direct way by a dog. His reaction is composed of imperatives and short phrases contained on either side of the hemistich. The tension built during the discourse between the two protagonists thus blurs human and canine perspective, simultaneously reinforcing a human social stereotype while granting access to the sophistication of dog logic. Although the direct speech from the dog’s ‘mouth’ ostensibly communicates human reasoning and might thus be considered a form of anthropocentric ventriloquism, the dog’s bark at the end of his argument unsettles such modes of thinking. In contrast to logical reasoning, the dog’s final bark, expressed as the infinitive abaier at the end of this narrative, not only communicates perspective, but also influences the form of the fable itself on a metapoetic level. The power of a bark is strong enough to bring this short narrative to a close, with only the moral left to state: that one should emphatically refuse to betray one’s overlord.27 By clearly switching from the perspective of the mouth to that of the muzzle at the last moment, the fable communicates a type of bubbling nervousness that dogs often exhibit when they are ready to bark. The bark thus pulls the perspective of the fable firmly back to a canine one.28 This is particularly evident if the epimythium is read in conjunction with the dog’s bark, for the moral message states that if someone wants to suborn or coax an honest man to betray his lord, that man must expect a recompense of the type that the dog offered to the thief. The dog’s bark is therefore interpreted as the logical conclusion of his rhetorical argument as well as his most instinctive behavior, emphasizing the importance of thinking through the mirrored perspectives offered by mouths and muzzles. The bark in ‘The Thief and the Dog’ demonstrates that what might be considered as human language is but a small piece of a larger puzzle that situates meaning in the Fables at the juxtaposition of the sounds and utterances of humans and animals. The release of the bark at the climax of rhetorical debate expresses how narrative tension based on human logic can be released by animal sound. It also expresses a form of canine perspective,

27



28

The moral reads: ‘si nuls l’en veut doner lüer | ne par pramesse losenger | que sun seignur deive traïr, | nel veile mie cunsentir; | atendre en deit tel gueredun | cume li chien fist del larun’ (if someone wants to suborn him or by promises coax him into treachery against his lord, he must not consent; expect a recompense of the same nature as that which the dog gave to the thief), Fables, 20, 31–6. This play with poetic tension and release is not present in the Romuli Nilantii nor the Romuli Anglici cunctis. See Les Fabulistes latins, 3, ‘De Fure Nocturno et Cane Seducto’, and 22, ‘De Fure et Cane’, pp. 527 and 580.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts as far as is possible through human language, for what does a good guard dog do but bark at the arrival of an intruder? Indeed, this is the function of the medieval household guard dog, whose inimitable bark and sensory perception cannot be outperformed by human senses. The fable exploits the ambiguity of the dog’s point of view by referencing actual dog behavior, while also making the bark a conclusion to his argument, a combination that conjoins both humanized mouth and canine muzzle. The dog’s final bark, which brings a material resolution to the denouement, is vital to the interpretation of the fable’s earlier messages concerning the falsification of speech, and its instinctive opposite in the expression of sound divorced from linguistic meaning. The canine sounds in this fable are thus situated on a long and muddled continuum of sonic communication tools that make fabulous soundscapes sites of identification between species.

Echoic birdsong The sounds emitted by beaks in the Fables can be put into contrast with those made by muzzles and mouths. Muzzled perspectives are often connected to domesticity and power in the Fables as this reflects a type of contact between humans and domestic dogs (and by association wolves and foxes) that spoke to medieval, as well as modern, domestication practices. The distinction between the perspective of the muzzle and that of the beak is connected to the very different positioning of birds as non-domesticated creatures, as well as to their association with melodious sound. Whereas the barking of dogs is connected to noisiness and confusion in the context of policing disputes, rhetorical debate, and warning signals, the sounds of birds hold special connotations with music and performance, and with social judgment of a different kind. These connotations closely tie birdsong and bird calls to the concept of responsivity in fable narratives. They also reveal links between birdsong and human singing, developing perspectives that explore the relationship between mouths and beaks, which is distinct from the interplay between mouths and muzzles in other fables. Birdsong also puts avian utterance in ambiguous relation to the concept of language, a relation particularly clear in the figure of the cuckoo in the Fables. In ‘The Birds and their King’ the birds seek a new ruler. Appropriately for a fable depicting a cuckoo, they consider electing their new sovereign based on the sound he makes.29 They thus convene a parlement (parliament or conference, 46, 2) to make their decision. Their collective decision is

29

The source for this fable is unknown, although it may be derived from Romuli Anglici Nonnullis. See Les Fabulistes latins, 2, 10, ‘De Volucribus et Rege Eorum’, p. 553.

152

Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables described as being made on the basis of le sun (sound): chescun dë eus numa le sun | a fere cele electïun (Each one of them proclaimed that sound would be the deciding factor, 5–6).30 The fable thus immediately connects the sounds of birdsong with communal decision-making in a quasi-courtly setting, which according to the ‘natural’ hierarchy of birds is usually overseen by the sovereign eagle. The birds are surprised, therefore, when they hear the call of the cuckoo reverberating around the woods, as they do not know which bird it is that makes such a sound: Tuz esteient dunc esbaï quant del cuccu oient le cri: ne surent quels oiseus ceo fu, mes que tut tens diseit cuccu.

(Fables, 46, 7–10)

[They were therefore all shocked when they heard the cry of the cuckoo. They didn’t know which bird it was, only that it always said ‘cuckoo’.]

The sound of the cuckoo holds abstract meaning for the birds in this fable, and they instinctively recognize the sound as a cri.31 On a metapoetic level, even for human readers the difference between cuccu as a name for a bird species and cuccu as a description of sound is not easily discernible. However, the fable depicts the cuccu orthographically in a way that disassociates it from the sounds of other birds, who converse through gargun (language or bird-talk, 13). The cry of cuccu is thereby marked as a distinguishing feature of a mysterious bird, leading to confusion at the parliament of birds. The sound of the cuckoo thus raises more questions than it answers for this fable soundscape: does the sound the cuckoo makes resonate or contrast with the type of sound emitted by other songbirds? Does the cuckoo call its own name? Is cuccu something humans and birds should imitate? On hearing the cuckoo’s call the excited birds fall into quick and superficial judgments on the nature of cuccu and what it represents. In response to the uncertainty arising from the ambiguous representation of the cuckoo’s call, the birds collectively proceed to attribute noble values to the cuccu sound, noting that whoever makes such a sound should be

30



31

British Library, MS Harley 978, f. 52v. Harriet Spiegel notes that most manuscripts have ‘chescuns duta de mesprisun’ (each one feared being wrong [of their decision]). See Fables (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 272. Brucker translates the lines into modern French as: ‘chacun désigna le sien pour procéder à une telle élection’ (each appointed their own to undertake such a choice), Fables, p. 199, 5–6. This contrasts with the Latin source from which the fable may be derived, in which the birds hear the cuckoo’s voice: ‘audita est uox Cuculi’. See Les Fabulistes latins, 10, pp. 553–4.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts their king and lord. This is a way of interpreting ambiguous sound in a fictionalized animal courtly or legal setting that once again mirrors human versions of these social spheres: Mut le peot l’um de loinz oïr, kar tut le bois fet retentir. Tuz diseient en lur gargun e afermerent par raisun que cil oisel, ke si chauntout e si grant noise demenout, deveit bien estre rei e sire de governer un grant empire; s’il fust di pruz e si vaillanz en ses ovres cum en ses chanz, a seignur le voleient aver.

(Fables, 46, 11–21)

[It could be heard from afar because it resounded through the whole forest. In their own language they all muttered and affirmed by reason that this bird, who sang so much and made such a noise, should truly be their king and lord, and govern a large empire. If he was as brave and worthy in action as in song, they wanted to have him as their lord.]

The cuckoo’s sound prompts the other birds to ponder the significations of cuccu while causing a great commotion in the woodland soundscape. This activity posits a distinctive sphere of avian communication, even as it clearly replicates human social structures and institutions. Indeed, the noise brings to light the superficial judgments of the avian community, which mark this as a considerably powerful and persuasive sound.32 Drawing on sound as an act of self-naming, the attribution of bravery and worth to he who produces cuccu in the fable clearly distinguishes this sound from other types of birdsong. Cuccu in this fable not only distinguishes types of birdsong, it also posits a third way of understanding bird sound in relation to language. Whereas in other medieval texts, such as the Life of Saint Francis, the vocabulary for birdsong – cri, chaunt, jargun, and noise – describes specific avian sounds in scenes such as Francis interacting with birds, in the Fables cuccu signifies something for the other birds rather than for human protagonists. Indeed, there are no humans involved in the birds’ decision-making process, an absence particularly evident when the birds discuss their subject, cuccu, in their own language (en lur gargun). Humans are not privy to the jargun of birds; a human can hear the sound, but while abstract vocalized and written

32

The strong goo-ko of the actual male cuckoo’s mating call is a highly evocative and recognizable sound that reverberates through woodland when emitted by the cuckoo from an open perch.

154

Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables imitation may be easy to achieve, interpretation remains firmly in the hands of the avian protagonists. This is a very particular type of animal soundscape that is ostensibly closed off from human comprehension, even as the reader participates in the narrative sequence and decision-making. The sound exemplified in cuccu accompanies the themes of reinterpretation and false judgment throughout the fable of ‘The Birds and their King’. Following the commotion caused by the cuckoo’s call, the fable describes how a small bird or titmouse (mesenge) is chosen to go and establish the true character of the cuckoo. When she arrives at the scene of the cuckoo’s calling, the tit looks derogatorily at the larger bird, who all but fails to respond or even notice her. The titmouse then decides to hop above the cuckoo in order to excrete onto his back. Following this, the tit jumps back down to the original branch, insulting and scorning the cuckoo for having said nothing in response to such a dishonorable act: Uncore vodra plus haut munter, sun curage volt espruver: sur une branche en haut sailli, desur le dos li esmeulti. Unces li cuccu mot ne dist ne peiur semblant ne l’en fist. Arere s’en vet la mesenge, le cuccu laidist e blastenge: ja de lui ne ferunt seignur.

(Fables, 46, 35–43)

[She wanted to go higher to get a better idea of his temperament. She jumped up high onto a branch and dropped excrement onto his back. The cuckoo said not a single word and did not lose his countenance because of it. The titmouse returned back and reproached and scorned the cuckoo: never would they make him their lord.]

The passage in which the tit examines the cuckoo is highly evocative of the movement of small songbirds among tree branches, highlighting once again the text’s attention to the detail and perspective of actual birds. Close attention to narrative details, such as the description of the titmouse’s decision to hop three times around the cuckoo, indicates an appreciation of the types of movement exhibited by songbirds in trees and shrubs. Unlike the ungainly cuckoo, the titmouse is able to move quickly from branch to branch to assess the character of the bird that emits such a persuasive cri. Alongside the description of movement, the perspective of the angry, tweeting titmouse is communicated through her scorn of the cuckoo, a reproach described with the evocative words laidist e blastenge (reproached and scorned). This choice of words highlights the reversal of the presumed hierarchy of the ornithological social order 155

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts and communicates the perspectives of the different birds. Those who hear cuccu are highly excited by the sound of it while the producer of that sound is paradoxically unresponsive. The smaller songbird is nimble in the branches and quick to judge; while the cuckoo is slow, heavy, and sonically awkward. The instinctive sound of the cuckoo is contrasted with the political and social silence of the larger bird in this passage. The reader, alongside the other birds, expects the noisy cuckoo to respond to the smaller titmouse’s antagonism in some way. Yet the cuckoo retains his composure while remaining completely unresponsive. This is an unusual way of describing the ungainly cuckoo, as it associates the bird with perseverance and haughtiness, and contrasts unresponsiveness with the monotonous call that it was supposed to have produced only a few lines earlier. As the titmouse scorns the cuckoo, we are left with the question of whether this cuckoo was ever actually interested in being made the king of the birds, for at no point had he expressed the desire for that title. Rather, the cuckoo has sown confusion among the avian community, which could work to the cuckoo’s advantage. In real terms, the cuckoo is a parasite bird, which takes advantage of the unsupervised nests of smaller birds in order to lay its own eggs, which the smaller birds then raise.33 Might then the fable soundscape be interpreted in such a way as to mirror the sound of cuccu with the cuckoo’s own action of ‘cuckolding’ the titmouse and, by association, the parliament of birds?34 Likewise, if this cuckoo is the one who would lay eggs in another bird’s nest, might there be a gendered element to this narrative, in which the titmouse finds that the cuckoo is not suitable to be king precisely because its gender, like the call of its mate perhaps, is ambiguous? Gendered readings of cuccu emphasizing the fickleness of the female titmouse would not be dissimilar to those discussed in relation

33



34

The cuckoo is a migratory bird that usually arrives in the British Isles in April and lays its eggs in the nests of smaller birds, leaving those birds to raise its chicks, a habit which caused them to be associated with notoriety and dubious sexual and reproductive behaviors. For further information, see James Hardy, ‘Popular History of the Cuckoo’, The Folk-Lore Record, 2 (1879), pp. 47–91; and Lesley Kordecki, ‘Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism’, in Carolynn Van Dyke (ed.), Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 249–52. The interpretation of the cuckoo cuckolding the titmouse is made possible by the etymological roots of the word cucu, a variant of the Old French cucualt, for cuckoo, which was associated with the husband of an unfaithful wife since at least the thirteenth century in English contexts. See ‘cuckold’ in T. F. Hoad (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The French cocu, of the same meaning, is attested by the fourteenth century. See ‘cocu’, in Paul Robert, Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993).

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Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables to the cuckoo in Chapter 2, in which the sound of the cuckoo bird acts as a metaphor for the adulterous trysts taking place in the lady’s chamber.35 Despite the ambiguous nature of the cuckoo’s call in this fabulous soundscape, the fable presents a further type of avian perspective as the titmouse returns to the other birds in parliament to condemn the cuckoo for not having taken action to defend his own honor.36 The birds decide on this hearsay that they will choose the eagle as their sovereign instead of the cuckoo, a decision that calls to mind the eagle’s position at the top of avian predatory hierarchies in bestiaries.37 Little do the birds in this fable realize that they have just chosen their top predator as their ruler! The epimythium of ‘The Birds and their King’ finally draws on behavioral as well as sonic qualities of different birds as it summarizes one possible interpretation of the fable: Par cest essample nus mustre ici que hum ne deit pas fere seignur de mauveis humme jangleür, u n’i a si parole nun: tel se nobleie par tençun e veut manacer e parler que mut petit fet a duter.

(Fables, 46, 70–6)

[By this example is demonstrated that man must not make a lord out of a bad jongleur in whom there is only verbosity. In argument he is grandiose; although he wants to talk and intimidate, he is not much to be feared.]

There are two ways of interpreting this moral. The first is superficial, taking the moral at face value. The immediate response to this moral message would seem to indicate that the cuckoo is the charlatan because of his monotonous verbosity, as well as the way he is described to the other birds by the titmouse.38 However, this rather misses the point that the eagle is

35 36



37



38

See p. 8. ‘As autres dist la deshonur | e la hunte qu’il li fist grant: | “Unc ne mustra peiur semblant. Si uns granz oiseus li mesfeseit, | mauveisement s’en vengereit”’ (She told the others of the dishonour and the great shame that she had inflicted: ‘Never did he lose his countenance. If a big bird did him wrong, he would find it difficult to avenge himself’’), Fables, 46, 44–8. Brucker signals this as direct speech on the part of the titmouse. The eagle was not especially known for its vocalizations in literature of the Middle Ages, but rather for the majesty it represented as sovereign of the birds, and for the fact that it flies at a higher altitude than other birds. See ‘Eagle; aquila; aigle; aille’, in Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 113–15. Note that the word jangleur, commonly interpreted as a musician or entertainer in the Middle Ages, also held considerable negative connotations, including:

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts now in charge. On the other hand, a subversive interpretation would take the actions of the titmouse into account, suggesting instead that the moral hints that the slanderous gossiper heralded in the epimythium is in fact the titmouse herself, who has just unwittingly brought a top predator into the ruling position. In this interpretation the epimythium would contradict the narrative that the fable initially seems to present, based on which of the birds’ utterances or songs are considered excessive. The expression of avian sounds in this fable thus highlights competing ‘beaked’ perspectives. The moral of the fable troubles the connections between the call of cuccu and the birds’ responses to both the cuckoo’s song and the theme of melody encapsulated in the image of the jongleur as itinerant minstrel. The fable itself seems to support no singular dogmatic conclusion about what the onomatopoeic sound cuccu may represent, instead inviting audiences to make this decision themselves, perhaps even by placing the sound into their own mouths as an experiment in onomatopoeia and mimicry. In terms of perspectives, this fable deprives the reader of access to the thoughts behind the cuckoo’s call, and therefore to a humanized perspective typical of fables. This is in contrast to other fables about birds, which clarify anthropocentric interpretations of such scenes, as in ‘The Peacock’, in which the peacock complains to Destiny that he has a voice (voiz, 31, 3) that does not behoove him, comparing his own voice to that of the nightingale. Instead, the value of cuccu remains ambiguous, meaning only slightly more to the other birds in the narrative than to human readers. There seems to be a disruptive third way of indifference to power represented by the cuckoo, which sits outside the power dynamics represented by all the other birds. The cuckoo’s call is given a meaning only through its capacity to excite the other birds, and through its implicit connections to echoic forms of human communication. Cuccu as the expression of the cuckoo’s call is a sound that therefore hovers at the edges of categories of meaningful bird sound, birdsong, and utterance. By presenting perspectives through a predominantly avian lens, this fable represents the cuckoo’s call not as the resolution to social tension, but as an invitation to interpret the text through the uncertain lens of sound. The sound cuccu conjures a perspective identified with the call that issues from the cuckoo’s beak, highlighting the superficial nature of the judgment that the birds make on the quality of sound, despite their lack of knowledge about the true character of the one who utters it. Although ungainly and cumbersome, the cuckoo thus actually teaches the reader several important things about language and point of view, in a similar way to how it teaches humans to imitate its call by listening. The close association between the cuckoo’s original cri and the act of producing ‘garrulous, loquatious’, ‘babbler, chatterer’, and ‘slanderer’. See AND, ‘janglur’.

158

Mouths, Muzzles, and Beaks in Marie de France’s Fables birdsong or bird calls means that the sound cuccu is correlated with a process of selection and decision-making that is pertinent to avian sonic behavior. This type of behavior does not require the presence of human protagonists for the communication of such a perspective, as did the sound of the hue and cry in my first two examples in this chapter. The sounds emitted from the beaks of birds in this fable are instead world-forming in their representation of an avian soundscape, even as the avian perspective relies on the suppression of a human point of view.

Conclusion Sounds emitted from mouths, muzzles, and beaks sit on a continuum with human utterance in various soundscapes in the Fables. By sharpening our attention to these soundscapes, we gain an insight into how medieval fables juxtapose representations of utterance and sound to demonstrate that language is not an inherently and exclusively human construct, thus challenging the notion of the fable project as a purely anthropocentric one. Human and animal perspectives are contested positions communicated in multiple ways: via a process of mirroring behavior between humans and animals, and by the presentation of sound as either directing a form of resolution to human and animal social problems or highlighting ambiguity. The sound in the Fables most clearly evoking the perspective of the muzzle is the dogs’ bark. Dogs raise the alarm, sometimes in the form of the hue and cry, and provide forms of resolution to social tensions between animals. Although bound in systems of human power and domestication, the dog’s bark can bypass a human point of view and give clearer access to a canine perspective, one that nevertheless relies on the conceptualization of language as a tool for communication. Rather like the barking of hunting dogs, the cuccu sound interpreted by the parliament of birds is a short circuit that almost bypasses human perspective to focus on an avian one. While the decisions taken by the birds do mirror human scenarios, the call of the cuckoo dangles avian perspective before the audience while simultaneously shutting off a specific type of avian perspective from view. The confusion between mouth and muzzle, or mouth and beak, in fable soundscapes thus draws attention to the fact that fables might also be invented in, and inventing through, animal sound as well as language. It shows how a soundscape perspective of fables must balance words from mouths with the types of nonlinguistic sounds from muzzles and beaks that would have been all too familiar to medieval audiences.

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall

T

he final chapter of this book brought this discussion of animal soundscapes to a conclusion emphasizing the competing perspectives at play in texts that represent animal sounds alongside animal discourse. These alternative forms of utterance sit alongside each other in Anglo-Norman literary cultures and encapsulate a wider practice of representing animal utterance as similar to human speech, but not quite. From this book’s first dabble in nonlinguistic animal sound in the example from Marie de France’s lai Le Frêne, we have come back to this author to consider animal speech as a metaphor for human discourse. The sounds of animals and birds in medieval texts are thus encoded in different forms of ‘humanese’, that is, a rewriting and interpreting of nonhuman sounds through human languages.1 Representations of contact between humans and animals based on language have come under considerable criticism in recent years, but over the course of this book I have shown how animal soundscapes develop modes of thinking about language that also enjoin audiences to pay attention to their own linguistic natures and vocal abilities. These abilities are often positioned in relation to animal voices and sounds. By considering how sonic phenomena are integrated into the broader acoustic and epistemological networks of medieval texts, I have drawn attention to the possible relationships between human and animal agents that such sounds might engender. This has therefore been an examination of the textual and aural conditions that provide a platform for continually reassessing human exceptionalism, even as it is asserted in some forms of dominance through language itself. 1



Donna Haraway develops a critique of ‘humanese’ in her discussion of the work of Vicky Hearne: ‘Hearne likes trainers’ using ordinary language in their work; that use turns out to be important to understanding what the dogs might be telling her, but not because the dogs are speaking furry humanese. She adamantly defends lots of so-called anthropomorphism, and no one more eloquently makes the case for intention-laden, consciousness-ascribing linguistic practices […]. All that philosophically suspect language is necessary to keep the humans alert to the fact that somebody is at home in the animals they work with’, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), pp. 49–50.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts My readings of the sounds of animals and birds in medieval texts have been, first and foremost, explorations of the ways that written sonic phenomena create acoustic environments in texts that communicate the perspectives and understanding (entendement) of nonhuman figures for different audiences. In investigating how such sounds are depicted through and across languages, I have focused on the structures that allow such perspectives to emerge, and the ways that these structures are represented for interpretation, while also attending to how they are challenged by depictions of sound found therein. In our last encounter with animal soundscapes, I would like to return to the question of textuality, and its place in the representation of animal sound, by looking beyond the Fables, discussed in Chapter 4, to another curious text with which they are bound. In doing so, I will finish this discussion on animal soundscapes by thinking about the types of dialogue engendered by texts that convey not only soundscapes and perspectives, but which also place animal sounds directly and emphatically into human mouths.

Cuckoo calling and counterfeit An early Middle English lyric, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, is bound with Marie de France’s Fables in London, British Library, MS Harley 978. This lyric places the cuckoo’s call, which we heard in the fable of ‘The Birds and their King’, directly into the mouths of human singers, and encourages them to repeat the call ad infinitum. In this song, the connection between the cuckoo’s call and the human act of singing is amplified by the presumption that the song will be performed by a human singer. By placing the act of calling ‘cuccu’ in ‘Sumer is icumen in’ in comparison to the expression of this sound in ‘The Birds and their King’, it is possible to consider the effect of singing and performing the sound of the cuckoo on the communication of a different type of avian perspective, or rather, perspectives.2 These beaked perspectives overlap explicitly with the points of view of human singers and demonstrate the importance of reading across species boundaries in medieval texts that exploit animal soundscapes for the creation of meaning. Languages and musical expression are different registers of communication that the texts in Harley 978 exploit to represent cuckoo sound.3

2 3

For my discussion of ‘The Birds and their King’, see Chapter 4, pp. 152–8. This manuscript was probably comissioned from Oxford booksellers by William of Wycombe (c. 1275), music copyist and Benedictine monk, or William of Winchester (c. 1265), a Benedictine monk of Reading in Berkshire in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. See Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers (Philadelphia: University of

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall Besides its inclusion of musical texts, another important aspect of this codex is its trilingual subject matter, which draws attention to the differences between languages, notably French, Latin, and English.4 The musical works in the volume include monophonic songs in Latin, estampies (a medieval dance and music form), and a three-part polyphonic conductus (a sacred, non-liturgical vocal composition) in Latin with a French alternative. On folio 11v is a four-part rota canon, beginning: Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu. This song is written on a two-part pes (refrain) sung to the words, Sing cuccu, with an alternative Latin text, ‘Perspice Christicola’, written underneath.5 Evidently, the short song, ‘Sumer is icumen in’, code-switches between different languages. In this case, the Latin lyrics to the song add a Christological gloss onto an English song about natural fertility. The juxtaposition of English and Latin stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the manuscript, in which French is the dominant vernacular. This suggests that Latin is being used to act as a linguistic bridge between English and French, since this is the only English text in the manuscript. However, this is a bridge that is inserted to provide its own alternative gloss. What is most surprising is that the Latin lyrics do not translate the lyric’s most evocative feature – the repetitive call of cuccu – a crucial aural component of the English verse which would have been recognizable to both anglophone and francophone audiences. The linguistic and sonorous contexts for this song emphasize how the crossing of vernacular languages displays the capaciousness of animal sounds, and their connection to human vocalization. The sound of cuccu in the English song is a leitmotif that signals the presence of multiple overlapping themes: the celebratory mood of

4



5



Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 76–136; and Nicky Losseff, ‘Wycombe, W. of (fl. c.1275)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The contents of the manuscript include: a calendar with prognostications; a musical miscellany with notation; a medical miscellany in Latin and French; poems by Walter Map; satirical verse and songs in Latin; and a legend of Thomas Becket’s parents. In the Latin lyrics God is identified as a heavenly husbandman (Celicus agricola). The Latin text, written in red underneath the English, reads as follows: ‘Perspice, Christicola, | Que dignacio! | Celicus agricola | Pro vitis vicio | Filio | Non parcens exposuit | Mortis exicio, | Qui captivos semivivos | A supplicio | Vite donat | Et secum coronat | In celi solio’ (Look, O lover of Christ, what condescension! The heavenly husbandman, because of a fault in the vine, not sparing his son, exposed him to the ordeal of death; and he brings back the half-dead prisoners from torment to life, and crowns them with himself on the throne of heaven). Original text and translation from Bella Millett, ‘Sumer is icumen in: London, British Library, MS Harley 978, f. 11v’, in Wessex Parallel WebTexts (online source).

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts summer; sexual promiscuity and its inevitability; the noisiness of the larger countryside soundscape; and human music and song-making.6 Arguments have been made for and against the interpretation of the lyric and the musical notation as depicting, in stronger or lesser terms, the call of the cuckoo bird.7 This is not only because scholars remain undecided on the meaning of the call cuccu in the song, but also because the sound of the cuckoo, as I discussed in relation to the fable, ‘The Birds and their King’, is utilized in some medieval texts precisely because of the ambiguity between human and bird vocalizations, and the act of naming, to which the short expression refers. Alongside the singers’ call to continue the musical round, the song evokes vivid images of nature in full summer, including descriptions of vegetation growth and the noises of agricultural animals, some of which are more or less decent than others, offering a range of perspectives on multispecies utterance: Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweþ sed and bloweþ med and springþ þe wde nu. Sing cuccu! Awe bleteþ after lomb, lhouþ after calue cu; Bulluc sterteþ, bucke verteþ, Murie sing cuccu!8 (‘Sumer is icumen in’) [Summer has arrived; sing loudly, cuckoo! The seed is growing and the meadow is blooming, and the wood is springing into leaf now; sing, cuckoo! The ewe is bleating after her lamb, the cow is lowing after her calf; the bullock is prancing; the billy-goat farting; sing merrily, cuckoo!]

Despite the celebratory tone of the song, the call cuccu conjures the negative associations of the cuckoo bird which were numerous in medieval bird-lore

6



7



8

‘Sumer is icumen in’ has been described by scholars as a musical piece, a literary parody, and a reverdie (an Old French poetic genre celebrating the arrival of spring). See B. Schofield, ‘The Provenance and Date of “Sumer is icumen in”’, Music Review, 9 (1948), pp. 81–6; Ross W. Duffin, ‘The Sumer Canon: A New Revision’, Speculum, 63 (1988), pp. 1–22; and Marguerite-Marie Dubois, ‘Le Rondeau du Coucou’, in Leo Carruthers (ed.), Ronde des saisons: les saisons dans la literature et la société anglaises au Moyen Age (Tours: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 15–22. G. H. Roscow, ‘What is “Sumer Is Icumen in”?’, The Review of English Studies, 50.198 (1999), pp. 188–95. MS Harley 978 f. 11v. Translation provided by Bella Millett in ‘Sumer is icumen in’.

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall and idiomatic expression, and many of which stem from the observation that cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and thus practice morally dubious or ethically ambivalent reproductive behaviors.9 As well as referring to the name of the cuckoo bird and the sound it makes, there is evidence that cuccu may refer to an adulterer, whose invasion of the marital nest provides a good analogy with the cuckoo’s behavior as a brood parasite, thus transforming the song into ‘a warning against the potential of adultery in the heat of summer’.10 As with all things cuckoo, it is quite possible to read the same passage as simultaneously celebrating adultery as part of the natural order of things around the summer season, as well as pointing it out as a warning. As this book demonstrates, there is no reason to assume that medieval texts could not entertain subversive messages about animal sounds alongside more conservative ones. Multiple perspectives are common to many medieval lyrics that were composed with the potential to be spoken or sung aloud. ‘Sumer is icumen in’ invites the singer, listener, or even the actual cuckoo, to loudly sing cuccu, an imperative that finds confirmation in the repetitive structure of the pes. The theme of transgression is reinforced strongly through the communication of cuckoo perspective at the pes, at which point cuccu is repeated potentially indefinitely: Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes þu cuccu. ne swik þu nauer nu! Pes: Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu! Sing cuccu, Sing cuccu nu! (‘Sumer is icumen in’) [Cuckoo, cuckoo, you sing cuckoo well; never stop now. Pes: Sing, cuckoo, now, sing cuckoo; sing, cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now!]

What is it exactly that the singers should never stop singing? This question is complicated by the possibility that the imperative statement, Sing cuccu nu!, appears to be addressed to both the human singers emulating the bird’s call, as well as to actual cuckoos. The human singers will eventually stop singing (and by association stop courting, having sex, or reproducing); likewise the birds will also stop calling in late summer when the mating season is over. The sound of the cuckoo here calls for association between the singer and the cuckoo but does so implicitly by enjoining the human to closely 9



10

By way of comparison, see my discussion of cuckoo sound in Chapters Two and Four, pp. 87–8 and 152–8. Roscow, ‘What is “Sumer Is Icumen in”?’, pp. 190–1.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts imitate the sound produced by the beak. Of particular interest for this discussion is the ambiguity inherent in two specific lines that accompany the pes. The addressee of the phrase Lhude sing cuccu!, could be the cuckoo himself as the singular form sing(e) has been used as part of the imperative statement. Were the statement addressed to a choir, the plural imperative ‘singeþ’ would presumably have been more appropriate. Nevertheless, it is not possible to rule out whether the singular imperative signals a human singer at the same time as the cuckoo bird. The second line, Wel singes þu cuccu, could likewise be addressed to the cuckoo or, were a pause added before the final cuccu, to a human addressee who is being praised for singing the pes. In both cases, the word cuccu provides the stimulus for overlap between human and avian songsters. The overlap between human expression and avian sound runs deeper than a purely textual reading can accommodate. While the musical notation that accompanies the text informs human singers of the notes they are to sing, it also brings the calls of actual cuckoos back into the debate on the nature of ‘cuccu’ calling. Since at least the eighteenth century scholars have debated the extent to which the musical notation that accompanies this song evokes the call of the cuckoo bird.11 The notation in the manuscript was at some point revised, changing the original f d f d or f d f dc (‘Cuccu, cuccu’) to c d c ba.12 The original notation provides a falling minor third that is equivalent to the cuckoo’s call at certain points of the year. However, despite the discovery of different original notation beneath the extant notation, some scholars remain critical of attempts to interpret the original notation as representing the sound of the cuckoo bird.13 But where do such tensions between the real and the symbolic, the literary, the allegorical, and the moral, leave our discussion of animal soundscapes? While concerns about the echoic qualities of calling cuccu in this song are in some respects supported by modern conceptions of musical tonality and rhythm, there is one obvious reason why such apprehensions are

11



12



13

Charles Burney, A General History of Music: from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. F. Mercer, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1935), p. 685, note u. See Duffin, ‘The Sumer Canon: A New Revision’, p. 7; H. E. Wooldridge, The Oxford History of Music, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901), p. 328; and M. F. Bukofzer, ‘“Sumer is icumen in”: A Revision’, University of California Publications in Music, 2 (1944), pp. 79–114. Roscow, for example, states that although the original interval may be appropriate for such a comparison, the rhythm of the notation is not an accurate representation of a cuckoo’s call, and the sound may not be obvious in performance. See ‘What is “Sumer Is Icumen in”?’, p. 194. On the rhythm of this song, Roscow demonstrates that the bird’s call is not two dotted crotchets but singular crotchets. See also J. Handschin, ‘The Summer Canon and its Background’, Musica Disciplina, 3 (1949), p. 81.

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall misplaced. The idea that all cuckoo birds have always sounded the same is an essentialist argument that can now be challenged by the approach to animal soundscapes explored by this book, emphasizing the interpretation of the call of the cuckoo from the perspective of cuckoos themselves. Decisions on whether the notation in the manuscript accurately depicts a real cuckoo’s call are in many respects doomed to failure because they posit a single, exemplary call of an actual cuckoo. Links between the cuckoo and its textual and melodic representation are evident in many texts but attempts to accurately identify the cuckoo’s sound rely on the essentialist postulation that all cuckoos must sound, and have always sounded, the same. In reality, an individual cuckoo’s call changes even during the course of the year and any attempt by a human to recall the sound is a subjective one.14 Rather than attempting to accurately portray the sound of a cuckoo, or to distinguish between cuckoo sound and human utterance, the song purposefully blends the two, and overlaps human and animal perspectives, as is the case in many of the texts discussed in this book. The musical aspects of this song, and therefore of the animal soundscape it produces, highlight the subjective decisions involved in the representation of nonhuman perspectives, in particular when such perspectives are based on the emulation or mimicry of sound in performance contexts, whether real or fictional. Unlike the representation of the confused perspectives of beaks in the fable ‘The Birds and their King’, which are beyond the understanding of the human reader of the Fables, the sound of the cuckoo in ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is strongly connected to human vocalization and imitation. The call of the cuckoo shifts vocal expression along a continuum that connects the sounds of cuckoos with human utterance. What unites both representations of the cuckoo call is that each of these texts suggests multiple possibilities for the meaning of cuccu. Cuccu comes to represent the name of a species of bird, an echoic expression of the sound of that bird, a literary motif in birdlore, and a range of human moral attributes, connoting a multiplicity of contemporaneous significations that are all potentially expressed in the sound. Cuccu teaches animal and bird perspectives through the emulation of the sound of the beak, while also revealing that such sounds cannot be relied upon to signify in a stable and constant way when they are emitted from mouths. ‘Sumer is icumen in’ demonstrates

14

I refer the reader to Margaret A. Barrett’s correspondence in The Musical Times, in which the author draws attention to the fact that the cuckoo generally begins calling early in the season with the interval of a minor third, then proceeding to a major third, and finally a fourth and a fifth. See ‘The Cuckoo’s Notes’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, 38.656 (1897), p. 697.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts that the cuckoo call may also demand interpretation from a human perspective. This song leaves the point of view of the cuckoo call hanging in decisions made by human performers. The type of world-forming perspectives the song creates draw as much on a human point of view as on that of a bird. How cuccu sounds, and what it means, are concerns for the mouth as much as of the beak. A close analysis of a Middle English lyric might seem an unusual place to bring this discussion on animal soundscapes in Anglo-Norman texts to a close, but utterance, discourse, language, and music are strong motifs that feature across medieval literary cultures. This example encapsulates my contention that animal sounds are intimately connected to multilingualism and intersubjective modes of reading in such cultures. At this point we must turn to one final example of an animal soundscape that encapsulates many of the themes explored so far. This is a scene from the famous legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, from the Tristan Rossignol, which captures the same process as that in the lyric above, although this time in narrative form. The Tristan Rossignol is an extremely short story from the larger Anglo-Norman poem Le Donei des amants.15 The lover persona of the Donei seeks to show what Iseult was prepared to do for Tristan, while his lady’s riposte tells the story of Tristan’s humiliation on behalf of Iseult. In this mise en abîme, in which the lovers of the Donei recount the stories of others, one story is told that does not appear elsewhere in the Tristan legend. On return from Brittany, at nightfall, and in a garden beneath a pine, Tristan sits down to wait for Iseult. He ‘disguises’ his own voice and imitates the birds to signal his presence: Humaine language deguisa, Cum cil que l’aprist de peça: Il cuntrefit le russinol, La papingai, le oriol E les oiseals de la gaudine. (Tristan Rossignol, 463–7) [He disguised his own voice, something he had learnt to do a long time ago: he imitated the nightingale, the parrot, the oriole, and the woodland birds.] See Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia et al. (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1995), pp. 967–73. For the Tristan Rossignol story within the story, see lines 453–683. For this episode’s links with the Tristan legend, see Geoffrey Bromiley, ‘Tristan Rossignol: The Development of a Text’, in Bonnie Wheeler (ed.), Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 49–62.

15

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall Tristan’s emulation of the birds is musical counterfeit in practice. He brings the melodious qualities of birdsong into his own form of utterance, forming a pidgin language: ‘neither articulata nor inarticulata, neither human nor nonhuman, but always both simultaneously’.16 This is an example of a similar type of nonlinguistic narrative sound as that which guides the servant in the lai Le Frêne, although this time it is a human producing an imitation of avian sounds. Iseult interprets Tristan’s song as a voiz (voice, 471), by which she understands that her lover is near: par cel chant ben entendi | Ke pres d’eluec ot sun ami (by this song she understood that she was near to her lover, 473–4). The same verb for understanding and hearing, entendre, is used here as in all my key source texts in this book. By hearing and understanding the animal soundscape that Tristan creates, Iseult is guided to him. By its very definition animal sound, whether produced by nonhuman or human figures, therefore necessitates a process of interpretation, whether that be from protagonists, or audiences themselves. As sweet as Tristan’s singing sounds to Iseult, this animal soundscape, if we can call it such, is not without recourse to power relations and competing perspectives. Tristan’s melodious lamentation, described as chant e gient (sung and sobbed, 494) is juxtaposed, on either side of a meditation on jealousy, with another sound – the screams of Iseult’s dwarf, whom she has just beat around the head in fury at being found out by the dwarf. In a description of sound that draws on the key terms interrogated throughout this book, the dwarf is rendered as something other-than-human through the noises he makes as he cries out in pain: La gule aveit plein’ de sanc; Gust le crapouz e crie en halt, Il chet e leve e pus tressaut. Tel noise e brai e cri leva Ke li rei Mark s’en esveilla, Si demande quel noisse i ait. ‘Sire,’ fait il, ‘malement vait: La reine m’ad si tué E de son poin tut endenté. (Tristan Rossignol, 618–26) [His mouth was full of blood. At the taste the toad cried out loudly, he fainted, got up again, and then jumped around. He made such a noise and din, and brayed, that King Mark woke up, asking what the noise was about. ‘Sire’, he said, ‘all is not well! The queen has hurt me so badly and has knocked all my teeth out.]

16

Eliza Zingesser, ‘Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania’, New Medieval Literatures, 17 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), p. 67.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts Crying, braying, making a din; these are all sounds used to describe the sonic phenomena of animal soundscapes, and which reveal the truth of the situation here in sharp opposition to Tristan’s artful endeavor to woo his lady. By dehumanizing the dwarf and deforming the orifice through which he describes the violence enacted upon him, this short text encapsulates the hierarchies of asymmetrical relation in which sounds are constantly reopened for interpretation in Anglo-Norman texts. This all begins with the imitation of birds by a human, so that a king is once more the cuckold.

Estuper ses orailes? Responding to entendement In my readings of animal soundscapes in Anglo-Norman texts, I have shown how a critical engagement with sound in these texts addresses the ways animals and birds are represented for interpretation through multiplicity, inviting reflection on humankind’s relationship to the animal as it is formed through language and understanding. In doing so I have shown how close listening, to language as well as to sound, is implicit in many early vernacular medieval texts. The first two chapters considered how the theoretical tools provided by studies of sound and translation can be utilized to uncover the complex networks of relation that draw together humans and animals in two Anglo-Norman texts: the Bestiaire by Philippe de Thaon, and Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz. Sound in these texts is not necessarily part of a single textual soundscape but may construct multiple environments of sound at once. The sound milieu of the bestiary and the sound zone of the treatise reflect variable kinds of linguistic power, hierarchies of life, and strategies for potential audience interpretation. Sound also performs different functions in such contexts: it might evoke the memory of literal and figurative meanings, as in the French bestiary, or it may form part of playful, if unequal, sound-making and wordplay, as in the multilingual treatise. Audiences of these texts may wish to explore such sounds further by memorizing them or imitating them as a language-learning exercise, but there remains the possibility that some may follow the example of the man who harvests the bestiary mandrake, who closes off his own ears (estuper ses orailes) to protect himself from the noxious effects of sound that kill the dog. The first two chapters of this book argue that animal sounds are always presented within particular frameworks for interpretation, and sometimes even contribute to the formation and destabilization of such frameworks. These frameworks are generated by the form and purpose of the texts themselves as material objects. Sounds become signifiers for 170

Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall recalling more than simply the sonic phenomena that they represent, and relate animal vocalization to memory, language, pedagogy, and subjectivity. The terminology I have explored in relation to my primary texts is a deliberate attempt to interrogate the complexity of sound and its effects, rather than simply to suggest that animal sounds are recorded in medieval texts in readily accessible ways for modern audiences. The sound milieu or sound zone are therefore reflections of different texts’ representational strategies, which generate multiple interpretations. In the second half of this book, the narrative aspects of the Life of Saint Francis and the Fables by Marie de France enable readings of animal sounds that create a dialogue with modern understandings of another theoretical term: the soundscape. Only having considered the full range of sound’s complexity can we arrive at a rigorous understanding of how we can apply such terms to medieval texts. The different sounds presented across the texts under scrutiny in this book are not just elements of the acoustic richness of these verse texts. They are integral to the construction of meaning and narrative perspective, two elements of medieval depictions of sound that force us to widen our notion of the soundscape as a recording of sound in a particular environment. Some of this positioning is dictated by genre. The audience of the Tretiz imitates sound in a pedagogic context while the bestiary by nature seeks to provide its own interpretations of animal behavior. Meanwhile the Vye de Seynt Fraunceys d’Assise prompts a reconsideration of the purpose of animal and bird praise in relation to Francis’ new concept of a mobile, communal form-of-life. In the Fables, audiences meet animals and birds who talk to each other using human utterance in scenes that mirror human and animal society, while the texts dangle competing perspectives on sound in front of the audience. Whether the audience decides to listen and learn from these sounds is a different question, with no clear answer. The sounds of animals and birds thus signify in ways that are often difficult to pin down due to how different texts treat representation and signification. Sounds refer both to vocalizations, as we saw with the barking of dogs and the calling of cuccu, but also to the perspectives and behaviors of actual birds and animals with which medieval audiences may have been familiar. The distinctions between sound, speech, and song are likewise unstable, as texts place different forms of utterance into the mouths, muzzles, or beaks of various agents. Animal soundscapes in Anglo-Norman texts are complicated by the ways texts link sound to language as sounds become dynamic forces for the interpretation of medieval vernacular texts, in which different agents cry, bark, quack, sing, roar, converse through jargun, or call cuccu.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts The animal soundscapes of medieval texts also encompass melodic and musical sounds. Many medieval texts figure melodic expressions of sound, such as sheep bleating the liturgy, or the jargun of birds, in ways that contrast with human singing. Depictions of melodic sound or singing draw specific attention to shared modes of communication through song and to possibilities for forms of imitation that go beyond onomatopoeia in word lists. While I am not suggesting that all depictions of animal sound in medieval texts are related to, or should be interpreted through, the lens of song, singing holds particularly evocative associations for readers participating in fictions or orality in which they are frequently shown that sounds must be heard and understood, a link crystalized in the key term entendre. The cuccu sound, to take one example, is restricted from human interpretation in the Fables, but invites a response when placed into the mouths of human singers in a Middle English song in the same codex. In other texts, song is connected to aural temptation, aesthetic judgment, or liturgical worship, in ways that mark certain kinds of vocalization as melodic, rather than simply as speech or utterance. This is significant because it calls on a musical perspective, rather than a purely linguistic one, in which the expression of a melodic sound requires the human performer or audience to make certain decisions about the nature of sound that might not be framed by ‘rational’ human discourse. The literary qualities of many of my chosen texts, even if they might not be described as ‘literature’ in the modern sense, enable authors and scribes to represent animal sounds in ways that push at the limits of boundaries generated by textual and melodic expression. Much of the interest in the representation and interpretation of animal sounds lies in the multiple perspectives and points of view that such sounds communicate. In the Anglo-Norman texts discussed above, sounds are presented as nonlinguistic forms of expression, as lists of verbs and nouns in grammatical structures, and through narrative descriptions of sonic phenomena and their effects. These sounds might on some levels be concrete representations of the actual sounds made by animals and birds; yet the textual presentation of such phenomena means that, on another level, the soundscapes of medieval texts are always to some degree fictional or conceptual. What can be said for certain is that animal soundscapes always harness the linguistic and semiotic tools offered by human languages to reconfigure the relationship between the human and the animal. The reconceptualization of sound in different texts, and through different means, forms an important part of the way medieval texts gesture beyond the limits of an anthropocentric vision of language present in many medieval scholarly and theological works.

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall My approach to the study of animal soundscapes has enabled a close examination of the types of philosophically suspect language used to depict sounds, and the ways that words frame networks of communicative relation between animals. I have drawn on critical theory in order to consider the complementarity of theory about animality and sound, and the practice of reading historically. In this respect, my focus has been on the connections between languages and sounds, and the ways these connections speak to critical paradigms in studies of sound and animals. My focus on words and nonlinguistic expressions of sound complements, but also contrasts with, assertions by scholars such as Aaron M. Moe that we must pay more attention to aspects of nonhuman communication such as gesture in order to truly understand the communicative potential of nonhumans: ‘animals possess communicative zones as well – zones that differ from the human mouth’.17 In medieval textual cultures, the words and the languages used to describe the sounds of animals and birds must be taken as equally significant as descriptions of gesture or physicality. Indeed, listening to or imitating the vocalizations of animals and birds in texts from vast historical removes is as close as one might get to such creatures. Such contact offers a transhistorical means of experiencing the animal, rather than merely observing them. This is precisely the reason why a discursive study of medieval animal sound and language is called for at present. The fundamental concerns raised by critical approaches that define themselves by a quest for the ‘living animal’, which I discussed in the Introduction, include the desire to give animals and birds a voice with which they might be reheard once again, after having been in some respects deprived of understanding and confined to the realm of symbolism in many philosophical and scholastic traditions for so long. In my own examination of medieval texts, the connections made between humans and animals emphasize how creatures were indeed heard in numerous ways through medieval texts in different languages, including, but not limited to, the language of animal semiotics. The manipulation of animal soundscapes by humans and animals reveals how webbed existences based on inequality and the sharing of semiotic materiality offer new modes of interpretation for what it is to be human or animal, and what it is to inhabit particular sonic environments with ears fully open. It also suggests how the act of giving a voice to hybrid creatures, such as the siren, is not always considered in positive terms in medieval contexts; deceptive vocalized sounds sometimes pose implicit dangers

17

Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014), p. 3.

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Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts to human auditors, which is why some may try to keep their ears closed. This is the case not only for the legendary siren and the mandrake in the Bestiaire, but also for the howling of the wolf in the Tretiz, the shamefully exemplary bleating of sheep in the Vye, and the bark of the dog in the Fables. The dangers posed by such sounds are moral, physical, and even existential, when such sounds undermine man’s control over language and life. Forms of manipulation and control of animal soundscapes, milieus, or zones reinforce the point that animal soundscapes in medieval texts invite audience interpretation. Acts of memorization, or the imitation, of sounds emerge within networks of relation that privilege specific forms of masculine humanity in my chosen texts, and even serve in some respects to form the subjectivities of the text’s projected audience in relation to other categories of creature. The human reader, listener, or performer must make certain interpretive choices in order to remember and understand the multiple meanings produced by such expressions of sound. However, moments of control or manipulation of sound are brought into relief by moments of silence. Where silence is expressed or implied, it invites a reconsideration of the role and function of sound itself, as well as the ability of humans and animals to control it: the Bestiaire contrasts the song of the cockerel in the chapter on the lion with the silencium that finishes the liturgical hours; St Francis silences the birds in his famous sermon so that he can preach; in the fable of ‘The Thief and the Dog’ the thief fails to bribe the dog into silence; cuccu calling must eventually cease. Sound thus works in parallel to its opposite, which highlights sound’s intangible and ephemeral nature, and contributes to the transience of sonic encounters in animal soundscapes. The sounds of animals and birds point to a grey area between different sound systems present in medieval vernacular texts, including language, song, and nonlinguistic forms of communication and expression. This area of ambiguity is fundamental to the destabilization of any absolute division of human from animal vocalization; as such, it creates the possibility for depictions of animals and birds as individual agents that contribute to larger acoustic environments and ecological communities, which may or may not include human beings. Creatures interact with their acoustic environments in diverse ways, and some sounds, like the cri or cuccu, have the remarkable capacity to cut through what might otherwise seem to be immobile anthropocentric modes of representation. In this respect, animal soundscapes encourage audiences to understand and entertain perspectives that are considerably other-than-human, but which also mirror or dwell on the connections that sounds form between the human and the animal. Sounds thus hold the keys to specific forms

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Coda: ‘Sumer is icumen in’, Response and Recall of power and understanding based on noise and communicative acts. By placing sounds into the minds, mouths, muzzles, and beaks of human and nonhuman agents, a cry, quack, song, or roar in a medieval text has the potential to situate sonic phenomena within networks of relation that continually invite, resist, and redefine what we hear and understand with our ears.

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INDEX acoustic ecology 25 Adam (biblical) 7, 8, 13, 21, 60, 65 Adams, Carol 48, 52 adultery 165 Aesopian fables 134 Agamben, Giorgio 28, 29, 32, 61, 63, 107, 110 Alfred, King 134 ancient texts 57 Anglo-Norman England 2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 17, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40, 78, 86, 97, 118, 134 Anglo-Norman French 70, 103 animal language 19, 30 Animal Languages in the Middle Ages 30 animal noises 1, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 85 see also animal utterance animal sounds 1, 4, 25, 28–31, 35, 71, 101, 126, 138, 143, 161, 168, 170, 172 and human language 10, 13, 19, 67, 114, 148, 162 in medieval texts 2, 9, 24, 165, 171 in Tretiz 70, 72, 83, 88, 89, 97 animal speech 138, 143, 148, 161 animal studies 2, 21 animal utterance 137, 161 animal voice 19, 63, 161 animal world 13, 14, 84, 95, 116, 144 Anthony, Saint 115 anthropomorphism 133, 137, 140 Aquinas, Thomas 17 Aristotle 7, 16 Assisi, Italy 100, 123 Augustine, Saint 14, 113, 130 avian communication 154 avian community 154, 156 avian protagonists 136, 155 avian sonic behavior 159

avian sounds 121, 122, 154, 158, 166, 169 avian soundscape 159 avian utterance 152 barking 4, 13, 24, 79, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151, 152, 159, 174 see also howling Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi 100, 123 bestiaries 11, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44, 57, 58, 122, 135, 157 Bestiaire (Thaon) 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55–60, 65, 66, 74, 170, 174 bestiary creatures 31, 38, 39, 40, 42, 47, 66 Bible 36 see also New Testament bios 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116–19, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131 bird calls 4, 14, 81, 152, 159 “Birds and their King, The” 152, 155, 157, 162, 164, 167 birdsong 13, 15, 25, 32, 81, 86–9, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126–30, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 169 bird sound 81, 87, 104, 128, 154, 158 Bloch, Howard 135 Bonaventure, Saint 32, 102, 108, 109, 128 Bondone, Giotto di 100, 123 Burt, Jonathan 18 canter 47, 50 Canticle of Brother Sun (Francis) 101 see also Canticle of the Creatures Canticle of the Creatures (Francis) 101, 109, 124, 128 Carruthers, Mary 36 Cazelles, Brigitte 23, 25

Index Chaucer, Geoffrey 144 Christ 36, 42, 43, 44, 45, 115 Christians 128 Christian Scripture 35, 42 Clare, holy virgin 123 Clareno, Angelo 108, 116 Classical texts 48, 60, 134 communal justice 141, 142, 144 community of living beings 8, 16, 17 Confessions (Augustine) 15 Crane, Susan 8, 20 Creator, the 119, 120, 123, 128, 130, 131 see also God cri 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, 174 cuccu 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 162–5, 167, 168, 171, 172 cuckoo bird 156 n.33, 164, 165, 166, 167 Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age, A 17

Evangelists 43, 44, 59 Eve (biblical) 60, 65 exceptionalism 9, 12, 17, 33, 114, 161 fables 1, 5, 11, 29, 31, 33, 133–8, 147, 148, 150, 152, 158, 159 Fables (Marie de France) 33, 133, 162, 167, 171, 172, 174 Fall of humankind 8, 65 Fletcher, Christopher 142 Fontenay, Elisabeth de 18 forma vitæ 110, 112, 116 see also form-of-life form-of-life 32, 33, 171 “Fox and the Cockerel, The” 144, 146, 147 France 83, 86 France, Marie de 3, 10, 11, 12, 33, 161, 162, 171 Francis (pope) 99, 131 Francis, Saint 17, 32, 154, 174 Franciscanism 131 Franciscan Rule 108, 109, 124, 127 French bestiaries 35, 44, 58 French glosses 69, 97 French language 25, 29, 42, 45, 57, 60, 79, 80, 85, 87, 92, 94, 96, 97 and English language 71–6, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89 from Latin 38, 43, 44, 59, 163 French literature 23, 32 French rhyme 84, 134 French texts 2, 12, 29, 38, 51, 82 friars 105, 107, 109, 110, 113–16, 118, 119, 120, 130, 131

De Anima (Aristotle) 16 De animalibus (Albert) 114 “De interpretatione” (Aristotle) 7 Derrida, Jacques 137 Dicta Chrysostomi 38 Dillon, Emma 14 England 67, 73, 74, 80, 83, 102, 142 English glosses 78, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 91, 97 English language 6, 11, 21, 22, 32, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 82, 88, 96 see also modern English English literature 20 English rhymes 95 English texts 2, 12, 23, 29, 163 entendement 13, 61, 63, 124–5, 162, 170 see also entendre entendre 43, 61, 72, 89, 91, 125, 143, 169 epimythium 147, 151, 157, 158 etymologies 8, 36, 62 Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, The 21, 38, 44, 45, 48, 114, 134 etymology 11, 45 Europe 16, 80, 118

Garden of Eden 65 gargun 153, 154 see also jargun Genesis, Book of 7, 8, 21 Giorgio, Saint 100 God 8, 42, 43, 45, 46, 101, 105, 106, 110–14, 116, 118, 128, 130 Gospel of John 115 Gospels 44, 109 Greek language 8, 45, 67 Greeks 49, 108, 114 Gregory IX (pope) 100 Guillaume, Count 135

194

Index lai L’Aüstic (Marie de France) 10, 11 lai Le Frêne (Marie de France) 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 24, 161, 169 Lais (Marie de France) 2, 12 Lamb of God 115 Langdon, Alison 30 Latin language 1, 8, 22, 35, 43, 44, 46, 70, 71, 78 Latin rubrics 38, 42, 43, 51, 56, 59, 60 Latin texts 12, 19, 21, 29, 37, 75, 163 latratus canis 9 Le Donei des amants 168 Le Livre de Sibile (Thaon) 37 Legenda maior (Bonaventure) 102, 109, 128 Libystican fables 134 Life of Saint Cuthbert 107 Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (Bonaventure) 118, 154, 171 see also Vye de Seynt Fraunceys d’Assise linguistic contexts 2, 5 linguistic expression 1, 11, 84, 140 linguistic plurality 11, 12 Lives of St Francis 101 Louvain, Adeliza de 37 lupine 138, 148

hagiography 5, 99, 106, 109, 118, 122, 123, 130 Haraway, Donna 27, 28 Harrowing of Hell 42, 45 Hassig, Debra 49 Hearne, Vicky 27, 28 Hebrew language 8, 9, 45, 46 Henry I, King 37 Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, The (Agamben) 32 High Middle Ages 8, 16 Homo Sacer project 28 howling 32, 79, 80, 81, 82, 97, 141–7, 174 Hsy, Jonathan 19, 73 hue and cry 33, 138, 141–5, 147, 148, 159 human cognitive processes 4 human discourse 33, 161, 172 humanese 161 humanization 61, 62, 140 human language 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 19, 23, 24, 28, 33, 41, 42, 76, 78, 80, 114, 123, 133, 135, 137, 138, 148, 151, 152 human utterance 80, 143, 147, 159, 167, 171 human voice 10, 15, 56, 71, 73, 80, 81, 84, 104 Hundred Year’s War 86 hybridity 48, 55, 56, 62

mandragora 57 mandrake 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 170, 174 mass 139, 140, 143 McCracken, Peggy 12, 136 medieval animals 16, 17, 18, 19 medieval audiences 5, 10, 11, 159, 171 medieval authors 60, 133 medieval communities 85 medieval cultures 1, 17, 19 medieval estate 72, 88, 96 medieval fables 137, 148, 159 medieval French 86, 136 medieval genre 134 medieval hagiography 101, 115 medieval herbals 57 medieval literary 1, 24, 168 medieval literature 5, 6, 17, 27, 86, 143 medieval lyrics 165

imitation 10, 32, 73, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 93, 97, 117, 137, 150, 155, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174 Innocent III (pope) 124 Isidore of Seville 8, 48, 49, 114, 134 Jacoba, Lady 117, 118 jargun 23–4, 112, 119, 122, 126, 127, 129, 154, 171, 172 see also gargun Jerome, Saint 115 jongleur 158 Judeo-Christian Scripture 46 Kay, Sarah 7, 26, 55

195

Index medieval period 13 medieval philosophers 17 medieval sound 12 medieval soundscapes 2, 28 medieval texts 2, 4, 5, 7, 14, 17, 20, 21, 27, 65, 73, 165, 170, 171 and animal soundscapes 3, 5, 13, 15, 18, 25, 26, 172, 174 and birdsong 154, 164 and sonic phenomena 10, 24, 161, 162 human/animal communication 6, 19, 28, 30, 173 medieval writers 1, 9, 49, 60 memorization 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 174 Middle Ages 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 21, 28, 30, 57, 92, 99, 107, 109, 115, 118, 135, 137 Middle English 21, 22, 23, 69, 73, 80, 93, 168, 172, 180 modern English 22, 23 Moe, Aaron M. 173 Mountechensi, Dyonise de 92 multilingualism 12, 71, 76, 168 musica harmonica 49 musical animal sound 14 musica organica 49 musica ritmica 49

Norman Conquest of England 86 Normans 142 Noudelmann, François 26 Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Chaucer) 144 Old French 6, 11, 21, 22, 23, 37, 41, 94, 126, 135, 148 Open, The (Agamben) 28 Order of Friars Minor 100, 102, 109, 118, 128 Paradise 57, 59 Paris, France 86, 87 Pastoureau, Michel 16 “Peacock, The” 158 peasants 93 Peter, Saint 43 phenomenology 17, 26, 137 philosophers 17, 135 phoenix 39 Physiologus 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 48 “Polemius Silvius” 78 Pratt, Mary L. 73 “Priest and the Wolf, The” 135 protagonists 1, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 150, 151, 154, 159, 169 Resl, Brigitte 17 Revelation, Book of 115, 130 rhetorical parody 150 richesce 51 see also Splendor Roman 108

natural order 112, 144, 165 natural phenomena 36, 66, 71, 99, 100 natural world 32, 69, 91, 93, 120, 122, 128 naturele 75 naturele langage 92 naturele noise 74 networks of relation 15 New Testament 42 nicticorax 39, 47 nonhuman communication 173 nonhuman environment/world 24, 147 nonhuman noises 69, 76 nonhumans 17, 61, 65, 107, 108, 109, 110, 162, 169, 175 nonhuman sound 69, 89, 161 nonhuman voice 63

saints 99, 107, 115, 122 salvation 109, 124 San Damiano church 100, 110 Schafer, R. Murray 24, 25, 103 Scripture 60 “Sermon to the Birds” 103, 123, 124, 126 sexual desire 48, 51, 55 sexuality 50, 57 silence 14, 15, 174 sirens 47–52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 174 song 99, 105, 106, 121, 136, 163–8, 171, 172, 174 songbirds 119, 128, 153, 155 sonic contact 33

196

Index sonic marker 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 56, 59, 62, 86, 148 sonic networks 6 sonic phenomena 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 23–6, 35, 40, 41, 47, 66, 105, 110, 142, 143, 161, 162, 170, 171, 172, 175 sound milieu 26, 31, 66, 74, 170, 171 soundscape 4, 11, 24, 25, 26, 31, 48, 74, 129, 130, 170, 171 sound symbolism 1 sound zone 26, 32, 171 sovereignty 28, 108, 136 Splendor 51, 56 Stanton, Robert 6, 19 St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata (Bondone) 123 “Stilling of the Swallows” 123, 126, 128 “Sumer is icumen in” 162, 165, 167 Thaon, Philippe de 31, 74, 170 Theobaldi Physiologus 44 “Thief and the Dog, The” 148, 151, 174 Thomas of Celano 102 Tree of Knowledge 65, 66 Tretiz (Bibbesworth) 23, 32, 170, 171, 174 Tristan Rossignol 168, 169 Uexküll, Jakob von 40 vernacular languages 4, 9, 11, 21, 37, 71, 72, 78, 87, 92 vernacular texts 5, 9, 10, 11, 171, 174 Vita Prima (Celano) 101

vocalizations 22, 23, 39, 42, 56, 67, 76, 79, 110, 111, 119, 127, 131, 172 animal 4, 7, 12, 19, 24, 74, 82, 89, 107, 138, 171 bird 15, 78, 87, 88, 112, 128, 173 human 91, 98, 163, 164, 167, 174 sheep 95, 96, 114, 118 voces animantium 19, 70, 74 vox confusa 9 vox discreta 9 vox harmonica 50 vox 9, 11, 121 vulpine 138, 148 Vye de Seynt Fraunceys d’Assise 32, 102, 105, 108, 111, 112, 123, 130, 171 and animal soundscapes 103, 106 and birds 110, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 131 and sheep 113, 114, 115, 117, 118 human/animal interaction 104, 107, 109 Walter of Bibbesworth 23, 32, 69, 170 Warren, Michael J. 18, 19, 20 Western culture 48 Western environmental thought 100 When Species Meet (Haraway) 27 “Wolf and the Billy Goat, The” 139, 145, 146, 147, 150 “Wolf and the Lamb, The” 136 zoë 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 126, 128, 131 zoosemiotics 18, 20, 27

197