In the Skin of a Beast

Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

Peggy McCracken

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226459080
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf's desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

CHAPTER ONE

Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty

Medieval notions of sovereignty are decidedly not modern, or so the logic usually goes, and they are decidedly not biopolitical. In Foucault’s well-known formulation, the premodern sovereign’s authority is defined by the power to let live and make die; modern sovereign power is located in the capacity to make live and let die.1 However, medieval literary texts repeatedly return to questions about the use, management, and production of life, and particularly of animal life. Biopolitics comes to the fore in human relations with animals, particularly in the conflation of survival and slaughter that justifies the human use of animals for food, clothing, and labor. In this chapter I examine the repeated representation of a relationship between flaying animals and the enactment and display of human sovereignty. I focus on the use of animal skins to argue that the technology of human sovereignty includes the slaughter of animals, but I also show that animals may resist the material and symbolic use of their skins in displays of human power. I begin with Genesis and some of its vernacular translations in order to explore the conflation of survival and slaughter in the story of the first humans. I then move to the fourteenth-century Conte du papegau (The Tale of the Parrot) to explore a romance representation of flaying that uses animal skin to map the contours of human sovereignty. An examination of the ostentatious furs worn by noblemen in late medieval courts extends my claim about the display of human sovereignty using animal pelts, and finally I turn to Le roman des romans, a moralizing poem in which animals chastise the humans who wear their skins in a call for ethical engagement.2

In the Beginning

Relations of dominion and rule are created along with humans, at least according to the biblical account of creation, where God gives man authority over the animals that inhabit the earth. In the relatively short account in Genesis 1, we find two iterations of the divine decree that man should rule over the animals:

And [God] said: “Let us make man to our image and likeness, and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth and every creeping creature that moves upon the earth.” And God created man to his own image; to the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, saying, “Increase, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26–28)3

The passage cites, first, God’s plan for his creation of man and, second, his command that the first humans should increase and multiply and enjoy dominion over the earth and all that live upon it. In medieval commentaries on this passage, both Jewish and Christian writers focused more on sexuality and the command to multiply than on dominion, as Jeremy Cohen has shown, but vernacular bibles and some Christian commentaries explored the human-animal hierarchy defined in the creation story in terms of political order.4 In particular, the notion of a divinely ordered hierarchy of dominion strongly influenced the biblical commentary known as the Glossa ordinaria, a collection of glosses written alongside or between the lines of the biblical text and developed from around 1100 to 1330.5

In the Glossa ordinaria, as Philippe Buc explains, clerics used Genesis to posit that “legitimate power [potestas] is symbolized, rendered legitimate, and clarified by the superiority of man over animals.”6 The hierarchies of dominion that structured the order of creation in Paradise offered models for the human exercise of legitimate power over animals, and extending those hierarchies to human social relations, medieval theologians describe human dominion over animals as symbolic of human power over other humans. For example, in Genesis 1:24–25, where God commands that the earth bring forth creatures according to their kind, “cattle and creeping things and beasts” (“iumenta et reptilia et bestias”), glosses identify reptilia as clerics, bestias [bestiae] as powerful lords, and iumenta as faithful lay people; all are under the dominion of man (homines), identified as the sovereign, he who is not subject to any secular judge.7 In other words, some medieval theologians understood God’s command that humans should have dominion over the animals as a figural expression of social and political hierarchies among humans. This analogy is further stressed in vernacular translations of the Latin bible. When the Genesis passage is translated into Old French, the Latin verbs “praesum” (to rule, to be set over) and “dominor” (to rule, to have dominion over) are rendered as “to have sovereignty/dominion over” (avoir seignorie), a more familiar term of human political organization for medieval translators.8 “Avoir seignorie” also translates “dominor” in Genesis 3:16, where God declares that Eve will be under Adam’s dominion: “tu seras souz la poosté d’ome et il avra seingnorie sus toi.”9 Within the divine hierarchy of creation, man has authority over both animals and woman; gender and animality are the differences that matter in the biblical definition of hierarchy and dominion. But does dominion mean sovereignty in this context?

Medieval theologians disagreed about the meaning of sovereignty in Paradise. While some took man’s dominion over the animals as a model for human political organization, others posited that political hierarchy originated not in God’s decree that man should have dominion over animals in Paradise, but in the postlapsarian world. According to this logic, in the harmonious world of Paradise a natural order recognized by both humans and animals eliminated the need for relations of power, and relations of dominion over others entered the world only after humans sinned. As Buc shows, theologians moved between the two explanations of the origins of power and political organization.10 On the one hand, social hierarchy could be understood as a divine invention that predated the Fall and allowed for the restraint of human excesses; on the other hand, power over others could be understood as a diabolical consequence of the fall.

It is only in the postlapsarian world, however, that sovereignty corresponds to the ability to kill.11 Once humans sin, their peaceful dominion over the animals in Paradise is lost, and postlapsarian relations between human and nonhuman animals are defined by enmity. Man should have the upper hand in this adversarial relationship, according to God’s reordering of human-animal relations after the flood. He commands that “the fear and dread of [man] will be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the fowls of the air and all that move upon the earth.” God then gives Noah permission to consume animals: “All the fishes of the sea are delivered into your hand. And every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you” (Gen. 9:2–3).12

Genesis describes two forms of human dominion over animals. The first is part of the divine order of Paradise: man shall rule over the animals. The second is defined by human predation in the use of animals for food (“every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you”). After humans are expelled from Paradise, human dominion over the natural world is enacted through the use of animals—eating them, wearing them, using their labor—and this use of animals is sanctioned by God. The divine decree that animal lives may be taken to sustain human life receives particular attention in medieval vernacular bibles—not in relation to animals as food, but as clothing. The divinely sanctioned use of animals is represented with particular emphasis on the use of animal skins to cover human nakedness.

Adam and Eve in Furs

Most of the texts known as medieval French vernacular bibles are not direct translations of the Latin bible into French. There were a few literal translations of the bible, but they seem to have been less popular than paraphrases of the biblical narrative that included glosses, elaborations, and commentary borrowed from other sources or invented by the translator.13 So, for example, Guiart de Moulins’s thirteenth-century Bible historiale is a fairly close translation of Peter Comester’s twelfth-century summary and explanation of the biblical narrative in the Historia scolastica.14 Another thirteenth-century French bible, conventionally called La bible anonyme, gives a rhymed translation of the Vulgate, but it also includes developments from apocryphal sources and adds narrative detail; the so-called Bible française du XIIIe siècle alternates an Old French translation of the biblical text with extensive commentary drawn from the Glossa ordinaria, the collection of glosses of the Vulgate bible I mentioned above. Such bibles seem to have been intended for lay readers and they script an understanding of Genesis in light of the New Testament.15

The commentary in medieval vernacular bibles is typological, but it is also anticipatory. It looks forward not just to Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, but also to what will happen next in the narrative. In Genesis accounts, this anticipatory reading compresses the gap between the expulsion from Paradise and the flood, effectively eliminating the period of time between Adam and Eve’s departure from Eden and the point at which, after the flood, God sanctions the consumption of animals. In vernacular bibles, animals are available for human use from the moment of creation. For example, La bible historiale records that God created animals for man’s use:

God knew that man would soon become mortal through sin, even though before he sinned he was immortal, and he gave him animals to eat and to clothe him and to help him in his labor. And before man sinned, God had given man and animals only plants and the fruit of the trees as food.

Car Dieu qui sauoit bien qu’il seroit tost fait mortel par pechie, qui deuant le pechie estoit non mortel, lui donna les bestes pour mengier et pour lui vestir et pour lui aydier a son trauail. Et deuant le pechie il n’auoit donne aux hommes et aux bestes a mengier fors les herbes et les fruiz des arbres. (La bible historiale, 22)

In passages like this one, vernacular bibles describe the human consumption of animals as part of creation’s order.16 They anticipate the loss of vegetarianism at the moment when sin enters the world and violent enmity displaces the formerly peaceful cohabitation of humans and animals. Vernacular bibles locate the beginning of humans’ use of animals for food well in advance of God’s decree to Noah that “every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you.”

Neither the biblical text nor the vernacular bible’s commentary that describes God’s gift to man (“he gave him animals to eat and to clothe him”) directly addresses the question of whether eating animals and wearing their skins means killing them. Probably because of the Leviticus definition of an animal that has died naturally as unclean, medieval translators and theologians seem not to think that God intended for people to eat or flay animals only after they died naturally, though as David I. Shyovitz has noted, some Jewish interpreters suggested that in Paradise Adam and Eve were allowed to eat animals that had died of natural causes.17 Christian commentaries on Genesis seem to puzzle over God’s gift of animals to humans, and the question of animal death arises in representations of the first instance in which animals are subjected to human use: in another gift to humans, a parting gift, God clothes Adam and Eve with animal skins before he banishes them from Paradise.

The Genesis account specifies that “the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins (tunicas pellicias) and clothed them.”18 Early Jewish and Christian commentators identify these tunicas pellicias metaphorically, as skin-like garments or as human skin, that is, as humanity: to be clothed in skin is to shed the garments of glory worn in Paradise and to become human and mortal. Some commentators understood the garments of skin more literally, as animal skins or as clothes made from animal skins. The animality of the skins then stresses the mortality of sin and the animality of the sinner.19 But the literal understanding of the garments of skin as animal skins raised a particular set of disturbing questions for late antique and early medieval scholars, as Jean Pépin has noted. For example, if animals were created male and female, and two skins were taken, wouldn’t their slaughter destroy an entire species? And what happened to the meat, since humans had not yet been authorized to eat animals?20 Other theologians countered that the Bible cannot be judged by human logic; the early Christian scholar Origen dismissed as absurd the idea that God should be seen as some sort of butcher.21 But the question of where the garments of skin came from persisted, and for some medieval writers, the nature and origin of the animal skins continued to invite explanation.

In his creation narrative, the fourteenth-century writer Lutwin eliminates the skins altogether, indicating that that God gave Adam and Eve woolen garments. Lutwin’s Eva und Adam is a German translation of The Life of Adam and Eve, an apocryphal text that elaborates th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• List of Color Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.  Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty
• 2.  The Social Wolf: Domestication, Affect, and Social Contract
• 3.  Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Sovereign: Skin, Heraldry, and the Beast
• 4.  Snakes and Women: Recognition, Knowledge, and Sovereignty
• 5.  Becoming-Human, Becoming-Sovereign: Gender, Genealogy, and the Wild Man
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index