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| Still from Marketa Lazarová. |
There's a big blog post about to spring up here tomorrow, so I'm squeezing in to beat the crowds. Once you read that, obviously, those of you lucky enough to be at Leeds must go to this excellent feminist medieval event, which is happening next Wednesday.
What follows is the opening of my 9,000-word (! yes! that was our limit: mine is exactly that) chapter on Animals and Violence for the Routledge Handbook for Animal-Human History (ed. Hilda Kean and Philip Howell), which I'm delivering a month late, because although I write about animals, I too am human. Roughly speaking.
The whole thing is called "Animals and Violence: Medieval Brutality, Margery Kempe’s Vegetarianism, and the Smugness of Modern Humanism." You've perhaps already seen earlier drafts of later sections here, here, and here. If so, great!
And now to read my co-presenters' papers for the "(Dis)abling the Human/Animal Body" session for the New Chaucer Society...
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Few readers of this chapter will be surprised to learn that examples of medieval cruelty to animals are easy to come by. William FitzStephen’s thirteenth-century portrait of London lauds the city for its entertainments, which include wrestling, target-shooting, and riverboat jousting, and also spectacular fights to the death between bulls or boars and dogs. The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Cleanness adapts Jesus' parable of the rich man's feast, so that, like a good English magnate, he proclaims the completion of preparations with a hearty ‘my bulls and my boars are baited and slain’ [my boles and my bores arn bayted and slayn]. And one early sixteenth-century English recipe meant for a convalescent begins notoriously: ‘Take a red Cock that is not too olde, and beate him to death, and when he is dead, fley him and quarter him in small peeces, and bruse the bones everye one of them.’[i]
I start here because this ‘medieval brutality’ is what
would be generally expected in a chapter on the medieval and animals. ‘Medieval
Brutality,’ a cliché in the general culture—as with this, from the New York Times: ‘experts in radicalization
said that understanding the process by which people fell for the medieval
brutality of a religious ideology is vital to combating it’—distinguishes the
medieval from the modern as filthier, crueler, and more ‘ferocious’ (from the
Latin ferox, wild animal, as ‘brutal’
comes from the Latin brutus, ‘beast’).[ii]
In this self-regard of modernity, the medieval is more animal than the present.
Recall the mudcaked peasants of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the
feral pagan temptress of Marketa Lazarová, one of František
Vláčil’s medieval existential tragedies, or the damp, fleshy, fecal crowds
in the streets and noble courts of Alexei German’s unendurable ‘medieval’
science fiction film, Hard to be a God.[iii]
The assumptions hold that the past is cruel, the present civilized; the past
superstitious, the present rational; and by extension, the past animal, and the
present human. According to these assumptions, medieval people were more ‘in
touch’ with animals, in part because they were more like animals than those of
us presumed to belong fully to the present.
My study of violence and animals focuses on the Middle Ages
because of this period's strange relationship to the paired conceptions of
modernity and humanity. The idea of modernity often operates by looking to the
Middle Ages either as its origin—where languages, religions, cuisines, and
customs arose organically—or as what it had to leave behind in order to form
itself as modern, by abandoning faith, aristocracy, and the
ferocious violence of medieval peoples.[iv]
As Kathleen Davis argues, a supersessionary model, itself borrowed from the
Middle Ages, drives these assumptions. The model was itself a central feature
of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Since the earliest Christian scriptures,
Christians portrayed Jews as outmoded, hidebound in irrational laws, and
parochial, superseded by a (Christian) present that is forward looking, free,
creative, rational, and cosmopolitan. Davis observes that eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century colonial administrators developed the concept of the ‘medieval’
to divide European modernity from colonies they preferred to think of as still
trapped in the past.[v]
The same assumptions of modernity persist into the present in a ‘developmental
narrative,’ as Geraldine Heng writes, ‘whose trajectory positions’ the West as
modern ‘and the rest of the world as always catching up.’[vi]
It is an obvious irony that to the degree that the middle ages is thought of as
superstitious, irrational, excessively traditional, and ahistorical—possessing
only a homogeneous unchanging ‘pastness’ until the modern arrives—it becomes
modernity’s ‘Jewish’ past, this while modern movements dedicated to closing
borders to preserve their supposed Western freedom claim as their irrevocable
heritage what they believe to be the medieval origins of their languages,
nations, and especially faiths.
Left behind, yet necessary as a foundation, launching pad,
or authentic core, the medieval is the animal in relation to the human of the
modern. Whether this animalized medieval is actually in the past or in
present-day regions, cultures, or activities disdained as ‘medieval,’ the
Middle Ages is understood to be bound in a way of life like that of a mere
animal: driven by instinctual appetites, beholden to the uncomprehending
superstition of religious fundamentalism, and tyrannized by a rule founded only
on direct, violent domination, the so-called ‘law of the jungle.’ If the animal
is fundamentally ‘brutal,’ so the medieval is fundamentally animal. Both are
what must be denied for the human to emerge, or both the true core concealed
beneath a veneer of reason and temporary, merely decorative consumer culture.
For all these reasons, a critical reassessment of medieval
attitudes towards violence against animals counteracts two interlocked
delusions simultaneously, that of ‘modernity’ and ‘humanity.’ One way to resist
these splits and the various paternalistic violences they justify is accurate
representation, which demonstrates the heterogeneity, contradictions, and
intellectual mobility of both sides of a presumed divide: Jewish exegesis was
never stolidly literal, Christians could practice ritual every bit hieratic as
what they accused the Jews of, and both engaged in an ongoing development of
their own faith, often through exegetical exchanges, not always hostile, with each
other.
So
too does the notion of ‘medieval animalistic violence’ fail.
[and so on!!]
[and so on!!]
[i] W. Fitzstephen, Norman
London, F. Stenton (trans.), New York: Italica Press, 1990, p. 58; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl;
Cleanness; Patience, A.C. Cawley and J. J. Anderson (ed.), London: Dent,
1991, l. 55; A. W., A Book of Cookrye,
London: Edward Allde, 1587, image 13, Early English Books Online, Cambridge
University Library.
[ii] K. Bennhold, ‘Same Anger, Different Ideologies: Radical
Muslim and Neo-Nazi’, The New York Times, 5 March 2015 [accessed 30 June
2016].
[iii] T. Gilliam and T. Jones, Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
EMI Films, 1975; F. Vláčil, Marketa Lazarová, Ústřední půjčovna filmů,
1967; A. German, Hard to be a God [Trudno byt’ bogom], Kino Lorber,
2013.
[iv] For a well-known example of this tendency, see S.
Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New York: W.W.
Norton, 2011.
[v] K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of
Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; I am also drawing on her as yet
unpublished work ‘Convolutions of Time: Why an “Early Modern” Period?’,
presented at Common Eras: Law,
Literature, and the Rhetorics of Commonality in Medieval and Renaissance
England, Freie Universität Berlin, 19 May 2016.
[vi] G. Heng, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
1: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass,
8.5, 2011, p. 264.
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