Carolyn Dinshaw begins her chapter ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies with a discussion of medieval roof bosses depicting humans with leaves sprouting from their heads and growing out of their mouths. The ubiquity of these sculptures across Europe, as ‘one of the most popular decorative motifs in medieval ecclesiastical sculpture’ demonstrates a preoccupation in the late medieval European imagination with the connection between humans and nature.1 In the ‘leafy heads’, ‘there is no “environment” apart from us’, Dinshaw writes, due to the conjoined nature of vegetation with the human.2 Her observation of the way late medieval art challenges our conceptualisation of ourselves as distinct from nature leads her to draw the conclusion that the entanglement of humans with what is broadly deemed the natural world ‘is a condition that defies all our most treasured and consoling ideas of human wholeness, unity, and sovereignty’.3 Indeed, when compared to a modern understanding of the relationship between humans and the natural world which we often imagine ourselves to be separate from, an examination of representations of humans and nature in medieval poetry does suggest that the notions of the human that is sovereign (existing independently of anything else or possessing complete autonomy) and ‘whole’ (the human that is unadulterated by anything other) is a construct.
In its depiction of the disintegration of a noblewoman’s body by worms, the poem ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx [th]e Body and Wormes’ shows the entanglement of the human body with creatures we hold so insignificant to ourselves that we barely consider them at all. By representing our relationship to the earth through our mortality, the poem highlights the frailty of the notion of our own wholeness and unity. Despite the fact that soil sustains us by providing the crops we need and the minerals we rely on, we rarely pay attention to it, let alone the worms that dwell in it. The poem challenges our conceptualisation of ourselves in relation to animals such as worms as in the poem, the woman is the pollutant and the earth (and its worms) are corrupted by her return to the earth in death, shown by the worms’ description of her body as ‘orrybyll flesche rotyng and stynkynge’.4 Despite this, they insist that they won’t ‘depart from’ her until they have ‘scowred and pollysched’ her bones and ‘made als clene as we can þaim amange’. The cleaning metaphor adds a purificatory tone to the worms’ eating of her which ascribes nobility to their work. This nobility is reinforced by the presentation of their work as self-sacrificial in light of their aversion to her body. By honouring the worms, therefore, while declassing the noblewoman, as her nudity and freedom from all adornment symbolises, the poet alerts us to the arbitrariness and highly constructed nature of our perception of our own nobility in comparison to other organisms. Showing her contempt towards the worms, the woman laments that
By 1ow my flesche is horribilly arayed
Whilk was a fygure whylom fresche and feete
Right amyabyll and odorus and swete. (ll. 32-36)
In contrast to her being ‘Wele atyred in þe moste newe gyse’ in the tomb, in the dream, the woman is now ‘arayed’ (adorned) by worms. As adornments refer to clothing generally as well denoting decoration, the grotesqueness of the image of a noblewoman now clothed in worms emphasises the collapse of human self-distinction that the poem represents. The woman’s distress at this reality is emphasised by the alliterated ‘f’ sound which demonstrates the stifling pervasiveness of the worms on her body. Rather than it being undignified to be naked with worms clinging to your body, the description of the worms as adornments challenges the tendency to view passing from death to life, and the subsequent entanglement of our bodies with ‘earthly matter’ as a degradation.
Further, throughout the poem the worms are imagined as more ‘Christian’ than the woman is, which they articulate through their repetition of biblical references. The poet also demonstrates this through the woman’s contempt of other beings and her love of worldly pleasures, expressed in her sorrow at the loss of her riches which is contrary to Christian teaching. In response to the woman’s vanity, quoting Proverbs 31, the worms say
þe fayrnes of women talde
Is bot vayne þinge and transitory
Women dredyng god sal be praysed holy. (ll. 174-76)
That the worms quote from one of the wisdom books of the Bible emphasises the poem’s muddying of the distinction between animal and human as in a dualistic understanding of creation, humans were distinguished from other animals by their possession of a rational mind which an intimate relationship with God through the revelation of his word signified. Therefore, by portraying the worms as possessing more wisdom and knowledge of spiritual things than a woman of high birth, the poet not only presents the worms as more spiritual than the woman, but also as more human. This dehumanisation of the woman, and the displacement of her humanity onto the worms is emphasised by the poet’s reference to her as a mere ‘body’ throughout, in contrast to the worms who in their multitude seem more ‘bodied’ in a human sense. The suggestion that worms, who resemble the serpent both physiologically and in their roaming on their stomachs, are closer to God than a human being made in his image emphasises the poem’s subversion of the scala naturae hierarchy of creation.
In his discussion of the poem, Karl Steel writes that ‘humans prefer to think of themselves as subjects in a word of objects rather than things’ and the way we deal with the unpleasant reality of our identities as usable things is by denying it.5 Writing that funerals ‘preserve humans from recognising themselves as useful materials’, Steel notes that through processes such as burial, in which a human is sealed into a ‘little subterranean homes’, humans are able to distinguish themselves from other beings who when they die cannot escape returning to the earth and being used as food for other organisms.6 He concludes that the poem therefore demands that the corpse ‘recognize her entanglement in an inescapably crowded, heterogeneous bodiment’.7 In exposing the human body to be a bodied being in a system of macro and microorganisms rather than the most privileged being in this system, the poem indeed defies the notion of our own wholeness. By locating the human body in a web of interconnected relations to the natural world, ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx [th]e Body and Wormes’ undermines the idea of a human state of being that is without relation to any other created beings, thus eroding the notions of human wholeness and sovereignty.
Dinshaw writes that the ‘the purely sovereign human is a narrow, historical construct,’ and later medieval writings depicting the entanglement of humans and non-humans demonstrate this.8 The fact that historically, humans have been defined by what they are not brings the interdependence between humans and ‘animals’ (referring to non-human animals) into clearer view, which the etymologies of Isidore of Seville showcase. In ‘How to Make a Human’, Karl Steel examines how the very idea of what the human is relies on notions of our dissimilitude from animals, writing that ‘By denying their likeness to animals, humans can ‘engage in the activity’ that is their self-conceptualization’9. Steel notes that the entries in Sidrak, an encyclopaedia of medieval popular culture, ‘dif-ferentially produce the human through repeated assertions that God created the animals for the sake of humans and through the denial to animals of likeness to the human’.10
This is also evident in Isidore of Seville’s etymologies of ‘animal’ and ‘beast’. Through the great care he takes to differentiate the species, Isidore exposes an anxiety towards the similarities between humans and animals. On the etymology of ‘animal’, Isidore wrote that animals were thus called because they were ‘animated by life and moved by spirit’ but that any animal that ‘lacks human language and form’ would be categorised as livestock, which was further subcategorised depending on its suitability as food for humans or its suitability for agricultural use by humans.11 Yet even in his cumulative distinctions between animals and humans, Isidore highlighted the fundamental sameness of the two when he wrote that beasts were called beasts due to ‘the force with which they attack’ and were ‘termed wild because they enjoy a natural freedom and are driven by their own desires’ (Isidore of Seville, p. 251). As humans, too, enjoy relative freedom and are able to attack, Isidore’s definition groups us with the ‘lions, panthers, tigers, wolves’ (Isidore of Seville, p.251) he attempts to distinguish us from. His categorisation of humans and animals highlights how even in our language, we have no way of imagining ourselves outside of our relation to other animals and this failure to disengage ourselves from our surroundings in order to define what we are demonstrates the fragility of the notion of human sovereignty.
Later medieval conceptualisations of animals such as the fox and the hare which depicted them as possessing almost human intellect and capabilities eroded the idea of human exceptionalism. For example, the late medieval poem ‘Names of the Hare’, which describes how a human who encounters a hare on his travels should respond to this threat, dismantles the idea of human mastery over animals, undermining the notion of human sovereignty. The poem’s portrayal of the hare in relation to the human leads Karl Steel to conclude that in the poem ‘what has been realized is that there might be other forms of human/nonhuman relations than domination or struggles for mastery’.12 Yet, although the poem certainly challenges human mastery over the animal as the only form of human/nonhuman relations, it would perhaps be more true to say that rather than the erasure of all dynamics of dominion/subjection, the poem instead ‘realises’ the animal’s mastery over the human and it is precisely this subversion of the scala naturae that unsettles us. The hare’s mastery over the human is established immediately, with the speaker opening the poem by cautioning his subject that in order to escape unharmed, the human must ‘lei down on londe/ That he bereth in his honde’ and ‘saien on oreisoun/ In the worschipe of the hare’, effectively lowering himself to the status of an animal while also deifying the hare which indicates its dominance in the situation.13 The need for the human to immediately disarm himself suggests that it is only through artificial means (represented by the weapons) that the human is ever able to dominate the hare and left entirely to fend for himself, he would not succeed.
In medieval courtly hunting culture, the hare was considered a ‘beast of venery’, a term applied to animals viewed as most noble to hunt and Dorothy Yamamoto explains that part of the hare’s respectability to humans was due to the ‘semantic challenges’ it posed for humans.14 Yamamato writes that ‘As language marked the hunters’ primary ability to anatomatize their prey’, in the hunt language therefore served ‘as a leitmotiv of human ascendancy’.15 The difficulty in defining the hare therefore elevated its value to hunters as capturing one signified the supremacy of the hunter over that which eluded human understanding. In other words, to capture a hare was to assert human sovereignty. The poet’s use of phrases with undecipherable meanings such as ‘the tirart’ (l. 4) or ‘the deubert’ (l. 10) to describe the hare therefore reflects the notion of the hare’s respectability and the plurality of the names for the hare frustrates the imposition of any certain meaning onto it. The disorientation caused by this failure to understand imitates the vulnerability of the human who has been stripped of the only thing that gives him an advantage over the animals he imagines himself superior to. Rather than ending with the human conquering the hare which would symbolise the futility of the hare’s elusiveness in the face of human dominance, the poem ends with the man being permitted to leave only once he has recited all the names of the hare:
When thou havest al this i-said,
Thenne is the hare migtt alaid.
Thenne migtt thou wenden forth,
Est and west, and south and north,
Wedrewardes so mon wile. (ll. 54-58)
The degradation to human dignity of having to yield to a hare, and the hare’s mastery over the human is reinforced by the repetition of ‘Thenne’ which emphasises that the human is completely at the mercy of the hare. In order to gain the freedom to exercise his ‘wile’, the human must first recite seventy names to a hare, an act of debasement that would have been especially resonant to a late medieval audience. Following from the extensive list of names which represent the hare’s pre-eminence in comparison to the human, that the poem ends with the speaker hoping that the next time he encounters the hare will be ‘in broth or bread’ (l. 63), meaning dead, also highlights that the only way for the human to gain mastery over the hare is in his imagination, which reduces the notion of human sovereignty to a mere fantasy.
Ironically, the development in later medieval high society of cultural markers signifying ‘civilised’ humanity in opposition to peasants and animals (who were often imagined as the same) betrays the nobility’s sensitivity to their own likeness to animals in the functional ways of excretion, reproduction, eating and sleeping. One way the nobility distinguished themselves from animals and the lower classes was through dining habits, as the adherence to etiquette such as washing hands, sitting down to eat and using utensils as well as differentiating between animals suitable and unsuitable for human consumption demonstrated a practice of discipline that wild animals lacked. Most significantly, the sport of hunting also signified civilisation as rather than animal hunting which was driven only by their appetite and therefore considered base and uncultivated in the human mind, because of its requirement of forethought and skill, the practice of hunting in chivalric society demonstrated human supremacy over all other animals. Moreover, the fact poems such as ‘Names of the Hare’ reflect the context in which the demarcation between civilised and uncivilised, human and animal was born highlights how late medieval society was all too aware of how the truth of their entanglement with animals challenged their claim to sovereignty.
As Dinshaw observes, medieval depictions of the human’s relationship to other animals completely defy our understanding of ourselves. The entanglement of humans with non-human animals and matter as shown in poems such as ‘The Names of the Hare’ and ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx [th]e Body and Wormes’ erode any ideas of human wholeness, unity, and sovereignty. By confronting us with our own edibility as Karl Steel puts it, reducing the human to the status of a merely compostable body, and exposing the precarity of our imagined supremacy over other animals — which ‘Names of the Hare’ dismantles to complete non-existence — the poems expose the illusory nature of our image of ourselves as especially distinct from all other things. In their illustration of this unsettling (to us) entanglement, these poems, just like the medieval roof bosses, reveal, as Dinshaw concludes, that ‘“us” is consequently very different from what ‘‘we’’ thought ‘‘we’’ were’.16
Bibliography
Anon., ‘Names of the Hare’ (c. 1200s), <http://www.forgottenworks.org/poem_les_nouns_de_un_levre.html> [accessed 10 December 2022]
Dinshaw, Carolyn, ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2013), pp. 347-362
Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, with the collaboration of Muriel Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 81-253
Ryttyng, Jenny Rebecca, ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx þe Body and Wormes: A Translation’ in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 31 (2000), 217-32
Steel, Karl ‘Abyss: Everything Is Food’ in Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 4 (2013), 93-104
Steel, Karl, ‘Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of Imperilled Animals’, in The Palgrave Handbooks of Animals and Literature, ed. by Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller (Cham: Springer International, 2020), pp. 141-152
Steel, Karl, ‘How to Make a Human’ in Exemplaria, 20.1 (2008), 3-27
Yamamoto, Dorothy, ‘Bodies in the Hunt’ in The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 99-131
- Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2013), p. 348.
↩︎ - Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’ p. 351.
↩︎ - Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’ p. 359.
↩︎ - Jenny Rebecca Ryttyng, ‘A Disputacioun Betwyx þe Body and Wormes: A Translation’ in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 31 (2000) 66. All subsequent references to this edition to be made in text.
↩︎ - Karl Steel, ‘Abyss: Everything Is Food’ in Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 4 (2013), 95.
↩︎ - Steel, ‘Abyss’, 95.
↩︎ - Steel, ‘Abyss’, 95.
↩︎ - Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’, p. 353.
↩︎ - Karl Steel, ‘How to Make a Human’ in Exemplaria, 20.1 (2008), 17.
↩︎ - Steel, ‘How to Make a Human’, 17.
↩︎ - Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, with the collaboration of Muriel Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 247. All subsequent references to this edition to be made in text.
↩︎ - Karl Steel, ‘Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of Imperilled Animals’, in The Palgrave Handbooks of Animals and Literature, ed. by Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller (Cham: Springer International, 2020), p. 144.
↩︎ - Anon, ‘The Names of the Hare’ (c. 1200s), ll. 3-4; ll. 8-9, <http://www.forgottenworks.org/poem_les_nouns_de_un_levre.html> [accessed 10 December 2022]. All subsequent references to be made in text.
↩︎ - Dorothy Yamamoto, ‘Bodies in the Hunt’ in The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 108.
↩︎ - Yamamoto, ‘Bodies in the Hunt’, p. 108.
↩︎ - Dinshaw, ‘Ecology’ p. 351.
↩︎
