Late Medieval Pet Keeping: Gender, Status and Emotions
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1 Late Medieval Pet Keeping: Gender, Status and Emotions Kathleen Fiona Walker-Meikle University College London UMI Number: U593483 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U593483 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 2 I, Kathleen Fiona Walker-Meikle, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract: This thesis is a social and cultural history of pet keeping across Western Europe in the late medieval period (and the early modem period where relevant). A central argument is that women and clerics were the majority of pet keepers in the period, and a change towards the acceptability of pet keeping by secular lay men was due to the influence of humanist scholars, who kept pets and eulogised them in their literary compositions. Topics discussed in depth are the display of status through pet keeping, practicalities of pet keeping (such as care and food), the place of the pet in space, especially in domestic interiors, social tolerance towards pets and contemporary criticism of the practice, pet keeping by scholars and elegies written in praise of pets. I end with a discussion of pet keeping at court in the early modem period, concentrating on a case study of pets at the Mantuan court. 4 Table of Contents: 1. Introduction pp. 8-27 2. Chapter One: Status and Identity pp. 28-73 3. Chapter Two: Space, Tolerance and Criticism pp. 74-118 4. Chapter Three: Pet Keeping by Humanists pp. 119-166 Excursus: Pets in iconography of scholarly saints pp. 167-169 5. Chapter Four: Pet Keeping at Court pp. 170-202 6. Conclusion pp. 203-205 7. Edited Texts: Elegies on Isabella d'Este's dog pp. 206-249 8. Plates pp. 250-259 9. Bibliography pp. 260-288 5 List of plates Plate 1: Self-portrait with pet badgers by II Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) in Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Tuscany. Plate 2: London British Library Seal cxxix.44. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 3: MS London British Library Stowe 17, 20verso. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 4: British Museum, Chatelaine de Vergi ivory casket (ref. 1892,0801.47). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Plate 5: MS London British Library Add. 36684, f. 49recto. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 6: MS London British Library Add. 36684, f.88verso. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 7: British Museum, Lorenzo Lotto, An Ecclesiastic in his Study. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Plate 8: MS London British Library Add. 29433, f.20. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 9: MS London British Library Add. 42130, f. 181verso. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 10: MS London British Library Add 35313, f. lverso. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. Plate 11: MS London British Library Stowe 17, f. lOOrecto. © The British Library. All Rights Reserved. 6 Plate 12: Fresco by II Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) in Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Tuscany. Scene from the life of St Benedict (St Benedict dines with his fellow monks). Plate 13: Fresco by II Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) in Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Tuscany. Scene from the life of St Benedict (the monks are tempted by visiting ladies). Plate 14: Petrarch's 'cat'. Arqua Petrarca, Italy. Plate 15: 'St Augustine teaching in Rome' by Benozzo Gozzoli in the church of Sant'Agostino (San Gimignano) 7 Note on Transcriptions All transcriptions of manuscripts are my own, unless otherwise noted. Abbreviations are expanded and put in italics; unclear transcriptions are marked by square brackets and accompanied by a question mark when seriously doubtful. I have kept the original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation. Ink stains and other such marks that make letters illegible are indicated by curly brackets (and the possible transcription is placed in the brackets). Inserted words are underlined. Archival abbrevations: Archivio di Stato di Mantova: ASMN Archivio Gonzaga: AG busta (file): b. 8 Introduction The state of current historiography This work belongs in the field of animal studies and more generally in the fields of social and cultural history. The emerging field of animal studies can be broadly defined as the study of human-animal relationships throughout history. Erica Fudge, in her monograph Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture, reminds the reader that animals can only be studied through the prism of the recording human eye. All traces of animals are necessarily those recorded by man from observation and interaction1. Fudge notes that for many early modem writers concern about cruelty towards animals was not focused on the suffering of the animals themselves but rather on the belief that a person who is kind to an animal would be kind to a fellow human being as well2. This sentiment is already found in Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who wrote that pity towards animals could provoke pity towards human beings, which would be the ultimate justification of the sentiment3. A history of pets per se is an impossible undertaking because of the very nature of the subject: one cannot trace the animal without the human. However, a history of pet keeping, which focuses on the relationship humans 1 See the introduction in E. Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana, Illinois, 2000), pp. 1-10. Many of these points are expanded in her chapter "A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals' inRepresenting Animals, ed. N. Rothfels (Bloomington, Indiana, 2002), pp. 3-18, where she defends the emerging field of animal studies and again contends that the history of animals is really the history of human attitudes towards animals. 2 Perceiving Animals, chapter two, pp. 34-63, esp. pp. 38-40. 3 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theolgicae (Turin, 1922), vol. 3, pp. 149-150 (Pars II 2a2ae, Quaest. XXV, Art. Ill: 'Utrum etiam creaturae irrationales sint ex charitate diligendae'). 9 have had with companion animals throughout the centuries and across cultures, is a field that can be studied. Joyce Salisbury's The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages offers a broad overview of the history of animals throughout the Middle Ages, and attempts to understand their relationship to humans through analysing the values humans placed on animals, such as the animal as property or as a metaphor. Salisbury argues for a fundamental change in the perception of the boundaries between the human and the animal from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, where a previous clear cut distinction between what was animal and what was human was replaced by more ambiguous borders between the two, which could be crossed over with ease4. One field of inquiry that has received a lot of scholarly attention is animal symbolism, in particular the representation of animals in bestiaries, a genre which combines descriptions of animals with related allegorical lessons5. Other growing fields include the study of material animal culture and the ecological impact of animals on the medieval landscape6 Yet there has as yet been no broad overview of pet keeping in the Middle Ages. Pet keeping is mentioned occasionally in the secondary literature, but there is little analysis of the practice itself. One notable collection of references to pets that does deserve mention is Eileen Power's 4 J.E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London, 1994), esp. pp. 1-11 and 167-178. 5 See for example D. Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge, 1995), W. George and B. Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts : Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London, 1991). F. McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill, 1962), R. Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud, 1998) and D. Hassig, ed., The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York, 1999). 6 See A.G. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006) and A. G. Pluskowski, ed. Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages (Oxford, in press). 10 Medieval English Nunneries. Her work even includes an appendix of convent pets in literature7. Some works on social and cultural history, especially those focusing on the household and leisure, occasionally refers to the practice of pet keeping8. For the early modem period there is more scholarly literature on the subject, and P. Reuterwaerd's article 'The Dog in the Humanist's Study7 is a particularly important contribution. It deals with the symbolism of pet dogs in humanist literature and art. Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 argues for a change in the treatment of animals in the Modem period, asserting that pet keeping was not a generally established practice until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the 'middle class household'. Thomas does believe that pet keeping existed in the Middle Ages and associates it with the 'well-to-do' and those in monastic orders. The present study aims to give greater precision to the correlation between pet keeping and status.