shaggygod.proboards.com/thread/860/recommended-literature The Bear: History of a Fallen King by Michel Pastoureau, George Holoch
The Bear: History of a Fallen King (review)
Irven M. Resnick
From: The Catholic Historical Review
Volume 98, Number 3, July 2012
pp. 528-529 | 10.1353/cat.2012.0188
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Michel Pastoureau’s The Bear: History of a Fallen King is a fascinating cultural history, but one that seems to come up short. In part I, Pastoureau points to a lost communion between man and bear, such that “ancient peoples in the Paleolithic considered the bear a creature apart” (p. 25) and elevated the bear to become a totemic animal. Later, Greco-Roman, Celtic, and Germanic mythologies evidence a cult of the bear and provide enduring tales of metamorphoses of human into bear; of protective she-bears that nurse human infants; and of monstrous love, sometimes fertile, between a human female and a bear. Although the bear was venerated in early-medieval culture for its strength, its close resemblance to man and its allegedly insatiable sexual appetite prepared the foundation for a more violent confrontation with ecclesiastical authority. Since the theology of the Church depended on man’s uniqueness and superiority to animals, precisely because the bear so nearly resembled man, Pastoureau contends, churchmen sought to suppress rites or festivals that included the bear: Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, condemned “vile games with the bear” (p. 83); and other bishops, too, condemned festivals in which men dressed as bears or danced with them. Until the end of the Middle Ages churchmen repeated that men should not “play the bear” (p. 83), which entailed not only adopting a bear disguise but also manifesting uncontrollable sexual desire. Thus, the Church “went to war” (p. 89) against the bear, organizing hunts to nearly eliminate European bear populations. It attacked the bear’s legendary strength by depicting it in hagiographical literature as tamed and domesticated by holy men, and it demonized the bear as the embodiment of numerous vices and as the preferred form in which the devil appears. Finally, it humiliated the bear, allowing it to be captured, muzzled, chained, and led from fair to market as an object of amusement. Once the Church “dethroned” the bear as king of the beasts after 1000 AD, it replaced him with the lion—an exotic, distant animal whose symbology could be easily controlled. By the end of the twelfth century, the lion began to replace the bear on armorial bearings and in royal menageries. The bear’s diminished status is best illustrated for Pastoureau in vernacular literature: in the chansons de geste, or in French fabliaux like the Roman de Renart, in which the bear is reduced to a foolish, stupid, clumsy creature.
Although Pastoureau’s study contains abundant fabulous material from medieval bestiaries and vernacular literature to fascinate the historian, this also underscores one of its shortcomings—it ignores challenges from natural philosophy following the introduction of Aristotle’s biology. Although many Scholastic texts do repeat the fantastic claim that bears couple like humans, face to face, they challenge other mythic characteristics. For example, the natural philosopher Albert the Great (d. 1280), in his commentary De animalibus, remarks that the bear is not very lustful (parum luxurians; DA 7.3.3.157). To the myth that the she-bear gives birth to an unformed cub and then brings it to life by licking it, Albert replies “none of this is true at all.” (DA 7.3.3.159) Although Alexander Neckam (d. 1217) does accept this myth, he does not attribute it, as Pastoreaux suggests was common, to the she-bear’s unsurpassing lust but rather to the bear’s humoral complexion, which causes the cotillidones that bind the fetus to the womb to rend, resulting in premature birth. (De naturis rerum, 2.131)
Nevertheless, The Bear contains much that will inform and entertain.
muse.jhu.edu/article/482617 The History of a Fallen King
By JONATHAN SUMPTION
Relations between man and the animal world have a complex history, with attitudes shifting between intimacy, awe and exploitation. Animals have been objects of fear and worship. Over the centuries, they have provided humans with food, protection, companionship and entertainment. More recently, hygiene, convention and industrialization have combined to distance mankind from the natural world. Animals have become aliens, even when they live in our houses, provoking in turns the irrational disgust and anthropomorphic sentimentality that we reserve for beings that we do not care to understand.
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Probst - ullstein bild / Granger Collection
The coat of arms of Greenland.
Michel Pastoureau is a highly original French cultural historian, a medievalist by training, who has made his reputation by writing about things that no one realized had a history. He has written the history of colors (black, blue, stripes). He has written the history of animals (pigs, now bears). Or, rather, he has written about man's attitudes toward these things. The common theme in his work has been mankind's habit of investing the nonhuman world with two layers of meaning, the one literal and the other symbolic.
Mr. Pastoureau came to his subjects not, like most observers, through psychology but through the study of heraldry. Heraldry can be a tedious occupation, a bit like the worst kind of train-spotting or stamp-collecting. But in Mr. Pastoureau's hands, the symbolic images represented by colors, patterns and animal images open windows into the eccentricities and fancies of men.
The Bear
By Michel Pastoureau
Harvard, 343 pages, $29.95
The theme of "The Bear" is characteristic of its author. As humans become more powerful and more knowledgeable, Mr. Pastoureau argues, they come to devalue the animal world, to discard what their ancestors had respected and venerated. The brown bear is an extreme example of this melancholy decline. Physically the largest and strongest animal indigenous to Europe, the bear was once seen as the king of animal world, just as the African lion is now. Bear pelts were worn to show off a man's strength. Collections of legends were full of heroic encounters between man and bear, fought on almost equal terms.
Early cave paintings and grave finds suggest that, among prehistoric communities, the gods were thought to appear in the form of bears. As with most pantheons, worship was born of fear. Fear of bears in early Europe was increased by myths, many with a strong sexual element. Bears were thought of as emblems of lust, abnormally potent, capable of raping women and siring a cross-bred race of heroes. "The border between human and animal," Mr. Pastoreau notes, "was in this instance much more uncertain that the one described by monotheistic religions."
Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource
Byzantine ivory diptych of circus bears.
Like many primitive religious beliefs, these persisted well into the Christian era, surviving side by side with the orthodoxies of the Christian church. Hence came the abiding hatred of the medieval church for bears. St. Augustine of Hippo knew little or nothing about them. But he had read his Pliny and, building on the fables of the great Roman naturalist, bequeathed to the medieval centuries the standard Christian image of the bear: malicious, lewd, destructive, predatory. Ursus diabolus est: "The bear is Satan," he wrote. Saints and hermits were frequently described as taming bears, and reducing them to menial servants, in order to show the faithful how the power of God could exorcise the Devil and reduce him to harmless submission.
But killing bears was equally worthy, as well as easier for ordinary mortals. Bears were ruthlessly hunted down, although they posed no threat to human communities and their meat was distinctly unappetizing. As a result, bears rapidly disappeared from much of western Europe. At the end of the eighth century, the Emperor Charlemagne organized at least two great bear-hunts in central Europe that resulted in the slaughter of several thousand bears.
First-century Roman mosaic of a wounded bear;
By the 13th century, reports of bear sightings become rare in Europe, as bears retreated to the sparsely populated mountain regions. In the eyes of men, bears ceased to be an object of fear and became a source of entertainment. Itinerant bear-tamers paraded their dancing bears at markets. Kings presented one another with bears to stock their menageries. In 1251, a polar bear arrived in London as a gift from the king of Norway to Henry III of England. According to a chronicler, it was called Piscator (Fisherman), was bathed daily in the Thames River and had its own keeper. Muzzled and chained to avoid accidents, it was regarded as a great spectacle by contemporary Englishmen.
As long as men stood in awe of the world of animals, the bear could still arouse respect, especially in the wild. At the end of the 14th century, a duke of Orleans and his friends could still dress up in bear costumes to inspire terror at fancy dress parties. But by the 16th century, the bear's fearsome image was gone. Its strength and potency were forgotten. Noblemen no longer put bears on their coats of arms, and turned to lions instead. Even the traditional association of bears with the Devil had faded away, as smaller beasts like goats, bats and owls displaced them.
Topham / National News / The Image Works
Paddington Bear.
Our own age has witnessed the ultimate humiliation of the bear. A handful of bears survive in Europe, mostly in the Pyrenees. There are many more in North America, but outside the national parks they too are well on the way to extinction. So far as the bear retains any emblematic status among humans, it is as a toy, symbolic of little more than dumb clumsiness. Winnie the Pooh, in A.A. Milne's fable for children, was a "bear of very little brain," forever being put right by his companion, a donkey if you please. In this, poor Winnie was characteristic of his race. Yogi Bear, another lovable idiot, is not very different. From the king of the mountains and forests to the cloying sweetness of the Teddy Bear, in a millennium. How are the mighty fallen.
—Mr. Sumption, a British barrister, is the author of "The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God." The third volume of his history of the Hundred Years War is "Divided Houses" (2009).