In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

By Peggy Mccracken

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226459080

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IN THE SKIN OF A BEAST

IN THE SKIN OF A BEAST

Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

PEGGY MCCRACKEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45892-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45908-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226459080.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Michigan toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCracken, Peggy, author.

Title: In the skin of a beast : sovereignty and animality in medieval France / Peggy McCracken.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016044826| ISBN 9780226458922 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226459080 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: French literature—To 1500—History and criticism. | Hides and skins in literature. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Sovereignty in literature. | Hides and skins—Symbolic aspects—France—History. | Animals—Symbolic aspects—France—History. | Hides and skins—Political aspects—France—History. | Human-animal relationships—Political aspects—France—History.

Classification: LCC PQ155.H43 M33 2017 | DDC 840.9/001—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044826

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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

COLOR PLATES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been fun to write because a lot of people were willing to talk with me about it, and it is a pleasure to thank some of my many generous readers and interlocutors here. First and foremost, heartfelt thanks to Kathryn Babayan, Artemis Leontis, Yopie Prins, and Elizabeth Wingrove, fellow members of the world’s greatest writing group. Kathryn, Artemis, Yopie, and Liz read every word between these covers at least twice; they challenged me to think harder and better, and their advice improved my book immeasurably. Valerie Traub read the entire manuscript with her characteristic rigor and generosity, and she helped me to make my argument sharper and more precise. Don Herzog also read the whole thing as I was writing and pushed me to think more carefully about sovereignty. Jennifer Nelson’s scrutiny of my final manuscript saved me from several errors and helped me think further about my claims. Virginie Greene and Rebecca Zorach read a rough mapping of my project for the Press and gave me advice that helped to shape it. William Burgwinkle and Simon Gaunt were Press readers for the final manuscript and I am grateful to both for valued feedback and some important corrections. Lauren Benjamin, Clara Bosak-Schroeder, Zeynep Gürsel, Adrienne Jacaruso, Sarah Linwick, and Eliza Mathie all read chapter drafts and offered patient and welcome advice. Geneviève Creedon has long been a crucial interlocutor in animal studies.

Catherine Brown, Gillian Feeley-Harnick, Simon Gaunt, Miranda Griffin, Sarah Kay, Elizabeth Morrison, Eleonora Stoppino, and Valerie Traub suggested ideas that became important for my analysis. E. Jane Burns inspired my thinking about snake women. Sarah Kay and I have been working in tandem on medieval animals over the past few years and it has been valuable and fun to share questions and insights. Sharon Kinoshita, Catherine Sanok, and Zrinka Stahuljak have been my interlocutors throughout, and conversations with many other colleagues over many years have shaped my thinking. In addition to those mentioned above, I thank Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Catherine Cassel, Alison Cornish, Susan Crane, Noah Guynn, George Hoffmann, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Karla Mallette, Deborah McGrady, Matthias Meyer, Helen Solterer, and Karl Steel.

For more than two decades, Karma Lochrie, James A. Schultz, and I have shared conversations and celebrations, shoe shopping and opera, and I am ever grateful for their friendship as well as for the willingness of Doug Anderson, Mitch Matsey, and Elizabeth Cure to join in. Thanks also to Jim for help with MHG. Gardening, hiking, traveling, shared dinners, and well-earned happy hours with Valerie Traub and Brenda Marshall are cherished parts of my life. Albert and Pauline McCracken, Tricia Clement, Nancy McCracken, and Charles McCracken make North Carolina still feel like home. On my main home front, Doug Anderson listened to my ideas, sent me references to weird animal stories in the news, organized trips, baked bread, and generally made my life very happy while I was writing this book. Sprocket didn’t help at all, but she did occasionally check on my progress.

I had the great good fortune to complete part of this book at the Getty Research Institute; I am immensely grateful to the GRI for the idyllic working conditions, and to Elizabeth Morrison for her generosity and expertise. Thanks also to Daniel Spaulding for crucial research assistance. I also wish to acknowledge with gratitude a generous publication subsidy from the University of Michigan that made the color plates possible. Many thanks to my editor Randolph Petilos for his encouragement and enthusiasm for this project.

All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

*

Part of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier version in "Skin and Sovereignty in Guillaume de Palerne," Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 24 (2012): 361–75. Parts of chapter 5 appeared in earlier versions as Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy, in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 39–64; and as "The Wild Man and His Kin in Tristan de Nanteuil," in L’homme et l’animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe-XVe s.)/Human and Animal in Medieval France (12th–15th c.), ed. Irène Fabri-Tehranchi and Anna Russakoff (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2014), 23–42.

Introduction

It is surely fair to say that in the stratified society of medieval Europe, one thing that every person had in common was dominion over animals. Even those who had little political or social agency probably felt that they were different from beasts. Daily experience as well as theological reasoning taught that in the natural hierarchy of the world, humans should be the masters of animals, following God’s decree in Genesis that man should have dominion over all living things. Medieval fictional narratives endorse this view, but they also challenge it, particularly in representations of encounters between humans and animals. My argument in this book is that literary texts use human-animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others. When animals and humans meet, sovereignty comes to the fore.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s oft-repeated phrase, animals are good to think; the animal world suggests a mode of thought, he tells us.¹ In the Middle Ages, animals are taken as a mode of thought in several different kinds of discourse. According to Christian theology, the natural world reflects and instructs on divine truth and, by extension, on the divinely ordained hierarchies among living beings. As part of the natural world, animals, too, reflect and instruct.² In their subjection to human mastery, for example, they recognize the natural superiority of humans, and—so the logic goes—dominance hierarchies among animals explain how some persons can licitly exercise power over others.³ Animal behavior is taken as exemplary for humans in literary as well as theological texts. Fables anthropomorphize animals to offer moral lessons for people, and bestiaries translate the natural qualities and habits of animals into demonstrations of Christian truth. But portrayals of animals in medieval literature extend well beyond these didactic genres. Latin beast poetry includes a range of forms—animal satires, dream visions, novels, and epics—and in medieval French texts, my primary focus, animals appear as protagonists in romance narratives about companion animals, in saints’ lives where animals respond to holy authority, in moralizing poems where animals speak, and in beast fables, like Le roman de Renart (The Romance of Renart), where animals live in a society organized according to human political and social structures.⁴

In this popular compilation of stories about Renart the fox, composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the lion King Noble rules over a menagerie of animal subjects. King Noble’s name may reference the aristocratic lineage that grounds his authority, and he is often represented with the accouterments of royal status. In plate 1, for example, from a fourteenth-century manuscript, he sits on a throne wearing a crown and holding a scepter. This monarch assumes a rather debonair pose: his legs are crossed, his left paw posed on his knee, and he looks upward in a contemplative gaze. Gesturing with his right hand, he seems to address the animals assembled before him. A fox, a goat, a rabbit, a stag, and an ass stand in front of the king as though summoned, and in the foreground, the fox raises a paw, perhaps to address the sovereign lion. In Le roman de Renart, animality meets sovereignty in the parodic use of animals to describe human political structures and the contests for power that take place within those structures.

Animals stand in for people in Le roman de Renart. Even though King Noble may retain characteristics of his animal identity, the lion king is like a human sovereign and he rules over other animal subjects whose desires and motivations are like those of human subjects. But when we move beyond the parodic anthropomorphism of the lion king and his court to examine relations of dominion more broadly, we find that sovereign relations are particularly evident in literary representations of human-animal interactions. The legitimacy of dominion and sovereignty over others is debated in encounters between humans and animals in which relations of mastery and submission are at stake.

Medieval people learned what it meant to be under the authority of others and to have authority over others from their own experiences, of course, but also from a variety of media, including literature.⁵ In the Middle Ages, political thought is everywhere and it invades all genres, one historian observes, and medieval writers puzzled over the nature of political order—and whether political order was part of nature—in literary texts as well as in scholarly treatises.⁶ Literary texts contribute to an understanding of medieval political theory by imagining sovereign relations in terms of animal-human relationships defined by exploitation, acquiescence, affection, and protection.

My inquiry into such representations is shaped by the persistence of the vocabulary of sovereignty in descriptions of encounters between humans and animals. Literary representations assume the superiority of humans over animals, but they also question the origins and the stability of such a hierarchy; they represent the benefits of contractual governance and also debate the desirability of the constraints it imposes; they identify the sovereign as a noble human, but also suggest the contingency of this identity. The literary texts I examine here reveal that animals are good to think because they both invite and disrupt ideas about natural relations of dominion and power. However, animals are not merely symbols in medieval narratives. Animals have a history, and even a point of view, and scholars in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies have insisted that inquiry into representations of nonhuman creatures should take into account animals’ own experiences, affects, and ways of being in the world.⁷ In medieval studies, the critical understanding of animals as living creatures rather than merely symbolic figures was inaugurated by Joyce Salisbury’s 1994 book, The Beast Within, a work that studies animals as property, food, and sexual objects, and explores their relationships to human social worlds.⁸ More recently Karl Steel has studied animal-human relations in medieval literary texts to argue that the human domination of animals and the violence that secures it are central to medieval understandings of the distinctiveness of human identity.⁹ Even more recently, Susan Crane has shifted attention from the violent exploitation of animals to the many ways in which medieval texts describe a proximity with animal being that may counter the narrative of human uniqueness and human superiority over the nonhuman animal.¹⁰ In my own approach to medieval animals I am, like Steel, interested in representations of human dominion over animals and, like Crane, I will explore literary representations of encounters between human and nonhuman animals. However, I focus not on descriptions of human-animal difference in reiterations of the violence that guarantees animal submission, nor on the ways texts may question human superiority over the animal. Instead, I argue that literary representations of encounters between animals and humans figure an interrogation of the forms of legitimate dominion and sovereignty over others, both human dominion over nonhuman animals and the power of some humans over others. I am, then, valorizing the symbolic meaning of animals in literary texts, but I also insist on the use of actual animals, and especially the use of their skins, in displays of human power relations.

Medieval Sovereignty

To speak of sovereignty in the Middle Ages risks confusing medieval political structures with modern forms of power and particularly with modern notions of state sovereignty. As historian Susan Reynolds cautions: No medieval ruler . . . was sovereign in the way that later theorists of the sovereign state or sovereign nation-state would require.¹¹ We know that the notion of a sovereign nation-state does not apply to the territorial governments of the Middle Ages, but does the notion of sovereignty depend on a recognition of the state? Is there a state in the Middle Ages? Historians differ on this question. The Latin term status does not have the connotations of the modern term state before the fifteenth century, and it is not until the eighteenth century that the state becomes what Quentin Skinner calls the the master noun of political argument.¹² The notion of the state sets conceptual booby-traps for the unwary historian, according to Rees Davies, because it privileges one kind of authority—kingship or the state—over other sources of authority and power. Davies describes what he calls the historian’s dilemma: how to write about a past society using its language and concepts without becoming incomprehensible to a current audience, but also how to employ current concepts and vocabulary without distorting the past.¹³ Some scholars are reluctant to use state at all because the term may imply the ideology, constitution, and technology associated with the modern state, but for others, the lack of a medieval term for the state does not mean that it did not exist in the Middle Ages.¹⁴ In Jean-Philippe Genêt’s summary, the state emerged between 1280 and 1360 when Western rulers, engaged in constant wars, called on those living in their lands to contribute service and goods to the protection of the territory and the institution of new modes of taxation upended feudal social hierarchies and practices.¹⁵ Bernard Guenée insists that we can speak of a state once the population of a limited area is subject to government, and Reynolds uses the notion of an organization of human society within a more or less fixed area in which the ruler or governing body more or less successfully controls the legitimate use of physical force.¹⁶ Reynolds further argues that the absence of the word state in its modern senses from medieval writings about politics does not mean that their authors had no concept of the state: Those who considered problems about limiting the power of rulers, or about their relation to law or to the Pope or each other, were concerned with something like what we might call problems of the state and its sovereignty.¹⁷

But state-like practices were not the only, or even the normative, forms of rule in medieval Europe. Governance took the form of flexible justice, mercy and anger, gifts, bribes, and compromises, tacit understandings, rewards, in John Watts’s formulation. Rather than seeing through the lens of a single form of power—the rising nation-state—Watts suggests that we recognize the interaction of a multiplicity of valid and effective power forms and power types.¹⁸ Davies uses the notion of lordship (dominium in Latin, seigneurie in Old French) to describe such distributed power relations, and he stresses the variety of such relationships in medieval Europe as well as what I would call their intimacy: power was described and structured on the model of familial or personal relationships.¹⁹ Yet during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, proliferating claims to lordship, land, and power over others were enacted not, or not only, through affective bonds but also through violence. During this period, castles, knights, and fiefs held by knights proliferated in many regions of France; each castle formed a lordship, and these lords (domini) sought to extend their fiefs through the domination of peasants. This feudal revolution transformed power relations by putting thousands of peasants under the lordship of untitled masters.²⁰

In this early period, men could achieve lordship without being nobly born, but over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, birth and family came increasingly to be seen as what qualified one person to dominate another, and kings were the most obvious beneficiaries of the assimilation of nobility to lordship. As people in need turned to the great nobles and ultimately the king, regardless of their specific commitments of dependence, the authority of the monarch was strengthened and lesser lordships weakened.²¹ Lordship became increasingly associated with genealogy and lineage, but even as nobility became a legitimating qualification for authority over others, personal relationships continued to support and articulate the exercise of power, even for kings.²²

When they describe political relations, medieval authors use words like dominium, jurisdictio, maestas, and regimen to indicate dominion or lordship over others; in Old French, we find seigneurie and maistrie.²³ Historian Brian Tierney insists on the importance of jurisdictio (jurisdiction), used as synonym for maiestas, or sovereignty, in the later Middle Ages. Tierney notes that some historians question whether such a notion of sovereignty is appropriate for medieval political relations, and he acknowledges that it is not much in evidence in early feudal society, where the right to govern was confused with other rights and powers, and rulership was based on personal loyalty to a lord, not on a collective obligation to a public ruling office.²⁴ But with the revival of Roman and canon law in the twelfth century, Tierney argues, the doctrine of sovereignty, or supreme jurisdiction, was widely understood as a power of ruling conceptually separate from the notion of personal authority.²⁵ In the thirteenth century, Philippe de Beaumanoir described the king as soverain over all the barons and claimed that whatever pleases the prince should be held as law.²⁶ The sovereign—the pope or the medieval king—was not subject to judgment by his subjects because they had not conferred the office on him: the king was above the law.²⁷ The sovereign exception was articulated in several ways by medieval thinkers, who grappled with the relationship of the king to the law in sometimes surprising ways. Alain Boureau has shown, for example, that explanations of the Immaculate Conception structured articulations of the sovereign exception in the fourteenth century, and in chapter 3, I argue that the notion is explored through animal embodiment in representations of sovereigns in animal skins.²⁸

Even as some discourses described the sovereign as above the law, medieval writers still debated consent to be ruled. From the thirteenth century on, medieval jurists and scholars questioned how people came to be bound by obligation and to be unfree, and such questioning was contextualized by the pervasive forms of contractual and corporate social organization in medieval society.²⁹ The development of a notion of sovereign power was then accompanied by debates about consent to be ruled.³⁰ Considerations of contractual rule and the consent to be governed are focal points for the interrogation of sovereignty in medieval Europe (and well represented in literary texts, as I argue in chapter 2).

If the notion of sovereignty can seem foreign to medieval political structures, that is in part because of historiographical traditions of periodization, as Kathleen Davis has pointed out in her analysis of the relationship between what she calls "the historiographical becoming-feudal" of the Middle Ages and the formation of political concepts considered central to modern politics.³¹ Davis argues that periodization itself functions as a sovereign decision, cutting off the feudal Middle Ages from the alignment of the secular, the modern, and the sovereign.³² More recently, Kathleen Biddick has argued for the importance of medieval literary and historical texts and archives for an understanding of biopolitical sovereignty, exploring medieval texts alongside modern theoretical claims about sovereignty and modernity.³³ These studies address the historian’s dilemma of how to employ current concepts and vocabulary without distorting the past by revisiting the periodization that defines some concepts as properly medieval and others as properly modern.³⁴

But this is not to say that all medieval relations of dominion and power over others are sovereign relations if, to use an abstract definition, sovereignty is the claim to be the ultimate political authority, subject to no higher power as regards the making and enforcing of political decisions.³⁵ Layers of obligation and authority define medieval political structures, and any ruler is subject to a higher power, since even the most powerful king is subject to God. Literary texts fully recognize—and debate—this complexity. They represent the multiple ways in which obligation is shared among lords and vassals in medieval culture, but they also imagine sovereign figures that claim ultimate political authority. In what follows, I use sovereignty to describe such figures and the relations of power in which they are imbricated. I also use sovereignty to insist on the coincidence of modern theoretical considerations of sovereign relations and medieval literary texts. Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Giorgio Agamben are among my interlocutors; the work of these theorists makes visible some of the imaginative and ideological workings of medieval texts, even as the medieval texts modify or revise some of the theoretical models.³⁶

Sovereignty and Animality

As part of the natural world, animals participate in the natural hierarchy of creation. Their own social organization demonstrates this order for medieval scholars, and I mentioned above that dominance hierarchies among animals were taken to explain how some people could licitly exercise power over others.³⁷ Such interpretations read nature as a source of knowledge about God’s design for the world; relationships among animals illustrate divine truths for humans.³⁸ Animals are also natural models for human social relations in literary texts like bestiaries and fables which originate in antiquity but are rewritten in both Latin and vernacular languages to show that animal behavior reveals Christian truths and morality. These didactic texts also use relationships among animals to offer lessons about sovereign relations among humans, and I explore such lessons in chapter 2, but a more vivid demonstration of the natural hierarchy of God’s creation was seen in human dominion over animals, sanctioned by God in Genesis and taken as a model for relations among humans in a variety of medieval discourses.

The Genesis story is a touchstone of my analysis, not only because it defines human authority over the natural world but also because medieval authors used the story to debate the extent to which human dominion over animals is a model for human sovereignty over other humans. Some medieval rewritings of the Genesis story trouble this model, representing the contested nature of human sovereignty over animals after the Fall. They debate postlapsarian relations of authority and power over animals, and they imagine models of sovereignty shared among humans and between humans and nonhuman creatures.³⁹

My analysis moves among texts and images composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and focuses on vernacular bibles and biblical commentary, fictional narratives, moralizing poems, and some of the manuscript illuminations that accompany these texts. My goal is not to trace an evolution or to read literary texts and images in relation to particular historical events or developments, but rather to insist on the repetition of motifs or characterizations that put animals and humans into contact around questions of mastery, dominion, or sovereignty. I examine a collection of narratives in which animal skin is taken as a material representation of human sovereignty in symbolic displays of power; another set of texts describes the sociability of the wolf and imagines the wolf’s desire for human companionship and care. I read several narratives that represent the use of animal images to publicize human identity in heraldic insignia and of animal skin as a disguise. In another group of stories, women and snakes meet and converge in representations of self-sovereign claims to territory and noble status. Finally, I explore narratives about wild men, situated at the boundary between the human and the animal. My claim is that the repetition of motifs across different texts—the use of animal skin, the domestication of the ravening wolf, the merging of woman and snake, and the emergence of the human man from an animal-like existence—suggests that the encounter between human and animal is good to think, in Lévi-Strauss’s formulation, and that such encounters are good to think because they allow for a thinking about sovereign relations.

Intimacy and affect come to the fore in these encounters. Medieval narratives may use animals and figures of animality to represent adversity and disputed dominion, but in the texts I examine, human-animal encounters are also described in terms of intimacy and affection. The sovereign protection of animals and other humans is characterized by care, and even love; a mirroring gaze on an animal recognizes the self-sovereign subject; and shared intimacy with animals redefines human kinship structures. It is perhaps not surprising that political relationships might be described as affective bonds, since feudal allegiance is conventionally described in terms of love for a lord, but when animals come into view, the affective relationships that coincide with dependency and mastery are indexed to perceptions of natural affinities and alliances. That is, affective relations between humans and animals are defined with respect to the natural capacities and desires of animal subjects, grounded in notions of human ability and animal inability.

Throughout this study, I argue that human dominion over the natural world—represented in many of the texts I examine as mastery over animals—figures other hierarchies and other power relations, but this is not to say