Excerpts from the cultural history of the toad

In the middle of the thirteenth century, Thomas de Cantimpré (1201-72) composed an encyclopedic work titled Liber de Natura Rerum, in which he provided an overview of animals, trees, stones, and parts of the human body, to mention only a few. The third book of his work, only four pages long in the 1973 edition, Thomas dedicated to the monstrous humans of the east, "De monstruosis hominibus orientis". For much of this material he draws on Pliny, although his debt to multiple sources is indicated by the work's subtitle "secundum diversos philosophos", or "according to several philosophers".

One of these monstrous nations of the east is very briefly, but fascinatingly described by Thomas and disturbingly depicted in the illumination below. The name of this nation is not provided, and all Thomas states is the following:

In quadam regione, ut dicit Iacobus, cum bufonibus nascuntur pueri. Si quis autem sine bufone nascatur, mater eius tanquam adultera iudicatur et, que ab alienigena conceperit, a marito suo repudiatur.

In which region [the mountains of India], so says Jacobus, children are born together with a toad. But if it is born without a toad, its mother is judged to be an adulteress and, as she has conceived with another, is repudiated by her husband.

(My translation.)

Woman giving birth to a toad and a baby 
Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.45v, Thomas de Cantimpré, De Natura Rerum, c.1290, Paris (Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

In the medieval imagination there were many nations on the peripheries of the world who were deemed monstrous, either by physical attributes or by differing from the beholders - European Catholic Christians - through cultural practices. The case of the women of the Indian mountain giving birth to toads, we are here dealing with a case straddling both those form of monstrosity, which shows that the distinction between cultural and physical monstrosity might be more academic than medieval, and not very accurate.

In any case, the fact that the women of this anonymous nation were believed to engender toads illustrate their monstrosity in two ways. In part this has to do with the fact that we are dealing with a birth that goes against nature. However, part of the monstrosity might also be said to come from the animal being born, namely the toad. Thomas de Cantimpré elaborates on this animal himself in book 9, on vermin, where the toad is described as venomous, and having a pestilential appearance.

Another instance of the toad being associated with evil comes from a Norwegian altar front dated to c.1300, currently on permanent exhibition in Bergen Museum. The altar front comes from Nedstryn in Western Norway, and depicts the recapture of the Holy Cross by Heraclius from the Persians in 628. The story appears to have been popular in Western Europe, and was widely transmitted through its place in Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine, but was also popular before this. The recapture of the Holy Cross was the occasion for the feast-day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, celebrated 14th of September.

The main antagonist of the drama, as it was portrayed in the various Christian renditions, was the Persian king Chosroes who had himself worshipped as a god, and whose evil power was confronted by Emperor Heraclius. In the altar front from Nedstryn, the Persian army is recognizable from the Christians by their coat-of-arms. The Christians led by Heraclius carry the cross on their shields, while the Persians carry the black toad, strongly resembling the toad being born of the woman in the Indian mountains depicted above. The use of the toad as the Persian coat-of-arms highlights the evil connotations of the toad, since it became the symbol for those who desecrated the cross of Christ by carrying it to Persia. Consequently, the victory of the Christians is also shown by the sword of Heraclius cleaving the toad in two during the fight against the Persian champion.

The Persians capture the Holy Cross
Detail from the Nedstryn altar front

Courtesy of kunsthistorie.com, photograph by Frode Inge Helland

Heraclius defeats the Persian champion

Detail from the Nedstryn altar front

Courtesy of kunsthistorie.com, photograph by Frode Inge Helland

Pikes, Thomas de Cantimpré and Ted Hughes

 

As can sometimes be seen on this blog, I'm very fond of juxtaposing medieval and modern cultural expression, be it folklore, literature, art, music or a range of other things. In this blogpost I'm taking a quick glance at the pike, nicely illustrated in Thomas de Cantimpré's book De Natura Rerum. As we see from this folio, the pike is called "esox". In a twelfth-century bestiary, Cambridge University Library II.4.26, edited and translated by T. H. White, however, it has been named "lupis". As White himself suggests in a footnote, this is probably a misspelling of "lucius", as the pike is known as "esox lucius". The bestiary's description of the pike goes as follows.

His wolfish greed has given the name of LUPIS to the Pike, and it is difficult to catch him. When he is encircled by the net, they say that he ploughs up the sand with his tai and thus, lying hidden, manages to escape the meshes.
- Anonymous, The Book of Beasts, edited and translated by T. H. White, Dover Editions, 2015: 202-03

Pike chasing sturgeon

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.126, De Natura Rerum, Thomas de Cantimpré, book 7, c.1290 (Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

As a modern counterpoint to this description, I give you Ted Hughes' famous poem from his collection Lupercal (1960). The following text is taken from poetryarchive.org.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads -
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them -
Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb -

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks -
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them -

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.

The Chill of the Hunt - hunting tips from the classical and medieval peripheries

In a previous blogpost I talked about the appearances of bearded women on the peripheries of the medieval world, and I lingered a bit on their mention in the encyclopedia De Natura Rerum, compiled by Thomas de Cantimpré (d.1272). This encyclopedia is a treasure-trove of medieval knowledge, and a great window into how the world was understood by the learned of the Christian west. One recurring feature in the learned litereature of the Middle Ages is of course the weirdness of the world's peripheries, the monsters and hominids of the far north and far east, perhaps best known to modern readers through Marco Polo's Il Millione or The Travels of John Mandeville. This weird world in earth's remote corners - figuratively speaking, because as we know, people in the Middle Ages did NOT believe the world was flat (see here, and here) - was a source of wonder to lay and learned alike, and make great reading even today.

One of the many delightful entries in Thomas de Cantimpré's De Natura Rerum deals with how the elephant is hunted, as shown by the illumination below. It was believed in the Middle Ages that the elephant had no knees and could therefore not bend down or lie down when sleeping. To make up for this defect, it was said, elephants spend their nights leaning against a tree where they slept. To hunt the elephant, therefore, you had only to chop down the tree, either before the elephant went to bed or while he was sleeping (although in the illumination below he seems to be wide awake). When the tree was sawed in two, the elephant would have no support, lose balance and fall helplessly to ground where he could be killed. 

Elephants hunted by saw
Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.051v, De Rerum Natura, Thomas Cantimpre, c.1290
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

This belief in the jointless animal sleeping against a tree is a very old one, and the perhaps most famous instance is perhaps the description of the moose in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, which is also said to be hunted by the same method: Hunters follow the tracks to the moose's sleeping-tree, and when this has been found they undermine the roots or cut into the tree so that it can't support the weight of the mighty moose.

The two motifs are most likely connected, but how I do not know. Both these texts, however, have that in common that their respective authors are writing about their peripheries. Caesar wrote about the Gaul and Germania, a transalpine world which he had visited and in which he had held battle, but about whose nature and history he was ignorant and had to rely on local stories and tales, some no doubt exaggerated or invented, perhaps knowingly pulling the Roman imperator's leg while laughing behind his back.

When Thomas de Cantimpré applies this motif to his encyclopedia, he becomes part of a long tradition, repeating only what is well known about elephants in learned circles, supported by classical authority and the conviction of repetition rather than any eye-witness stories. Few learned men in the Middle Ages had ever seen an elephant, but of Thomas had seen one, he might have changed his mind about its appearance, as did his contemporary Matthew Paris, when he saw the elephant of Henry III in the Tower of London.

Where the Wild Women Are - bearded women in medieval geography

To the human mind, faraway places have always held a vague promise of wonder. In the Middle Ages, these places were predominantly located in the east and the north, places were few of their own had gone and places of which the ancient authorities spoke of with enchanting but incredible certainty. Writers of natural history from Herodotus to Pliny the Elder included in their works great narratives of the marvels of the east and the north, the homes of wild peoples and monstrous races. The fictitious Letter To Aristotle, purportedly written by Alexander to his old tutor, and other accounts of the Macedonian conqueror captivated the medieval imagination and achieved a wide dissemination in languages as diverse as Georgian, Greek, Old Norse, Old English and Old French.

Several writers throughout the medieval centuries dealt with the marvels of the world's periphery, and it was not only the east but also the north which served as the setting for tales about strange and weird creatures and phenomena. When these stories were set in the north, they often received an additional dimension by reference to the passage in Jeremiah 1:14 where the Lord says to His prophet that from the North, evil will break out. In a future blogpost I hope to expand more on this.

For the time being, however, I simply want to address the appearance of bearded women in the medieval periphery as described by two medieval writers, Thomas de Cantimpré (1201-72) and Adam of Bremen (fl. c.1070). 

Bearded women in conversation
Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.045, Opus de Natura Rerum, Thomas Cantimpre, c.1290
Courtesy of Enluminures.cultures.fr

Among the many wonders of the east, we find a selection of wondrous and often monstrous women. The most famous are probably the amazons whose masculine ferocity had troubled male minds since the time of Homer. There were also others, and first I will present some which are found in Thomas de Cantimpré's magnificent encyclopedia Opus de Natura Rerum.

Thomas de Cantimpré was born in modern-day Belgium and received his education at Liége and later at Cantimpré. He entered the Dominican order in 1232 at Louvain and the next year he went to Cologne where he went to study under Albertus Magnus. After a while in Cologne, he went to Paris. Thomas was a very learned man, and he wrote a big encyclopedia of the known world which was called Opus de Natura Rerum. One section of this work - in which the marvels of Creation are expounded - is dedicated to the monstrous races of the east. It is in this section we find the mention of the bearded women, among a number of other typical marvels of the eastern periphery, such as women with infected glands and women giving birth to toads.

Women with inflamed glands

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.045, Opus de Natura Rerum, Thomas Cantimpre, c.1290

Courtesy of Enluminures.cultures.fr

Woman giving birth to a toad

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.045, Opus de Natura Rerum, Thomas Cantimpre, c.1290

Courtesy of Enluminures.cultures.fr

The appearance of these weird and, perhaps most importantly, subversive women are part of a monstrous kaleidoscope through which the east is seen as a kind of mirror of the west, and its peoples are held up as a way of emphasising the normalcy of the Christian world. The east is a world of heathendom, of monstrosity and of women who transgress the natural order by growing beards or giving birth to amphibious creatures.

We also see women inhabiting the same role in Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, written in the 1070s. The fourth part of this history deals with the faraway north, a description of the northern islands, i.e. Scandinavia, Greenland and Iceland. Adam himself was never north of Denmark, but received his information at the court of the Danish king Svein Estridsson. However, although Adam might have heard a great deal of fantastical tales about Norway in Denmark, parts of his description probably owes to commonplace descriptions of the wild periphery.

This can be seen for instance in his presentation of the women of Norway, chapter 30 (my translation):

In the wildest mountains which are there [in Northern Norway] we hear about women who are bearded, and men who hide in the forest and rarely are seen. 

This is part of a lengthy exposition of the weirdness of the north, which includes references to anthropophagi, oxen that live in the sea, white bears and islands inhabited by cyclops, several of which we also find in Thomas de Cantrimpré's Opus de Natura Rerum. Small wonder, since these are features of the imagined periphery, a place of contrariness whose topography rests on centuries of writings of natural history.

Anthropophagi and cyclops

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.045, Opus de Natura Rerum, Thomas Cantimpre, c.1290

Courtesy of Enluminures.cultures.fr