THE ORIGINAL TALE OF THE SPARROW-HAWK (original) (raw)
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The crane appears in one fabliau, Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue, a stereotypical fabliau, in which a worldly valet dupes a naive young girl over the exchange of a bird: a crane. In understanding the significance of the crane, the bestiary tradition appears a logical point of departure; yet, a careful examination of these animal texts reveals otherwise, and points to the influence of other types of animal texts: encyclopaedia; natural history texts; Christian exemplar literature; and homilies. Moreover, the significance of the crane is not restricted to animal texts or to other literary contexts. Rather, the significance of the crane in Cele qui fu foutue et desfoutue further depends on the ways in which the audience understood the crane, particularly in a social and cultural context. This paper will consider three specific contexts – literary, social and cultural – in an attempt to reveal the complex, often overlapping and mutable meanings of the crane in this fabliau.
Bird in a Human Lap: From Natural Observation to Moral Lesson
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2017
In late medieval encyclopedias there is an apparent revival of an ancient classical motif, which was traced by me in a previous study: the motif of the suppliant bird, that is, a bird which, escaping a hawk, seeks refuge in a human lap. The encyclopedists tend to attribute to this motif, in a more pronounced way than their classical predecessors, the force of natural observation, in accordance with the general aim of their works. As a result of this tendency, the dove and the sparrow, typical birds in the role of a suppliant in the classical sources, come to be replaced by the lark, presumably because it was one of the targets of contemporary falconry. At the same time, by way of allegory, the image of the suppliant bird continues to serve as an example of mercy, one of the main virtues in the pagan worldview and the highest ideal in Christianity. In the present study, I follow the lines of the motif of the suppliant bird from the medieval encyclopedias to the rise of awareness in Europe of the humane treatment of animals.
The Essay explores the genesis of Angel's in religious belief and their affiliation with the worldwide cult of so called Bird God's. It goes on to present a clear linkage between this mythos and that of the Holy Grail.
Avian Provocation: Roosters and Rime Royal in Fifteenth-Century Fable
Exemplaria, 2017
Despite the conservative programs of John Lydgate's and Robert Henryson's fifteenth-century retellings of the "cock and jewel" fable, these texts find ways to provoke both their own audiences and us as modern readers. This essay will demonstrate that the fable's provocations reveal themselves in the quotidian vocality of the medieval chicken yard. The soundscape of this space attunes the poetic audience to variations in the pace of rime royal, and this complex pacing draws out new meanings of the fabular moral. When read in terms of poultry sound, both Henryson and Lydgate's verses provoke readers to negotiate nuances of relation between individual experience and generalities of convention in formulating an understanding of value. The Middle Ages frequently retell Latin versions of the Aesopian "cock and jewel" fable, in which a rooster scratches up a gem while foraging and proceeds to address it with a meditation upon its lack of value to him. From Marie de France's twelfth-century Anglo-Norman adaptation to the fifteenth-century English fables of John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, we encounter diversely modified versions of this familiar scene of barnyard poetry and philosophy. The fifteenth-century fables in particular present themselves as a predominantly conservative endeavor, not only in their reactionary dependence upon a rime royal form developed in a previous century but also in the fact that their approach to their source seems considerably less adventurous than that of Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who, as Edward Wheatley points out, creatively inverts the fable's components by offering "a cock telling a fable of humans searching through a dung-heap, " Lydgate and Henryson cleave to their source with less imagination (2000, 109-10). 1 At the same time, and in some ways from within this very conservatism, these fables equally demonstrate the ability to provoke. In making this case about fifteenth-century literature, I consider two loci of provocation. The first, as Andrea Denny-Brown notes in her introduction to this special issue (268), involves this literature's incitement of its medieval audience to react to novelty and thus to alter their readerly encounters and interpretations. The second pertains to fifteenth-century literature's potential to provoke modern readers to recognize the need for new methods with which to approach it. This essay will demonstrate
G. Grupe and J. Peters eds.: Feathers, grit and symbolism. Birds and humans in the ancient Old and New Worlds. Documenta Archaeobiologiae 3, Verlag Marie Leidorf, Rahden/Westf., 2005
Sporadic remains of crane are found in the faunal assemblages of almost all periods in Europe. Osteological evidence of this bird is also widespread in the archaeological record of the Carpathian Basin and adjacent areas. Discussion in this paper concentrates on the presence of crane remains and their possible interpretations on the basis of historical and ethnographic parallels using the evidence from 30 sites in Hungary, Romania and Slovenia.
Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond. Edited by Enrique Jiménez and Catherine Mittermayer. Berlin etc.: de Gruyter, 351-366., 2020
Said tea to coffee: "Oh youb urnt one, All blackened and crushed, your good looks gone, (…) Howc omey ou're so proud and so haughty? Loquacity'st rulyy our forte! Yellow one, shall Il ist your disasters, One by one to your Bedouin masters? Youd ullard! Your real name is coffee, To all whoi mbibe, catastrophe! Af ruit youa re not,n or as avour, Nor relieff or the tired from their labour. But me, Ig ivea ll relaxation, I'mabalm, soothingw ounds and vexation."
A Nest of Nightingales in Her Belly
At an 18th century performance by superstar diva and Handel protégée Francesca Cuzzoni, one astonished member of the audience cried out, “Damn the woman, she has a nest of nightingales in her belly!” Taking this impromptu accolade as its point of departure, this essay explores the avian presence in opera performance, theory and text. Drawing on notions of the uncanny voice proposed by Carolyn Abbate and expanding on the cultural and philosophical resonances of opera outlined by Gary Tomlinson and Mladen Dolar, it considers how the treatment of birds in opera highlights its engagement with debates over the animal-human divide. Despite their centrality to opera's founding myth, the beasts tamed by Orpheus are largely absent from the repertoire, their potentially disruptive presence barred from the opera stage by precarious notions of human exclusivity. Birds, on the other hand, are granted an “operatic personhood” which is still denied our nearest biological relatives. In opera, the bird seems to reify the human/ist struggle against and triumph over the body - unbound from earth, discorporeal, by nature pointed literally heavenward. Even more crucially, birds effortlessly excel at music and song, making the imitation of birdsong an irresistible challenge to human bodies in performance and human art in representation, as pointed out by Daniel Albright and Elizabeth Eva Leach. Birds, then, are granted special access to what is otherwise the most human of stages. Not relegated to roles of spectacle to which other non-human animals are confined, birds take an active part in opera narratives. They have agency, they interact with humans, and most importantly, they are allowed a voice. Considering avian presences from The Magic Flute to Siegfried to early-modernist opera and beyond, this paper argues that the privilege of bird over beast on the opera stage confirms that opera's humanist roots are more than merely historical – opera remains a central part of what Giorgio Agamben has termed “the anthropological machine”.
“EVEN THE SPARROW HAS FOUND A HOME” (PS 84,4) FROM UPROOTING AND WANDERING TO SAFETY AND INTIMACY
Danilo Verde and Ante Labahan (eds.) Networks of Metaphors in the Hebrew Bible BETL 309, Leuven-Paris-Bristol: Peeters, 2020
Various phenomena that are drawn from the avian world reflect daily experience and familiarity with their lives and habits. The first bird related metaphor exemplifies the semantic field of hunting and trapping birds which inspired the figurative and paradigmatic expression of the innocent entrapped by the evildoer. The second metaphor encompasses a long psychological process of conceptualization, from the petitioner’s trauma of uprootedness and wandering to the intimate experience of safety provided to those who dwell in the house of God.