The Holy Grail,
another text centered in King Arthur’s Court and which sprouted from
Chretien’s Perceval,
is littered with a bevy of pop-up monks whose primary message is, “What you
saw is not what you think you saw, but…” I open the Chretien Companion with the
same proclamation: the assortment of beasts real and imagined found in Erec and Enide,
Lancelot, and Yvain,
are not simply stags, hawks, or lions, but are instead allegorical
creatures imbued with human traits and morality. Bestiaries, or “books of
beasts,” were catalogs of Animalia generally written for the purpose of
religious or moral education. According to David Badke of The Medieval Bestiary, much of
Christian Europe believed that God had created the natural world in such a
way to provide lessons for people on how to live according to their faith –bestiaries
are the physical manifestation of this belief. These allegorical instructions
can therefore be read as their own genre of literature with its own traditions
and parameters. The traditions of medieval bestiaries are at work in medieval
romance and continue to be at work today, (albeit perhaps in a more subdued
manner) because many modern mediums of literature draw upon medieval romance
for inspiration. The tradition that this project is primarily interested in is
the weaving of human traits and imposition of human morality into the
classification of beasts. For this reason, I have included mythical beasts from
Chretien that would not have normally been included in a bestiary but help us
explore the ambiguity of the beast-human spectrum, especially in the context of
literature that is marked by beasts who have been infused with humanity. The
goal of this project is to place the medieval romances of Chretien de Troyes in
conversation with both contemporary bestiary literature and its probable offshoots
in modern popular culture in order to present a history of how the
representations of certain beasts have followed allegorical traditions that
have imbued the beasts with human morality.
You can read more about this project at the top-left link, or, scan this bestiary by category or by individual beast -also at left. Enjoy!
