Abstract
Jevtić explores the ways in which the use of gendered animal imagery in the thirteenth-century anchoritic treatise Ancrene Wisse destabilizes the human–animal boundary. The chapter begins by looking at the normative use of animal images aimed at the circumscription of the anchoress’s body. It then expands the scope of its analysis by looking at the treatise through the prism of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “becoming-animal.” Focusing on the dynamic, processual aspects of the imagery, Jevtić moves beyond the metaphorical reading of the animal body and examines the animal image as a transformative model of anchoritic embodiment.
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Notes
- 1.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 11.
- 2.
Described as a beginner’s guide for female recluses, Ancrene Wisse was written in English in the first half of the thirteenth century by an anonymous author and originally intended for three sisters living as anchoresses ; the later versions of the text were amended with other audiences in mind—i.e., male recluses and lay men and women. The author of the text may have been a Dominican friar (see Bella Millett , “The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions,” Medium Ævum 61, no. 2 (1992): 206–28); it has also been suggested that the work was a result of a collaborative process between the writer and the anchoresses . For more detail on authorship and later distribution of the text , see Yoko Wada , ed., A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), in particular Chaps. 1 and 3.
- 3.
Robert Hasenfratz , ed., Ancrene Wisse (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/hasenfratz-ancrene-wisse, accessed July 2017.
- 4.
Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, trans., Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 108.
- 5.
Mari Hughes-Edwards , “How Good It Is to Be Alone? Solitude, Sociability, and Medieval English Anchoritism,” Mystics Quarterly 35, nos. 3–4 (2009): 31.
- 6.
Hughes-Edwards , “How Good It Is to Be Alone,” 31–61.
- 7.
Cats were not considered domesticated animals and were seen as occupying the border between wild and domestic animals; nevertheless, they were considered beneficial for catching rodents (see Joyce E. Salisbury , The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages [New York: Routledge, 2011], 11). Cats were often used to control rats and mice in medieval churches; Exeter Cathedral records from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show monetary provision for the cathedral’s cats, which was probably intended for food supplementing the cats’ catch. Further evidence of the continuous presence of cathedral cats can be found in the door leading to the clock in the North Tower of Exeter Cathedral, which has a cat hole dating back to the seventeenth century (see Nicholas Orme, The Cathedral Cat: Stories from Exeter Cathedral [Kindle edition, Exeter: Impress Books, 2008]). It seems, however, that the very function of the cat could be used as a disguise for pet-keeping, so that cats were quite common among monastic orders (for more on pets in monastic settings see Kathleen Walker-Meikle , Medieval Pets [Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012], 67–72).
- 8.
See n14 in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 404.
- 9.
Salisbury argues that it is the property relationship that is ambiguous in the first place, as it connects the owner and the owned in binding ways and suggests that a close examination of even early medieval sources shows that the privileged human position was not always necessarily secure. See Salisbury , The Beast Within, 29.
- 10.
Walker-Meikle , Medieval Pets, 72. On the other hand, a fourteenth-century exemplum recounts the story of a little girl brought up as a nun who “begins by loving” the abbesses’ dog and bird, but is later moved to love the image of Christ (Walker-Meikle , Medieval Pets, 71). Here the relationship between spiritual devotion and attachment to animals is not mutually exclusive but, rather, part of a continuum of love.
- 11.
Hughes-Edwards , “How Good It Is to Be Alone,” 33.
- 12.
For various types of ascetic instruction in Ancrene Wisse, see Robert Hasenfratz , “‘Efter hire euene’: Lay Audiences and the Variable Asceticism of Ancrene Wisse,” in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes–Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 145–60.
- 13.
Apart from the scorpion, the animals used to represent the deadly sins were part of a traditional repertoire of bestiary tradition. For the particular use of scorpion, see Lucinda Rumsey, “The Scorpion o Lechery and Ancrene Wisse”, Medium Ævum 61, no. 1 (1992): 48–58.
- 14.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1978), 93.
- 15.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus, 239–40. “Becoming” is central to Deleuze’s work; it stands for movement between particular events. It is not to be understood, however, as a discrete stage between two states but, rather, as the in between, dynamic process of change tending toward no determinable outcome. For a concise introduction of “becoming,” see The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 25–27.
- 16.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus, 32.
- 17.
As already indicated, Deleuze and Guattari give precedence to “becoming” over “being.” A “line of flight” describes the path of transformation, “of mutation precipitated through the actualization of connections among bodies that were previously only implicit (or ‘virtual’) that releases new powers in the capacities of those bodies to act and respond.” See Tamsin Lorraine, “Lines of Flight,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 147. As opposed to “organism,” Deleueze does not understand the body as a hierarchically organized entity but, rather, as a whole characterized by a set of relations between different parts. As such, the body is capable of being affected by other bodies and of mixing with other bodies in ways that may result in new, unexpected sets of relations.
- 18.
For more on the trope of the unstable heart, see n2 in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 347–48.
- 19.
For more on the ideology of anchoritic life, see Mari Hughes-Edwards , Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012).
- 20.
Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), 123.
- 21.
For more on bestiary sources in Ancrene Wisse, see Lenora Marsh , “The Female Body, Animal Imagery, and Authoritarian Discourse in the Ancrene Riwle” (PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 2000).
- 22.
Wada , A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, 19.
- 23.
The equation of senses with organs is in keeping with the penitential theory of the time; see Alexandra Barrat , “The Five Wits and their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse,” Medium Ævum 56, no. 1 (1987): 12–24. For explanation of the comprehensive nature of touch or “felunge,” see n84 in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 358.
- 24.
“St. Paul forbade women to preach: Mulieres non permitto docere (1 Timothy 2:12),” Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 75.
- 25.
Rikelot has also been translated as a gossip or a chattering woman. See n485 at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hasenfrantz-ancrene-wisse-part-two#485.
- 26.
Hughes-Edwards , Reading Medieval Anchoritism, 42.
- 27.
Hughes-Edward , Reading Medieval Anchoritism, 42.
- 28.
For a fuller explication on the variety of animals used in Ancrene Wisse, see Luuk A. J. R. Houwen , “‘From Dumb Beasts Learn Wisdom and Knowledge’: Animal Symbolism in the Ancrene Wisse,” Das Mittelalter 12, no. 2 (2007): 97–118.
- 29.
Thomas Aquinas , On the Power of God, trans. English Dominican Fathers, 1952, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdePotentia5.htm#5:9, accessed October 2016.
- 30.
On the various theories of medieval music in relation to bird song, see Elizabeth Eva Leach , Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
- 31.
Thorsten Fögen , “Animal Communication,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life, ed. Gordon L. Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 220.
- 32.
Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, trans. A. F. Scholfield, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 203. For Fögen’s discussion of Aelianus, see Fögen , “Animal Communication,” 226–27.
- 33.
Houwen , “Animal Symbolism,” 115.
- 34.
Jean-Claude Schmitt , La raison des gestes dans l’Occident medieval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 18.
- 35.
Dorothy Yamamoto , The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 56.
- 36.
Because of its inability to fly, medieval bestiaries often classed the ostrich among the animals rather than the birds. Yamamoto , The Boundaries of the Human, 20.
- 37.
For a fuller explication of various gestures in prayer, see Schmitt , La raison des gestes, 289–320. In his book on lectio divina, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Ivan Illich mentions Marcel Jousse’s notion of corporage, which describes the “psychomotor techniques of fixing a spoken sequence in the flesh” (In the Vineyard of the Text, n39, 60). Illich claims that for Scripture to become part of the monk’s “biography,” they had to rely on what was essentially a Jewish tradition, the tradition of the book, which was “swallowed” and “digested” by focusing closely on the “psychomotor impulses” evoked by the text . In other words, the monks “embodied the lines” (In the Vineyard of the Text). Just as Schmitt claims that the culture of gesture and the culture of literacy were fundamentally intertwined and fed into each other, Illich shows comparable processes with regard to the history of monastic reading. The art historian Hans Belting has proposed what he calls a Bildanthropologie, which operates with the triad of terms image, medium, and body ; to better understand an image one also has to take into consideration the medium and the body (see Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology, “Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 [Winter 2005]: 302–19), where, of course, both are to be understood as subject to historical change. This opens up interesting avenues in the understanding of images as they relate to the materiality of the text (book) and the (reading, listening, praying) body . It also indicates that the full impact of the image cannot be reduced to its historically codified iconological meaning.
- 38.
The four marriage gifts are already mentioned at the very beginning of Ancrene Wisse, in Part I. See n15 in Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, 58.
- 39.
Michael J. Curley, trans., Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Natural Lore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13.
- 40.
Jacques Le Goff , The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 80.
- 41.
Miri Rubin , “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 101.
- 42.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 22.
- 43.
Yamamoto , The Boundaries of the Human, 34.
- 44.
Deleuze and Guattari understand becoming-animal as a real process; according to James Urpeth , they give priority to “becoming over being, kinetic and verbal over static and nominal.” James Urpeth , “Animal Becomings,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calargo (London: Continuum, 2004), 102.
- 45.
Gerald L. Bruns , “Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways),” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 703.
- 46.
Gilles Deleuze , Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2004), 21.
- 47.
Deleuze , Francis Bacon, 21.
- 48.
Deleuze , Francis Bacon, 21.
- 49.
Deleuze , Francis Bacon, 26.
- 50.
Joshua Delpech-Ramey , “Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery,’” SubStance 39, no. 121 (2010): 11.
- 51.
For an interesting discussion on medieval ideas about animals in heaven, see Joyce E. Salisbury , “Do Animals Go to Heaven?: Medieval Philosophers Contemplate Heavenly Human Exceptionalism,” Athen Journal of Humanities and Arts, January 2014, https://www.atiner.gr/journals/humanities/2014-1-1-7-SALISBURY.pdf, accessed July 2017.
- 52.
Grace Jantzen , Violence to Eternity: Death and the Displacement of Beauty (London: Routledge, 2009), 35–55.
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Jevtić, I. (2018). Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse . In: Langdon, A. (eds) Animal Languages in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71897-2_2
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