Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
the Christian tradition. Writers like Neckam might view parrots as too clever, but in general they were being reimagmed as miraculous and even sacred. For instance, one Jaco (perhaps Jacques de Vitry),2 the author of a fifteenth-century bestiary called The Waldensian Physiologus, explains the birds’ supposed intolerance of water by claiming that “they love purity above all other things, so that in the parts of the orient where they live there is neither dew nor rain,” and he concludes that “every Christian should observe this nature and quality devoutly so as to preserve his purity and integrity and follow them without sin” (Mayer 403–404; my translation).
While the bestiaries develop this distinctive view of parrots as fabulous birds with sacred associations, something similar happens in the geographical and mythographical writing of the Middle Ages. Pliny’s Natural History provides a source not only for medieval zoology but also for medieval geography. In Pliny, as in almost every classical writer to deal with the subject, the parrot is an Indian bird. As a result, the earliest European map to include an illustration of a parrot also identifies the bird with India: this is the so-called Ebstorf Map, attributed to Gervase of Tilbury and dating from about 1235 (Figure 4). This map divides the world into the three continents known to scholars in the Middle Ages: Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the process, it also provides numerous richly detailed illustrations of each region’s flora and fauna. In a time before cartography as we know it, maps functioned less as an independent mode of representation than as a subspecies of painting, and the Ebstorf Map makes an outstanding case in point. It is blanketed with pictures of birds and beasts, many of them mythical or semimythical, many of them drawn from Pliny, each one supposedly representing a specific region. Africa, for instance, holds not only an elephant, a leopard, and a hyena, but also a mirmicaleon, a cameleopardalis, and a tarandrius. Europe offers us not only lions and tigers and bears, but also an aurochs, a bonacus, and a gryphe. And in Asia, along with chameleons and antdogs and saiga antelopes, we encounter our parrot.
It’s right where it should be, on a mountain in India (Figure 5). But India itself may prove hard for a modern reader to recognize. For one thing, it’s covered with strange pictures. For another, there’s no wedge-shaped peninsula jutting into the expanse of the Indian Ocean, no island of Sri Lanka suspended from the tip like a teardrop. And even worse, India itself isn’t where we expect it to be; it occupies the upper right-hand quadrant of the map, roughly where modern maps locate Outer Mongolia.
Figure 4. The Ebstorf Map of the World, c. 1235, from the Miller reproduction (courtesy akg-images, London)
Part of the problem here involves the principle by which the map is organized. Although medieval navigators and cartographers understood that India lay to the east and south of them, Gervase did not therefore feel obliged to organize his map by the traditional points of the compass. Instead, he oriented it in the root sense of the term: toward the east. As a result, Asia occupies the entire upper half of the map, with Europe on the lower left and Africa on the lower right. East is up, south is right, west is down, north is left. And this entire rotation, haphazard as it may seem, is superimposed upon an anatomical model that lends method to the design; the body of Christ, feet at the Pillars of Hercules, head on the eastern horizon, spans the entire earthly creation. The parrot appears immediately below and to the right of Christ’s head, its placement there marking not only the geographical location of India on this topsy-turvy map, but also the medieval belief that parrots are created in the earthly paradise.
Figure 5. Detail of the Ebstorf Map, depicting the earliest appearance of parrots on a western map, just below and to the right of Christ’s head (courtesy akg-images, London)
This idea survived the end of the Middle Ages, appearing in Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (1551–1558): “The parrot surpasses other birds in cleverness and understanding, because it has a large head and is brought into India from the true heaven, where it has learned not only how to speak but even how to think” (2Plr; my translation). It also appears in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Bucolicum Carmen (1370), where the Kingdom of Naples under Queen Joan and Louis of Taranto is a second Eden, for which the world’s parrots leave their home on Mount Gilboa:
Here the bright birds made their nests;
The parrot, much enraptured with the land,
Came all the way here from her dried-up fields. (5.43–45)
And in John Mirk’s book of homilies Festial (c. 1450), we learn that Saint Matthew included among the joys of paradise “popinjays and birds evermore singing, love, and rest, and all manner of comfort” (256; text modernized).
Over the course of the Middle Ages, parrots are identified not just with India, but with biblical and mythical locales as well. Perhaps the most striking example of this trend appears in Mandeville’s Travels (c. 1357–1366). This notorious book, supposedly written by a peripatetic English knight, became one of the most popular medieval travelogues. Among its extraordinary tales appears an account of the marvelous realm of Prester John, the emperor of India, whose kingdom “is situated on islands because of the great floods that come from Paradise, and that depart all the land in many channels” (195; text modernized). There, we learn, the country is so rich that “they find … of popinjays as great plenty as men find here of geese” (196; text modernized). If one proceeds deep into these territories, one arrives at an arid plain between mountains. “And there be many popinjays, that they call psitakes in their language. And they speak of their own nature and greet men that go through the deserts and speak to them as fluently as though it were a man. And they that speak well have a large tongue and have five toes upon a foot. And there be also another sort that have but three toes upon a foot, and they speak not or but little, for they do nothing but cry” (198). The idea of five-toed parrots comes, as we’ve seen, from Apuleius; the idea of inarticulate three-toed specimens would seem, in turn, to be a medieval addition to the record. In both cases, the record is wrong by one digit.
But the most remarkable thing about this account remains the extraordinary gift of speech with which it credits the parrots of India. This gift has long since transcended ideas of mere imitation. Like the bestiarists, Mandeville insists that the birds “speak of their own nature.” Moreover, he also gives them a fully human capacity for conversation, a misconception easily traced to its source. After all, classical writers like Pliny and Apuleius insist that if one heard a parrot speaking without actually seeing it, one would mistake the bird for a human being. As first advanced, this comment applied to the quality of the bird’s voice, not its conversation. But taken out of context, it might easily seem to describe much greater abilities. If we add to this the parrot from Martial, who proudly declares itself a self-taught Latinist, we get the medieval parrot, with its miraculous command of language and its fully developed human consciousness.
And if a parrot can speak and think like a man, perhaps it might even once have been a man. Boccaccio takes this obvious next step in the chain of association in his influential encyclopedia of classical mythology, the Genealogia Deorum (1374). Here, under the entry for “Psittacus,” Boccaccio traces the race of parrots back to an ancestry both human and divine:
Psittacus was the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha…. Having been imbued with the learning of his grandfather Prometheus, he traveled among the Ethiopians, where he was held in the greatest veneration after he had passed a long time there. He then prayed to the gods that he be withdrawn from human affairs, and, moved by his prayers, the gods readily transformed him into the bird of his name. I believe the basis of this tale to be the fame of his strength and name, which endured in his perpetual green color; these birds are generally green. There are some people who believe this to be the Psittacus who is said to have been one of the seven wise men. (4.49; my translation)
Boccaccio’s reference to the seven wise men marks one more