Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
B.C.) was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. His name differs from the Greek word for parrot (psittakos) only in its initial consonant. So it becomes easy enough to confuse the letters pi and psi, which makes possible a tale in which the races of people and parrots become genealogically related.
And the relationship is an exalted one. Parrots don’t simply wander into the world as an undistinguished afterthought; they embody a direct line of descent from one of the wisest of the ancients, in a form given to him by the gods as acknowledgment of his eminence. Elsewhere, we have seen parrots casually endowed with prophetic powers, uncanny articulacy, sacred origins, and more. It’s tantalizing, and challenging, to imagine the mental environment these stories must have produced, and to imagine how they must have affected the way men and women viewed the few forlorn parakeets that somehow made their way into European aviaries during the Middle Ages. These birds must have seemed a feeble approximation of their wondrous and distant relatives, who spoke like human beings, foretold the future, lived almost forever, and flew freely from branch to branch among the trees of paradise.
Such supposedly factual matters—what manner of bird the parrot might be, where it hailed from, how it behaved, and so forth—affect more imaginative treatments of the bird, both literary and visual. These, too, transform parrots into miraculous and supernatural beings. Hence over the course of the Middle Ages, parrots become a prominent feature of medieval European cultural life.
The parrot is one of the “commonest” birds to appear in medieval illuminated manuscripts (Yapp 75)—so common that paintings of parrots occur in manuscripts of bestiaries that don’t mention the bird, such as Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium (twelfth century). In the process, too, parrots become associated with certain standard visual motifs. For instance, they become a beloved element of marginal decoration, frolicking in vines and knotwork around many a block of calligraphy. And more prominently, they sometimes appear in illustrations of biblical events.
For instance, the early fourteenth-century Queen Mary Psalter (Figure 6; MS Royal 2 B.VII, fol. 2, in the British Library) depicts a parrot amidst God’s creation of the animals (Genesis 2.19), where its beauty, exoticism, and association with paradise make it automatically at home. Here God sits enthroned among his new creation, dominating the picture plane, with the beasts of land and air surrounding him in adoration. In typical medieval fashion, the artist has made no effort at establishing perspective or proportion. The animals encircle God in a two-dimensional ring, perhaps suggesting his transcendence of earthly space at the very same time that earth’s creatures place him at the center of their being. Both of God’s hands are raised in blessing. And the parrot appears immediately at God’s right hand, in a scale that makes it larger than the goat just beneath it. In fact, the parrot in this illustration seems to leap from the page with special exuberance. Not only is it rendered in remarkable size and accurate detail, but its coloring, too, makes it more prominent than every other figure in the illustration except God himself.
A parrot appears in another manuscript of the early fourteenth century, this time illustrating a scene not from Genesis but from Revelation (Figure 7; MS Royal 19 B.XV, in the British Library). This image represents the “Summoning of the Birds” at the Apocalypse, from Revelation 19.17–18: “And I saw an angel standing in the sun: and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.” This Hitchcockian moment might seem like reasonable payback for the culinary excesses of ancient Rome, but the artist has made the scene sedate and even reassuring. The angel stands to the left, a vague smile playing on his features and his hands half-outstretched, as if he were making a point about the price of livestock. Standing on the ground or perched on the usual stunted tree, a dozen birds and a rabbit regard him with something like mild curiosity. There is a certain amount of incidental scratching and grooming. The entire montage reminds me of one of my undergraduate Milton lectures. On the ground, in the dead middle of the painting, stands another supersized parrot, poised as attentively as an honors student.
Figure 6. The Creation of Birds and Beasts, from the Queen Mary Psalter (BL MS Royal 2 B.VII, fol. 2), early fourteenth century (courtesy of the British Museum)
Figure 7. Early fourteenth-century illumination depicting the gathering of the birds from Revelation 19.17–18 (B.L. MS Royal 19 B.XV, fol. 37v; courtesy of the British Library)
Then again, a parrot appears as marginal ornament in another Biblical scene, this time from the London Hours of René of Anjou (Figure 8; MS Egerton 1070, British Library, c. 1410). This volume, illustrated in gorgeous detail by an artist now known as the Egerton Master, contains an extraordinary full-page Adoration of the Magi, with the Virgin Mary seated inside an open animal-stall that has been turned into an impromptu bedroom. As she dandles the infant Christ on her knee, the Magi approach with their gifts. One removes his crown and kneels before the infant, while Joseph greets the second. Behind these figures appear various animals (a bull, an ass, two horses), an attendant, and a bit of landscape. But as much of the page is devoted to marginal decoration as to the miniature itself. The picture is framed by a marvelous tangle of vines and flowers, in which five birds perch at various intervals. Among these, the parrot appears at lower left, directly across from the Virgin Mary.
This placement may not be accidental. As it happens, parrots come to be associated often with the Virgin during the high Middle Ages. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the medieval word “popinjay” is often used “in a eulogistic sense in allusion to the beauty and rarity of the bird” (sb. “Popinjay” 4.a.). The Middle English Dictionary is more specific, defining “papejai” first as “a parrot” and then, figuratively, as “a lady, the Virgin Mary” (“Papejai” sb. a.). Given this relationship, the parrot in the Egerton Master’s painting is right where it should be.
The relationship itself seems to have grown out of the parrot’s reputation as a rare and luxurious creature. In one of his few references to the bird, Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) describes the popinjay as “ful of delicasye” (Parliament of Fowls 359), fond of elegance and daintiness. From that point it becomes easy to identify one precious creature devoted to luxury with another of similar disposition. Parrot and lady emerge as birds of a feather, and the Virgin, most precious and delicate lady of all, stands in for all others.
For instance, one anonymous Middle English lyric begins, “I have a bird in a bower, as bright as beryl” (Luria and Hofman 21, text modernized): But before we mistake this poem for a panegyric to a green bird, we learn that the bird’s “rode is as rose that red is on ris;/ With lilie-white leres lossum he is” (21), meaning that her complexion is as rosy as red on a twig, and she is lovely, with lily-white cheeks. The poem views woman through bird and vice versa, praising both in the process. Finally, it becomes evident that the bird-woman in question has more than normal abilities:
Figure 8. The Egerton Master’s Adoration of the Magi, c. 1410, with a parrot in the marginal decoration to the lower left (B.L. MS Egerton 1070, fol. 34v; courtesy of the British Library)
“Her face is a flower, fairest under fine linen with celandine and sage, as you yourself see. He who looks upon that sight is brought to bliss.… She is the parrot who relieves my suffering when I am in pain” (21, text modernized). As the bird merges into the woman, so the woman metamorphoses into a spiritual comforter. The poem works both as a love-lyric and as a devotional exercise.
Elsewhere, the parrot elides with Mary more directly. Around 1450, the poet John Lydgate could compose a “Balade in Commendation of Our Lady” in which the Virgin is addressed as a “popynjay, plumed in clennesse” (81). And around 1481, Vittore Crivelli painted an exquisite altarpiece whose center panel depicts a Virgin and Child sumptuously enthroned amidst