Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
As for the bird’s broader association with women, we can see it in the Middle English alliterative poem Susannah (late fourteenth century), attributed to a shadowy author named Huchon. This is a verse rendition of the tale of Susannah and the elders from Daniel 13 in the Vulgate Bible. There, as Susannah prepares to take the bath that will expose her to the elders’ lust, the Vulgate simply remarks that she entered into a garden with two maidens (Daniel 13.15). Using this as his only instigation, Huchon develops an elaborate and luxurious setting for Susannah’s bath, replete with “popyniayes prest / Nightyngales vpon nest / Blithe briddis of [th]e best / On blosmes [so briht]” (75–78). By contrast, Thomas Hoccleve’s roundel in “A Humorous Praise of his Lady” (c. 1430) offers some peculiarly uncourtly compliments to the damsel in question:
Hir mowth is nothyng scant/ with lippes gray;
Hir chin unnethe [scarcely]/ may be seen at al;
Hir comly body/ shape as a foot-bal:
And shee syngith/ fol lyk a pape Jay. (17–20)
These lines may seem to contradict the idea that parrots represent something precious and miraculous. After all, Hoccleve’s mistress would have plenty of cause to complain about his verses, and the obvious reason he compares her voice to a parrot’s is to imply that she won’t stop talking. The old classical associations of the parrot with satire don’t disappear in the Middle Ages, but they do grow gentler. Likewise, despite its flippancy, Hoccleve’s inept but amiable joke of a poem preserves the ghost of a more traditional, serious connection between parrots and ladies.
Figure 9. Vittore Crivelli, Enthroned Virgin and Child, with Angels, c. 1481 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1896)
While parrots acquire a feminine cachet in the Middle Ages through their relation to luxury, the birds’ association with opulence acquires a masculine cast, too, at certain moments. The obvious case in point is the long-standing tie between parrots on the one hand and kings, emperors, and popes on the other. But in a poem like William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370), this tie leads in the direction of social condemnation. There “the pokok and the popeiay with here proude federes/ By-tokneth ryght riche men” (C-text 15.173–174); reigning on earth, they pursue their earthly appetites at the risk of spiritual perdition. Such opinions don’t amalgamate well with medieval conventions of deference to authority, so Langland’s remains a minority voice. In contrast, Richard de Holland’s beast-fable The Buke of the Howlat (c. 1450) describes the “Pacocke of pryce” as the pope of birds, while “the proper Pape Iaye, provde in his apparale,” becomes the pope’s chamberlain (in Amours 90, 125). If the parrot can be identified with the rich and powerful, it can also be identified as the rich and powerful.
But among the beast-fables of the Middle Ages, parrots figure most prominently in what may be the most noteworthy of the lot: the anonymous Latin verse narrative called Ecbasis Captivi (c. 1150). The lion, king of beasts, has fallen ill. The fox undertakes to cure the lion and to govern his realm during his illness. As the lion recovers, the parrot enters the scene, and along with the nightingale and the swan it sings a song to celebrate the “paschal feast of the one who is undergoing resurrection” (quoted in Ziolkowski 186)—that is, the lion, but also, of course, the spiritual king of beasts, Christ. After the birds sing an Easter hymn for the lion, the parrot reads a lengthy sermon on proper spiritual comportment. Finally, the parrot, the lion, the swan, and the leopard disperse to the four points of the compass, to which they will bear the good news of what has happened at the lion’s court. The parrot heads, of course, to India, to disseminate the lion’s gospel throughout that region (Ziolkowski 189).
Using a parrot as an evangelist in the medieval context grows out of a tradition that endows the bird with miraculous qualities and sacred connotations. Established through a misreading and embellishment of classical literature and philosophy, this tradition expresses a distinctive way of experiencing the world, in a sense beyond the contemporary distinction between fact and fiction.
Yet one part of the medieval world’s classical heritage still involved the parrot’s status as a vehicle for satire. Medieval writers respond to this part of the classical legacy by crafting an image of the bird as wily, wise, and humorously deceptive. Part trickster, part jester, this model of the parrot’s character enhances the bird’s traditional role as an object of entertainment while extending still further the remarkable qualities with which it is credited. As John Trevisa observed in his late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ On the Properties of Things, among the animals meant for man’s entertainment were “apes and marmusettes and popyngayes” (2:1110). This view assimilates the classical idea of the ridiculous parrot to later views of the bird as an animal savant.
We’ve already seen an example of this assimilation in Alexander Neckam’s tale of the cunning parrots who prove more than a mental match for the English knight. Likewise, a late fourteenth-century French fabliau entitled “The Tale of the Lady and the Three Parrots” produces a parrot that outwits both its master and his wife.
The master in this case is an elderly vavasour (the tenant and liege-man of a feudal baron) married to a young and beautiful lady. This vavasour, in typical fabliau fashion, suspects his wife of bestowing her favors upon another man. To test his suspicion, he places three parrots, each in its cage, in a gallery from which they can see the comings and goings at her chamber door. He commands these birds to keep a eye on his wife, they promise to do so faithfully, and he leaves home.
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