[In the following essay, Henderson examines ways in which medieval fabulists freely modified Aesopic fables—sometimes adding elaborate morals to suit their needs—and looks critically at the rigidity of modern techniques for finding meaning in medieval works.]

Not long ago, we were told that a poem should not mean but be. No one told the medieval author. He—or she—blithely layered meaning upon meaning. Noticing this difference -between then and now, we have made meaning—the original meaning and the original reader'sprocess of getting at it—the central issue in most modern criticism of medieval literature. How are meanings wrapped up in a text? How did the original audience know what was there? Were some meanings hidden? We, certainly, have found many hidden meanings: historical allusions hiding behind the surface, pagan myths lingering beneath the surface, patristic exegesis glossing and transforming the surface. We have stripped the surface off entirely to find basic logical structures beneath. What we have not found is a method for testing the limits of our sometimes too universally successful methods.

Where ought we to start for an unobstructed view of authentically medieval moralizing? Some works spell their meanings out for us: the fables, the bestiaries, the sermons, and any other work with an explicit moral. Even if the moral is but an author's joke or a scribe's mistake, at least the joke or mistake is a medieval one; thus we have medieval commentary on medieval texts. Granted that authors may convey more than what they put in an explicit moral, even the partial meanings and misrepresentations reveal the mental processes of a medieval reader and suggest the kind of thing a meaning was expected to be. They are certified as conceivable and authentically medieval by the very scribes and authors who passed the works to us.

Beast fables are particularly useful as test cases, for they have oft-recycled plots, with each new author giving a meaning that may or may not be the same as that of his or her source. We catch the authors thinking aloud of what they have decided to do with their material. In the explicit moralizations to the fables, authors reveal their own perceptions, not of what the traditional material does mean or has meant (since we will find some of these authors consciously innovating), but of what potential for meaning they found. If we hope to extend the Nun's Priest's advice and take "the moralite" of not only his tale or works with explicit moralizations but all sorts of medieval works, we might well examine beforehand such a "control" as the relatively straightforward genre of fable.

When one follows the meanings explicit in fables and bestiaries from their entries into Christianity down through the close of the medioval period, one finds, to be sure, a good deal of mindless copying but also certain kinds of variety. The most innovative group seems to be a line of loosely related British and French fabulists working from the twelfth century on and creating variation in three major areas: (1) more specific social applications, (2) more elaborate moralizations that, in certain authors, resemble the point-for-point allegory of exegesis rather than the simple application more typical of fable, and (3) a style crackling with vividness and colloquial dialogue. Though many moralizations, even in these authors, remain copies of old moralizations, so much is new that we can be sure innovation was a sought-after good. The range of freedoms we find authors allowing themselves in their actual practice can help warn us when our modern methods of closing in on a meaning threaten to cage up our medieval authors.

The New Social Specificity

The first freedom of the fabulists is the freedom to shift a moral to a new specific application, often social, within a broad area suggested by the plot's inherent pattern. If a strong beast harms a weak one in the plot, then the moralization may provide a lesson about strength in general or else about the power of some specific social group—the rich, the bishops, the lords. Antique and most medieval collections before the later twelfth century preferred general ethical considerations to specific social satire. Generality was deep in the grain of fable collections. In imitating the antique collections of Phaedrus and Avianus, medieval collections copied a breadth of moralization that Phaedrus and Avianus had apparently themselves taken from earlier collections. As Ben Edwin Perry suggests, these earlier collections seem to have been intended as reference handbooks for orators; since orators intended rewriting the fables anyway to suit the circumstances of particular orations, the handbook needed to supply only brief headings to help locate appropriate fables—anything more precisely satirical was better left to the orator.' At least one quite late medieval fabulist, John Lydgate, still felt sufficiently in touch with his origins to give us with confidence Aesop's own intention—we are supposed to turn a fable to our own purposes: "Isopus … / Fonde out fables, bat men myght hem apply / To Sondry matyrs, yche man for hys party."2 Toward the end of the twelfth century, such fabulists as Berechiah ben Natronai, Marie de France, and Odo of Cheriton began turning fables to new purposes right in the written moralization itself. They apply the ancient general lessons of weak and strong to specific classes in a real society: rich and poor, seigneur and vilain.³

One fable by Phaedrus, the first from the antique collection of greatest influence in the Middle Ages, is already about as specific in its social application as a fable of Phaedrus ever gets. A wolf and a lamb are drinking at a stream. The wolf claims the lamb fouls his water. No use for the lamb to point out that the water flows from the wolf to him, not the other way. The wolf eats him. The fable's application attacks those "who invent false charges by which to oppress the innocent."⁴ "The innocent" and "false charges" are moral categories: villain and victim may be of any social class, though there is some indication that they meet at the lawcourts. Few other fables of Phaedrus are so specifically social in application. But this fable becomes much more specifically social from the end of the twelfth century on, as developed by Berechiah, Marie de France, Odo of Cheriton, and, in the fifteenth century, John Lydgate and Robert Henryson. It is still a fable of calumny and the innocent, but these later fabulists identify oppressive caluminators with the rich; they identify the innocent with the poor. Henryson cites even so specific a social class as tenant farmers.⁵

From the first, each fabulist of this new social specificity has his or her own concern, his or her own "party," to use Lydgate'sword. Within the power structure stands the courtly Marie de France; locked out of it stands the Jew Berechiah. Though they look on the same world of laymen, their perspectives are different. Odo of Cheriton prefers the ecclesiastical world—prefers it, that is, as a subject for satire. Odo looses a menagerie of snail bishops, spider bishops, and rector flies, of dog officials and crow officials picking the bones of the lesser clergy and, ultimately, of the poor. Though the three innovative fabulists often share the plots of fables, they each invent many new morals—morals that are not shared, not borrowed. Originality must have been valued, and we can sometimes hardly specify the "traditional meaning" of a fable after one of these writers has handled it.

Thus, from the late twelfth century on, fabulists were preparing for Robert Henryson's brilliant but not quite phoenixlike performance as social and philosophical fabulist. His work is not cold tradition suddenly enflamed by fiery genius, and we miss the essence when we set his fables alongside some dull old version he probably knew, like Walter of England's. What Henryson took from the tradition of social fabulists was not particular ideas but support for the process of being original. Such an urge to originality had its own tradition from Marie and Berechiah and Odo through the Isopets: Henryson rose from something other than his own ashes.⁶

The New, Point-for-Point Allegory

After the new social specificity, the second freedom of certain among these fabulists (Odo but not Marie) lies in their setting meanings forth more elaborately than before and by a method more at home with preachers and bestiarists than with traditional fabulists. As a preacher, Odo was, of course, familiar with the exegetical method of the Fathers and trained to use it in sermons, matching literal items in a text to their spiritual equivalents. This direct, detailed listing is a method no early fabulist would touch, at least not in collected fables. Fable collections, as distinct from isolated fables embedded in sermons or other texts, imitated a pagan literary tradition, retaining the air, as well as the plots, of Phaedrus and his peers. When Odo used a fable, anecdote, or other illustration in a sermon, he might naturally have felt that his genre was sermon, not fable collection, and he might naturally have moralized even the fable in a sermonlike style. When he did make his collection of fables—many of them, again, not classical fable but anecdotes or animal lore from varied sources—he perhaps continued to feel small allegiance to the tradition of Phaedrus. It is not surprising, then, that he continued his more exegetical style of moralizing right alongside morals of the older type. It is not surprising, but it is new, for his fables circulated in collection form and could affect the expectations to be aroused by the genre of fable collection.

Most collections, even after Odo, retained the older sort of moralization in which the whole central act of the fable istransferred from beasts to human beings but in which the incidental properties and subsidiary characters of the fable are not each given their own meanings. So when we come to the detailed moralizations of John Lydgate and Robert Henryson, we must remember that the exegetical method, common in sermons and bestiaries, is not the method of fables. However little we credit Lydgate with originality and however much we suspect that the and Henryson had read their Odo or, perhaps more likely, had heard preachers influenced by Odo, still we must recognize that Lydgate and Henryson not only rediscover what was new in Odo but often surpass him in their energetic transformation of detail after detail.

One example, from Henryson, must suffice. A wolf overhears a plowman cursing his oxen, saying, "May the wolf take you!" The wolf demands that the promise be kept, the plowman refuses, and they ask a fox to act as judge. Accepting the plowman's bribe of chickens to get rid of the wolf, the fox leads the wolf off through darkening woods in search of a cheese the plowman supposedly offered in place of the oxen. They find a well whose water reflects the round, yellow moon, and the fox proclaims this reflection the cheese, ready for taking. But the wolf bids the fox go first, down in the well bucket. Once down, the fox calls for help lifting the too great cheese, and the wolf rides down in the other bucket, unaware that both buckets run on one pulley, so that as the wolf goes down, the fox goes up and runs off, leaving the wolf to bob alone in the well bottom. Whereas other fabulists moralize the act of trickery, Henryson moralizes both act and setting—the cheese of covetousness, the wood of wicked riches, even the chickens of good works.⁷ Although elaborate allegory in sermons is said to have been distinctly the fashion in England in the late Middle Ages, with Holkot, Bromyard, and their followers, sermons are not fable collections.⁸ Any fabulists who chose to adapt to their lesser genre the prestigious methods of the sermon would still have needed the freedom and will to innovate. The morals of Henryson's fables, or Lydgate's, are far harder to find in "sources" than are the plots. Once the authors had decided on a new fashion of moralization, they could hardly help finding "new meanings" in all the old fables that had never before had their entire plot and paraphernalia run through the great meaning machine of exegesis.

The New Colloquial Style

In pursuing the explicit meaning expressed in fables, we do not strictly need to examine style, whose meaning is implicit. But the stylistic shift that constitutes the third area of newness in late medieval fable appears sometimes linked to the shifts toward specific social meanings and more detailed allegories. The authors who innovated in other areas tended to do so in style, too, though not many passages show all three traits. Dialogue, formerly rare or restricted to making essential points, grows and becomes more flexible in fables from Marie and Berechiah on. Odo, the first we know to use the names of the Renart cycle, has at times the verve, too, of that great beast epic, then at peak popularity. Two centuries later, Henryson, when compared to Walter of England and the ordinary Romulus, seems an isolated genius at dialogue; but group him with the other innovators and you see these fabulists supporting one another in their invention of new, vivid dialogue as well as new moralizations. Once again Henryson may be the best, may be highly original, yet may still be nurtured by his tradition. Particular phrases need not be borrowed; inheriting the spirit and the sanction for invention suffices. For example, in Marie, Isopet I of Paris, or the Romulus of Trier, Henryson could have found his motif of the fox who wishes to break his Lenten vow to eat no meat and who, drowning a kid that he finds, calls the drowning a baptism and rechristens the kid a salmon, thus making his eating of the kid lawful. Henryson would have found there, too, a rather livelier style than in most old collections or, indeed, than in most of those still being copied and taught in the schools. But he did not find there the specific phrase by which he embodies this new zest for dialogue, the fox's joyous baptismal cry, "Ga doun, Schir Kid, cum up Schir Salmond agane!" What Henryson inherited was not a motif alone but a tradition of invention.

Medieval Invention—Turning Game into Earnest

For reasons, then, of social relevance or stylistic innovation, medieval fabulists sometimes varied the explicit meanings they assigned to the beasts and actions of their inherited, traditional fables. Were we to list all the extant meanings for every beast or for every role played by various beasts, we would still lack a medieval audience's sense of the process generating those meanings and making them acceptable. I suspect the sense was more nearly a spirit of fun than of obedience to some defined set of rules for moralization. I am certain it was not the process to which modern scholars are reduced: combing the analogues, the glosses, and the Patrologia for a known meaning one could try out on the work. Too many fable morals have unique elements; too many, particularly in Odo's collection, have been fitted to contemporary conditions.

Combing and cataloging do have interest and at least tell us some of the things a motif could have meant. Scholars seeking "the moralite" of the "Nun's Priest's Tale" have dug out many a fox and cock from works perhaps known to Chaucer and his audience. But the story antedates many. such meanings and so need not mean what it might mean. If a fox, even a fox with Chaucer's Rossel for a name, satirizes friars in Renart le nouvel, the story of fox and cock does not itself depend on friars for its right to be told—it had circulated in the Roman de Renart and in Marie's fables for years before there were any orders of friars for authors to satirize.⁹ On carved misericords and in manuscript margins of Chaucer's time one indeed finds the friar fox at his preachings, but he is flanked by other preaching foxes garbed as bishops or indeterminate ecclesiastics.'" Friars, then, can have no exclusive right to ridicule in the guise of foxes. Similarly, cocks indeed represent priests in many an encyclopedia or a scriptural commentary, but the explicit meanings fabulists attached to the cock of this fable—as in Marie's version—or to the cock in most versions of another fable, the cock and the gem, show the cock only as the vainglorious fool. Preachy Chantecler may be, and we are free to compare him to the priest who tells his story or to the monk who has just finished telling of many another fall through fate and sin, but this sort. of analogy making is not the same thing as discovering a code in which the cock is a priest. What are we to think of all the various works that do seem to equate cock and priest or fox and friar, or bishop, or devil, or wicked man, or anything else we have found in the explicit moralization of some particular fable or sermon exemplum? These equations must be, not the necessary meanings of the characters and plots in question, but possible meanings that the author chooses at the moment to develop.

"Traditional" meanings, the history of fable tells us, are potential in a given work, not necessary: the invention of new senses might itself be called a "traditional" pastime. Suppose, one long evening late in Chaucer's lifetime, that a group of medieval literati decided to indulge the half-playful spirit of such medieval literature-for-discussion forms as the demande d'amour, forms in which each member of the audience might, in turn, try his or her hand at supplying the conclusion or explanation for the work all have heard. Our group choose to hear the "Nun's Priest's Tale" and to expound their rival views of its true moral. We might well overhear from their con-versation any or all of the interpretations of modern scholars, for each modern explanation has been drawn from some authentic find in the medieval texts. Yet would those idle chatterers about the fire have put forth their interpretations as exclusive truths or, rather, as playful—though meaningful—elaborations? We cannot know. We can, however, find in our simpler test genre of the moralized beasts evidence that wit, playfulness, and surprise were all available options.

Playful, surely, must be Richart de Foumival's Bestiaire d'amour. It amuses its obviously literate audience by packing the materials of a bestiary into the form of a love epistle.¹¹ The first speaker, the lover, junks most of the old religious senses and, evoking the approved methodology of exegesis, carefully explains just how every beast of the bestiary "means" that the lady should love him. But then the lady, accepting his facts of animal lore and taking up in her turn the method of exegesis, calmly shows how absolutely everything "means" quite the opposite of what he claimed. The very point of Richart's allegorizing is to make the result surprising and fantastical while preserving a straightforward, logical, and traditional mode of reasoning.

Place with Richart's detheologized bestiary of love all the many hunts of love, chess games of love, and prisons of love. By method they are works of the old allegory; by application they are works of the new vogue of the literature of love. Were they, too, intended as playful? Even a sermon may be playful enough in its exegesis. Take a Latin text that says no one (nemo) can enter the kingdom of heaven without first doing such and such. Read thatsentence as if "no one" were a proper name. Collect all such sentences and you have the epic of Nemo, the hero who could indeed do all the things that no one could have done. Several sermons play this game with that most earnest of texts, the Bible. They amuse, yet along the way they remind the audience of much Scripture and doctrine; the resulting sermons take their place in serious orthodox collections.¹² Religious interpretations do not need even this jesting context to find the freedom to innovate: a bestiary somewhat later than Richart's discards standard meanings for the beasts but, unlike Richart's, turns all to the praise of Mary.¹³

That writers sought daring leaps rather than conventional echoes of the Fathers shows strikingly even in serious contexts by the transformation from secular to religious in two sermons on secular love songs written by a French preacher shortly before 1214, that is, a few years before Richart's bestiary. In the song "Sur la rive de la mer" we have the characters and properties of many a song, but they are now "explained:" The maiden (la pucelle) is Saint Mary Magdalene, the stream (la rive) is the Virgin Mary, and the ill-matched wife (la dame mal mariee) is the soul, badly married in being tied to sin though called to be Christ's love. The preacher expects to surprise. He calls attention to the thoroughly secular frivolity of the songs and claims to be only "spoiling the Egyptians to enrich the Hebrews" in turning such light songs to a religious purpose.¹⁴ We are clearly not to take these invented moralizations as evidence that all the songs of la dame mal mariee are "really" about the soul. In these religious as in secular contexts, one may preserve the process of allegorical thinking while making it generate surprising new meanings. Aware of what their materials meant, authors such as Richart or the anonymous preacher set about inventing meanings not anticipated by the audience yet recognizably possessed of a witty "rightness" once set forth.

Even an accident, a carelessly copied line, can seem to bear a new meaning, and authors may develop this supposed meaning into genuine new interpretations. In Phaedrus III. 12, a cock finds a gem and, incapable of understanding its value, leaves it lying. This fable Phaedrus applies to those who do not understand him, that is, his book: "qui me non intellegunt" (Perry, p. 278). But in the ordinary Romulus the me dropped out: "qui non intelligunt" [sic] (Hervieux, II, 195). Now the fable seems to apply to those lacking understanding without reference to any particular thing misunderstood; the gem was accordingly later allegorized as, not one writer's book, but the quality of wisdom itself, and Henryson can plead eloquently for the pursuit of that wisdom which so many, like the cock, leave lying uncomprehended. Thus a copyist's slip, subjected to the same analogical process of reasoning that generates applications for genuine readings, produces a sensible, "original" passage, which must have seemed as "right" to the medieval audience as any original reading.

A new meaning becomes right by seeming a reasonable analogy. In De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), the handiest summary of what the medieval audience understood by "reasonable analogy," Augustine makes it clear that we should not memorize a set meaning for each beast or other item of the biblical text, a meaning that we would then transport to all the other entries for the same item. Rather, we should ask what things our item may resemble, without expecting the answer to be consistent from text to text: "but since things are similar to other things in a great many ways, we must not think it to be prescribed that what a thing signifies by similitude in one place must always be signified by that thing."¹⁵ Augustine understands the useful watchword of modern structuralism, that not the actor but the role matters, not the beast named but the traits singled out and the function identified within a context.

Building similitudes in new ways can lead an author to discard one animal for another or to jam a new meaning up against an old one, yet without abandoning the basic method of reasoning. Nicole Bozon, a fabulist who otherwise follows Odo and Marie in many of his fables, manages to substitute a sheep for a wolf (in the fable of the well with two buckets) without changing the old moral.¹⁶ The reason is simple: the point of the fable is that the wolf is stupid and easily hoodwinked by the rascally fox. A sheep can be as stupid as a wolf, so the moral does not change no matter which beast we choose. Nicole does not care about the other traits of wolves, however relevant they may be to the moral chosen by some other fabulist. In the bestiaries, one beast can normally mean various things. In a group of elephants one may be the Old Adam in every person, another may be Christ; a wild goat on a mountain may be Christ, a domestic goat lechery. The trait, the action, counts. Occasionally a bestiarist takes the trouble to explain how the meaning derives from the action. A sungazing eagle resembles a baptized soul and a farseeing goat on a mountain resembles God because they see clearly from on high. For clarity of vision, eagle and goat, with their superior physical vantage points or clear eyes, resemble the baptized soul or God, whose vision is spiritual. Guillaume le Clerc spells out the logic for us as he makes his claim that the goat, like Christ, sees from afar whatever people are doing: "Car Deu … / De loing esgarde e veit e sent / Quantque font ça e la la gent."¹⁷ That word car ('because') is the key: Guillaume intends his allegories to ring with logic and not merely authority.

Reading through a few bestiaries, we soon find certain patterns of analogy becoming most familiar. Old and young may suggest the Old Adam and the new Christ, the person lost and saved (eagle, elephant, stag); high and low suggest spiritual and earthly (goat on a height); sleep and death suggest spiritual death through darmnation (sirens, crocodile), while the contrasting arousal from sleep or death suggests either personal salvation or the historical resurrection of Christ (lion, pelican, phoenix). Each chapter of a bestiary, each fable in a collection, has a text and a meaning. A transforming boundary separates a bit of animal lore or a bit of a narrative about the beasts from the spiritual meaning that that material becomes as it passes to the moralization. The logical structure of the opening animal lore or opening narrative remains the structure of the moralization. If a fable is built on the contrast between an oppressive beast and its innocent victim, then the moralization will transform that opposition into some human opposition. No rule specifies which human opposition one must choose so long as the relative positions of the pair are comparable to those of the beasts. One may apply such a fable to the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the devil and the sinner, the landlord and the tenant farmer. This continuity of pattern between fable narrative and fable moral gives us a sense of reasonableness when our fabulists push a fable to new applications, from ethical to social, from lay to ecclesiastical. But we must be wary if we are to play this logical game of sensing the structural contrasts and attempting to predict their transformation from natural history to spiritual or social application. Sensing such a structural contrast as high-low, we might attempt to predict for the moral some sort of juxtaposition of spiritual and earthly. We would gain one thing, a sense of participating in a reading process something like that of the mystery-story reader. But, like the reader of that clue-laden genre, we, too, must expect some clues to be false. In many a bestiary the eagle dives into the water, descending, of course, from high to low, yet not a single bestiary invokes the ready contrast of high and low in order to say something about a falling from spiritual to worldly levels. The fall was into water; its result was the renewal of the eagle. These traits suggest baptism. Baptism thus seems a reasonable moral, not because it is the ordinary moral (though it is), but because we can look back and see the logical pattern of old and new underlying both the animal lore and the rite of baptism, we can see the familiar washing motif in legend and moral alike.¹⁸ Process, not inventory, generates new meanings and keeps the old alive and welcomed as reasonable. Use the old process on new elements of the narrative or on new realms of application in the world, and you produce new meanings, yet new meanings genuinely drawn from the old material by accepted methods. Augustine foresaw well enough such innovative potentials in his analogical method. Comparing things to one another, reader and author may select different pairs, but no harm arises if the reader's and author's final goals are compatible: "When, however, from a single passage in the Scripture not one but two or more meanings are elicited, even if what he who wrote the passage intended remains hidden, there is no danger if any of the meanings may be seen to be congruous with the truth taught in the passages of the Holy Scriptures" (Robertson, pp. 101-02).¹⁹ Such is the thinking of our fable authors, our sportive bestiarists and allegorists of love, our earnest, jesting preachers: one may generate many a meaning from fable, song, or fleeting beast of the fields, provided only that the meaning is good and the method sound.

Conclusion (In Which Nothing is Concluded)

And now the moral of this search for explicit meanings. What do we learn from animal fables and from bestiaries and from works with explicit morals—what, that is, that would help us interpret all those other works without the morals? We learn that the fables and others surprise us, that we cannot quite predict the meaning until we see it. And what if there is no stated meaning to see? What if we are dealing with a genre that has no explicit moralitas? If there is such freedom with brief fables and bestiary chapters, what are we moderns to do, faced with the complex suggestiveness of The Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, or the Commedia? The possible meanings are all too possible. Perhaps the historical or exegetical critics can offer helpful suggestions, showing us what might be meant in our text because it was demonstrably meant in some other text. Perhaps structuralist analysis of the basic logical structures and movements in the text could suggest some chains of reasoning that might have been more habitual than others, giving us, as Roland Barthes puts it, not a new meaning so much as a new way of stating the old, of abstracting from the many senses that cultures have generated the inherent principles of generation.²⁰ Yet where the explicit moralizations of fable and bestiary allow us to detect authentic medieval meanings, we find that what was once meant need no longer be meant and that the process of reasoning may reason out many a surprise. We can catalog options known to be open to our authors, but we cannot predict their choices among options. Our medieval authors perhaps called this little mystery by the name of Free Will, and no "ism" seems of much use in pinning it down.

Inherent in each piece of animal lore or in each narrative of beasts are all the logical patterns that any writer has ever seen in it or any other patterns that one might reasonably—as the age defines reason—see in it. Each author reinterprets, and we, as critics, reinterpret too. Exegesis, as Morton W. Bloomfield argues, is a branch of the larger process of making the universe meaningful to ourselves.²¹ We interpret everything. The message even of our eyes is only a stirring of nerve cells until our minds interpret the patterns—we call the process perception.²² Poetry, supposed untranslatable, always is translated, not into a second language, but into the responses and interpretations by which we perceive the poem. Yet the second "language" takes its shape from the first, and the meaning we project has tests of reasonableness. Beast literature shows the universal process so clearly because it places the interpretations and their underlying logic so explicitly on the page; they record the living choices of living persons, choices drawn from the entire universe of meaning by available habits of reasoning. Our critical approaches to the past, if they are to avoid the wrong-way telescope that so often has made distant and "primitive" cultures seem simpler than our own, must keep before us not simply the inventory of medieval fact but the enduring process of mind at work.

Notes

¹ Perry, Introd., Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Ben Edwin Perry, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. xi-xvi.

² Prologue to Isopes Fabules, vv. 9-14, in Part II (Secular Poems) of The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, Early English Text Society, OS 192 (1934; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 566-67.

³ Arnold Clayton Henderson, "'Of Heigh or Lough Estat': Medieval Fabulists as Social Critics," Viator, 9 (1978), 265-90; the topic is treated more broadly in "Animal Fables as Vehicles of Social Protest and Satire: Twelfth Century to Henryson," Niederdeutsche Studien, 30 (1981). See also my "Moralized Beasts: The Development of Medieval Fable and Bestiary, Particularly from the Twelfth through the Fifteenth Centuries in England and France," Diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1973.

Principal editions of fabulists with social content are Marie de France, Die Fabeln der Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke, Bibliotheca Normannica 6 (Halle, 1898); Recueil généal des Isopets, ed. Julia Bastin, Societe des Anciens Textes Francais No. 73, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1929-30); Nicole Bozon, Les Contes moralises de Nicole Bozon, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith and Paul Meyer, Societe des Anciens Textes Francais No. 28 (Paris, 1889); Berechiah ben Natronai, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967)—but for biographical information, see the introduction to Hermann Gollancz, The Ethical Treatises of Berachya Son of Rabbi Natronai ha-Nakdan (London: David Nutt, 1902); John Lydgate, Isopes Fabules in The Minor Poems (n. 2, above); Robert Henryson, Poems and Fables, ed. Henry Harvey Wood, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1958) (I have not yet used the new edition by Denton Fox); and Odo of Cheriton and John of Sheppey, both in Vol. IV of Leopold Hervieux-, Fabulistes latins, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1899). Also social in part are two Latin collections related to Marie's, Robert's Romulus and the Romulus of Trier (Hervieux, II, 549-63, 564-652), and parts of the Fabulae Rhythmicae (Hervieux, II, 714-57).

For a discussion of seigneur and vilain in Marie de France, see Hans Robert Jauss, Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1959), p. 49.

⁴ "Haec propter illos scripta est homines fabula / qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt," Perry, p. 193.

⁵ The following treatments of this same fable all have social or political implications. Berechiah (n. 3, above) includes judge and bailiff among examples of "he that is stronger than his neighbor" (pp. 12-13). Marie de France (n. 3) applies the fable to feudal justice: "Co funt li riche robeuir, / li vescunte e li jugeuir / de cels qu'il unt en lur justise" (fable 2). Accepting the reading seignur for robeur, after A. Ewart and R. C. Johnston (Marie de France: Fables [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1942]), these lines mean, "rich lords, viscounts, and judges behave this way towards those under their jurisdiction." Lydgate (n. 2) asserts that as dead lambs grace the king's table, so the poor go to heaven (MacCracken, p. 578). Henryson (n. 3) refers to maill men, or tenant farmers (pp. 93-95). There are analogues by Odo of Cheriton and his follower, John of Sheppey, in Hervieux, IV, 197-98, 417, and in anonymous Latin collections, where the fable is made an attack on tyranni (Hervieux, II, 565) or principes potentes who oppress pauperes (Hervieux, II, 715).

⁶ For Henryson's probable use of a collection like the Isopet of Lyon, see John MacQueen, Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 200-07. But I am arguing something different from any specific debt. I am arguing that because Henryson wrote in a tradition that considered certain forms of originality as proper, even his original inventions may be seen as nourished by that tradition of originality.

⁷ Henryson's version of the well story is in Wood, pp. 77-84. For this non-Phaedrine and apparently Jewish-Arabic story, Henryson draws most closely on Petrus Alphonsi in some version, possibly French. The Latin is edited by Alfons Hilka and Werner Soderhjelm, Disciplina Clericalis (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1911), Exemplum 23, the English by W. H. Hulme (Western Reserve University Bulletin, NS 22, No. 3 [1919], 48-50), and the French Chastoiement d'un pere a son fils by Edward D. Montgomery, Jr. (Univ. of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, No. 101 [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971], pp. 140-46). Like Henryson's version, the French has a full moon (v. 3642), where the others have a half-moon. Other principal versions, none with a moral quite like Henryson's, are these: the French Roman de Renart (Branches IV and IVa) is related to the English Vox and the Wolf (ed. Bruce Dickins and R. M. Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, rev. ed. [London: Bowes and Bowes, 1956], pp. 62-70), to several German versions (Reinhart Fuchs, ed. Jakob Grimm [Berlin, 1834], pp. 54-62; Der Fuhs und der Wolf in Grimm, pp. 356-58; and Reinke de vos, ed. Friedrich Prien [Halle, 1887], pp. 202-04), to the later French Renart le contrefait (in A. C. M. Robert, Fables inedites, II [Paris, 1825], 300-07), and to allusions in the Flemish (O. Delepierre, trans., and Jan Frans Willems, ed., Le Roman du Renard traduit … d'apres un texte flamand du XIIe siecle [Brussels, 1837], pp. 301-02) and Caxton's The History of Reynard the Fox, ed. Donald Sands (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), Ch. xxxiii. Versions in fable, rather than epic, form include the Kalila et Dimna, in Hervieux, v, 755-56, which resembles Petrus; Odo of Cheriton (Hervieux, IV, 192-93); John of Sheppey (Hervieux, IV, 441-42); Nicole Bozon (n. 3, above), pp. 150-51, and Hervieux, IV, 261; Spanish versions derived from Odo (Libro de los Exenplos, por A.B.C., ed. John Esten Keller [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1961], No. 363, pp. 280-81, and El Libro de los Gatos, ed. John Esten Keller [Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1958], No. 14, pp. 55-56); Berechiah (n. 3), No. 117; and the ninth fable from "Alfonce" (i.e., Petrus Alphonsi) in Caxton's collection (1484), ed. Joseph Jacobs, as The Fables of Aesop (1889; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), II, 276-78, and ed. Robert Thomas Lenaghan, as Caxton's Aesop (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 205-07. Even this list does not exhaust the versions of this tale, and at least one of the folk versions, that retold by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus ([1880; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965], pp. 78-79) has an exchange between fox and rabbit about "de way de worril [world] goes" that even in wording echoes Henryson's image of the wheel of Fortune (vv. 2418-19) and Caxton's image of the world's rise and fall (History of Reynard, Ch. xxxiii)!

⁸ Joseph Albert Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1911), pp. 81-82, refers to Holkot's sermons. See also Gerald Robert Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), p. 304, for Bromyard and pp. 311-12 for the trend generally.

⁹ There has been quite a debate about what medieval motifs may be traced in the Nun's Priest's Tale and how seriously to use them in reading the tale's meaning. See esp. Mortimer J. Donovan, "The 'Moralite' of the Nun's Priest's Sermon," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 52 (1953), 498-508; Charles Dahlberg, "Chaucer's Cock and Fox," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 277-90; and Judson Boyce Allen, "The Ironic Fruyt: Chauntecleer as Figura," Studies in Philology, 66 (1969), 25-35. A late echo of the debate occurs in Nancy Dean, "Chaucerian Attitudes toward Joy with Particular Consideration of the Nun's Priest's Tale," Medium Aevum, 44 (1975), 1-13. Robert A. Pratt presents evidence for Chaucer's combining primarily the versions in Marie de France, the Roman de Renart, and Renart le contrefait ("Three Old French Sources of the Nonnes Preestes Tale," Speculum, 47 [1972], 422-44, 646-68).

¹⁰ Kenneth Varty, Reynard the Fox: A Study of the Fox in Medieval English Art (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), pp. 54-56.

¹¹ Richart de Fournival, Li bestiaires d'amours di maistre Richart de Fornival e li response du bestiaire, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1957).

¹² Gerald Robert Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933), 63-64.

¹³ Paul Meyer, "Les Bestiaires," Histoire littéaire de la France, XXXIV (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1914), 390; Gaston Raynaud, "Poeme moralise sur les proprietes des choses," Romania, 14 (1885), 443-84.

¹⁴ "Debemus Hebraeos ditare et Ægyptios spoliare, prava in bonum exponere laborantes," quoted from Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au moyen dge spéialement au XIIIe siéle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1886), p. 198. Taking Egyptian treasure to decorate the Tabernacle will also be Pierre Bersuire's image for his Christianizing interpretation of Ovid. See the prologue to Reductorium morale Liber XV, fol. Ir, col. b 8-9, in Joseph Engels, ed., Petrus Berchorius … Werkmateriaal, III (Utrecht: Rijksuniversiteit, 1966), 2.

¹⁵ "Sed quoniam multis modis res similes rebus apparent, non putemus esse praescriptum ut quod in aliquo loco res aliqua per similitudinem significaverit, hoc eam semper significare credamus," De Doctrina Christiana, 3.25.35, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XXXIV, Col. 78; trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., On Christian Doctrine (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), pp. 99-100.

¹⁶ Toulmin Smith, pp. 150-51, and Hervieux, IV, 261.

¹⁷ I translate the passage: "This beast, who sees so clearly, and who perceives from so far off his enemy who wickedly seeks him, is fitting as the example of God, for God looks from afar and sees and observes whatever people do here and there," Le Bestiaire, ed. Robert Reinsch (Leipzig, 1892), vv. 1749-56.

¹⁸ Guillaume le Clerc's description of the eagle (Reinsch, vv. 657-80) follows the First Family Latin manuscript Royal 2C.xii of the British Library and its ancestor, the Greek Physiologus B, in allowing the eagle a three-fold plunge into water, suggesting baptism. Other bestiaries may lack the motifs of threeness or baptism while still suggesting some form of spiritual renewal.

Changes in the animal lore or "legend" portion of the bestiary often seem deliberate matchings of the legend to its intended allegory: Michael Curley shows the process operating long before Guillaume in the ancestral bestiary, the Physiologus (Physiologus [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979], Introd., p. XXV et passim).

¹⁹ "Quando autem ex eisdem Scripturae verbis, non unum aliquid, sed duo vel plura sentiuntur, etiam si latet quid senserit ille qui scripsit, nihil periculi est, si quodlibet eoreum congruere veritati ex aliis locis sanctarum Scripturarum doceri potest," De Doctrina Christiana 3.27.38, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XXXIV, Col. 80 (Robertson, pp. 101-02). Cf. 1.36.41.

²⁰ Barthes, "L'Activite structuraliste," in Essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964), pp. 218, 220.

²¹ Bloomfield, "Allegory as Interpretation," New Literary History, 3 (1972), 301-18.

²² Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Bollingen Series No. 35, 2nd ed., v (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 3-30.