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Chapter 2

Mysteries and Marvels

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, avid bird-fancier and leader of the Sixth Crusade, received a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Babylon that was probably unique in thirteenth-century Europe: an umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) from Indonesia (Streseman 25). Charles IV of France (1322–1328) kept an Alexandrine parakeet in his royal menagerie (Loisel 1:169). By the fifteenth century, parrots inhabited the Vatican.

These were exceptional cases, however. As a rule, living parrots seldom appear in the historical records of medieval Europe. One ornithologist claims that after the glut of Indian parakeets in Roman times, “all trace of them disappears until the fifteenth century” (Streseman 25). No medieval naturalists complain about the birds’ abundance. No accounts of royal processions involve them. There is, of course, no sign of them being eaten. The story of parrots in medieval Europe is in large part the story of their absence.

Yet, paradoxically, as they grow less available in the feather, they loom larger in the cultural imagination, often in ways that bear no discernible relation to biological reality. So the story of medieval parrots is one of art, literature, and the birth of a marvelous fiction. Where the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed these birds as somehow both sublime and ridiculous, in the Middle Ages they become less commonplace, less servile, and more magical.

Of course, it’s easy to overstate the changes that occur from classical times to the Middle Ages. Parrots remained available in medieval Europe and were still prized as pets, although their availability diminished. Likewise, the Middle Ages preserved classical parrot culture but also reinterpreted it in the process, so that the birds of India come increasingly to figure as emblems of the mythic and supernatural.

For a good example of this process, consider the medieval legacy of Pliny’s Natural History. This is partly what we would now call a work of zoology, but partly also a work of geography. In the Middle Ages, these two aspects of Pliny’s history split into separate literary forms: the bestiary and the travel-narrative. In the process, Pliny’s remarks about parrots undergo embellishment at the same time that they are preserved and repeated.

On the whole, the bestiaries remain quite faithful to what Pliny wrote, given their complicated history. In design, they served as zoological encyclopedias, dealing with animals both real and imaginary. In the typical bestiary, entries on the hedgehog and weasel and frog stand side by side with those on the parander, monoceros, and manticore, and the parrot’s scarcity in medieval Europe tends to ally it with these latter, fantastic creatures. In derivation, the bestiary is a compendium of beast-lore without identified authors, developing by transmission of material from one copyist to another. The main sources for the form were the great classical works of natural history, especially those by Aristotle and Pliny, supplemented by versions of a late Roman-Greek treatise on beasts, now lost, attributed to a writer called the Physiologus (c. 100–140 A.D.). By the twelfth century, bestiaries circulated throughout Europe, combining the opinions of Aristotle, Pliny, and their fellows with variations on the Physiologus’ work and passages from post-classical authors such as Isidore of Seville and Hugh of Fouilloy.

Two entries on parrots drawn from English manuscripts typify the bestiary form. In a twelfth-century description:

It is only from India that one can get a PSITIACUS or Parrot, which is a green bird with a red collar and a large tongue. The tongue is broader than in other birds and it makes distinct sounds with it. If you did not see it, you would think it was a real man talking. It greets people of its own accord, saying “What-cheer?” or “Toodle-oo!” It learns other words by teaching. Hence the story of the man who paid a compliment to Caesar by giving him a parrot which had been taught to say: “I, a parrot, am willing to learn the names of others from you. This I learnt by myself to say—Hail Caesar!”

A parrot’s beak is so hard that if you throw down the bird from a height on a rock it saves itself by landing on its beak with its mouth tight shut, using the beak as a kind of foundation for the shock. Actually its whole skull is so thick that, if it has to be taught anything, it needs to be admonished with blows. Although it really does try to copy what its teacher is saying, it wants an occasional crack with an iron bar. While young, and up to two years old, it learns what you point out to it quickly enough, and retains it tenaciously; but after that it begins to be distrait and unteachable. (Cambridge University MS 11.4.26, in Book of Beasts 112–114)

And from the thirteenth century:

The parrot is only found in India. It is green in colour with a pumice-grey neck and a large tongue which is broader than those of other birds, and which enables it to speak distinct words, so that if you could not see it, you would think that a man was speaking. It will greet you naturally, saying “Ave” or “Chere” (the Latin and Greek words for “Hail”). It learns other words if it is taught them. As the poet says: “Like a parrot I will learn other words from you. I have taught myself to say ‘Hail, Caesar’” [Martial xiv.73]. Its beak is so hard that if it falls from a height on to a stone, it presses on it with its beak and uses it as a kind of protection of extraordinary firmness. Its head is so strong that if you have to teach it with blows while it is learning how to speak to men, you have to strike it with an iron rod. For as long as it is young, not much over two years old, it learns what it is taught quickly and remembers it longer; if it is a little older it is forgetful and difficult to teach. (Oxford University MS Bodley 764, in Bestiary 129)

These passages offer a literary pastiche that transcends any idea of individual authorship. Both manuscripts clearly refer to Pliny with his tales of parrot corporal punishment and the firmness of the parrot’s beak. (This latter story, by the way, misconstrues fact. Parrots do rely heavily upon their beaks for mobility, but not, as Pliny believes, “because of the weakness of [their] feet” [10.58.117]; on the contrary, their legs and beak are strong and together make them such excellent climbers that they are more at home in the forest canopy than on the wing. The specialized use of their beak for climbing is an adaptation to this preferred habitat.) Likewise, both manuscripts cite Martial, who was also referring to Pliny, so the manuscripts already find themselves performing three distinct acts of literary reference: one to Pliny, one to Martial, and one to Pliny again via Martial. And that is just the beginning. For instance, these bestiaries also report that parrots learn best when young—an observation that doesn’t appear in Pliny but does show up in later writers like Apuleius and Solinus, both of whom also rely upon Pliny. So once again we encounter a wide range of potential acts of literary allusion: to Apuleius, to Solinus, to Pliny through Apuleius, to Pliny through Solinus, to Apuleius through Solinus, to Pliny through Apuleius through Solinus. The number of possible sources and cross-sources, borrowings and cross-borrowings, multiplies at an alarming rate. Nor have we even considered the manuscripts’ possible indebtedness to postclassical sources like Isidore of Seville (c. 630). Like the bestiaries after him, Isidore contributes to a corporate text that transcends time and individuals, reencountering and reproducing version after version of itself. Through this rage for allusion and compilation, the medieval bestiary preserves a remarkable lot of classical nature-lore, but it does so by becoming a fabulous genre, in the root sense of the word: a kind of writing more preoccupied with the act of writing, the process of story-telling itself, than with any of its declared subjects.

Yet even as these works preserve the classical heritage, they also introduce novelties. At least two innovations occur in the bestiary entries cited above. One has to do with the parrot’s appearance: in Pliny it is described as possessing a “vermilion collar,” and other classical writers preserve Pliny’s exact diction on this point. But for Isidore, Pliny’s vermilion collar has already become a band of pumice-gray; of the two later bestiary manuscripts, in turn, the Cambridge version follows Pliny, while the Bodley version follows Isidore. As it happens, this variation might have some basis in experience. Closely related to the Alexandrine and the rose-ringed parakeet are several other species of Indian parrot, of similar overall appearance, in which the rose-red of the collar-band has been replaced by various patterns of gray and black. These include the Malabar parakeet (Psittacula columboides [Forshaw 338–339]), the emerald-collared parakeet (Psittacula calthorpae [Forshaw 339]), and perhaps most impressively, the slaty-headed parakeet (Psittacula himalayana [Forshaw 330–331]), in which the collar is surmounted by a full head of feathers that could easily be called pumice-gray. As parrots became less plentiful in medieval Europe, a few stray specimens of one of these breeds might have found their way into captivity, thus confusing the record of their appearance. Perhaps (this is a bigger stretch) this confusion might have influenced the visual record too. As medieval painters stylize the birds, they introduce various anatomical variations, including peculiarities of color. In the Holkham Bible Picture Book (early fourteenth century; British Library MS Add. 47682, fol. 10r), for instance, a parrot with green breast and blue-gray head and wings perches on a family tree of Jesus Christ (Figure 3). This image may reflect the medieval understanding of parrots as gray-collared or even gray-headed.

But a second change is far more important: the idea that parrots can speak on their own. Isidore and both of the bestiaries cited above agree on this point: the parrot speaks to people “of its own accord” and “naturally”—although all three works also agree that parrots need human instruction to utter more than a simple greeting. In each case the bestiaries cite the same authority for this view: Martial 14.73, whose psittacine narrator claims to have taught itself to say “Hail, Caesar!” It is as if the bestiarists, in their preoccupation with collecting the observations of older authorities, had lost any sense of the difference between such literary genres as natural history and epigram, so that Martial’s outrageous flattery can now somehow pass for fact. Likewise, where the speech of Martial’s parrot originally marks it as a very clever servant, the bestiaries generalize that parrot’s talent to its species as a whole, thereby producing a race of birds that seem less servile than magical. Consider, for instance, these anecdotes from Thomas of Cantimpré’s On the Nature of Things (1240):

Figure 3. The Holkham Picture Bible (B.L. MS Add. 47682, fol. 10r), with a family tree of Christ depicting a parrot perched on the far left, above King Solomon (courtesy of the British Library)

[The parrot] has from nature a voice with which it greets emperors. It so happened that when Charlemagne was traveling through the deserts of Greece he was met by some parrots, who greeted him, as it were, in the Greek language, saying: Farewell, Emperor. Later events were to prove the truth of this expression, almost like a prophecy, because at that time Charles was only king of France. In the subsequent period he became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. There is also a story in the life of Pope Leo, that a certain nobleman had a talking parrot, which he sent to Pope Leo as a present. When the parrot was on its way there and met passers-by, it cried out: I am going to the Pope, I am going to the Pope. And as soon as it reached the presence of the Pope, it cried out: Pope Leo, hail! (5.109)

“At this,” the story concludes, “the Pope was rightly delighted, and often afterwards, as a relaxation from the labours of the day, he would talk to the parrot.” What pope and parrot said to one another has not been recorded, but the clear implication is that they shared some sort of meaningful conversation on a regular basis.

Of course, the Romans had already imagined parrots as companions of princes or as associates of the sacred. So to transfer the bird’s intimacies from emperor to pope may seem a small enough adjustment. Still, the shift has huge implications, for it endows the bird with a specifically Christian sanctity. This, in turn, is enlarged by the parrot’s reputation for saying meaningful, even prescient things, as in the anecdote about Charlemagne. Such stories combine and proliferate, generating a medieval view of the parrot as sentient, sacred, and prophetic.

Sometimes this reputation can carry ambiguous moral overtones. In his On the Nature of Things (c. 1180), for instance, Alexander Neckam remarks, like Thomas of Cantimpré, that the parrot is “admired of the Pope” (1.36). In fact, Neckam explains the origin of the parrot’s common medieval name—“popinjay” in English, “papagallo” in Spanish, “Papagei” in German, and so forth—in this same phrase, papae gabio (1.36). Such false etymologies provide a popular way of relating the names of things to their supposed natures. But Neckam declares that the parrot “has great ingenuity and is most prone to falsehood” (1.36) and illustrates this remark with a story:

In Great Britain there lived a knight of great generosity who owned a parrot and loved it most dearly. The knight, having set out on a journey around the mountains of Gilboa, saw a parrot there, and recalling the one that he had at home, said to it, “Our captive parrot, identical to you, sends greetings.” Hearing these words, the bird fell down as if dead. The knight grieved at this, being deceived by the bird’s trickery, and, having completed his journey and returned home, brought the tale back with him. The knight’s parrot listened attentively to his master’s words and then, feigning grief, fell from its perch as if dead, too. The entire household marveled at this sudden onset of grief, but the knight commanded that the bird be placed out in the open, so that it might be revived by fresh air. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, the parrot then flew off maliciously, never to be caught again. The master groaned and the entire household complained loudly that they had been tricked. (1.37; my translation)

Having thus deceived its master, the parrot presumably headed straight back to Mount Gilboa, which was becoming the preferred haunt of parrots in some bestiaries. After the Philistines had killed Saul and Jonathan there, King David prayed that no dew or rain should fall upon the place (2 Samuel 1.21). For whatever reason, the bestiarists had begun to insist that parrots could not stand to touch water (Neckam 1.36; Cantimpré 5.109).¹

Of course, giving parrots a home in the Holy Land illustrates how well the bestiaries had absorbed these birds into 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 bizarre medieval misunderstanding of classical lore. As it happens, Pittacus of Mytilene (c. 650–570 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 angels in fifteenth-century attire with lutes and rebecs (Figure 9). The scene is one of great splendor, rich in gold and ornate hangings. A parrot appears on the Virgin’s right hand (the viewer’s lower left), in the same place where it also perches in the Egerton Master’s Adoration of the Magi.

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.