I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror," and I recently landed on this footnote:
In one 14th century illuminated manuscript, Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat.
To begin with, if anyone has any leads on which manuscript she might be referring to and whether there are any images available, I'd love to hear - Google isn't turning up anything.
But I'm also interested in these particular animal symbols - some seem conventional and obvious, I guess because they've survived to this day, like Pride and the lion, and I'm aware that the medieval imagination saw many living creatures as theological or moral parables, like the association of the stork with Christ. But how universal was the association between badgers and avarice? Would these animal images have been strictly defined, or might different scribes have interpreted boars and badgers in different ways? And do we know how far these associations actually impacted the way people in the middle ages treated the animals around them?
Here is the manuscript: it's a French manuscript from 1392 (BNF fr 400). Each capital sin is represented by a character from a recognizable social class riding an animal and holding objects or smaller creatures.
It's a very early example of the "parade of sins" iconography that became widespread in the XVth century in France and in other European countries, notably England, Italy, and Spain, where such parades were painted on church walls. The number of animals to symbolize the sins was initially much larger: in the 13th century, more than 100 creatures were mentioned in treaties about vices (that later became sins). This menagerie was that of the medieval bestiaries, themselves adapted from the 2nd-century Greek Physiologos, which drew from earlier compendiums of animals, included Roman, Greek, and Eastern ones. The repertoire of "vice" animals was progressively reduced to include only those that were familiar to the European public, including common ones like the dog, the badger, the boar, the donkey, or the goat. In the late XVth century, some of these images only included the animals.
The choice of animals was not always strict, except for the lion, always associated with Pride. Luxury, for instance, could use a goat, as in the cited manuscript, or a sow. Wrath could be a boar, a leopard, or a dragon. Pigs and boars show up in different sins. Greed could be a badger or a monkey. Donkeys and (male) goats had been associated respectively with laziness and aggressive sexuality for centuries, so their use in sin iconography can be expected, but other associations, like the badger with Greed, are less obvious (to be fair, I have not looked very hard into the latter). The riders could also be different and change from a "parade" to another. In any case these images seem to have been basically visual aids and (possibly) used like Powerpoint slides with the preacher making their significance explicit. Indeed, they were often shown alongside scary images of Hell, towards which those riders galloped on their strange mounts.
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