History of a Fallen King ~

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~~ The Bear: History of a Fallen King
by Michel Pastoureau, George Holoch  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?i...0674047822 The oldest discovered statue, fashioned some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, is of a bear. The lion was not always king. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear’s centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, literatures, and legends from the Slavic East to Celtic Britain. Historian Michel Pastoureau considers how this once venerated creature was deposed by the advent of Christianity and continued to sink lower in the symbolic bestiary before rising again in Pyrrhic triumph as a popular toy.The early Church was threatened by pagan legends of the bear’s power, among them a widespread belief that male bears were sexually attracted to women and would violate them, producing half-bear, half-human beings—invincible warriors who founded royal lines. Marked for death by the clergy, bears were massacred. During the Renaissance, the demonic prestige bears had been assigned in biblical allegory was lost to the goat, ass, bat, and owl, who were the devil’s new familiars, while the lion was crowned as the symbol of nobility. Once the undefeated champions of the Roman arena, prized in princely menageries, bears became entertainers in the marketplace, trained to perform humiliating tricks or muzzled and devoured by packs of dogs for the amusement of humans. By the early twentieth century, however, the bear would return from exile, making its way into the hearts of children everywhere as the teddy bear.This compelling history reminds us that men and bears have always been inseparable, united by a kinship that gradually moved from nature to culture—a bond that continues to this day. Reply

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~~"Pastoureau brings erudition and expertise to his subject as he traces how the bear was a venerated figure in pagan Europe, but dethroned as king of beasts by Christianity. He makes an important contribution by providing a long history of the bear, an animal whose symbolic importance is unknown by many. Reader will be treated to an elegant review of medieval history and theology, as well as informed discussions about the art on cave walls, the boundary between humans and animals in Greek myth, the philosophical foundations of natural history from Aristotle to Buffon, and a wealth of information about popular culture during the Middle Ages and Renaissance." - Matthew Senior, Oberlin College.   Reply

[brotherbear]

page #150 - Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, these two polar bears were 'curiosa exotica' of the kind that every menagerie of any importance had to possess in order to effectively function as an emblem of power. ( keeping up with the Jones' ) Owning a brown bear had become totally banal and held very little interest. Kings and princes gave up that animal, abandoning it to the menageries of towns and petty lords, or even to jongleurs, tumblers, and animal showmen who traveled from one village fair to the next. Lions, not bears, were now what every princely menagerie had to contain. It would be useful to know in detail the composition of thirteenth-century menageries, but, in the absence of plentiful documentation, we have only an approximate idea. Thanks to narrative texts and a few accounting archives, we know that they contained many lions that had to be fed, cared for, guarded, and replaced. Lions, but also panthers, leopards, and even some "tigers," about which we can guess that they were not the animals we know by that name. When medieval images intend to depict tigers, they never show felines resembling our Asian tigers, but quadrupeds with dark, sometimes spotted fur, resembling large wolves with enormous teeth and claws. In the closing years of the fourteenth century, King Charles VI of France adopted the "tiger" as an emblem that he used, among others, as a personal "device." Narative texts and accounting documents frequently mention this "tiger," but images never represent it as a large, striped wild animal, but rather as a kind of fox or wolf ( the latter was, incidentally the device of the king's brother, Louis d'Orleans ).
*Question: what animal in Europe once went by the name "tiger" ? Reply