Feeding the Dogs

Images by Saiman Chow. Source, without words.

by KARL STEEL

In comments in the post below, Ryan Judkins reminds me that:

during the curee, the dogs were usually fed on the innards of the deer, including the stomach, lungs (if they be hot) and the intestines, after they'd been washed, usually chopped up and all mixed together with blood and bread.

How to Make a Human talks about this too:

Humans’ mastery over their hunting animals is even more apparent in techniques that prevented dogs from killing or freely eating the prey. Dogs were allowed to slow, harry, and corner prey, while humans were meant to deliver the killing blow. Hunting rules required that the field butchery reserve a portion of the prey for the dogs, but they also required that the dogs eat only at their master’s command. In practical terms, the restrictions preserved the bulk of the carcass for the human hunters while ensuring that the dogs received the positive reinforcement of a reward. At the same time, to restrict dogs’ actions in hunting, restrain them from the kill, and permit them to eat only with human permission ensured that neither the dogs’ violence nor their necessity to human hunting might call human mastery into question. The ritual protection of human mastery encompassed even carrion birds, which were left the scraps from the carcass; as the Middle English Tristrem puts it, “þe rauen he 3aue his Ʒiftes, / Sat on þe fourched tre” (to the raven he gave his gifts, and set them on the forked branch; 502–3). The ravens now became beneficiaries of the hunters’ largesse, their appetite appropriated by a ritual that indicates that the control not only of violence but also of meat-eating concerned humans (64-65).

Judkins' forthcoming JEGP article on the royal hunt stresses the community around the breaking of the deer carcass, in which servants and colleagues, whether human or animal, receive their due. More and more, I'm slipping away from my strong paranoid reading of human mastery (see above!) and sliding towards readings like Judkins', which consider affects other than anxiety and cruelty. Love, familiarity, conscientious attention to particular appetites, shared joy: these matter too. 

This isn't something as simple as a switch from negative to positive affect. Things are more complicated. Think of this brief encounter in Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation:

Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen. Some of them were just things like the boar wanted to have his dandruff scratched while they were collecting him. (Pigs have big flaky dandruff all over their backs.) The other things the man had to do were a lot more intimate. He might have to hold the boar's penis in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he hold me, who wanted to have his butt hole played with. "I have to stick my finger in his butt, he just really loves that," he told me. Then he got all red in the face (103).

Grandin aptly calls this section "How to Make a Pig Fall in Love." Like all love, things can go awry. Our face might go red, maybe because the pig doesn't love us anymore, or maybe because we're a bit embarrassed. When intimacies that can hardly be named find their way into the public eye, things can be a bit disgusting or embarrassing for the guardians of human exclusivity. For more on love's weirdness, see my post below, and also see Dominic Pettman's Human Error, 77-101, which discusses the films Zoo and Tierische Liebe (Animal Love) as well as Haraway's dog love in When Species Meet and J. A. Baker's The Peregine to track love's strangeness, how it can entail, don't forget, "monomania, projective narcissism, and so on," a "familiar libidinal economy, involving the kind of struggles around difference and recognition that can lead to passive-aggressive sulking because of perceived miscommunication" (95).

I have this in mind because I've just read Kathy Rudy's Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy. Rudy, a dog lover, says that "the task of coming out as gay was a piece of cake compared to coming out as--what?" She observes "there is not an adequate name for the kind of life I lead, the way my desires organize themselves around animals, especially dogs" (35), that "it's not so much that I am no longer a lesbian...it's that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. My preference these days is canine" (41). For more on this kind of love, we might look to "Michael Field" and their love for and through Whym Chow: perhaps start here and here.

Rudy cooks for her dogs. One loves any kind of meat, another needs a lot more food than you'd think to look at her, and another, Duncan, a yellow lab mix, goes nuts for oatmeal and scrambled eggs (when I told my wife, Alison, about this, she cried "he's a breakfast dog!"). Rudy's learned a lot more about her dogs by feeding them; it's another way to "talk" to the dogs, to build affection and knowledge, another way to render "their subjectivity more visible" (184). She's made a better love between them, which is to say, this queer animal lover is making love to them in a new, better way.

Feeding animals, eating with them--as Cuthbert did with his horse, you remember--makes us companions, a word Haraway often uses in When Species Meet. And companionship can be very intimate indeed. The scholar of How to Make a Human would claim that this is just bad faith: after all, look at Chaucer's Prioress, so deeply sad about her dogs and mice, but still happy to feed her dogs roast meat. Charity begins and ends at home, says the old me. The scholar I am now isn't so sure, and Rudy's partially to thank for that. Because becoming companions (or concarnians, as I say in AVMEO) with animals might mean something's not quite clicked with your human relations. It isn't just hypocritical humanism. To be sure, animal companionship isn't necessarily a better love; it's just, perhaps, a love that disorients you from the community of humans. It's a weird love, like any love, but weirder than most because it lacks the veneer of (human) normalcy.

After all, isn't the Prioress a bit camp, what with her silly romance name, her (arguably) bad French accent, her fancy wimple, by which I mean, aren't the Prioress and her dogs a bit queer?

I have in mind dog-feedings, like the one Judkins describes above. Or Yvain and his lion sharing meals when the lion may be the only one who knows who Yvain really is. Or even the willingness among the philosophers (of all people, generally the most obstinately human)--Albert the Great, Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais--to repeat Pliny's observation that certain cuts of deer meat disgust dogs, unless (as Vincent says), they're especially hungry. Or Richard Wyche's fifteenth-century account of his religious persecution, where amid his tortures, he "asked the bishop to have my horse taken to his stable, and I gave what I had in my purse to the man leading it there" (trans. Christopher G. Bradley, PMLA 127.3 (2012): 630 [626-42]). Yes, Richard asks this because the horse, a special kind of transportation machine, needs sustenance, but I have to think he asks also because he likes his horse, and he, a religious man (of all people &c.), remembers it, even with execution looming, with nothing mattering for eternity, we would think, but his imperiled soul.

So the shared affect of a meals draws my attention. The love the hunters and the dogs share matters, even as we must not forget the dismembered carcass of the deer around which this affect clusters.

One more thought on the queer love of dogs: if this particular project continues (and it could, if someone's looking for a Kalamazoo paper to fill a slot?), think of the stories of knights who love hunting and disdain the love of women...until they're forced to grow up. Guigemar, for example, but we could come up with dozens more. Think of how queer that love is, particularly when read with the compulsory erotics whose force draws the knight out of his pleasures with his horses, hounds, and hawks, and into his human, only human maturity.

(for more stuff on zoophilia, see James Goebel's excellent musings over at "A Geology of Borders")

GOT YOUR NOSE: Bisclavret defaces his wife

Plaster cast from the Palais de Chaillot

by KARL STEEL

First, join us in wishing Jeffrey safe travels.

Then, lest it be said that my promises or threats aren't worth the nose they're printed on, here, for your use, is my monumental post on the noselessness of Bisclavret's wife.

Recall that towards the end of Marie's lai, Mr. B's wife shows up at court, only to be attacked by her lupine husband:

Oiez cum il s'est bien vengiez!
Le nes li esracha del vis.
Que li peüst il faire pis? (Bisclavret 234-36)
"Just hear how successfully he took his revenge. He tore the nose right off her face. What worse punishment could he have inflicted on her?" (translation by Gallagher. My own translation would go like this: "Listen to how well he avenged himself! He tore her nose off her face. What worse could he have done to her?") 

The loss of the nose has long been a rich interpretative site in Bisclavret criticism. We can divide the readings into several groups:

• psychoanalytic ones, which pun on vis [face] and vit [penis]: e.g., Bloch, Labbie, and Dolores Warwick Frese, "The Marriage of Woman and Werewolf: Poetics of Estrangement in Marie de France's 'Bisclavret'" in A. N. Doane's and Carol Braun Pasternack's anthology Vox Intexta: Orality And Textuality in the Middle Ages, rooted, I believe, in Jean-Charles Huchet, "Nom de femme et ecriture feminine au Moyen Age: Les Lais de Marie de France," Poetique 48 (1981): 407-30. Essentially, Ms. B had illegitimately taken on the phallic function and has it torn from her. This helps explain why only her female descendants are noseless; 
• claims that nose-removal was a common torture in the Middle Ages, which I think is a wild exaggeration: I'm looking forward to seeing Larissa Tracy's further contextualization: I believe she's arguing that the court of Henry II, being antipathetic to torture, would have found the scene repugnant;  
• claims that the nose-removal makes the wife more bestial: for reasons I'll explain (far) below, I disagree; I'm more in the neighborhood (less in the same block than on the same bus line) as Laurence M. Porter's proposal in Women's Vision In Western Literature: The Empathic Community that "Wolves have prominent muzzles and the missing nose makes Bisclavret's wife's face resemble a human skull more than a wolf's head, suggesting the skull underneath the skin, the illusoriness and transcience of sexual delight";
• interconnections with many, many stories of Roman virgins and, in particular, virgin saints, who cut off their noses to make themselves unattractive to the Barbarian invaders [see Claude Thomasset, 'La femme sans nez', Littérature et médecine II, ed. Jean-Louis Cabanès, Eidolôn, 55 (Bourdeaux: Université Michel de Montaigne, Bourdeaux III, 2000), 57-52 and Jane Tibbetts, 'The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation," Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives Ed. Mary Beth Rose. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986]: implicitly, then, Bisclavret's assaulting his wife's attractiveness; 
• and finally, most influentially, a great many claims that losing the nose [or losing the nose and ears] was a punishment for an adulterous wife. See Stith Thompson Q451.5.1, Nose cut off as punishment for adultery. This requires a lot of detail.

Stith Thompson's most frequent citations here are to the Kathasaritsagara, "The Ocean of the Stream of Stories," an enormous 11th-century Sanskrit tale collection in which adulterous wives often lose their noses (or their noses and ears), sometimes while embracing the reanimated (and bitey) corpses of their executed lovers. Anna Kłosowska suggested to me that the stories could have made their way to Latin Europe: I want to know more about this: perhaps via Iberia or Norman Sicily?

Saxo Grammaticus tells the story of Hjalte, who's with a ladyfriend while his king's being betrayed. When Hjalte hears the sound of battle, he decides to leave her to rescue his lord. His ladyfriend asks him "si ipso careat, cuius aetatis viro nubere debeat," if she should lose him, how old a man ought she to marry? He answers her by cutting off her nose.

Robert Stanton directed me to the laws of Cnut, which punish a female adulterer with the loss of her nose and ears. Frederick II of Sicily (1194-1250) commanded that an adulterous woman's nose be amputated, unless her husband didn't want this: otherwise, she would just be flogged ("adultera convicta de adulterio traditur viro, ut in recompensationem thori violati, truncetur ei nasus, & si maritus ei truncare non vult, fustigabitur"; h/t Shulamith Shahar The Fourth Estate for this reference).

Still earlier law codes might be referenced, with increasingly remote chances of relevance: Ezekiel 23:25 hints at the loss of nose and ears for adultery: medieval Biblical commentaries might profitably be consulted; the Byzantine Ecloga of 726 punishes adulterers of both sexes with nose-slitting; and  Diodorus of Sicily's 1st c. BC universal history says that in Egypt, "In case of adultery, the man was to have a thousand lashes with rods, and the woman her nose cut off. For it was looked upon very fit, that the adulteress that tricked up herself to allure men to wantonness, should be punished in that part where her charms chiefly lay" (thanks to Sharon Kinoshita for proposing the web search that led me to these sources).

Looking ahead, Valentine Groebner Valentin Gröbner 'Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town," trans. Pamela Selwyn History Workshop Journal 40 (1995): 1-15 (in work that I expect appears in some form in her his 2009 Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages) talks about a 1479 case in Nuremberg in which a certain Fritz Schreppler tried to cut off his wife's nose in the marketplace. We have several others like this from the same period, including multiple instances in which a husband and wife teamed up to cut off still another woman's nose. 

Groebner Gröbner also records fourteenth-century denasatio punishments against prostitutes in Augsburg, and then, finally, she he cites evidence of pan-medieval texts that link the loss of a nose to public humiliation and punishment for sexual crimes: there's Du Cange, where "the examples under the adjective denasatus alone fill an entire column," and Aenied VI.496-7, where Deiphobus's terribly mutilated in his face, perhaps for the crime of sleeping with Helen of Troy. And, finally, the Knight of La Tour Landry speaks of a husband who breaks his disobedient wife's nose and "all her lyff after she had her nose croked, the whiche shent and dysfigured her uisage after, that she might not for shame shewe her uisage, it was so foule blemisshed."

We might also look to the witness of medieval translations and adaptations of "Bisclavret." In Biclarel [warning: pdf], Mr. B just mutilates his wife's face (373-74), with no specific reference to her nose, and then she's walled up, presumably to be crushed or to starve to death (454-5). In the Icelandic version, he tears off her clothes and nose, and in the Old Norse version, "Bisclaret," he tears off his wife's clothes, but her female descendants are still born noseless. Incidentally, "Bisclaret" ends in a tantalizing way for werewolf scholars: "Nothing that happens now is more true than this adventure we have told you about, for many strange things happened in olden times that no one hears mentioned now. He who translated this book into Norse saw in his childhood a wealthy farmer who shifted his shape. At times he was a man, at other times in wolf's shape, and he told everything that wolves did in the meantime. But there is no more to be said about him. The Bretons made a lai, 'Bisclaret', of this story which you now have heard" (translation by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane).

And that would seem to be that: Ms. B loses her nose as a sign of her marital infidelity, or to humiliate her, or to disfigure her. Absent legal or (other) narrative evidence particularly from the court of Henry II, we don't have firm ground for these explanations, but we probably have enough to make our claims with sufficient confidence, and to say, as well, that any further interpretation would just be fanciful, evidence only of our critical ingenuity in this ongoing professional party game we call "producing a reading."

But I can't help myself: I have to propose one more possibility. Recall how my previous Bisclavret post takes the lai's opening as structurally analogous to a bestiary. From that, I'm led to illustrations in the bestiaries of Adam naming the animals:

Aberdeen Bestiary f 5r, detail

I know I'm stretching things, but I'm struck by the protuberance of the animal faces in this and other medieval illustrations of Adam before the animals, and by Adam's comparatively flat face. Had the deer, or even the round-faced lions lost their noses, they would have a face that more resembled Adam's than that of any other animal. That is, as Laurence M. Porter observes, the loss of a nose doesn't make Ms. B more "bestial" (despite what's commonly said in the criticism) but rather less bestial. Porter takes the injury as making her face more skull-like, turning her into a kind of vanity figure somewhat avant la lettre. However, I take the injury as one that traps her in being only human, denying her the freedom of movement, and of the freedom of ontological (or, for that matter, ethical) positions enjoyed by her husband and by the masculine court to which he belongs.

She had been afraid of a husband able to shift from man to wolf; she wanted to be married only to a human, and nothing more; and for that, she's punished with nothing less that an inescapable humanity. In a lai, it's hard to imagine a worse punishment! She and her daughters, barred from the dangerous fun of men, have been made...well, boring.

More to come, perhaps, if you think this is worth developing.

Bisclavret's (Secret) Diet

by Karl Steel

Our readers likely remember how Marie de France's "Bisclavret" begins, because it's one of our favorite stories:

Quant de lais faire m'entremet
ne voil ubliër Bisclavret.
Bisclavret a nun en Bretan,
Garwalf l'apelant li Norman.
Jadis le poeit hum oïr
e sovent suleit avenir,
hume plusur garwalf devindrent
e es boscages maisun tindrent.
Garwalf, ceo est beste salvage;
tant cum il est en cele rage,
humes devure, grant mal fait,
es granz forez converse e vait.
Cest afere les or ester:
del bisclavret vus voil cunter. (Bisclavret, 1-14)
[In my effort to compose lays I do not wish to omit Bisclavret--for such is its name in Breton, while the Normans call it Garwaf. In days gone by one could hear tell, and indeed it often used to happen, that many men turned into werewolves and went to live in the woods. A werewolf is a ferocious beast which, when possessed by this madness, devours men, causes great damage, and dwells in vast forests. I leave such matters for the moment, for I wish to tell you about Bisclavret" (translation by Gallagher)].

Frightening, no? Well, no, not really, since we never see our werewolf hero [hereafter Mr. B] eat anyone. Or really, anything (barring, perhaps, his estranged wife's nose). When Mr. B's wife wheedles him into giving up his secret, lupine life, he confesses that when he becomes bisclavret he goes into the great forest, into the deepest part of the woodland, and there lives on prey and plunder ("vif de preie e de ravine").

This is violent language, but there's nothing here about his explicitly eating humans. At least not so far as he tells his wife, or us, for that matter. Jeffrey will remark on the vagueness of Mr B's account of his diet in a forthcoming piece in Studies in the Age of Chaucer; Burgwinkle's talked about it too ("As he ceases to be dangerous – no devouring of men that we know of – his wife appears ever more treacherous" (166); no doubt there's more: I don't have Bynum's discussion on hand, for example (although I don't think McCracken and Kinoshita discuss this matter in their recent critical companion to Marie).

Readers of my AVMEO essay would expect me to suspect Mr. B of anthropophagy: wolves like to eat people, and Marie's already told us werewolves eat people. Only special pleading could get Mr. B off the hook: maybe, some might say, Mr. B would be unlikely to find many humans to eat in the deepest part of the forest. That's not much of a defense. It's easier to accuse Mr. B of hiding the nastiest truth from his wife, who nonetheless proves that she understands him perfectly well by immediately plotting to get rid of him. More sympathetically, we might even suspect Mr. B not of being duplicitous, but of being too self-deluded to admit, even to himself, what he's really doing.

Maybe we can suspect worse. For while there's something marvelous about not being confined by the armor of an alienating (human) identity, there's also something horrific (to us) about letting the human frame slip. Again following the path laid by my AVMEO essay, I suggest that Mr. B's own vagueness hints at the consequences of giving up on human supremacy, namely, that once human supremacy doesn't matter, humans fall under the general category of "prey and plunder." There's no need for Mr. B to conceal anthropophagy, but neither does he need to disguise it with a euphemism, because, for him, human flesh is just like other fleshes. There's violence here; there's a wrong being done, to someone or something; but it's not a particular violence, or a violence that quite knows what it's injuring, unless it's the particular violence through which a nobleman sustains his position within the state of exception.

The dehumanized point of view isn't the only stance the lai takes, however. Its opening doesn't forget about the specificity of human flesh, not at all. I propose that we read the opening lines as modeled on a bestiary, not at all an inconsequential genre for the late twelfth-century England in which Marie wrote. See the Aberdeen Bestiary's entry on the wolf, for example. Like Marie's lai, we have an initial discussion of names, followed by a summary of behavior. To be sure, I may be over-reading the resemblance, but I suggest it to call attention to the generic difference between the lai's narrative and the lai's opening. Marie opens with what we might call a scientific and humanist voice, maybe like a bestiary, maybe not. Whatever the voice, it's knowledgeable, distant, one that looks out at the nonhuman world, always thinking of how it might help or hurt people. To this voice, a werewolf, like wolves in general, can only be a threat.

(Monday edit: I really do need to say, here, that Susan Crane's Animal Encounters will be doing interesting stuff with bestiaries and Bisclavret in ways that will be enormously important to my own developing Bisclavret argument)

The narrative voice, on the other hand, doesn't care so much about human supremacy. For this point, in the next few months, look for Cohen and, as well, Susan Crane's Animal Encounters; also see McCracken on translation and movement. The narrative voice concerns itself with gender and sexuality (see Burgwinkle and Tovi Bibring), and with feudal loyalties, but not with humanity, except to observe how it's slipped. Note that when the King meets (the) bisclavret, he declares, first, that "ele [i.e., this beast] a sen d'ume" [154; this beast has human intelligence], and then revises himself three lines later: "ceste beste a entente e sen" [157; this beast has understanding and intelligence]. Beasts, he realizes, have their own intelligence, not a wan imitation of human reason, but rather their own. When anthropocentrism collapses, what dangers follow?

We might therefore hear Mr. B's "preie e ravine" as at once being aware of the violence of appetite and unaware of the specificity of human flesh as compared to the flesh of deer, or pigs, or sheep. Mr. B may be hiding something from his wife; or he might just have forgotten, like most eaters, that what he eats has any significance apart from how it benefits him. After all, he's concerned mainly with his own safety, not hers, and not with--it seems--ours.

Or he might be observing that eating means subjecting someone or something to prey and plunder; that it means taking someone's "better part" (again, my AVMEO essay), regardless of what that thing is. This is a lai, in other words, that knows what it is to eat in a world without the comforts of a naturalized, absolute human privilege.

Next-Day Edit: that should read "without the comforts of a naturalized, absolute privilege, human or otherwise." For some recent discussions of posthuman ethics, relevant to my post, see Levi Bryant and Scu at Critical Animal. I think Scu gets it exactly right when he says "Ethics is not a pathway for innocence. Rather, it is about how to live after innocence, how to exist in a fully post-lapsarian world." I think that "Bisclavret" might answer Levi's statement that he's "not even sure what a non-anthropocentric ethical theory would look like." Well, here's one, and it's lycanthropocentric. It's not a flat ontology (edit of the edit: or rather, not a flat ethics), because--as Bogost reminds us--there's no escaping -centrism, of whatever sort. But to eat from the perspective of the wolf (as I suggest the Wolf-Child of Hesse does) or the werewolf (as Mr. B does), is certainly to be non-anthropocentric. Edit of the edit: although I may be speaking far above my pay grade, and certainly far outside my expertise, while we might be able to conceive of a flat ontology, I'm not sure we, or anything else, can conceive of a flat ethics.

And one more next-day edit: I know that going into the deep woods to "vif de preie e de ravine" essentially describes the life of a poacher, which matters, of course, in late twelfth-century England, given the rising importance of royal forest privileges. But I just don't see that observation leading to an interesting reading. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

That's all I have for now, though I have notes on hand for talking about the eaten nose. Those who looked at my book two proposal might suspect (correctly) that this material will probably form the introductory section to second chapter, leading up--of course--into my Wolf Child of Hesse discussion. Time, and effort, will tell. For now, though, I'm planning to learn what the latest issue of postmedieval has to say about about lepers.

 (video from Emilie Mercier's animated Bisclavret)

"Nature"; also Guigemar's Hermaphroditic Cervid

by KARL STEEL

1) Point the First: saw an excellent paper ("Lost Geographies and The Awntyrs off Arthure") by Kathleen Coyne Kelly at the MLA in the "Alliterative Romances" session, where something struck me: When did "nature" become a place? When did it become possible to go out into nature? When did nature cease to be, primarily, a synonym for "kynde," or a word meaning "all of creation"? The Middle English Dictionary, the OED, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, and Glossa aren't helping me here.

2) Point the Second: On the topic of Nature: I recently read Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought (for a hit-and-run review, see here). Enjoyed it enormously, not least of all for his take-down of heteronormative, hearty, unironic "nature." Morton says, for example:

Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through extreme contrasts. It's outdoorsy, not 'shut in.' It's extraverted, not introverted. It's heterosexual, not homosexual. It's able-bodied--'disability' is nowhere to be seen, and physical 'wholeness' and 'coordination' are valued over the spontaneous body (81)....Masculine Nature is unrealistic. In the mesh, sexuality is all over the map. Our cells reproduce asexually, like their single-celled ancestors or the blastocyst that attaches to the uterus wall at the beginning of pregnancy. Plants and animals are hermaphrodites before they are bisexual and bisexual before they are heterosexual. Most plants and half of animals are either sequentially or simultaneously hermaphorditic; many live with constant transgender switching. A statistically significant proportion of white-tailed deer (10 percent plus) are intersex (84)....The ecological thought is also friendly to disability. There are plentiful maladaptions and functionless phenomena at the organism level (85)

Follow the link, the source for Morton's observation about the frequent intersexuality of white-tailed deer. If you're a medievalist, and this doesn't remind you of something, I recommend you reread my post's title.

En l'espeisse d'un grant buissun
vit une bisse od sun foün.
Tute fu blanche cele beste;
perches de cerf out en la teste (89-92)

In the densest part of a great thicket, he saw a doe and her fawn. this animal was completely white; it had a rack of antlers on its head. (5)

Morton, via Joan Roughgarden, talks of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), not native to Europe, and certainly unknown to Marie (but not unknown in their intersexed form to American hunters). But Roughgarden goes on to speak about several other species essential to the high-class hunting culture of twelfth-century Northern Europe:

a male morph in black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus) called cactus buck may be a form of intersex as well. Elk (Cervus elaphus, also called a red-tailed deer), swamp deer (Cervus duvauceli), Sika deer (Cervus nippon), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), and fallow deer (Dama dama), all have a male morph with velvet-covered antlers, called a peruke, that is described as nonreproductive. (36-37)

Now, Marie's white deer with a fawn doesn't quite correspond to the so-called male morphs of Elk or red-tailed, fallow, or roe deer; but the mixture of secondary sexual characteristics (at this point, would you please turn in your hymn-book to hymn #25, "All Sexual Characteristics are Secondary (Praise J. Butler)") in/on a cervid would not have been entirely unknown to Marie. It would not have been purely fantastic, nor purely symbolic. However, my sense from my dipping into Marie criticism is that this hermaphroditic deer's characteristics tend to be taken this way. If we take this as a known variant in cervid bodies (again, thanks, this time with the hymn book, "All Bodies Are Variants"), if we accept that what we tend to think of as "nature itself" "will not be pitched into binary assignations" (thanks Richard Maxwell, via Amy Hughes), then we, and Guigemar, ought not to take this critter as being as much a wonder, or monster, as we perhaps have been prone to do. Please do more with this if and as you like.

(image via the post "Something is missing on this 10-point 'buck,'" here)