A Saint Nicholas Miracle, or, These PIES, they are DELICIOUS

by KARL STEEL

12th-c. font, Winchester Cathedral, photo by John Cook

Over at the Smithsonian, Natasha Geiling writes about Santa, who has as many hometowns as Christ has foreskins. Santa lives at the North Pole, or, rather, the "North Pole," variously in New York, Alaska, and Finland. Saint Nicholas, we medievalists know, lived further South. Geiling writes:

The real Santa Claus—the historical figure upon which the legend is based—never lived anywhere near the North Pole. Saint Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop who lived and died far from the Arctic Circle, in what is now Turkey. Born into a wealthy family, Nicholas is said to have loved giving gifts, once throwing three sacks of gold coins into the house of a poor family, thereby saving the home's three daughters from a life of prostitution. Nicholas was also a favorite among sailors, who prayed to him during rough seas. The sailors spread Nicholas' story around the world, turning him into one of the most popular saints in Christendom.

My favorite Saint Nicholas story, though, is the Miracle of Nicholas and the Three Clerks, an early version of the Sweeney Todd legend. I tell the story in my How to Make a Human (210-216), where it's subjected to the kind of microscopic, psychoanalytic exegetics academic literary critics, and only us I think, delight in doing ("The furtiveness instead announces the presence of a secret; it gives up the secret, and what the secret wants to hide: the presence of narrative content too traumatic to relate directly" and so on; really very sorry).

From the twelfth century on, the story's told often, in art, in poetry, and in song, beginning with a story about -- yes -- a travelling salesman. The one I like best is in one manuscript (Bodley 779) of the South English Legendary, a massive Middle English collection of saint's lives. 

It begins like so: “on a tyne thre clerkis com wandry in a street / of hongred and ful sore athirst” (once upon a time, three clerks were wandering in a street, suffering much from hunger and thirst). When the clerks plead with a butcher to board them (“her out that we ne sterue”), he refuses, often and rudely, until his wife suggests that they kill and rob the students in the night. After all, students are rich! ("of siluir habbeth gret plente. and ek [also]...gret...sacheles"). The students eat their fill, and then bed down, all the while invoking the name of Saint Nicholas. Soon after, the butcher has his wife fetch his ax, and he goes to work (""for culle ich wole hem sone" [for I will slaughter/kill them [or sort them!] soon]).

Being students, they have nothing worth stealing but their bodies. 

When the butcher panics, he blames his wife: you should never have called the clerks back! His wife patiently reminds him of his craft: they should make the corpses into “pastis and pyus . . . for pork hy cholleth ben solde” (pasties and pies . . . [to] be sold as pork). The next day, the butcher announces that he is selling three pennies’ worth of pies for the price of one (“for on peny ich wolde yeue, for hanseles sake, / that is worth to other thre, whoso hit wolde take”).

Quickly, maybe even before the butcher manages to unload any stock, Jolly Old Saint Nick arrives, with his entourage of ushers. Nicholas “axed of [the butcher] what he hadde, and what to sillin wolde” (asked [the butcher] what he had and what he would sell), who “answered baldeliche, pasties and pyes he hadde / and good chep” (boldly answered that he had pasties and pies, and that for cheap). The butcher intensifies his pitch, “and swythe loud he gradde / for a peny that is worth to. to the ich wele selle / lok nouthe wher hit be gret chep. by hem yif thou wille” (and he cried out very loudly, “I will sell two pennies’ worth to you for one. You can’t find it this cheap anywhere else. Buy them if you like!”). Nicholas's response: 

hastou any other flesch. telle swythe anon
for ich wold ther of bigge. wel swythe gret won
of bacon that were fair and clene. fain ich wolden habbe
sel me so wel as thou wost. and nought that thou ne gabbe
other flesch nab ich non. tha thou sext her to sille
yis for soth hastou. bakis thre ich wene
that liggeth isilt ther in thy fate . . .
do and bringe me ther to. yif hit thin wille be
for my wil is of hem to bigge.

Do you have any other flesh? Answer quickly, for I would buy from you a great deal of fair and clean bacon. I would gladly have this. Sell me as good meat as you know of. And don’t lie.” “I have no other flesh except for what you see here for sale.” “Yes, in truth, you do have it. I believe you have baked three that lay salted there in your vat . . . bring me there, if it is your will, for it is my will to buy them.

The butcher and his wife confess and cry for mercy, promise not to do this anymore (""for neuer her after ne cholle we more") -- though it's unclear whether they mean butchery or slaughtering students (in which case, how many times have they done this?) -- and Nicholas resurrects the clerks. The end!

Or not! You'll notice a continuity error: are the boys in the pies or not? Why does Nicholas keep insisting that he wants better meat than the meat that he's being sold? Aren't the boys right there on the counter already? There's something a bit off here, as if the story's too embarrassed to admit what it's done: like all embarrassments, the story's furtiveness instead announces the presence of a secret; it gives up the secret, and what the secret wants to hide: the presence of narrative content too traumatic to relate directly (ha! got it in). It's that boys and pigs are pretty similar (the corpus/porcus joke is tediously common in medieval writing, and not just in medical texts); it's that, as we know from Snowpiercer, babies taste best. It's that Nicholas wants a bit of that Christmas pie, but he's too ashamed to go at it directly.

Remember this miracle today by feeding a student. Tell them it's Christmastime, and there's no need to be afraid, because today's a butchers holiday. And if you're having ham (shame on you if you are), think about where it might have come from; if there's a knock on the door, and you see a fourth-century bishop outside, you'll know what you did.

Tiny Shriner III: Pigs Edition

In honor of my dissertation's final chapter, on pigs, here's a set of piggy links. I've mentioned this on the blog before, but you might still want to watch out for potentially anthropophagous pigs. The police say that there's no proof the pigs ate human flesh; but they're not entirely sure. While it wouldn't have been entirely fair to the pigs, the police might have looked to the pseudo-Egbert penitential, which explains, "Si porcus, vel gallina vel cujuscunque generis animal de corpore hominis ederit, vel sanguinem ejus biberit, occidatur animal, et detur canibus" (if a pig, or a cock, or any other kind of animal has eaten from a human corpse, or drank its blood, let the animal be killed and given to the dogs). Alternately, if they were feeling more humane, the police could have consulted the Adomnan penitential: "Caro suilla morticinis crassa vel pinguis, ut morticinum quo pinguescit refutanda est. Cum vero decreverit et in pristinam maciem reversa, sumenda est" (The flesh of a swine grown fat from [eating] carrion should be rejected like the carrion on which the swine grew fat. However, when the swine has lost weight and returned to its former leanness, let it be accepted [for eating]).

Pigs were probably the most dangerous domestic animals of the Middle Ages. Don't let down your guard: pigs do tend to gang up on people. In 1379, three sows rushed to help their piglets murder little Perrinot Muet; Mars sends pigs to "freten the child right in the cradel" (Chaucer CT I 2019) and perhaps he also inspired the pigs in a recent case in Norfolk in which a "51-year-old man was knocked over by a sow at a Norfolk farm, prompting the rest of the herd to attack him" or in another case in Serbia, in which "A farmer's home in northern Serbia was destroyed in a blaze caused by three pigs that broke out of their pen, walked into the living room and knocked over the TV."

The foundation of the common medieval punning alternation between porcus and corpus dates at the latest to Aristotle's observation on the similarity between porcine and human anatomy. More recently, a poster for a torture horror film, Hostel II, has come under fire because of its bloody representation of flesh. No harm, explains the designer; it's just a picture of wild boar meat. With that in mind, purchasers of meatballs made from human fat may want to check that they're not being cheated.

If I've whetted your appetite for pork, you may want to look at this dubiously sourced article on zombie pigs or you may wish to look into a future stocked with meat tubes (here and here and also in Oryx and Crake) or, if you're feeling more gentle, you may just want to satisfy your cravings with a pork-flavored postage stamp. If you're feeling really gentle, you may want to become a hog breeder.

Breeding pigs commercially is an art. I talked to a man who had one of the most successful records for breeding sows out there and he told me things no one's ever written in a book as far as I know. 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 [locution sic]. (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 that the boar liked, and he had to masturbate some of them in exactly the right way. There was one boar, he told 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.

(from Animals in Translation, 103, a peculiar, chatty book that I might write about in the next few weeks)

It doesn't all taste like chicken

Michel Pastoureau observes that "for medieval society, in effect, the animal that was closest to man is not the bear (despite its outward appearance and its supposed similar method of coupling), even less so the monkey (an abominable figure of the devil), but in fact the pig." The notable resemblance between human and pig, apparent in their shared cunning and omnivorousness, is perhaps at its most disquieting in the similarity between human and porcine anatomy, for this internal similarity is precisely what would be on display at Christian meals. If our Christian eaters had done their homework--and I don't doubt that some of them did--they would have recalled medieval medical treatises, which often included an anagrammatic pun on corpus (body) and porcus (pig). More likely, by remembering the common disparagement of pigs in medieval moral treatises, they would have thought about the pig as a speculum of their own gluttony, but the medical pun might be recalled even in this context: Peter the Chanter's On Virtues and Vices (aka Verbum abbreviatum), for example, points out that "the pig has much in common with humans in its body, as is shown from the arrangement of its internal organs (sicut ex anatomia et divisione ejus patet)" (PL 205:337D-338A). Perhaps first noted as long ago as, of course, Aristotle, such observations have the support of modern science: see Wilson Pond and Harry J. Mersmann's Biology of the Domestic Pig (New York, 2001), which observes that "the digestive similarity and nutrient requirements of the pig and human are remarkably similar."

Pond and Mersmann don't talk about similarity of flesh, but if they're ever so inclined, they might ask a Japanese robot to write a chapter in their textbook's next edition:

At the end of the robot's left arm is an infrared spectrometer. When objects are placed up against the sensor, the robot fires off a beam of infrared light. The reflected light is then analyzed in real time to determine the object's chemical composition.
"All foods have a unique fingerprint," Shimazu said. "The robot uses that data to identify what it is inspecting right there on the spot."
When it has identified a wine, the robot speaks up in a childlike voice. It names the brand and adds a comment or two on the taste, such as whether it is a buttery chardonnay or a full-bodied shiraz, and what kind of foods might go well on the side...
When a reporter's hand was placed against the robot's taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

All I have to say right now is: no kidding.

Works

(hat-tip: Majikthise) (thanks to this ebay auction for the image. You've a day left if you want to own it yourself)

Claudine Fabre-Vassas The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig (trans. Carol Volk, New York, 1997) is essential. Michel Pastoureau’s several discussions of pigs can be found in: "Quel est le roi des animaux?" in Le monde animal et ses représentations au Moyen-Age (XIe-XVe siècles) (Toulouse, 1985); “L’homme et le porc: une histoire symbolique,” in Couleurs, images, symboles: études d'histoire et d'anthropologie (Paris: Léopard d'Or, 1989); "Histoire d'une mort infâme: le fils du roi de France tué par un cochon (1131)," Bulletin de la société nationale des antiquaires de France (1992): 174-76; "L'animal et l'historian du Moyen Âge." in L'animal exemplaire au Moyen Âge (Ve - Xve Siècle), ed Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Rennes, 1999), 13-28; "La chasse au sanglier: histoire d'une dévalorisation (IVe-XIV siècle)," in La chasse au Moyen Age: société, traités, symboles, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Baudouin van den Abeele, (Florence, 2000), 7-23; and "Une justice exemplaire: les procès intentés aux animaux (XIIe - XVIe s.)," Cahiers du Léopard d'or 9 (2000), 173-200. He reprints some of the above material in Les animaux célèbres, (Paris: Bonneton, 2001) and Une histoire symbolique du moyen âge occidental,(Paris: Seuil, 2004).

Narcissism Corner: if you're still a bit music-obsessed, listen to most or all of music through your computers, and are a medievalist, perhaps you'd care to join up with me here.

(best wishes, Eileen. Hope you're able to come back soon)

“They only call them pigs when they’re alive.”

I'm stepping up during this time of exhaustion, figuring that between JJC, EJ, and a bit of me--Karl 'the Grouchy Medievalist' Steel (it is my real name: no jokes please. Norwegian-Americans are too solemn to joke)--we constitute a full, if chimerical, blogger.

I'll periodically share some material from the winding down of my dissertation as a kind of textual precipitate. Perhaps some other stuff too. Some of this, like the discussion below, is material that I can pry free easily from existing chapters, and some of what I'll share, like the discussions of meat or Dolopathos, is just material I love that I might never get to use anywhere else. I'm aimed to find material whose conclusions are somewhat tentative, that might strike a nerve, that, at the least, might be fun, all material I think suitable to be presented in medias res.

One of the works I encountered the course of writing my dissertation is the Testamentum Porcelli (the Will of the Little Pig), a short prose work of the fourth century that, as Jerome complained, schoolchildren preferred to Plato’s Timaeus. The Testamentum takes the form of a dictated will—“since I cannot write with my hand”—in which a pig named Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus (translated by one critic, a certain "G. Anderson," as “Grunter Boarman-Roastpig, Esq.") bequeaths grain and other foodstuff to his porcine survivors and portions of his body to sectors of human society: his bristles to shoemakers, his intestines to sausage makers, and more fancifully, his tongue to lawyers and “to the verbose” and “cinaedis musculos” (muscles to sodomites), until he reaches the end of his own body.

The work is a joke whose humor relies upon the disjuncture between its solemn legalities and its characters, one a cook, usually a low-class comic figure in classical literature, and the other an ambiguous animal. The Testamentum could be comfortably funny only because animal rights or animal consciousness should be inherently ridiculous; a gecko selling insurance is usually much funnier than the human salesman, Ralph, from Perth Amboy. Usually. But the effectiveness of the Testamentum’s joke requires that its violence not stay comfortably put, that the animal not remain merely an animal. Freud argues that jokes “evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible.” The words of smut, Freud’s paradigmatic example of course, compel the person subjected to it “to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it.” The pleasures that the Testamentum opens are pleasures of eating, imagined pleasures of cannibalism in fact; they are pleasures of butchery that need not limit itself to animals; they are pleasures of the hidden, unacknowledgable truth about the carnal companionship of animals with humans. What has been exposed by the “smut” of this joke is the human disassembled in, by, or along with a pig temporarily become a person, a joke in which both teller and hearer are victims who participate most fully only by imagining themselves as edible flesh, as human corpus that finds itself in porcus. It is no wonder, then, that the poem tries a little too hard to keep its joke under control by hanging a patronizing diminutive, porcellus, on an animal whose proximity to the human is what makes the joke worth telling in the first place.

Ambiguity 1. The pig possesses something few animals do, an individual, even familial name, yet this name is little more than a concatenation of pigs’ stereotypical traits, a bestiary in miniature. In contrast, the pig’s animal lack of hand joins him to the human. Although pigs have no hands or any other limb they could use to write, nothing prevents Grunnius from drafting a written document formed in accordance with the law; even most fourth-century humans—of whom most were neither professional scribes nor literate—dictated their wills. Thus the first joke, “quoniam manu mea scribere non potui,” hardly separates Grunnius from humans: he cannot write, but neither could most of his supposed superiors.

Ambiguity 2. The pig’s ambiguity necessarily infects his killer. The cook’s initial words belong to a juridical register: “Come here, homewreaker, garden destroyer, fugitive piglet; today I interrupt your life.” The pig should be subject only to the law of human appetite; a cook or butcher’s ideal indifference to their professional killing depends on the irrelevance of morality to animals. They should be only means, not ends; they should be unsubjectable within thanatopolitics—although this point certainly merits more consideration: maybe there is a porcus sacer? Grunnius nevertheless is subject to criminal, that is, human law, and execution administered by the cook: first, because the cook has deemed him a criminal, a bandit even; second, because the cook characterizes the killing as punishment; third, because the cook allows the pig to make a will, which, even by the nature of the word—testamentum derives from testor (to testify/bear witness)—requires acknowledgement of the pig’s subjecthood; and fourth, by recognizing that the goods to be distributed are in fact the pig’s own to distribute, that is, that the pig has a right to property, even if the property is only food for pigs and his own body, food for us. For all these reasons, the cook blurs the classifications dividing his animal victim from humans. And if he colludes with the pig to flout the animal/human boundary, he also flouts the boundary between executioner and butcher, trades both encompassed in the word “carnifex.”

After the pig asks leave to dictate his will, the cook summons a servant, “come here, boy, bring me my knife from the kitchen that I might make this piglet bloody,” apparently restoring both pig and himself to their proper categories. But rather than immediately using the knife, the butcher pauses to allow the pig to make a will. The hesitation catches pig and cook up inextricably in two disharmonious practices: one in which even to execute a pig is to treat it to a legal procedure to which an animal whose sole function is alimentary should not be entitled, and one in which a legally recognized criminal is to be unceremoniously butchered and then consumed. By failing to resolve this tension, in fact by combining these two practices, the Testamentum defamiliarizes both law and appetite: if the cook simultaneously punishes and slaughters, the law becomes little more than the codification of the pleasures of appetite—or the pleasures of appetite become ennobled by expression through the disinterested rigor of law. In the Testamentum the boundary between butcher and executioner swallows criminal and pig, human and animal. All that finally draws or rather cuts the boundary between butcher and pig is not morality, not the law, not species, but who holds the knife and who—or what—suffers it.

Sources
d'Ors, Alvaro. "Testamentum Porcelli: Introduccion, Texto, Traduccion y Notas." Supplementos de 'Estudios Classicos': Serie de Textos 3 (1953): 74-83. (thanks to Martha Bayless for pointing me to this edition)
Anderson, G. "The Cognomen of M. Grunnius Corocotta: A dissertantiuncula on Roast Pig." American Journal of Philology 101 (1980): 57-58
Baldwin, Barry. "The Testamentum Porcelli." Studies on Late Roman and Byzantine History, Literature, and Language. Brill, 1985. 137-148
Braund, D. C. "Coracottas: bandit and hyena." Liverpool Classical Monthly 5.1 (1980): 13-14
Champlin, Edward. "The Testament of the Piglet." Phoenix (1987): 174-83
Daube, David. Roman Law: Linguistic, Social, and Philosophical Aspects. Edinburgh, 1969. 78-81