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
