appears as marginal ornament in another Biblical scene, this time from the London Hours of René of Anjou (Figure 8; MS Egerton 1070, British Library, c. 1410). This volume, illustrated in gorgeous detail by an artist now known as the Egerton Master, contains an extraordinary full-page Adoration of the Magi, with the Virgin Mary seated inside an open animal-stall that has been turned into an impromptu bedroom. As she dandles the infant Christ on her knee, the Magi approach with their gifts. One removes his crown and kneels before the infant, while Joseph greets the second. Behind these figures appear various animals (a bull, an ass, two horses), an attendant, and a bit of landscape. But as much of the page is devoted to marginal decoration as to the miniature itself. The picture is framed by a marvelous tangle of vines and flowers, in which five birds perch at various intervals. Among these, the parrot appears at lower left, directly across from the Virgin Mary.
This placement may not be accidental. As it happens, parrots come to be associated often with the Virgin during the high Middle Ages. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the medieval word “popinjay” is often used “in a eulogistic sense in allusion to the beauty and rarity of the bird” (sb. “Popinjay” 4.a.). The Middle English Dictionary is more specific, defining “papejai” first as “a parrot” and then, figuratively, as “a lady, the Virgin Mary” (“Papejai” sb. a.). Given this relationship, the parrot in the Egerton Master’s painting is right where it should be.
The relationship itself seems to have grown out of the parrot’s reputation as a rare and luxurious creature. In one of his few references to the bird, Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) describes the popinjay as “ful of delicasye” (Parliament of Fowls 359), fond of elegance and daintiness. From that point it becomes easy to identify one precious creature devoted to luxury with another of similar disposition. Parrot and lady emerge as birds of a feather, and the Virgin, most precious and delicate lady of all, stands in for all others.
For instance, one anonymous Middle English lyric begins, “I have a bird in a bower, as bright as beryl” (Luria and Hofman 21, text modernized): But before we mistake this poem for a panegyric to a green bird, we learn that the bird’s “rode is as rose that red is on ris;/ With lilie-white leres lossum he is” (21), meaning that her complexion is as rosy as red on a twig, and she is lovely, with lily-white cheeks. The poem views woman through bird and vice versa, praising both in the process. Finally, it becomes evident that the bird-woman in question has more than normal abilities:
Figure 8. The Egerton Master’s Adoration of the Magi, c. 1410, with a parrot in the marginal decoration to the lower left (B.L. MS Egerton 1070, fol. 34v; courtesy of the British Library)
“Her face is a flower, fairest under fine linen with celandine and sage, as you yourself see. He who looks upon that sight is brought to bliss.… She is the parrot who relieves my suffering when I am in pain” (21, text modernized). As the bird merges into the woman, so the woman metamorphoses into a spiritual comforter. The poem works both as a love-lyric and as a devotional exercise.
Elsewhere, the parrot elides with Mary more directly. Around 1450, the poet John Lydgate could compose a “Balade in Commendation of Our Lady” in which the Virgin is addressed as a “popynjay, plumed in clennesse” (81). And around 1481, Vittore Crivelli painted an exquisite altarpiece whose center panel depicts a Virgin and Child sumptuously enthroned amidst angels in fifteenth-century attire with lutes and rebecs (Figure 9). The scene is one of great splendor, rich in gold and ornate hangings. A parrot appears on the Virgin’s right hand (the viewer’s lower left), in the same place where it also perches in the Egerton Master’s Adoration of the Magi.
As for the bird’s broader association with women, we can see it in the Middle English alliterative poem Susannah (late fourteenth century), attributed to a shadowy author named Huchon. This is a verse rendition of the tale of Susannah and the elders from Daniel 13 in the Vulgate Bible. There, as Susannah prepares to take the bath that will expose her to the elders’ lust, the Vulgate simply remarks that she entered into a garden with two maidens (Daniel 13.15). Using this as his only instigation, Huchon develops an elaborate and luxurious setting for Susannah’s bath, replete with “popyniayes prest / Nightyngales vpon nest / Blithe briddis of [th]e best / On blosmes [so briht]” (75–78). By contrast, Thomas Hoccleve’s roundel in “A Humorous Praise of his Lady” (c. 1430) offers some peculiarly uncourtly compliments to the damsel in question:
Hir mowth is nothyng scant/ with lippes gray;
Hir chin unnethe [scarcely]/ may be seen at al;
Hir comly body/ shape as a foot-bal:
And shee syngith/ fol lyk a pape Jay. (17–20)
These lines may seem to contradict the idea that parrots represent something precious and miraculous. After all, Hoccleve’s mistress would have plenty of cause to complain about his verses, and the obvious reason he compares her voice to a parrot’s is to imply that she won’t stop talking. The old classical associations of the parrot with satire don’t disappear in the Middle Ages, but they do grow gentler. Likewise, despite its flippancy, Hoccleve’s inept but amiable joke of a poem preserves the ghost of a more traditional, serious connection between parrots and ladies.
Figure 9. Vittore Crivelli, Enthroned Virgin and Child, with Angels, c. 1481 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1896)
While parrots acquire a feminine cachet in the Middle Ages through their relation to luxury, the birds’ association with opulence acquires a masculine cast, too, at certain moments. The obvious case in point is the long-standing tie between parrots on the one hand and kings, emperors, and popes on the other. But in a poem like William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370), this tie leads in the direction of social condemnation. There “the pokok and the popeiay with here proude federes/ By-tokneth ryght riche men” (C-text 15.173–174); reigning on earth, they pursue their earthly appetites at the risk of spiritual perdition. Such opinions don’t amalgamate well with medieval conventions of deference to authority, so Langland’s remains a minority voice. In contrast, Richard de Holland’s beast-fable The Buke of the Howlat (c. 1450) describes the “Pacocke of pryce” as the pope of birds, while “the proper Pape Iaye, provde in his apparale,” becomes the pope’s chamberlain (in Amours 90, 125). If the parrot can be identified with the rich and powerful, it can also be identified as the rich and powerful.
But among the beast-fables of the Middle Ages, parrots figure most prominently in what may be the most noteworthy of the lot: the anonymous Latin verse narrative called Ecbasis Captivi (c. 1150). The lion, king of beasts, has fallen ill. The fox undertakes to cure the lion and to govern his realm during his illness. As the lion recovers, the parrot enters the scene, and along with the nightingale and the swan it sings a song to celebrate the “paschal feast of the one who is undergoing resurrection” (quoted in Ziolkowski 186)—that is, the lion, but also, of course, the spiritual king of beasts, Christ. After the birds sing an Easter hymn for the lion, the parrot reads a lengthy sermon on proper spiritual comportment. Finally, the parrot, the lion, the swan, and the leopard disperse to the four points of the compass, to which they will bear the good news of what has happened at the lion’s court. The parrot heads, of course, to India, to disseminate the lion’s gospel throughout that region (Ziolkowski 189).
Using a parrot as an evangelist in the medieval context grows out of a tradition that endows the bird with miraculous qualities and sacred connotations. Established through a misreading and embellishment of classical literature and philosophy, this tradition expresses a distinctive way of experiencing the world, in
