a writer called the Physiologus (c. 100–140 A.D.). By the twelfth century, bestiaries circulated throughout Europe, combining the opinions of Aristotle, Pliny, and their fellows with variations on the Physiologus’ work and passages from post-classical authors such as Isidore of Seville and Hugh of Fouilloy.
Two entries on parrots drawn from English manuscripts typify the bestiary form. In a twelfth-century description:
It is only from India that one can get a PSITIACUS or Parrot, which is a green bird with a red collar and a large tongue. The tongue is broader than in other birds and it makes distinct sounds with it. If you did not see it, you would think it was a real man talking. It greets people of its own accord, saying “What-cheer?” or “Toodle-oo!” It learns other words by teaching. Hence the story of the man who paid a compliment to Caesar by giving him a parrot which had been taught to say: “I, a parrot, am willing to learn the names of others from you. This I learnt by myself to say—Hail Caesar!”
A parrot’s beak is so hard that if you throw down the bird from a height on a rock it saves itself by landing on its beak with its mouth tight shut, using the beak as a kind of foundation for the shock. Actually its whole skull is so thick that, if it has to be taught anything, it needs to be admonished with blows. Although it really does try to copy what its teacher is saying, it wants an occasional crack with an iron bar. While young, and up to two years old, it learns what you point out to it quickly enough, and retains it tenaciously; but after that it begins to be distrait and unteachable. (Cambridge University MS 11.4.26, in Book of Beasts 112–114)
And from the thirteenth century:
The parrot is only found in India. It is green in colour with a pumice-grey neck and a large tongue which is broader than those of other birds, and which enables it to speak distinct words, so that if you could not see it, you would think that a man was speaking. It will greet you naturally, saying “Ave” or “Chere” (the Latin and Greek words for “Hail”). It learns other words if it is taught them. As the poet says: “Like a parrot I will learn other words from you. I have taught myself to say ‘Hail, Caesar’” [Martial xiv.73]. Its beak is so hard that if it falls from a height on to a stone, it presses on it with its beak and uses it as a kind of protection of extraordinary firmness. Its head is so strong that if you have to teach it with blows while it is learning how to speak to men, you have to strike it with an iron rod. For as long as it is young, not much over two years old, it learns what it is taught quickly and remembers it longer; if it is a little older it is forgetful and difficult to teach. (Oxford University MS Bodley 764, in Bestiary 129)
These passages offer a literary pastiche that transcends any idea of individual authorship. Both manuscripts clearly refer to Pliny with his tales of parrot corporal punishment and the firmness of the parrot’s beak. (This latter story, by the way, misconstrues fact. Parrots do rely heavily upon their beaks for mobility, but not, as Pliny believes, “because of the weakness of [their] feet” [10.58.117]; on the contrary, their legs and beak are strong and together make them such excellent climbers that they are more at home in the forest canopy than on the wing. The specialized use of their beak for climbing is an adaptation to this preferred habitat.) Likewise, both manuscripts cite Martial, who was also referring to Pliny, so the manuscripts already find themselves performing three distinct acts of literary reference: one to Pliny, one to Martial, and one to Pliny again via Martial. And that is just the beginning. For instance, these bestiaries also report that parrots learn best when young—an observation that doesn’t appear in Pliny but does show up in later writers like Apuleius and Solinus, both of whom also rely upon Pliny. So once again we encounter a wide range of potential acts of literary allusion: to Apuleius, to Solinus, to Pliny through Apuleius, to Pliny through Solinus, to Apuleius through Solinus, to Pliny through Apuleius through Solinus. The number of possible sources and cross-sources, borrowings and cross-borrowings, multiplies at an alarming rate. Nor have we even considered the manuscripts’ possible indebtedness to postclassical sources like Isidore of Seville (c. 630). Like the bestiaries after him, Isidore contributes to a corporate text that transcends time and individuals, reencountering and reproducing version after version of itself. Through this rage for allusion and compilation, the medieval bestiary preserves a remarkable lot of classical nature-lore, but it does so by becoming a fabulous genre, in the root sense of the word: a kind of writing more preoccupied with the act of writing, the process of story-telling itself, than with any of its declared subjects.
Yet even as these works preserve the classical heritage, they also introduce novelties. At least two innovations occur in the bestiary entries cited above. One has to do with the parrot’s appearance: in Pliny it is described as possessing a “vermilion collar,” and other classical writers preserve Pliny’s exact diction on this point. But for Isidore, Pliny’s vermilion collar has already become a band of pumice-gray; of the two later bestiary manuscripts, in turn, the Cambridge version follows Pliny, while the Bodley version follows Isidore. As it happens, this variation might have some basis in experience. Closely related to the Alexandrine and the rose-ringed parakeet are several other species of Indian parrot, of similar overall appearance, in which the rose-red of the collar-band has been replaced by various patterns of gray and black. These include the Malabar parakeet (Psittacula columboides [Forshaw 338–339]), the emerald-collared parakeet (Psittacula calthorpae [Forshaw 339]), and perhaps most impressively, the slaty-headed parakeet (Psittacula himalayana [Forshaw 330–331]), in which the collar is surmounted by a full head of feathers that could easily be called pumice-gray. As parrots became less plentiful in medieval Europe, a few stray specimens of one of these breeds might have found their way into captivity, thus confusing the record of their appearance. Perhaps (this is a bigger stretch) this confusion might have influenced the visual record too. As medieval painters stylize the birds, they introduce various anatomical variations, including peculiarities of color. In the Holkham Bible Picture Book (early fourteenth century; British Library MS Add. 47682, fol. 10r), for instance, a parrot with green breast and blue-gray head and wings perches on a family tree of Jesus Christ (Figure 3). This image may reflect the medieval understanding of parrots as gray-collared or even gray-headed.
But a second change is far more important: the idea that parrots can speak on their own. Isidore and both of the bestiaries cited above agree on this point: the parrot speaks to people “of its own accord” and “naturally”—although all three works also agree that parrots need human instruction to utter more than a simple greeting. In each case the bestiaries cite the same authority for this view: Martial 14.73, whose psittacine narrator claims to have taught itself to say “Hail, Caesar!” It is as if the bestiarists, in their preoccupation with collecting the observations of older authorities, had lost any sense of the difference between such literary genres as natural history and epigram, so that Martial’s outrageous flattery can now somehow pass for fact. Likewise, where the speech of Martial’s parrot originally marks it as a very clever servant, the bestiaries generalize that parrot’s talent to its species as a whole, thereby producing a race of birds that seem less servile than magical. Consider, for instance, these anecdotes from Thomas of Cantimpré’s On the Nature of Things (1240):
Figure 3. The Holkham Picture Bible (B.L. MS Add. 47682, fol. 10r), with a family tree of Christ depicting a parrot perched on the far left, above King Solomon (courtesy of the British Library)
[The parrot] has from nature a voice with which it greets emperors. It so happened that when Charlemagne was traveling through the deserts of Greece he was met by some parrots, who greeted him, as it were, in the Greek language, saying: Farewell, Emperor. Later events were to prove the truth of this expression, almost like a prophecy, because at that time Charles was only king of France. In the subsequent period he became Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. There is also a story in the life of Pope Leo, that a certain nobleman had a talking parrot, which he sent to Pope Leo as a present. When the parrot was on its way there and met passers-by,
