From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  48 children, especially in urban settings: Michael Simon, ‘Der Storch als Kinderbringer’, in Rheinisch-westfälische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, eds Martha Bringemeier, H. L. Cox, Gunter Wiegelmann, Matthias Zender, Band xxxiv/xxxv (Bonn and Munster, 1989–90), 25–39. I am very grateful to Gerard Rooijackers for bringing this article to my attention.

  49 ‘… far more pleasantly … their lives’: HCA op. cit, 155.

  50 On greetings cards: The folklore still circulates widely in Europe: I bought a greetings card in Turkey in 1992, showing a large red heart wrapped in a snowy white napkin carried in a stork’s beak – an illustration which interestingly conflated Valentine’s Day and newborn imagery. Copyright, Ya-Pa Ltd.

  51 stick and stock: John Dickson, letter, 5 July 1993, quotes W. B. Lockwood, The Oxford Book of British Bird Names (Oxford, 1984): ‘In older German dialect, Storch could have the secondary meaning of penis …’

  52 bird who delivers babies: Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, II, 672–3.

  53 … lutje Swester: cf. ‘Klapperstorch, du Luder/brink mich en klenen Bruder.’ In Ernst and Luise Gattiker, Die Vögel im Volksglauben (Weisbaden, 1989).

  54 D’Aulnoy and Perrault in Amsterdam: ‘Des Harlequins Kindbetterin-Schmaus’, in Simon, op. cit., 34.

  55 greet a new arrival: Letter to MW, 6 July 1993. I am most grateful to John Heath-Stubbs.

  56 clapperatie: As in the comment made by Bishop Antonio de Guevara’s letters of advice, tr. Cornelis van Beresteyn (Delft, 1583): ‘ ‘t Gene men in de mannen noemt soete gratie, hout men inden vrouwen voor clapperatie’ [that which in men is called sweet grace, in women is considered babbling]’. Mariët Westermann, letter to MW, 19 July 1993. See also Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Rerum Proprietatihus (Frankfurt [1601] 1964), 528–9.

  57 bird-bodied … classical tradition: See ch.23.

  CHAPTER FIVE: NO HIDEOUS HUM

  1 ‘… riot in the cave’: Virgil, Aeneid VI, tr. W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, 1969), 148.

  2 ‘… with her voice’: McGinn, 8; for Sibylline lore see Zielinksi, La Sibylle: Trois essais sur la religion antique et le Christianisme (Paris, 1924); J. Haffen, Contribution à l’étude de la Sibylle médiévale (Besançon–Paris, 1984); Peter Dronke, ‘Hermes and the Sibyls: Continuations and Creations’, in Dronke (1992), 219–44; Britnell, ‘Reputation of Sibyls’, kindly lent to MW. See also Britnell (1989).

  3 ‘… named Sibyl by the Libyans’: Pausanias, 435.

  4 ‘… was to come true’: Pausanias, 436.

  5 ‘… immortal nymph …’: ibid., 435–6.

  6 earlier flight: For a scholarly survey of the oracles and the history of their publication and editions, see Nikiprowetzky, esp. 281–7; McGinn, 9–11.

  7 his book The Divine Institutions: Lactantius was following a list drawn up by Varro; see 219–44, 223–6.

  8 ‘…a fish of the sea’: Oracula Sibyllina, bk 1, 356–8, ed. C. Alexandre (2 vols, Paris, 1841–56) quoted Robin Lane-Fox, Pagans & Christians (London, 1986), 647–54; McGinn, 12–7.

  9 ‘… time’s utmost limit’: Dronke (1992), 227

  10 ‘… purposes for us’: Lane-Fox, op. cit., 648.

  11 a new beginning: Virgil, Eclogue IV, 4–8. The verses announce: ‘The last era of the Cumaean prophecy has come,/ the great sequence of ages is born anew;/ now the Virgin returns, the golden age returns,/ now the firstborn is sent down from high heaven.’ tr. Henry Rushton Fairclough, in Works, eds T. E. Page and W. H. D. Rowse (2 vols, LCL, 1916–18).

  12 above the Sibyl and the emperor: e.g. Maestro Veneziano, ‘Vision of Augustus and the ruins of the Temple of Peace’, c. 1400, Stoccarda, repr. Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana (Turin, 1986), III, f.p. 412; see Emile Male, L’Art religieux de Jin du moyen-âge, (Paris, 1931), 280ff.

  13 translated … ten years later: McGinn, 12–9; Britnell, Reputation of Sibyls.

  14 Latin and Greek: McGinn, 24.

  15 ‘… citizen of the city of God’: Augustine, City of God, 18, 23; he also cited her Hymn, see Dronke (1992), 9–13.

  16 ‘and the Sibyl testify’: Thomas of Celano, ‘Dies irae’, The Penguin Book of Latin Verse, ed. Frederick Brittain (Harmondsworth, 1962), 239–42.

  17 pavement of Siena Cathedral: See Dronke (1992), 220–2.

  18 in praise of women: e.g. Le Mistère du viel testament, ed. J. De Rothschild, VI (Paris, 1891); Symphorien Champier, (Paris 1515); see D. R. Walker, The Ancient Theology (London, 1972), ch.3; Britnell, Reputation of Sibyls.

  19 ‘… those God knows’: Prophetica Sibyllae Magae, in Dronke (1992), 233, where he attributes it to a seventh-century Spanish origin.

  20 mysteries of redemption: For a detailed, comprehensive and learned survey, see Carlo de Clercq, ‘Contribution à l’iconographie des Sibylles – I’, Jaarboek, 1979, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten-Antwerpen, 7–60; II, ibid., 1980, 7–35; id., ‘Les Sibylles dans les livres des XVe et XVIe siècles en Allemagne et en France’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch 1979, 98–119; ‘Quelques séries italiennes de Sibylles’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Beige de Rome, Fascicules xlviii–xlix, 1978–9, 105–27; id., ‘Quelques series de Sibylles hors d’ltalie’, ibid., li, 1981, 87–116; see also, Emile Mâle, Quomodo Sibyllas: Recentiores artifices repraesentaverint (Paris, 1899); M. Hélin, ‘Un texte inédit sur l’iconographie des Sibylles’, Revue beige dephilologie et d’histoire 15 (1936), 349–66.

  21 Filippo Barbieri: Opusculum de Vaticiniis Sibillarum (Oppenheim, c. 1514).

  22 ‘… as Heraclitus wrote …’: De Clercq, ‘Quelques séries italiennes’; Hélin, op. cit., 365.

  23 pictures before the reader’s eyes: Oracula Sibyllina (Weissagungen der zwölf Sibyllen), eds P. Heitz and W. L. Schreiber (Strasburg, 1903).

  24 beam on high: Lactantius had not mentioned this Sibyl specifically prophesying the death of Jesus Christ. His Hellespontine sibyl uttered an open oracle: ‘O Felix fructus ligno quo pendet ab alto.’ But Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiatica, II: 1, connected this prophecy to the Crucifixion, and French artists in the fifteenth century inaugurated this interpretation in the iconography. See Mâle, op. cit., 69.

  25 halt and wrinkled: In the pavement of the Duomo at Siena, for instance, even the Erythraean Sibyl, though her head is covered in the style of a married woman, has not achieved a great age, while the Hellespontine defies the sources’ specifications, and in Neroccio’s chiselled evocation, appears with free-flowing hair like a sister of Botticelli’s Flora.

  26 others had believed: Britnell, Reputation of Sibyls.

  27 ‘… from the prophetic cell’: ‘Nativity Ode’, lines 173–80; see C. A. Patrides, ‘That great and indisputable miracle: The Cessation of the Oracles’, in Patrides, 105–23.

  28 Ralegh … their sanctuaries: The History of the World, I, vi, 8, quoted Patrides, op. cit., 107.

  29 ‘… thenceforth held their peace’: ‘E. K.’ Commentary on ‘The Shepheardes Calender: May’, line 54, ibid.

  30 ‘White Ladies, Ladies, Goodwomen …’ Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons ou il est amplement traité des sorciers et de la sorcellerie, intro. Nicole Jacques-Chaquin (Paris, 1982), 89.

  31 give her love charms: To Mme de Grignan, 30 Jan. 1680, SC, 2, 819–24.

  32 ‘… to be more orthodox’: Bernard de Fontenelle, L’Histoire des oracles (1686), ed. Louis Maigron (Paris, 1908), f–g.

  33 several incensed pages: Servatius Gallaeus, Dissertationes de Sibyllis, earumque oraculis (Amsterdam, 1688), 182–4.

  34 version of Van Dale: Fontenelle, op. cit., 10.

  35 ‘… By Fortune seem’d design’d’: Queen Mab: containing A Select Collection of Only the Best, most Instructive and Entertaining Tales of the Fairies. Written by the Countess D’Aulnoi, Adorned with Curious Cuts. To which are added A Fairy Tale, in the ancient English style, by Dr Parnell. And Queen Mab’s Song (London, 1782), 365. (Opie Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford.)

  36 old wives’ tales: C
BK, 84–7.

  CHAPTER SIX: SAINT ANNE, DEAR NAN

  1 Infant Mary: Verses by Arias Montanus (Antwerp, 1571), added to images in sequence of engravings, Vita Deiparae Virginis Mariae, see p.87.

  2 from the Holy Land: Another legend, which connects the cult of Saint Anne in the East more tightly to its development in the Roman church, described how Saint Helena had restored Saint Anne’s tomb in Jerusalem, when she was discovering and enshrining the holy places, and had kept the body there, but sent the head to Apt. Charland (1898), I, 211–14; Louis Réau, III, 1, 90–6.

  3 all over the Christian world: One finger was given to the Convent of the Visitation, rue St Antoine, in Paris, another to the Praemonstratensians in the same city; yet more fragments were presented to the church of St Eustache and the Confraternity of the Goldsmiths. Charland (1898), 226.

  4 pardon pilgrimages … in the province: At Sainte Anne d’Auray and Sainte Anne-la-Palud – ‘Mort ou vivant, à Sainte Anne une fois doit aller tout Breton’, the nnpopular motto goes.

  5 did not initiate it: See H. M. Bannister, ‘The Introduction of the Cultus of St Anne into the West’, The English Historical Review, XVIII (Jan. 1903), 107–12, for the cult’s origins.

  6 Speculum humanae salvationis and the Biblia pauperum: See Biblia Pauperum Nach dem Original in der Lyceumbibliothek zu Constanz, ed. Pfarrer Laib and Decan Schwartz (Zurich, 1867), pls. II, XXII; Miroure of Mannes Salvationne: The Roxburghe Club edition of a fifteenth century English version in rhyming couplets, (London, 1888); J. Lutz and P. Perdrizet, Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Traduction inédite de Jean Miélot (1448) (2 vols, Mulhouse, 1907); Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Avril Henry (Ithaca, 1987).

  7 prodigious offspring: Gerhard Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV Jahrhunderts (Graz-Köln, 1959), pl. 18; H.-F. Neumuller, ed., Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Vollständige Facsimile-Ausgabe des Codex Cremifanensis 243 (Kreuzmünster) (Graz, 1972), fo. 15v/16r, fo. 55r; Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324–1500 (Berkeley, 1984).

  8 the birth of the incomparable Mary: Ton Brandenbarg, ‘St Anne and her Family’, in Saints & She-Devils: Images of women in the 15 th and 16th centuries, ed. Lène Dresen-Coenders (London, 1987), 101–27.

  9 spiritual daughter: BN, MS Lat., 9474, fo. 3. Victor Leroquais, Les Livres d’Heures ms. de la BN, I (Paris 1927), pl. CXV.

  10 sitting on her lap: See Brandenbarg (1987), op. cit., for accounts of Pieter Dorland, Historia perpulchra de Anna sanctissima (Antwerp, 1490) and Jan van Denemarken, Die Historie, die ghetiden ende exemplen vander heyligher vrouwen Sint Annen (Amsterdam, 1496); Ton Brandenbarg, Heilig Familieleven (Nijmegen, 1990).

  11 benefits of her instruction: Brandenbarg op. cit. (1990), 40.

  12 pictures in support: Images de confrérie, Paris et Ile-de-France (Catalogue), ed. José Lothe and Agnès Virole (Paris, 1992), 168–177, exhibition 18 Dec. 1991 to 7 Mar. 1992, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

  13 desire for education: See Rapley, passim.

  14 lessons in literacy: The Education of the Virgin Frick Collection, New York.

  15 collections of stories: Jean-Claude Schmitt, La Raison des gestes dans l’occident méldiéval (Paris, 1990), 52–3, 258.

  16 ‘… gentle granny’: Brandenbarg op. cit. (1990), English abstract.

  17 bathed by some helpers: See for example, Pedro Berruguete’s painting at the end of C15th, Pinacoteca, Montserrat Monastery, Catalonia.

  18 Zurbarán’s magnificent version: Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.

  19 young women bring her food and drink: For other examples see P. Noury, ‘L’alimentation des accouchées dans l’art’, Bulletin de la Société Médico-historique (1909–10), 76–82.

  20 stork-shaped instruments: See Hans van Kulmbach [1476–1522], The Birth of the Virgin, Sammlung Lippman, Berlin, reproduced in Volker Lehmann, Die Geburt in der Kunst (Braunschweig, 1978).

  21 placed on the Index for excessive enthusiasm: Charland (1898), 286.

  22 loving teacher of the young: e.g. Joseph Parrocel’s drawings, ‘Les Enfans viennent à lui’ engraved for La Bible de Paris; Nicolaes Maes’ painting, Christ Blessing Children, in the National Gallery, London, belongs in this wave of seventeenth-century homely piety.

  23 ‘… tender name that little children use’: Jean-Joseph Surin, Correspondance, ed. Michel de Certeau (Bruges, 1966), letter 206 (1658–9), 696–7, quoted Loskoutoff, 62.

  24 rule by women: Abbé Fénelon, Oeuvres, ed. Aimé Martin, II Recueil de Fables composées pour l’éducation de Mgr. Le Due de Bourgogne (1689–) (Paris, 1870), 512ff; Loskoutoff, 154–5.

  25 while one rocks the crib: Vita Deiparae Virginis Mariae (see 81 (i) above).

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE MAGIC OF THE CROSS

  1 ‘… girt me with gold and silver’: ‘The Dream of the Rood’, The Earliest English Poems, tr. Michael Alexander (Harmondsworth, 1966), 109.

  2 Ethiopian Christian Church: E. A. Wallis Budge (ed. and tr.), The Queen of Sheba and her Only Son Menyelek, I (Oxford, 1892).

  3 Legends of the Queen of Sheba: Chastel, I, 61–122; also Beyer; Daum; Pritchard; St John Philby.

  4 Sibyl called Sabbe: Pausanias, 437.

  5 name was Sibylla: Georges Monachos, Chronique, quoted by J. Haffen, Contribution à l’Etude de la Sibylle Médiévale: Etude et édition du ms, BN f.Fr. 25 407 fol. 160v–172v: Le Livre de Sibile (Paris, 1984), 37.

  6 ‘… events to be recognized’: Copy in the Warburg Institute; original in the Berlin Stadtsbibliothek.

  7 heathen and Jew: e.g: Sibyllenbuch (Frankfurt, 1531); Weissagungen der zwölf Sibyllen (Frankfurt, 1534); Zwölf Sibyllen Weissagungen (Frankfurt, 1565), of which several copies are extant. The queen is sometimes given the name Nicaula. Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae. Viii, vi, i, refers to the Queen by this name. See Introduction in Daum, 20. See also F. Neri, ‘Le tradizioni italiane della Sibilla’, Studi Medievali 4 (1912–13), 213–30.

  8 aetiology … cross: Mariane Overgaard gives the clearest account I have read of the composite tale’s history, xxi–xxxvi; see also E. C. Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago, 1962); Gertrude Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art, tr. Janet Seligman (London, 1971), II, 12–4.

  9 omnivorous mind: Petrus Comestor, ed. J. J. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 198, col.40; Johannes Beleth, writing before 1165, also passed on the material. See Jean Beleth, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, ch.151; Migne, op. cit., 202, col. 152.

  10 Thomas Malory: Malory’s source was a late C13th epic called Cursor Mundi; he tells how it was Eve who planted the very branch on which the forbidden apple grew. His story then interweaves Arthurian motifs on to the warp of the Solomon legend. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. Sir John Rhys (2 vols, London, 1967), II, chs.5–7, 242–7. David Freeman’s dramatization and production, Morte d’Arthur, July 1990, at The Lyric, Hammersmith and St Paul’s Church, managed to give a clear account of this tangled episode.

  11 dead father: GL, III, 125–36, V, 169–76.

  12 allow Christian pilgrims to enter: Felix Faber, Evagatorum in Terrae Sanctae Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, tr. Aubrey Stewart (2 vols, London, 1897), I, 429.

  13 ‘… defaced and cease’: GL, III, 170.

  14 ‘…whatsoever sickness he was sick of’: GL, ibid.

  15 ‘… depths of the cistern’: Faber, op. cit., 456.

  16 the cross of our Lord’: GL, III, 170.

  17 Jacobus’ narrative scheme: For Piero della Francesca see Lionello Venturi, Piero della Francesca, tr. James Emmons (Geneva, 1954), 52–92; Michael Podro, ‘Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross’ (Newcastle, 1974); Stephen Bann, The True Vine (Cambridge, 1989), 225ff; Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca (London, 1992).

  18 dread and fascination: See Elizabeth McGrath, ‘The Black Andromeda’, JWCI, LV, 1992.

  19 Moorish Queen of Sheba: See Jean Devisse, ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, II From the Early
Christian Era to the ‘Age of Discovery’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), part 1, 132–3.

  20 behind the Queen: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ed. and intro. John Plummer (London, 1966), pls. 79–87

  21 her flowing golden hair: ibid., part 2, 37–8.

  22 most important saints: Wallis Budge, op. cit., viii–xii; Marcel Griaule, ‘Légende illustrée de la Reine de Saba’, Documents, 2, 1 (1930), 9–16 reproduces a painted Ethiopian narrative variation on the legend.

  23 Egypt and Ethiopia: Josephus, op. cit., VIII, vi, i.

  24 ‘…many kinds of perfume’: Herodotus, The Histories, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt, rev. A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, 1983), III, 106–12, 248–9.

  25 myth of the Orient: In the writing of the last fin de siècle, the Queen of Sheba’s name instantly connects with seduction (Yeats wrote: ‘Sang Solomon to Sheba,/And kissed her dusky face’; Flaubert’s Saint Antoine is tormented in the desert by the myriad coloured delights when she tempts him); see also Gérard de Nerval, ‘Histoire de Soliman et de la Reine du Matin’, in Voyage en Orient (Paris, 1851).

  26 The Queen of Sheba … the apostle Philip: Gérard Cames, Allégories et symboles dans l’Hortus Deliciarum (Leiden, 1971), 53, pl. XXXIX.

  27 two compositions: Lavin, op. cit., 78.

  28 Church of the (converted) Jews: Cames, op. cit., 52–3.

  29 Hans Holbein: Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle. Justifications of colonial enterprise in C16th and C17th also adopted Solomon as a forerunner. See Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Moralizing the colonial body: discourses of difference in early modern writing’, paper kindly lent by the author (to be published in Liverpool, Studies in Language and Discourse).

  30 wise dancing girl: Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth, 1991), 186; see also Marina Warner, ‘In and Out of the Fold’ in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, eds. Christina Büchmann and Celina Spiegel (New York, 1994).