Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer

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, it cried out: I am going to the Pope, I am going to the Pope. And as soon as it reached the presence of the Pope, it cried out: Pope Leo, hail! (5.109)

      “At this,” the story concludes, “the Pope was rightly delighted, and often afterwards, as a relaxation from the labours of the day, he would talk to the parrot.” What pope and parrot said to one another has not been recorded, but the clear implication is that they shared some sort of meaningful conversation on a regular basis.

      Of course, the Romans had already imagined parrots as companions of princes or as associates of the sacred. So to transfer the bird’s intimacies from emperor to pope may seem a small enough adjustment. Still, the shift has huge implications, for it endows the bird with a specifically Christian sanctity. This, in turn, is enlarged by the parrot’s reputation for saying meaningful, even prescient things, as in the anecdote about Charlemagne. Such stories combine and proliferate, generating a medieval view of the parrot as sentient, sacred, and prophetic.

      Sometimes this reputation can carry ambiguous moral overtones. In his On the Nature of Things (c. 1180), for instance, Alexander Neckam remarks, like Thomas of Cantimpré, that the parrot is “admired of the Pope” (1.36). In fact, Neckam explains the origin of the parrot’s common medieval name—“popinjay” in English, “papagallo” in Spanish, “Papagei” in German, and so forth—in this same phrase, papae gabio (1.36). Such false etymologies provide a popular way of relating the names of things to their supposed natures. But Neckam declares that the parrot “has great ingenuity and is most prone to falsehood” (1.36) and illustrates this remark with a story:

      In Great Britain there lived a knight of great generosity who owned a parrot and loved it most dearly. The knight, having set out on a journey around the mountains of Gilboa, saw a parrot there, and recalling the one that he had at home, said to it, “Our captive parrot, identical to you, sends greetings.” Hearing these words, the bird fell down as if dead. The knight grieved at this, being deceived by the bird’s trickery, and, having completed his journey and returned home, brought the tale back with him. The knight’s parrot listened attentively to his master’s words and then, feigning grief, fell from its perch as if dead, too. The entire household marveled at this sudden onset of grief, but the knight commanded that the bird be placed out in the open, so that it might be revived by fresh air. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, the parrot then flew off maliciously, never to be caught again. The master groaned and the entire household complained loudly that they had been tricked. (1.37; my translation)

      Having thus deceived its master, the parrot presumably headed straight back to Mount Gilboa, which was becoming the preferred haunt of parrots in some bestiaries. After the Philistines had killed Saul and Jonathan there, King David prayed that no dew or rain should fall upon the place (2 Samuel 1.21). For whatever reason, the bestiarists had begun to insist that parrots could not stand to touch water (Neckam 1.36; Cantimpré 5.109).¹

      Of course, giving parrots a home