Castor

The Medieval Studies 2011 Spring Lecture Series starts Monday. We are very excited about it. Last year's lecture series was fantastic. To learn more go to http://www.unm.edu/~medinst/. It's free and open to everyone interested in medieval history.

Tonight's photo is of the Bestiary, MS Bodley 764. It's open to the Castor or what we know as the Beaver. The original text is in Latin, and I have the English translation open below it. This Bestiary was originally published in the middle of the 13th Century. 

The stories are about animals, as best they knew them at that time (mostly from folklore), and the illustrations were mostly what they imagined the more exotic animals would look like. All stories have Christian morals, which was common during the time. By the account in the Bestiary, beavers became extinct in Europe because of a peculiar behavior unheard of in the North American beaver.

"There is an animal called the beaver which is quite tame, whose testicles are excellent as medicine. The naturalists say of it that when it realises that hunters are pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them down in front of the hunters, and thus takes flight and escapes. If it so happens that another hunter follows it, it stands up on its hind legs and and shows its sexual organs. When the second hunter sees that is has no testicles, he goes away. In like fashion everyone who reforms his life and wants to live chastely in accordance with God's commandments should cut off all vices and shameless deeds and throw them in the devil's face. Then the devil will see that that man has nothing belonging to him and will leave. That man will live in God and will not be taken by the devil, who says: 'I will overtake, I will divide and spoil' [Exodus 15:9]. The beaver (castor) is so called because it castrates itself."

Here the commentator has a flawed idea of the commandments and the Bible. God does not say to live a chaste life, he says to "go forth and multiply". Quite the opposite. And Exodus 15:9 is not in reference to the Devil. The "enemy" is the Egyptians who boasted that they would overtake the enemy and destroy them, but God blew his breath and covered them with the sea, and "They sank like lead in the mighty waters."

Things never seem to change as people in the 13th Century were taking Bible verses out of context to justify their idea on morality.

Then there are the modern beasts who hide behind
blinds to protect themselves from evil things like
getting matts brushed out of their fur.