Download PDF | Dolly Jørgensen - The Medieval Pig (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages, 9)-Boydell Press (2024).
166 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making. I discovered medieval pigs while working on my master’s thesis under Professor Sally Vaughn at the University of Houston. I continued to bump into pigs in the medieval streets as I wrote my PhD with Professor Bernie Carlson at the University of Virginia. Even when my primary research interests had moved into the modern era, I could not let medieval pigs go. I have had the opportunity to publish a number of articles on medieval pig management over the course of my career – these are listed in the bibliography and notes. I thank the reviewers and editors who helped me to shape those pieces and my thinking over the years. I have drawn on that prior work for the kernel of this book.
I also want to thank the libraries, archives, and special collections who make their holdings freely accessible online. I have relied extensively on the digital assets of the Internet Archive, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Getty Museum, the Morgan Library & Museum, and many smaller collections of medieval manuscripts to do research for this book. The various projects that have made printed primary sources and translations available, including British History Online, Stephen Alsford’s Medieval English Towns website, MPublishing of the University of Michigan Library, and Digital Dante, have been incredibly valuable to me. Scholarship is greatly advanced through all of their efforts to make it more effortless to access historical material.
Placing the Medieval Pig he pig was a commonplace animal in the Middle Ages and, like many commonplace animals, the medieval pig embodies paradoxes. The pig was a major food source in winter, yet pork was a food that carried the connotation of religious uncleanliness. The omnivorous pig was useful as a garbage recycler, but was also a dangerous eater who could steal food and even root up buried corpses. Some pigs were domesticated, while others ran freely through the woodlands.
The pig larder was a blessing, but pigs were also believed to do the Devil’s bidding. As art historian Michael Camille observed, ‘pigs were both celebrated and reviled in medieval culture’. This book will explore these paradoxes of the pig in medieval culture and practice as we journey together to the places the pig inhabited. Human lives are, and have been, deeply entangled with animal lives. Humans have sought wild animals for meat, skins, and a myriad of other products – from beaver castoreum to whale ambergris – as long as humans have existed.
Wild animals, from lions to kangaroos to bats, shape human culture through symbolism and social practices that incorporate them. Both livestock and pets are brought directly under human control, often living under the same roofs as people and dependent on them for food and care. Humans began domesticating livestock mammals such as goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle over 10,000 years ago; dogs were domesticated even earlier.
In the domestication process, the genetic makeup of the animals was modified as humans bred them for economically advantageous traits (more milk production, better wool fibres, more strength, better stamina, etc.) and human cultural contexts were modified to accommodate the animals’ needs 1 and wants. This closeness to animals is both physical and mental – as humans have interacted with animals, we have thought with and through them.
In a book about animals, looking at animals involves looking at both them and ourselves. This book looks at human–animal relations through one animal (the pig) in a particular time (the Middle Ages) in a particular geography (western Europe). Writing about pigs is nothing new. Scholars have written about Fascist Pigs, Capitalist Pigs, The Symbolic Pig, The English Pig, and Legions of Pigs. Even just The Pig.
Some of these studies emphasise the pig’s history of domestication; others focus on the pig as a standardised commodity; still others hone in on the pig as a carrier of meaning. Since pigs and humans have been living together for ten millennia, there is plenty of history to explore. This book focuses on the European Middle Ages, approximately AD 500 to 1500, as a particularly useful time to delve into the paradoxes embodied and acted out by the pig. Unlike our modern age, in which the pig is often tucked away in industrial production facilities out of sight or fed in fields far from the eyes of urbanites, pigs in the Middle Ages were part and parcel of daily life.
This means that they leave their imprints in many sources, from artworks to land grants to court records. This book makes use of this variety of sources to understand how pigs shaped human life and how humans shaped the pig’s. This will take us into various European places in which pigs appear in the medieval sources: in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind. Humans placed pigs into each of these environments and, in each place, the pig’s paradoxical characteristics interacted in contentious ways.
When a reader today thinks of the pig, the image which probably pops into the mind is a very large, pink, smooth animal with a group of hungry piglets in a pen on a farm. This is not what should come to mind when we think of a European medieval pig. The body colouring and conformation of most modern pigs are a result of breeding in the early modern period. In the eighteenth century imported pig breeds from China with rounder bodies and faster weight gain were crossbred with local varieties to create larger and fatter pigs that fitted well into the industrialisation of meat production.
For most of the 10,000-year history of pig–human interaction, pigs have not looked like the titular pig in Babe or Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web. Pigs, both wild and domesticated types, are known scientifically as Sus scrofa, with 25 subspecies described by scientists. Pigs were probably domesticated independently more than once in Eurasia. Archaeological investigations have traced the evolution of pigs under husbandry regimes globally. In this book I am writing primarily about the domesticated type of pig in medieval Europe, although the European wild boar also makes a few brief appearances.
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