✵fëanorian defense lawyer ✵

and this mentality was carried by white people everywhere they colonized—seeing any animals thats mildly challenging to humans as something thats degraded, unpersoned and killed off or contained in the deep wilds.

This post made me ponder when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe, and what where the factors behind its development. Can i ask for your opinion as a medievalist and historian in this subject?

...Well. For starters, the linked post is just, uh. Wrong. On several levels. In several ways. Before I get to its facts, falsehoods, and assumptions, let's start with one of the problems involved in citing it as a source on history: it's written by a retired veterinary nurse. I'm sure that Debbie Graham (retired veterinary nurse) has done many wonderful things in her career. I'm reasonably sure that we'd be in sympathy politically, and would get along if we found ourselves on the same protest line or weekend hike. But uh. As a set of historical claims, this is egregious.

For one thing, it is either disingenuous or breathtakingly stupid to take the wolf as a stand-in for "the environment," full stop. The wolf is the most culturally iconic predator of the western world. At the risk of seeming flippant: the wolf, which lives in a cave and eats 10,000 sheep per year, is an outlier adn should not have been counted. There are good essays about what is going on with the wolf in literature and culture, both in the Middle Ages and beyond, in this book, via @jstor.

Was there hostility toward wolves in the European Middle Ages? Sure. Arnaud, a fourteenth-century French peasant, is famously on record as a heretic because he concluded that wolves were not created by God. (But... everything is created by God, said a presumably very frazzled member of the clergy. That's kind of a big deal.) Arnaud, however, was a shepherd, and he stuck to his story: God was good, wolves did nothing but eat sheep and lie. Evil. Therefore of the devil. QED. Arnaud eventually conceded that the devil could not create things and that even wolves were created by the Almighty.

Anyway. There are just a shocking number of fallacies and errors in that article. It wants to claim that wolves were hunted to near-extinction by the Normans, while also pointing out the ways in which the Normans placed limits on hunting. The article also conflates the rhetorical/literary wolf (enemy of sheep, humans, Good Things Generally) with the actual wolf, and claims that "This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people believed that stabbing, beating, flaying, burning and poisoning wolves was good." From the bottom of my heart: what the fuck. I know what was "babbled from every pulpit" in medieval England. Greatest hits include:

the Virgin Mary has your back

pray regularly

do not play dice in the cemetery / in church / with money you don't have

be nice to your neighbor

consider that you are, in fact, sinful

do not be too anxious about your soul, though

yay, saints

do not have sex during Lent

...no seriously, we mean it, no sex during Lent

Anyway: there's not some weird pulpit-thumping anti-wolf brigade. The article claims that church and civic law permitted and rewarded killing of wolves. Common law in England? yes. Church law... I have never heard of such a thing, nor can I imagine any document saying "40 days off purgatory if you -- with the right spirit in your heart -- come hear a sermon, donate to the roof repair fund, or kill a wolf." In the immortal words of Benoit Blanc, it makes no damn sense.

The linked article writes of "things called fields, impounded [sic; not actually what that word means] by structures such as fences or hedges." I think the enclosure movement of the 14th-17th centuries (late medieval/early modern) can certainly be viewed as bad for the ecosystem of England. But that's about pasturage, not arable fields. Not coincidentally, it helped to fuel Robin Hood legends. Moreover, one can also find fenced-in fields in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, etc. Fields are not inherently colonialist.

You say you are pondering "when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe." My answer would be: it wasn't. A recent overview of environmental history in medieval Europe is this, examining sustainable practices and norms:

Also via @jstor, there's the open-access book The Green Middle Ages, which argues that "the green earth was a generally treasured, indispensable and integrated component of life." It makes its argument, in my view, cogently and well. Full book here.

Ask yourself, how does this piece make you feel? (No wrong answers)

Look for an artist statement nearby. What does it say about the artist and their relationship to their work? What does the artist say that they are trying to convey with their art? What contextual clues can you pick up from what they say about their background, or what they omit?

Look at the title of the piece. What is the artist saying about their work by naming it that, either explicitly or implicitly?

Look at the medium. Is there anything about the piece that stands out to you, knowing what it's made of?

Look at the year it was made. What cultural events might have been happening around this time? Was this piece part of a particular art movement? What was the purpose of that art movement, and what was it trying to say?

🕳

@everything-you-feel-is-real I know by tumblr tradition that I'm to say "impossible, my posts never blow up like that," or "please don't do this to me."

círdan is concerned

happy belated @crablorday ! i was so sad i didn’t get any time to do something for the event but i made good time on work and commissions today so enjoy a quick and frankly kind of messy little illustration. if you’re worrying that the implication is that círdan is going to eat crablor, you would be absolutely correct.

A couple I was helping earlier had two little ones, three and six, who were behaving in a rather saintly fashion for the average bored kid I see. I tried to engage them with remotes and things while their parents talked.

Eventually they were restless enough that I pulled out notepads and asked if they wanted to draw. The three year old quickly lost interest and I went over to ask her favorite animal. She told me “elephant” so to delight and amaze her I started drawing an elephant. Usually kids are into it.

When I was done she pronounced, “It looks like a giraffe.”

I staggered back melodramatically but actually laughing hysterically and said, “There goes my art degree!”

The parents laughed and said kids were harsh critics. When they checked out they saw my elephant doodle on the desk and both did a double take like, “Woah, that’s a really good elephant!”