Emasculation as empowerment: lessons of beaver lore for two Italian humanists

Abstract

In the sixteenth century, two Italian humanists, Paolo Giovio and Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, included in their imprese (personalised emblems) a portrayal of a beaver gnawing off its testicles. Since the impresa was intended to express something distinctive about its bearer, their choice of the beaver suggests that they conceived of their own masculinity in ways that seem counterintuitive. The present essay traces the story of the beaver's sacrifice to Antiquity, both classical and early Christian, and surveys the diverse interpretations of it up through the early-modern period. It details the wide constellation of meanings attached to the beaver in influential compendia of knowledge written around the time that Giovio and Bonifacio flourished, including Conrad Gesner's History of Quadrupeds and Pierio Valeriano's Hieroglyphica. Finally, it assesses how the appropriation of the beaver may have made particular sense, for different reasons, to Giovio and to Bonifacio. While these cases exemplify how animals served as enabling devices for portraying one's masculinity, the appropriation of the beaver in particular challenges historians today to reconsider what constituted acceptable masculine performance in early-modern Europe. It also serves as a caution against attributing a constant gendered meaning to even the most quintessentially male of organs.

Keywords::

• animals
• beavers
• Bonifacio
• Giovio
• castration
• emblems
• Ovid
• Pliny
• Reformation
• imprese

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Brendan Kane and Laurie Nussdorfer for their generosity and for their thorough and insightful vetting of drafts of this article. A short-term fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library greatly facilitated the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1.Simons, Sex of Men. For other recent scholarly contributions that address the meanings associated with testicles in the early-modern period, see especially Finucci, Manly Masquerade. See also the essays in Hairston and Stephens, Body in Early Modern Italy and Vigarello, Histoire de la virilité.

^2.Simons, Sex of Men, 291. The penis was relegated more or less to the status of a delivery mechanism. Its erection, in fact, was “medically explained in terms of semen” (ibid., 14). More generally: “Sexual metaphors tended to be grounded in an understanding of the adult male body's fluids, heat and projective more than penetrative capacity” (ibid., 3). On how a Freudian reading of “phallus” as exclusively the penis has distorted the understanding of pre-modern sexuality, see ibid., esp. 66–72.

^3. On the probability that Alciati and Giovio had earlier discussed emblems while in Pavia, see Minonzio, “Emblemistica ‘pavese’?” with discussion of the beaver emblem at 165–7. On Alciati's establishment of the genre of the emblem book and on the books' subsequent proliferation, see Gehl, Humanism.

^4.Imprese, unlike Alciati's emblems, did not need to include an epigram, but in the hands of some authors they did so. Thus in his expansion upon Giovio's dialogue on imprese, Gabriele Simeoni glossed Giovio's device of the beaver with his own four-line poem: “Poi ch'il castor de i fugitivi piei / Sente i nervi doler, mancar la lena, // Di quel si priva, ch'alla morte il mena. / Necessità constringe huomini & Dei.”

^5.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 247–9, quotation at 248.

^6.Giovio, Dialogo dell'imprese, in Opera, 9: 351–443. In 1551 Giovio dedicated the work to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence. The printer of its first edition (1555), Antonio Barré, significantly underestimated demand: “According to Girolamo Ruscelli, not a single copy could be found in Venice, not even at a price of ten scudi, for the entire Rome press run had been exhausted in only a few months.” Nuovo, Book Trade, 110.

^7.Aesop, Complete Fables, 113 (no. 153). On the problems of dating the origins of these fables with precision, see the translators' notes in ibid., ix–xli. Herodotus, Histories, 4.109, claims that beavers' testicles are useful for healing diseases of the womb, but does not tell the story of the beavers' self-castration.

^8. Ibid., 113.

^9.Cicero, Speeches, 271 (Pro Scauro, frag. 2.7).

^10.Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 21 (1.9).

^11.Juvenal, Sixteen Satires, 94 (12: 34–6); “imitatus castora, qui se / eunuchum ipse facit cupiens evadere damno / testiculi; adeo medicatum intellegit inguen.”

^12.Pliny, Natural History, 79 (8.109).

^13.Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, 99 (2.26). I follow the English translation of 1655 by John Goodyer. For the Latin, see Dioscorides, De medicinali materia, 159–60 (2.22). Where the former has “stones,” the latter reads testes.

^14.Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, 99 (2.26).

^15.Pliny, Natural History, 32.13.

^16.Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, 54 (6.34). The Greek words rendered by Scholfield as “great skill” and “ingenuity” have somewhat wider resonances: respectively, pano sophos (with great skill) can also mean “very cleverly”, and panourgos (with ingenuity) might also be rendered “adept in every action.”

^17. See the discussion of the text's authorship, place of origin (probably Alexandria), and date of composition in Physiologus, trans. Curley, x–xxi.

^18.Physiologus, trans. Curley, 52. For the Latin, see the critical edition of the Y text (the best surviving version) in “Physiologus,” ed. Carmody, 101–34, at 128–9. The apostle cited is Paul, at Romans 13:7.

^19. Some manuscripts omit the passage that characterises the animal's sacrifice as manly (viriliter): see, for example, Physiologus, ed. Heider, 34–5. According to Michael J. Curley, in the Physiologus “the details of the ancient legend are left largely intact,” and so in this particular case (unlike those of the descriptions of several other animals) the allegory has simply been “appended to a pagan model” rather than actively integrated into it: Physiologus, trans. Curley, xxiii. The beaver story does not appear in the verse version of the Physiologus by Theobaldus (c. eleventh to twelfth centuries) as edited by P. T. Eden: Theobaldus, Physiologus.

^20.Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 85.

^21. Ibid., 86. Hassig suggests that the distortion of scale may serve to emphasise how major a vice lust was, but notes that the subject matter also provided artists with a rare opportunity to depict genitalia prominently. There remained leeway for interpretation even in the fairly homogenous genre of the bestiary, as one sees in the Bestiaire d'amour of Richard de Fournival (1201–60): in this case, the female object of desire is enjoined to “give up her heart” (here a euphemism for virginity) just as the beaver does its testicles, and is assured that “I am pursuing you only for that.” Ibid., 92; and, for the passage itself, see Richart de Fournival, Bestiaire, 396.

^22.Horapollo, Hieroglyphics, trans. Boas, 85 (bk. 2, §85). On the probable identity of the author, Horapollo “Niliacus,” with the Alexandrian scholar Horapollo the Younger (c.450–500 CE), see Curran, Egyptian Renaissance, 23. Boas translates from a 1727 edition of the Hieroglyphica. It may be that a variant in that edition (which I have not had the opportunity to examine) explains his specifying the self-harm as being suicide.

^23.Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book 12, 2: 21 (Isidore explicitly cites the passages in Cicero and Juvenal detailed above); Albertus Magnus, Man and the Beasts, 90 (bk. 22, §39). Unlike Isidore, Albertus specified that hunters, not beavers, performed the castration from which the name supposedly derived.

^24. Bernard Silvestris, De Mundi universitate, 22 (1.3.228–9): “Prodit item castor proprio de corpore velox / Reddere quas sequitur hostis avarus opes.” On Guillaume de Lorris, see Friedrich, “Insinuating Indeterminate Gender,” which also discusses (at 264–72, 275) other medieval instances of the trope of beavers' self-castration. According to Delcorno, “La tradizione,” 552, the classical stories and medieval bestiary lore became intertwined in the encyclopaedias of Isidore of Seville, as well as of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais (both twelfth-century); but as noted above, Isidore's account of the beaver's sacrifice is strictly classical in sources and tone.

^25.Gerald of Wales, Journey, 176 (1.3).

^26.Galli, First Humanistic Translations, 55 (Guarino), 100 (Barbaro) and 176 (Valla).

^27.Babrius and Phaedrus, Fables, 413. Accame, “Note scite,” came to my attention too late for inclusion in the body of this article. At 45–48, Accame describes the comments on beavers that survive in the notes of the Roman humanist Pomponio Leto (1428–98). These include both critical analysis of classical texts (for example, he assesses particular uses of the words fiber and castor) and the recollection of what he himself had seen when travelling in the Black Sea region (for example, he identifies three classes among fibri that are distinct both in appearance and in social role, and he notes that the locals often raise and keep them in the house).

^28.Alciati, Emblemata, 165: “Aere quandoque salutem redimendam.” Around the same time, Ludovico Ariosto invoked the self-castrating beaver in his Orlando furioso, XXVII, 56: 3–8; 57: 1–4. See Delcorno, “La tradizione,” 551.

^29. Alciati, 165: “Huius ab exemplo disces non parcere rebus, / Et vitam ut redimas, hostibus aera dare.”

^30.Camerarius, Symbolorum et emblematum centuriae tres, pt. 2, 186–87, no. CXIII (MODO VITA SVPERSIT): “Ut vivat Castor sibi testes amputat ipse, / Tu quoque, si qua nocent, abjice / tutus eris.” The Latin phrase “modo vita supersit” is drawn from Virgil, Georgics, 3.10. Camerarius goes on to cite Giovio's glossing of the device with the Greek ANAGKE (“necessity”), and he concludes the entry with the maxim “Dura est necessitas.”

^31.Ripa, Iconologia. Although this book glosses numerous emblems, the 1593 edition lacks illustrations altogether.

^32. Ibid., 471: “questo animale irragionevole il quale per privarsi di sospetto, si taglia quel membro, che lo fa state inquieto.” In this edition (1645) of the text, the beaver's image appears on a page adjacent to another emblem for peace that portrays the mythical halcyon bird, which lays its eggs on a floating nest when the sea has been calmed.

^33.Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556). For a brief biography of Valeriano (1477–1558), see Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 1–23.

^34. See the summary by Anthony Grafton in Horapollo, Hieroglyphs, xix. The first printed edition is Horapollo, Hieroglyphica (1505). The text had earlier been translated into Latin by one of Valeriano's teachers, Georgio Valla (1447–1500). Valeriano's uncle and mentor, Fra Urbano Bolzanio (1442–1524), had helped to popularise the study of Horapollo and hieroglyphs in northern Italy: see Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 270; and Sider, “Horapollo,” 17.

^35.Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, 94v–102r ( =  Book 13).

^36.Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, 98v: “Nam & adulteri eadem affici poena solent, ut deprehensi praesectis testibus dimmitantur.” He also notes that the beaver's resemblance in front to a land animal, and in back to a fish, makes it for some an embodiment of the distinction between days of feast and those of fasting, when meat could not be eaten.

^37. Unlike Alciati's emblems, Giovio's imprese did not include the third element of an epigram.

^38.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 249, close paraphrase. On occasion Giovio violated his own rule about not including the human form.

^39.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 248–9, quotation at 248.

^40.Giovio, Opera, 9: 438.

^41.Pliny, Natural History, 331–32 (10.30).

^42. See Frigo, Il padre; and the essay in this issue by Laurie Nussdorfer, who writes that “phlegmatic, exacting, tactful, and patient vigilance was the predominant characteristic of the model patriarch” in prescriptive literature for maestri di casa. Nussdorfer, “Masculine hierarchies in Roman ecclesiastical households.”

^43. He declined the offer.

^44.Giovio, Opera, 9: 396. For his source, see Pliny, Natural History, 23: 26–50; 16: 222–23.

^45.Giovio, Opera, 9: 396: “Inclinata resurgit; alludendo all virtù del Duca, la quale non aveva potuto opprimere la furia della fortuna contraria, benché per alcun tempo fusse abbassata.”

^46.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10; transl. from Giovio, Opera, 9: 419.

^47.Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 225. Giovio's Anterotica is not known to have survived. Like his composition of the impresa of the beaver, it very likely dates from his sojourn in Pavia in 1506–11. Evidently it participated in a tradition of literary remedies for unrequited love. See Franco Minonzio's comments in Giovio, Dialogo, 2: 545–46 n. 48. Minonzio gives particular attention to the Anterotica, sive de amoris generibus of Pietro Edo (c.1427–1504), written in 1492, which discusses love as an illness of youth, and around half of which draws closely upon Ovid's Remedia amoris.

^48.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 10.

^49. The goons who castrated Abelard had been employed by his beloved Héloïse's uncle, who was avenging what he perceived as Abelard's dishonouring of her and, thereby, the males of her birth family.

^50. On the seeming instability in Machiavelli's use of the word, see for example Kahn, “Virtù.” Translators' solutions have ranged widely. At one extreme, Bill Connell consistently renders virtù as “virtue,” carefully explaining however that Machiavelli uses it to refer to “a person's or a thing's intrinsic and essential strength, regardless of whether this is morally good or bad.” Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Connell, 41n5. Mark Musa, in contrast, renders virtù with 12 different English words, as he explains in Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Musa, x–xv.

^51.Giovio, Opera, 9: 419: “il fato, che non è altro che voluntà divina, la quale ha più forza che la virtù e solerzia umana e l'inganna molto.” The beaver's sacrifice, a literal emasculation, lessens the hunters' scope for displaying prowess, but at the same time can empower others, inasmuch as the testicles have “molta virtù in medicina.”

^52. See the analysis in Gouwens, “Meanings of Masculinity.” Testicular injuries, however, were not uncommon, and could be treated through orchidectomy (surgical excision of the testes). See Wailes, “Potency in Fortunatus,” 7.

^53. On the popularity in the Renaissance of the topos of reason triumphing over youthful desire, see Milligan, “Masculinity and Machiavelli,” 166–7, esp. 167n44.

^54. Letter to Marco Contarini, trans. in Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 117.

^55.Pasquinate, 1: 311–12 (no. 314). In contrast, Giovio himself at one point referred to Paul III (pope, 1534–49) as having “a good pair of balls” (un bon paro di coglioni).

^56. For example, on his disappointment at not gaining a substantial pension from Charles V at Bologna in 1530, an incident recounted by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, see Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 155–6. Most infamously, Giovio wrote to Rodolfo Pio of Carpi in 1535 that “[a] man cannot be expected to rack his brains at his own expense.” Trans. in ibid., 136. See also Giovio's juxtaposition of Clement's ill fortune with his lack of liberality (implied but not stated) in Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 95.

^57.Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio, 163.

^58.Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 93–5: “Though during this entire deadly war I often outspokenly condemned some points of wrongheaded counsel or lax administration that I foresaw would lead to this lamentable outcome, I do not on that account think that the pope's plans, which were generally very reasonable, ought to be disparaged.” Though expressed diplomatically, the sense that his advice has been ignored is clear. Later in the dialogue (ibid., 353) he laments that the pontiff was too swayed by the authority of men “whose spirit had long ago been rendered unmanly by fatal avarice.” (ibid., 352: “aliquorum etiam quorum animus exitiali avaritia iam pridem erat effeminatus”).

^59. Note in particular Ascoli, “Machiavelli's Gift,” 251–2, with somewhat different emphasis: “The image of Fortuna as a woman just waiting to be raped, usually assumed to be prototypically Machiavellian, is instead the sign of a total exclusion of prudence, and hence of Machiavelli's vision, from the historical domain of politics, and can even be said to dramatise in the most brutal terms the author's sense of his own vulnerability to princely violence.” Compare Giovio's motto: “FATO PRVDENTIA MINOR.”

^60.Ascoli, “Machiavelli's Gift,” 248.

^61. This is Lorenzo de' Medici the Younger, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), the grandson of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de' Medici (d. 1492). According to a later sixteenth-century account by Riccardo Riccardi (1558–1612), Machiavelli's presentation of his manuscript to this prince was upstaged by another's gift of two hunting dogs: “Lorenzo gave greater thanks and responded in a friendlier way to the man who had given him the dogs than to [Machiavelli].” Machiavelli, Prince, trans. Connell, 142.

^62.Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 169.

^63. Muscettola's advice here calls to mind Lucio Paolo Rosello's comment in his Ritratto del vero governo del principe dall'esempio vivo del gran Cosimo de Medici that the prudent man “is compelled by necessity … and accommodates himself to the times, now concealing, now revealing, as circumstances allow.” See Martin, Myths, 52, in the context of a nuanced discussion of prudential rhetoric in the Cinquecento.

^64.Giovio, Opera, 2:38, lett. no. 158 (15 August 1546).

^65.Spagnolo, “Giovio's Puns,” 521.

^66.Gaisser, Pierio Valeriano, 165–7.

^67.Giovio, Opera, 2: 28–29: “son celebrati i boni omini eccellenti morti, quali non son stati eunuchi.”

^68. See, for example, Giovio, Notable Men and Women, 13–17.

^69.Lettere di Principi, 99v (Girolamo Negri to Marcantonio Michiel, 1 March 1523): “Harei salutato il Giovio … È in rotta con l'Alcionio [Pietro Alcionio], perche gli è stato detto, che l'Alcionio scrive historia, la quale impresa egli non vuol cedere ad alcuno.”

^70. Cf. the reference in the preceding note to history-writing as something Giovio regarded as his impresa (here, in the sense of “undertaking”), possibly a pun on Negri's part.

^71.Talvacchia, Taking Positions.

^72. The woodcut portrait is reproduced in Bonifacio, Miscellanea hymnorum, fol. N3r. In the woodcut he is described as “in the fiftieth year of his life, in the year 1567.”

^73.Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 111–15.

^74. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15. 61–62; trans. mine.

^75. The following two paragraphs draw upon Caccamo, “Bonifacio”; Church, Italian Reformers, 273–303; and Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio.

^76.Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 113: “Castor sequentes quum canes prope aspicit, / Iamiam capi et discerpier // Miser timet, nullamque qua evadat viam, / Nullam salutem respicit. // Portare secum cogitat quod expetunt, / causam esse mortis id suae. // Scindit sibi tum dentibus testes suis, / Hos proiicit, tutusque abit. // Ratus bene hoc cessisse toti corpori, / Quum sola pars abscissa sit. // Fecisse stulte dixeris, AMERBACHI, / Si fecimus nos sic quoque?” Trans. mine.

^77. Ibid.: “Quam pulcre illud quod communi more ego de castore ad bona, quae in patria reliqui, alludebam, tu id ad divina retorsisti! Qui sunt mundani, quemadmodum et ego, non est mirum si humano more et videant et sentiant et loquantur. At qui divino aguntur motu, ita vident, sentiunt et loquuntur, quemadmodum et tu.” Trans. mine.

^78.Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Fasanini, chap. 64: “[quomodo] hominem cui propria fraus perniciosam relegationem attulerit, cuique fuga sua noceat significare volentes, castorem pingunt[?]” English trans. mine. Cf. Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Trebazio, 41: “Hominem sibi ipsi damna ferentem cum volunt dicare, castorem pingunt. hic enim venatoribus insequentibus testiculos suos demordens, abiectos relinquit.” On the former translation of Horapollo's text, see Drysdall, “Filippo Fasanini.”

^79.Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 119: “impiissimi, stultissimi et crudelissimi antichristi Ioannis Petri Caraffae alias Pauli paparum quarti.”

^80. Ibid., 117. According to Church, Italian Reformers, 277, the anecdote was deployed in this anonymous Jesuit text as “evidence of Lutheran leanings.”

^81. Thus George Boas writes in the introduction to his edition of Horapollo that Valeriano's “great weakness, which was a weakness of all the Neoplatonists also, lay in the assumption that the ancient myths had an allegorical meaning which could be made consistent, that the names of the gods were univalent, and that Orphic and Neoplatonic interpretations of their meanings were correct.” Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. Boas, 26.

^82.Ashworth, “Emblematic Natural History,” 20.

^83. Ibid., 35, 36.

^84. Ibid., 22.

^85.Gesner, Historiae animalium, 1: 336–44.

^86. Here (ibid., 337) he relates the story from Pliny and Solinus that one bitten by a beaver can only be cured by hearing the crashing of the animals teeth, but immediately notes Albertus Magnus's dissenting opinion.

^87. Ibid., 340.

^88. Ibid., 340: “Castoris testiculos qui hodie venduntur, longe maiores esse, quam ut genuini & veri castoris videantur …”

^89. Ibid., 338.

^90.Ashworth, “Emblematic Natural History,” 20–2; quotations at 21 and 22.

^91.Gesner, Historiae animalium, 344.

^92.Jonston, Historiae naturalis, 1: 102–4.

^93. Foucault, Order of Things, 128–30. See also Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” 317, and 330n41 on Foucault's sloppiness in mistaking the 1657 Amsterdam edition of Jonston for the first printing, which in fact dates to 1650.

^94.Jacob, Logic of Life, 28. In contrast to Jacob, however, Ashworth downplays the importance of Bacon and Descartes in favour of the difficulties of incorporating into wide-ranging natural histories those animals newly discovered in the Americas, which lacked the apparatus of similitudes.

^95.Jonston, Historiae naturalis, 1: 102.

^96. Ibid., 1: 103.

^97.Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

^98. Ibid., 144 (Book 3, chap. 4, “Of the Bever,” comprises 144–7).

^99. Ibid., 145.

^100. Ibid., 146.

^101. Ibid., 147.

^102.Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Connell, 111 (in chap. 21). Compare ibid., 88 (in chap. 15).

^103.Welti, Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, 111, emphasises the separation of the letters from the motto, and notes how in the woodcut portrait of 1567 the initials took the place that in an earlier image had been held by his identity as marquis of Oria (Oriae Marchio). On the medal, however, the initials appear immediately below the image of the self-masticating beaver: they are, in my view, integral to the entire conceit.

^104. It is difficult to imagine the motif of self-castration having currency in academe today, even in those instances where its metaphorical resonance might be uncannily appropriate. For the definition and significance of semiophores, see Pomian, “Histoire culturelle”; Paul, Poetry in the Museums, 184, offers a pithy summary. For a recent deployment of Pomian's theories, see Ago, Il gusto.

^105. Notable contributions include Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things; and Lakoff and Johnson's accessible primer, Metaphors We Live By.

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Notes on contributors

Kenneth Gouwens

Kenneth Gouwens is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, USA. His publications include Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome, (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 1998); and a critical edition and translation of Paolo Giovio, Notable Men and Women — Dialogus de viris et feminis aetate nostra florentibus (I Tatti Renaissance Library Series, no. 56) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).