Bones,fire,and falcons: Loving things in medieval Europe

Bones

In 1190, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200) undertook a visiting tour of Normandy. Hugh was well known for his devotion to the relics of saints (Leyser, 1987). Whenever he traveled up and down France and England, according to his biographer Adam of Eynsham, he always stopped at different churches to inspect holy bones and bodily fragments. One day his enthusiasm reached a new peak of intensity. While visiting the Norman abbey of Fécamp, Hugh asked the abbot for permission to touch the relics of Saint Mary Magdalene. The abbot agreed and handed Hugh the saint's shinbone, wrapped in a cloth. But as Hugh held the relic he turned his back. He gnawed at the bone and bit off two small shards, which splintered in his mouth. The abbot was outraged, complaining that Hugh had acted “as if he were a dog” (ecce ritu canino hec dentibus tradidit lanianda) (Douie and Farmer, 1962: 2: 169–170). Yet Hugh seemed oblivious to the scandal. Defending his actions, he claimed he acted out of “commemoration” and “reverence.”

Why did Hugh bite the shinbone? Elina Gertsman (2018: 27–29) has described this moment as one of “aggressive determination.” While arguing that holy artifacts provoked deep emotional responses in medieval Europe, Gertsman views Hugh as the object, rather than the subject, of the encounter. As the magnetic power of the relic overtook him, she says, the bishop was overcome by “a longing to possess,” and lost control of himself. Alternatively, the anthropologist Charles Lindholm (2002: 332) has compared Hugh to the curator of a modern museum, capitalizing on his “good teeth” in an attempt to acquire relics for his own collection. Navigating these extremes of impulse and calculation, the historian Philippa Byrne (2017) has noted tensions between careful judgment and instinctive action in Hugh's biography. Stressing how Adam of Eynsham framed the Magna vita sancti Hugonis, Byrne explores Hugh as a prudent legal judge who, nevertheless, remained outside the confines of the law. In the biography, as Byrne says, Hugh appears as a man “who had no need to learn [the] rules,” and whose actions, however erratic, were made “according to what he knows to be justice” (2017: 54).

Hugh's own explanation is brief, but revealing. When challenged by the Abbot of Fécamp, he compared the bone of the saint to the bread eaten by Christians in the Eucharist. There should be no difference, he said, between how people handled relics and how they ate the “body of Christ.”

Although it was perhaps a stretch, Hugh's connection between consumption and devotion would have made sense to his contemporaries. In the final decades of the 1100, the Eucharist was becoming a central practice in European communities. At this point, Christians widely understood that the communion bread really was Christ's body, transformed in the course of the ritual by divine workings initiated by the priest. Before this doctrine received official clarification at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, it seems that enthusiasm for the practice was increasing across the continent. Chroniclers told stories of groups of women beating down church doors to be given access to the small wafers, and exempla gave accounts of visions and prophecies centering on the Eucharist as a miraculous agent (Bynum, 1988). By Hugh's time, in other words, the idea that people physically ate “Christ’s body” in the Eucharist had become a matter of course for ordinary Christians.

While this may contextualize Hugh's enthusiasm, it does not fully explain or exhaust it. Even to his immediate audience, there was something excessive about this level of devotion to a relic. Yet perhaps what outraged the Abbot of Fécamp so much was how Hugh's act momentarily restored the bone to its very materiality, its thingness. By roughly handling and attempting to eat the bone of Mary Magdalene, Hugh subverted the formalized customs of relic curation, of which the abbot would have been a master. The bones of medieval saints were ordinarily kept in resplendent reliquaries. Sometimes shaped in imitation of the parts of the body they housed, these elaborate boxes were often covered with gold or jewels and kept in closely curated shrines. In essence, the function of these reliquaries was to translate the matter of the saint's body into the higher matter of the heavens, infusing their corporeal material with a miraculous immortality. As the inscription on a foot reliquary from Northumberland put it, they “made for the incorrupt foot [of the saint] a shoe of purest silver” (Bartlett, 2015: 268).

But Hugh's act also explicitly defied the commercialized reliquary practices of the later 1100s. Just like the abbey of Fécamp, many religious houses chose to keep their relics locked away from view. Rather than prioritizing their handling and worship, monasteries and churches placed a greater emphasis on the relic's role as a guarantee of institutional prestige. They built great collections, such as the 242 relics listed in a cartulary as possessions of Reading Abbey in the 1190s (Bethell, 1972). They also profited from these relics. After the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in 1170, pilgrims from across the continent began traveling to southern England hoping to buy the small amulet relics, containing the saint's diluted blood, that brought Canterbury enormous revenues. ⁵ Unsurprisingly, this mirrored the activity of a professionalized black market of stolen and false relics (Geary, 1990: 44ff; Smith, 2012). Although these fraudulent traders had served the personal collections of aristocrats since at least the Carolingian era, they were a matter of particular concern in the lifetime of Hugh of Lincoln. At the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III (r.1198–1216) advised prelates to restrict access to relics as a way of preventing both their theft and illicit sale (García y García et al., 2013: 581–582).

Running parallel to this commodification of the relic trade was a continuing diversification of relic worship. Contact relics—objects that had been handled by or left in close proximity to a saint—had always been vital commercial property throughout the Christian world. Dust from saints’ tombs, cloths that wrapped their bodies, and even oil from lamps that burned in their homes all appeared as regular objects of veneration. As the chronicler Gregory of Tours (d.594) described, any cloth that had touched a saint would be “so soaked in divine power that it will weigh much more than it weighed previously” (Bartlett, 2015: 250). By the fifteenth century, people were even honoring the bodies of saints while they were still alive. Accounts of the life of Saint Lydwine (d.1433), a young woman from Schiedam in Holland who fell chronically ill, describe how her parents took “fragments of bone and strips of flesh which had detached themselves from their child’s limbs,” placing them in glass jars and exhibiting them to pious visitors, who worshipped them as relics (Huysmans, 1923: 79). Although these bodily pieces “exhaled a sweet perfume,” Lydwine eventually insisted that her parents should bury them, as the pilgrims crowded her bed and had become too much for her to handle.

As potent as relic worship was for Bishop Hugh's contemporaries, there were also groups who vigorously denied the power of holy objects. At the extreme end of the spectrum were the followers of Peter of Bruys (d.c.1131), known to contemporaries as the “Petrobrusians.” On the surface, these outsiders (who were eventually persecuted as heretics) sought to reject the devotional power of objects, including relics. For instance, they denied the sacrament of the Eucharist, mocking it as a phony transformation of wine into blood (Fearns, 1968: 87–125). Likewise, they argued that churches were detrimental to Christian fellowship, and demanded that they should all be pulled down (Fearns, 1968: 56–66). Arguably, the Petrobrusians’ opposition was a response to the growing autonomy and power of holy materials in the Christian society of the 1100s. According to their detractors, the Petrobrusians also defied the Christian celebration of the cross. In fact, they were so anxious that they demanded for all crucifixes to be burnt as a “revenge” for the torture and death of Christ (Fearns, 1968: 66–86). This claim was most dramatically embodied in the demise of Peter of Bruys himself. After making a bonfire of crucifixes in the market square of St Gilles, Peter was seized by a local mob, thrown into the flames, and burnt, very horribly and very publicly, to death.

But did the Petrobrusians really want to deny the power of materials in Christian devotion? Far from rejecting material love, if we read further we can see that Peter of Bruys and his followers had their own unique philosophy of loving materials, one that was both powerful and challenging. While burning crucifixes may show hatred for the object, it also demonstrates a high level of respect for their power precisely as objects. Close attention to how they spoke of materiality itself reveals a clear line in the sand. According to Peter the Venerable, who recorded their practices in great detail, when the Petrobrusians condemned ornate churches, their problem was that they placed the symbolic value of materials over their immediate, physical dimensions. If what mattered was welcoming believers into a building, they demanded no “design,” which might interrupt and mediate that experience, but instead a space where humans could have a direct relation with their physical surroundings. Equally, they hated the wooden cross not for any aspects of its form, but for the fact that believers insisted on placing wood on the wall to symbolize torture. Instead of any figurative or ceremonial value of objects, what the Petrobrusians most demanded was a respect for the unmediated thingness of materials. Stripping away layers of mediation, their devotional demands held out hope for an experience of the matter in its most immediate, physical terms.

Although it would have been scandalous to say it in the 1190s, Hugh of Lincoln was himself therefore a kind of Petrobrusian in his material philosophy. Instinctively rejecting the ceremonious framing of Mary Magdalene's bone as a relic, he sought instead to have an encounter with the bone simply as a special object. Of course, there could be fewer more immediate forms of reckoning between human and materials than crunching something with the teeth. Yet his biting was not so much an act of acquisition as an act of devoted absorption. Hugh defended his motivations as made in “reverence,” and his comparison with the Eucharist opens parallels with medieval Christians, such as Mary d’Oignies, for whom eating communion wafers was something felt in “the gorgeously embellished marriage bed of the heart” (Bynum, 1988: 59). Read in this way, the bishop's encounter with the shinbone sits in the narrative as a culmination of his overflowing love. It makes sense of the many moments in which Hugh appears “in the happiness of his love” for the holy way of life, hardly able to “keep his passion to himself” (Douie and Farmer, 1962: 1: 22). Short-circuiting the rerouting of desire that continued to grip the relic trade in the late 1100s, and extending the logic of the Eucharist, it was a loving communion with the thing-in-itself, as opposed to the thing-as-symbol.

Fire

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), founder of the Friars Minor monastic order, was famous among his contemporaries for his core principles of poverty, simplicity, and radical humility. An essential aspect of this humility was a respect and awe for the natural world (Armstrong, 1973; Harris, 2020: 87–108). Among other relations, Francis cultivated a complex devotion to “Brother Fire.” A curious moment appears in the Assisi Compilation, a biography assembled by vanguard Franciscans to in the early 1300s. ⁶ Here Francis is shown declaring his love for fire in the strongest terms, suggesting he would rather die than impede its desires.

Francis's concern for “Brother Fire” can be traced across his many biographies, and even within his very few written works. One example is his Canticle of the Creatures. Reportedly written while he was suffering from an intense illness in 1225, Francis loved the song so much that, while he lay dying a year later, he insisted his brothers sing it with him. In the Canticle, Francis endowed different aspects of nature with human characteristics.

For all its anthropomorphic language, the Canticle appears torn on the status of the material world. On the one hand, it emphasized the classic Christian view of nature as a “useful” resource (Epstein, 2012). If fire was lovable, in this sense, it was because of its light and warmth, just as fruits were lovable for their nourishment. Tallying with Francis's sense of the economic exchange “value” of animals, identified by Lisa Kiser (2011), this approach could be classed as functional and respectful. Yet he also assigns personality and agency to material phenomena in the song. Just as he praises “Sister-Our-Mother-Earth” for “governing” (governa), he highlights fire's “joyousness” (iocundo) and “beauty” (bello). As well as celebrating how fire may be used, the song also appears to honor fire's independent motives and desires.

Yet Francis's encounter with “Brother Fire” in the Assisi Compilation seems to go beyond any simple respect for fire's character. What is most extraordinary about that episode is precisely its excessiveness. Lee Patterson (2010), considering the anecdote, has said it shows Francis “subordinating” himself to “a force… able to enact its very being with an unselfconscious immediacy.” Just like the saint himself, “Brother Fire” was “idiota et simplex,” a thing that follows its own good instinct without self-consciousness or principle. As compelling as Patterson's reading is, however, it still retains an element of symbolism in explaining the saint's relationship to nature. Rather than the actual fire itself, it suggests Francis valued the simplicity and immediacy that fire represented. This hardly accounts for the exceptional human/material relationship played out in this moment, which goes even further than other episodes in which Francis walked barefoot so as not to hurt the rocks on the ground, or asked brothers to avoid chopping wood out of concern for trees (Armstrong, 1999: 165). In order to accommodate the wishes of the fire, Francis was apparently willing to suffer great pain. Given the level of the sacrifice involved in this kind of relation, I would suggest that a more fitting term might be “love.”

Stretching back as far as Augustine of Hippo (d.410) and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. c.400s–500s), there was a rich tradition of self-sacrificing and self-annihilating love among medieval spiritual writers (McGinn, 1994, 1998; Turner, 1995; Van Dyke, 2016). Notable was the Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose ideas of loving God influenced centuries of writers, from Hadewijch of Brabant to Dante Alighieri. Bernard argued that love was essentially a way for the soul to learn to dissolve itself into the oneness of God. By producing an insatiable craving, Bernard said, love revealed to the individual their own material and psychological nothingness. Eventually, the soul in its craving realized that love of God was “the only desire that can be truly quenched” (Leclercq et al., 1963: 25).

Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this motif of self-annihilating love picked up strong associations with fire, and specifically with human transformation into the substance of fire itself (Barbezat, 2018). In his final state of “arduous love” (violentae caritatis), the mystical philosopher Richard of St Victor (d.1173) said that the soul would be “swallowed up on the pyre of divine flame and into the fire of inmost love (amoris)” (Feiss, 2012: 292). Now intoxicated by divine desire, it “grows hot… glows, and finally… liquefies entirely.” The French mystic Marguerite Porete (d.1310), writing around the time the Assisi Compilation was assembled, described divine love in similar terms (Field, 2012). The perfect soul, she said, would “commit herself to Love” to the extent that she would eventually “not see herself at all.” (Marin, 2010; O’Sullivan, 2006). Upon reaching this “pure love,” the individual soul would become indistinguishable from heavenly fire itself.

These devotional departures in fire's status were supported in thirteenth-century philosophy, especially in works by scholars who identified as Francis's followers. One was Robert Grosseteste (d.1253), the master of sciences who also operated as a protector of the Franciscan community at Oxford. Robert performed countless scientific experiments, combining a forensic eye with an expansive reading of theological texts. Within his studies on the elements, he identified fire as the substance that formed the core building block of all other materials in the world. As he said, “every natural body on earth has something of celestial light and luminous fire in it” (McEvoy, 1987: 182). Fire, for Robert, was even understood as the essential matter of the highest thoughts, with the “sentient soul” acting “in the eyes through pure shining fire” (Martin, 1996: 188). Extending the ideas of Thierry of Chartres (d.c.1155) before him, he finally articulated fire as the substance of heaven itself, in a sphere in which fire mingled with “the higher calm air” (Häring, 1955: 183–200).

Some of these perspectives were formulated more systematically by the Master of Theology and Minister General of the Franciscan Order, Bonaventure (d.1272). As curator of the saint's memory, Bonaventure's key objective was to bolster Francis's beliefs with rigorous philosophical inquiry, recasting his life through deeper exegetical principles. Among his works was the Breviloquium, which discussed the precise physical and metaphysical nature of the created world. Taking an innovative step, Bonaventure described nature as a “world machine” (mundi machina), or more precisely as a fusion of “celestial” and “elemental” bodies “integrated and constituted in a distinct, perfect, and ordered fashion” (Monti, 2005: 2: 3). At first, it may seem that the harmony of creation Bonaventure proposed was exclusively human-oriented. As he wrote elsewhere, “the goal of everything that exists… is so that through these things humanity might ascend to loving and praising the Creator of the universe” (Monti, 2005: 2: 4). If the world was “a machine of corporeal beings,” then it was also “a dwelling fashioned by the supreme architect to serve human beings until such time as they arrive… in heaven” (Monti, 2005: 2: 4).

There was a critical distinction, however. Within Bonaventure's integrated “world machine,” material phenomena—such as fire—were also imagined as acting upon their own sets of desires. “The completion of nature requires that the human be body and soul,” he wrote, “because form and matter need and seek each other.” More specifically, matter and spirit had “a natural ordination” (ordinatio) to one another, a structural interdependence that compelled them toward mutual completion (Monti, 2005: 7: 5). Like his neo-Platonic theological ancestors, Bonaventure believed that the forms present in the world “proclaim[ed] the eternal emanation of the Image and the Son from God the Father” (Brown, 1990: 15). This was an altogether more nuanced way of thinking about material motives, one that endowed materials agency as reciprocal parts of a universe guided through emanation and return. Taken as one of the dual components of the desiring “world machine,” therefore, Bonaventure appreciated a material like fire as desiring in the same way as a human. Just like an individual soul, enmeshed in erotic love, it was an entity that sought completion in the eternity of God.

Francis of Assisi shunned sophisticated philosophical or theological debates, and there is no evidence he took any interest in the natural sciences. In his embodied responses to the natural world, however, he appears as a pivot between the self-annihilating love of mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux and Richard of St Victor and the respect for the material agency of Robert Grosseteste and Bonaventure. Francis's passion for fire was a unique example of sacrifice for the nonhuman that took mystical self-annihilating love to a new material and physical dimension. Willing himself to be consumed by fire in front of his fellow brothers, Francis enacted (perhaps for lively comic effect) the kind of literal descent into the nothingness of fire eventually lived out by mystics like Marguerite Porete, in what appears to have been a deliberately humiliating process of love (Jones, 2018). Accommodating the fire's own desires for him, the Francis that appears in the Assisi Compilation sought to articulate a love that would dissolve the wishes of the human into the wishes of the material, and vice versa.

Falcons

Known in his own time as stupor mundi (the wonder of the world), Emperor Frederick II (d.1250) was a highly literate, scientifically curious, and occasionally deeply violent leader. Among other achievements he restructured the tax and administration of Sicily, introduced the first vernacular law code into the German Empire, conquered Jerusalem through diplomacy, and began a terrible war with Pope Gregory IX that led to him being excommunicated seven times (Abulafia, 1988; Dale, 2018; Weiler, 2006). Yet Frederick was also a deeply committed bird lover. His Treatise on the Art of Falconry, which he wrote in the 1230s as a guide to all aspects of hunting and caring for birds of prey, is a penetrating and scholarly investigation. Experts working with these birds today in the twenty-first century, by all accounts, still consider Frederick's treatise to be a key authority (White et al., 2013).

The tone of Frederick's text is rigorous and pedagogical. It focuses a dispassionate eye on the care of falcons and takes the reader step-by-step through every aspect of their training. Yet, reading Frederick's prose it is impossible to ignore the tenderness of his empathy for the birds. At points his advice even suggests a kind of stealthy voyeurism; the kind of obsessive attention of a lover poised to caress their beloved even while they sleep.

Frederick extended this logic when he came to discussing methods for gaining the bird's obedience and trust. Describing how to adjust their diet, he suggested a more mutual kind of love, one that sought for a middle ground between the needs of the bird and its keeper.

Zoological scrutiny of this kind was exceptional in the 1200s. Through the hours of care and communion Frederick describes, the needs of the human and of the birds seem almost to blur into one.

Falcons already had a range of loving associations in medieval texts. Because their cultivation required intense patience, many writers seized on them as metaphors for the “art of love,” and countless tapestries showed falcons as central symbols in lovers’ courting rituals (Camille, 1998: 95–98). Contrasted with dogs, who were associated with wayward lust, falcons were used as symbols of three loving tendencies: discipline, nobility, and unswerving fidelity. Sometimes, in more comic texts, these were given a sly lusty dimension. Parodying court literature, for instance, one French fabliau tale played on the lewd pun of faucon/faux con (“false cunt”) (Levy, 2000: 59). But, as many poets recognized, what the falcon had most in common with the (idealized) lover was their state of captivity. In Gottfried von Strassburg's epic romance Tristan und Isolde, written around the same time and place as Frederick's treatise, the poet described the “exquisite” Isolde, who was “as if love had formed her to be her own falcon” (Camille, 1998: 97). Like the bird, she was defenseless, trapped tightly in the harness of an intense love.

Such comparisons risked condemnation from Christian authorities. According to Saint Augustine, the idea that the human should ever come to resemble a beast was anathema (Salisbury, 2014). Likewise, Albertus Magnus was keen to distinguish humans from animals, on the basis of the moral and physical deficiency he claimed defined their souls (Kitchell and Resnick, 2018: 1, 21). But chief among these theological anxieties was the fear that an animalization of people would necessarily pervert the divine human image. In the 1200s, Robert Grosseteste put these fears plainly in a sermon he gave on sin. Wicked acts, he explained, led to the deformity of the “inner man,” to the extent that these people even began to resemble beasts.

Despite these horrors, Robert's fear of human–animal blurring was ultimately productive. When Christians came to recognize the “sheer hideousness” of their own animalistic deformities, he said, they would finally learn to restrain themselves from all sin.

Clearly, Emperor Frederick had little mind for these cautions. But did he draw on more positive moralizations of animals then in circulation? In Frederick's lifetime, bestiaries grew in popularity. Typically, these lavish manuscripts presented readers with illustrated compendia of real and mythical animals, from lions and elephants to dragons and phoenixes, alongside scholarly moralizations of their virtues and vices. Intriguingly, many of these texts praised the animals for their capacity to love. Elephants, for example, were described in many bestiaries as exemplars of ideal husbands and wives, due to their monogamy and patient dedication to their partners (Hassig, 1995: 129–144). Other texts suggested that stags were examples of good loving friendship, apparently because they were often observed in the wild helping one another cross rivers and streams (Hassig, 1995: 40–51).

Thirteenth-century bestiaries gave the most complex moralization of love to bees. Beyond all other animals, bees were praised as models of perfect Christian citizenship (Hassig, 1995: 52–61). As the texts explained, this was because they forged a communal lifestyle, working together to produce something that could be enjoyed by all members of the community in equal measure. Yet most importantly, bees were valued for how they managed to sustain their love for one another without engaging in any sexual intercourse. They were, in other words, the perfect chaste lovers.

In their celibate communities, bees appeared here as practitioners of an idealized monastic love. After all, members of Bernard of Clairvaux's Cistercian Order had also sought to live a common life of uniformity and discipline. And, just like the bees, these monks had also learned to temper their lusts and desires, channeling their intense feelings toward their local monastic community, if not toward God himself. Just as they embodied the ability to abstain from any “unlawful desires,” bees also represented the highest type of utopian Christian promise: the possibility of becoming the perfect human. Or rather, the possibility of becoming nonhuman. For what was a perfect monk supposed to be, if not an angel living on earth? And what was an angel supposed to be, if not a being that transcended the form and nature of humanity itself?

This hardly matches Frederick's intimate love for falcons, however. The power of the emperor's writing arguably lay in his refusal to use the birds for any kind of symbol or function. As he insisted in the preface to his second book, “the falconer’s primary aspiration should be to possess hunting birds,” and not “to capture the quarry” (Wood and Fyfe, 1943: 105). He instead articulated a genuinely bilateral relation between human and animal, showing how the birds accommodated the “indefatigable, enthusiastic lover” that cared for them. In these respects, the emperor had more in common with ideas presented in works of avant-garde verse.

Among the southern French Troubadours, the poet Marcabru (fl.c.1150) sketched animals with a similar commitment to decentering human needs (Gaunt et al., 2000: 356–60). Significantly, he found inspiration in what we might think of as an animalized view of the world, writing longingly about how “when the frog sings” he felt pure desire (Bel m’es quan la rana chanta), or how when “the nightingale cries” (rossinhols crid’e brama) it inspired him to appreciate a being who “does not feel cold nor frost, ice nor gale” (Ples d’orgueilh car el no sen freg ni gel ni gla ni bisa) (Gaunt et al., 2000: 152–153). Marcabru also incorporated sounds from the animal world, such as squawking cries and dog-like shrieks, into the sonics of his poems. As Sarah Kay has pointed out, by admitting these nonhuman “voices within his own,” he allowed his poetry to be “open to worlds and sounds beyond the human” (Boynton et al., 2016). While this was at once a method for undermining human rationality, it also had a genuine loving effect. By articulating a space of communion between human and animal, one necessarily outside of the confines of language or immediate human needs, Marcabru offered a blueprint for an idea of the human condition that could also include a deep intimacy with the animal.

Emperor Frederick's loving attention to falcons likewise stretched beyond the symbolic imaginary. And when he cared for these birds of prey, he meant it as more than an aristocratic pursuit or diversion. Like Marcabru, Frederick was searching for a barely intelligible shared space between the animal and the human. Whether he was nursing them back to health and gently restoring their eyesight, bathing them or looking out for signs of distress while they were perched on his fist, he was outspoken in putting the falcons’ own unique needs before any of his own. And when he considered the handling of their whims, Frederick even made the effort to recognize them as independent lovers within a reciprocal partnership. Whether or not he was prepared to sacrifice his life for a particular falcon, as Saint Francis apparently wanted to do for fire, is not clear. But insofar as he was prepared to pay for his meticulous observations with abundant patience and care, Frederick shared with Francis of Assisi a genuine lover's desire to make way for the autonomous will of his (nonhuman) beloved. By loving the falcons, Frederick was temporarily not sovereign, something exemplified in one moment when, while out hunting, he left an imperial camp near Parma unguarded and lost it to invaders (Abulafia, 1988: 270). In the midst of his excessive absorption, the bird—the nonhuman other—momentarily became sovereign over him.