Sunday, December 15, 2024

Book Review: Le Corbeau: Une histoire culturelle (The Raven: a cultural history) by Michel Pastoureau

 


Michel Pastoureau likes to write books about the (Western) cultural history of very specific things. He wrote a whole series of books about colors, for example: everything about blue, or red, or black. "Le Corbeau" (which in French means raven, but can also refer to crows or corvids more generally) is one of a series of books about specific animals and their significance in European culture.

Pastoureau shows us how Northern European pagan cultures in Scandinavia and Scotland gave much respect to the bird, who they correctly identified as being intelligent. But Christianity was less kind to the corvid. The trouble starts in the book of Genesis: we all know how Noah, after the great flood, sent out a dove to check for dry land, and how the bird returned with good news in the form of an olive branch. But what's less commonly known is that Noah had first released a crow, who had proved useless: instead of finding land, it feasted on the human corpses floating around. And thus, the crow's fate was sealed for centuries. Sure, there are a few anecdotes about saints having a friendlier relationship with the black bird, but he remained an ominous symbol for centuries.

And even when his reputation changed, it was only because the culture changed to align with him: the Romantics, who reveled in all things dark and lugubrious, enjoyed the odd crow in their gothic paintings, poems or plays (Edgar Allen Poe springs to mind). He's frequently depicted as hanging around cemeteries at night, even though he's not a nocturnal creature.

It's only very recently that crows are seen more favorably, mostly because scientific research has revealed them as the big brains in the world of birds, often giving even chimpanzees and small human children a run for their money. They're also silly and playful. But especially in the countryside, they're still seen as a big nuisance. More than a millennium's worth of mudslinging can't so easily be discarded. Pastoureau's book fights the good fight, while showing us beautiful works of art throughout the ages that feature crows and ravens.


Coq au vin

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