This is not all. As mere signs they are completely polyvocal; they serve to communicate different things according to the circumstances and properties highlighted. To confine ourselves to the dog, Rabanus Maurus (IX century) explains why and by virtue of what contradictory properties the dog may represent either the devil, the Jews, or the Gentiles,19 while in the anonymous eleventh-century Libro della natura degli animali or in the De Bestiis attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy the fact that it swallows its own vomit allows the dog to be chosen as a symbol of the repentant sinner, and in the Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio (thirteenth–fourteenth century) the dog that dies defending its master becomes a symbol of Christ who died for our salvation.
Things are not so very different in the case of the Renaissance emblem books, which are far more dependent on the medieval bestiaries than is commonly thought. Some historians have seen this as a development of the theme of canine intelligence (see, for example, Höltgen 1998), given that, in the best-known source for the emblem books, Horapollon’s fifth-century Hieroglyphica (I, 39), the dog is singled out to represent a sacred scribe or a prophet or an embalmer or the spleen or the sense of smell or laughter or a sneeze (or a magistrate or a judge). But from this abundance of references it is evident that the dog (or any other animal for that matter) lends itself to many interpretations. In the texts that develop the theme in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, such as, for example, Picinelli’s Mondo simbolico (1653) or the various versions of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (between 1556 and 1626), the dog is represented as a symbol of magnanimity, generosity, courage, obedience, love of sacred literature, remembrance of things past, and memory of benefits received, while, at the same time, it is an emblem of sacrilege, stupidity, adulation, buffoonery, and impudence. In Alciati’s one hundred and sixty-fifth emblem “Inanis impetus” (“Antagonism that achieves nothing”), a dog gazes up at the moon as if in a mirror convinced there is another dog up there, and he bays, but the moon continues on its course, and the dog’s bay is carried away vainly on the wind. And in emblem 175 “Alius peccat, alius plectitur” (“One sins and another is punished”), the dog who bites the stone that has been thrown at him is incapable of harming his aggressor. Finally, in an allegory of Logic that appears in the various editions of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica we find two hunting dogs symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge, but one represents truth and the other falsehood—which does not offer much of a guarantee of canine sagacity.
Still, there is an area of discourse, for the most part indifferent to the universe of symbols, in which we encounter references to animal behavior based on nonfanciful observations, and this occurs in the discussions of language on the part of grammarians, to say nothing of philosophers and theologians, where we encounter canonical references, not merely to articulated language, but also to various forms of interjection or vocal emission, such as the moaning of the sick, the lowing of oxen, the chirping of chickens, the pseudo-language of magpies and parrots, and especially and most frequently the barking of the dog.
Encountering these references so frequently, we get the obvious impression that each author is borrowing from predecessors a well-worn topos, and is therefore simply repeating concepts handed down by tradition. The dog’s bark is a victim of the inertia of the auctoritates, while the examples migrate automatically from text to text.20
And yet it pays to proceed cautiously in the case of medieval writers, who realized (if we may be allowed to cite another famous topos) that the nose of their auctoritas was made of wax and could be reshaped ad libitum. The first thing a student of the Middle Ages must do when coming across the same term and—to all intents and purposes—the same concept, is to suspect that this terminological identity masks or conceals an idea that is almost always novel and in each case different.
If, out of a taste (also medieval) for summing up systems of definitions in trees of the Porphyrian kind, one begins to construct (for every author who mentions the barking of the dog or similar utterances) taxonomies of the various species of utterances and sounds, one becomes aware that, depending on the author, the moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog occupy different positions. Which leads us to suspect that, when different authors spoke of the latratus canis, they had in mind a different zoosemiotic phenomenon, and that this difference in classification implied a difference in underlying semiotics.
Sometimes, to discover the soul of a philosophical system we must latch on to symptoms at its periphery. Which amounts to saying that sometimes we can better understand the Thomistic system through the implications it produces in a quaestio quodlibetalis than by starting with the Summae Theologiae (to which, however, we must obviously return). This may not be true in every case, but one thing that is sure is that an inquiry into the barking of the dog demonstrates that not only is there a medieval semiotics, but there are in fact many.
4.2.
Latratus Canis
4.2.1. Names and Signs
To account for the embarrassing position of the latratus canis in medieval linguistic theories we must bear in mind the fact that Greek semiotics, from the Corpus Hippocraticum to the Stoics, draws a clear distinction between a theory of names (in other words, of verbal language) and a theory of signs. The signs (semeia) are natural phenomena, which today we call symptoms or indices, whose relationship to what they signify is based on the mechanism of inference: if such and such a symptom, then such and such a malady; if this woman produces milk, then she has given birth; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Words, on the other hand, bear a different relationship to the things they name or the concept they signify, and this relationship is the one sanctioned by the Aristotelian theory of definition. It is a relationship of equivalency or mutual substitutability.
Now, these two semiotic lines begin to merge in the Stoics, and this fusion will be explicitly recognized by Augustine (in the De magistro, in the De doctrina christiana, and in the De dialectica).21 In Augustine a science of the signum as the supreme genus takes shape, of which both symptoms and words, the mimetic gestures of actors and the blare of the military trumpet, are species. Still, not even in Augustine is the dichotomy definitively resolved between the relationship of inference, which binds a natural sign to the thing it is a sign of, and the relationship of equivalence, which binds a linguistic term to the concept it signifies or the thing it designates.
By now medieval semiotics is aware of both lines of thought, but is not yet fully capable of perfecting their unification. This is why, as we shall see, the latratus canis will occupy a different position in different classifications, depending on whether they are classifications of signs in general or of voces. Because the classification of signa is Stoic in origin, while the classification of voces is Aristotelian.