Pulter structures this emblem quite simply around Mary Douglas’s classic distinction between purity and danger: forms of cleanliness and filth, both physical and moral, literal and figurative. For Douglas, this distinction “protects the local consensus on how the world is organized” by “reduc[ing] intellectual and social disorder.” Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), xi.
1 In this spirit, Pulter renders the opposed conditions of virtuous purity and vicious filth through the person and behavior of two iconic animals. The ugly sow of the poem’s opening line of course represents the qualities of uncleanness and dangerous impurity, drawing in the process upon a rich history of pig symbolism grounded in both classical and biblical sources. Prominent biblical antecedents include the pearl-scorning swine of Matthew 7.6, the prodigal son’s porcine companions in Luke 15.15, and the Gadarene swine of Mark 5.1-12. But Pulter’s real inspiration here derives from the classical tradition instead, in a way that conflates separate strands of that tradition. The sow’s pedigree—descending from the boar that killed Adonis—ties her to a story about two competing forms of venery: sexual lust and blood-lust. But the sow’s behavior—returning to her wallow despite experiencing a higher standard of cleanliness—rehearses different tropes altogether. One of these appears in the seventeenth emblem of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (1614; see Image 1 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where Combe (translating the earlier work of Guillaume de la Perrière) laments, “The dirty Swine delights more in the mire, / Then in sweete balmes that are of costly price. / Some men there likewise be, that do desire, / Rather then vertue for to follow vice.” Thomas Combe, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), sig. B6v.
2 Similarly, a cognate trope descends from Plutarch’s Moralia (c. 100 CE) through Giambattista Gelli’s Circe (1549) to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and beyond. See Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia, 15 vols., trans. Harold Cherniss and William Helmbold (Cambridge, US: Harvard UP, 1957), 12.311-533; Giambattista Gelli, The Circe of Signor Giovanni Battista Gelli, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1702); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12, The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Didge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
3 The key figure in this lineage is one Gryllus, a companion of Odysseus who, transformed into a hog by Circe, refuses to revert to his human form, preferring instead to abide in animality. The emblem “In Grillum” from Pierre Cousteau’s Pegma (1555; see Image 2 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) makes the obvious point, with Odysseus asking his porcine companion, “What ill-omened fate has so terrified you that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to return to the office of a man? Once pleasure holds you in its shameful grip, it freely exercises control over you.” Pierre Cousteau, Petri Costalii Pegma (Lyon, 1555), 176: “Qui tibi Grilli feri stomachum movere parentes? / Quae te sors miseris terruit oscinibus / Ut te immunda iuvent foedi vestigia porci / Et renuas iterum munus obire viri? / Quem semel in turpi retinet ditione voluptas, / Huius vel gratis utitur imperiis: / Et quo plus demens eget assertore patrono, / Hoc mage blanda sui vindicis ora fugit” (What bestial parents have so angered you, o Gryllus? What chance has so terrified you with birds of ill omen that the filthy tracks of an unclean swine please you, and you refuse to resume the office of a man? Once pleasure holds one in its shameful power, it freely exercises its control: and the more a madman needs a patron as his defender, the more he flies his protector’s persuasive words).
4 Pulter’s emblem assimilates this material to the tale of Venus and Adonis. In appropriating this material, Pulter notably re-genders the mythic swine upon whom she draws, both the boar who killed Adonis and Odysseus’ companion Gryllus. This transformation is not entirely new; Lanteaume de Romieu’s French translation of Cousteau’s Pegma, for instance, refers to Gryllus as “[une] truye immunde”—a filthy sow. Pierre Cousteau, Le Pegme de Pierre Coustau, trans. Lanteaume de Romieu (Lyon, 1560), 224.
5 But in Pulter’s case the change may suggest that she sees women as the particular target of her moral instruction. In any event, Pulter’s trans-gendering mirrors the similar reversals that Milton introduces to the Circe-myth in his Masque Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), another reworking of classical material in the service of moral, and particularly sexual, instruction. As for the animal Pulter chooses to embody purity, it may be less commonly familiar than the pig, but its symbolic associations run deep. The ermine’s nearly-immaculate winter coat—pure white save for a tuft of black fur on the tip of its tail—had gained currency by the Middle Ages as a marker of virtue appropriated to various kinds of aristocratic symbolism. Of the many royal portraits employing this imagery, we may single out the Ermine Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1585; see Image 3 in the Curation Swine and Ermine), where the beast in question, sporting a gold crown-shaped collar, signifies both sexual and political purity. More importantly for the behavior described by Pulter, Leonardo da Vinci claims “[t]he ermine . . . is so fastidious that he will allow himself to be caught by hunters before he will take refuge in a muddy spot.” Oliver Evans, “Selections from the Bestiary of Leonardo da Vinci,” Journal of American Folklore 64.254 (Oct.-Dec., 1951), 395.
6 Leonardo considers this behavior under the rubric of “Moderation,” but for Henry Peacham the animal’s fastidiousness assumes the same broad moral quality it does for Pulter. In his emblems (see Image 4 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) Peacham thus laments of the ermine, “Me thinkes even now, I see a number blush, / To hear a beast, by nature should haue care, / To keepe his skinne, themselues not care a rush, / With how much filth, their minds bespotted are.” Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), 75.
7 For Mary Douglas, purity rituals help to underpin consensus as to the world’s design, and they do so by reducing ambiguity to a minimum. However, markers of purity can themselves be subject to ambiguity, as is the case with both of the animal-figures Pulter employs in this emblem. Regarding swine, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have demonstrated how dominant associations with filth and pollution coexist alongside a subordinate register of meaning in which the same animals figure as emblems of “good order” and “utilitie and profit.” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 40, 45.
8 In the case of the ermine, something similar occurs as well: its dominant affiliations with chastity and cleanliness can yield to a secondary and opposed set of meanings. Thus Olaus Magnus describes the ermine as a “luxurious” creature, with luxury (from Latin luxuria, or lust) here flatly reversing the traditional associations with chastity. Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals (London, 1658), Book 18, p. 186.
9 In the visual record, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (1489-91; see Image 5 in the Curation Swine and Ermine) arguably draws on such reversals; its subject, Ludovico Sforza’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, was pregnant in 1489, near the time of the portrait’s creation. The existence of these opposed meanings helps to foreground the very manufactured nature of the reality to which they refer. In Pulter’s emblem, however, the dominant associations of swine with filth and ermines with purity go unchallenged. In both the sow and the ermine, Pulter thus found a congenial and well-established form of moral representation that had already made its way into earlier emblem books. Her transformation of this material confirms her dynamic engagement with the emblem tradition as a whole.
— Leah Knight and Wendy Wall