Early Modern Ostriches
Ostriches had a significant place in early modern culture with their unconventional form that straddled bird and beast, lending them to myriad possible metaphors. Their feathers were used in luxury fashion, their eggs became accessories, and the beasts themselves were a source of scientific wonder and literary inspiration. In The Ostrich (Emblem 41)106, Pulter focuses solely on their egg-laying habits as proof of their poor parenting skills, but other early modern sources wrote about ostriches in different ways. Pulter may have encountered any number of these descriptions and ideas about the curious bird-beast that laid its eggs (and hid its head) in the sand.
Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) was one of the first English emblem books, or collection of illustrations with accompanying moralizing or allegorical text. Whitney’s ostrich emblem compares the ostrich, a bird that cannot fly, with hypocrites who show off without substance.
- The hypocrites, that make so great a show
- Of sanctity and of religion sound,
- Are shadows mere and without substance go,
- And being tried, are but dissemblers found.
- These are compared unto the ostrich fair,
- Who spreads her wings, yet seldom tries the air.
George Wither’s emblem book was published almost fifty years after Whitney’s and contains a longer verse about the ostrich. In this emblem, he focuses on the ostrich’s appearance, especially its feathers, in order to condemn showy courtiers. Like Pulter’s ostrich with its “gallant gaudy plumes,” the outward trappings of many courtiers are useless when they cannot produce anything of real value.
- The ostrich (though with many feathers trimmed
- And decked with goodly plumes of no mean size)
- Is so unwieldy, and so largely limbed,
- That up into the air he cannot rise.
- And, though in wings and feathers he appears
- A goodly fowl and bears his head so high,
- As if he could o’er top the lower spheres
- And far above the towering eagles fly;
- So useless are those feathers and those wings,
- To gain him name among their airy race,
- That he must walk with such inferior things
- As in this common region have their place.
- Such fowls as these, are that gay-plumed crew,
- Which (to high place and fortunes being born)
- Are men of goodly worth in outward view,
- And in themselves deserve nought else but scorn.
- For though their trappings, their high-lifted eyes,
- Their lofty words, and their much-feared powers,
- Do make them seem heroic, stout, and wise,
- Their hearts are oft as fond and faint as ours.
- Such animals as these are also those
- That wise, and grave, and learned men do seem
- In title, habit, and all formal shows;
- Yet, have nor wit, nor knowledge worth esteem.
- And, lastly, such are they that, having got
- Wealth, knowledge, and those other gifts which may
- Advance the public good, yet use them not,
- But feed, and sleep, and laze their time away.
- He may be but a goose which wears the quill,
- But him we praise that useth it with skill.
Pulter is concluded to have read the ancient historian Pliny’s History of the World (in early modern translation) and used it as a source for many of her other emblems, but she does not utilize the work here. Pliny, remarkably, does not engage with the ostrich’s egg-laying practices at all in his brief description.
It followeth now that we should discourse of the nature of fowls. And first to begin with ostriches. They are the greatest of all other fowls and in manner of the nature of four-footed beasts: (namely, those in Africa and Ethiopia) for higher they be than a man sitting on horseback is from the ground, and as they be taller than the man, so are they swifter on foot than the very horse. For to this end, only hath nature given them wings, even to help and set them forward in their running; for, otherwise, neither fly they in the air nor yet so much a rise and mount from the ground. Cloven hooves they have like red deer, and with them they fight, for good they be to catch up stones withal, and with their legs they whirl them back as they run away, against those that chase them. A wonder this is of their nature that whatsoever they eat (and great devourers they be of all things without difference and choice), they concoct and digest it. But, the veriest fools they be of all others. For as high as the rest of their body is, yet if they thrust their head and neck once into any shrub or bush and get it hidden, they think then they are safe enough and that no man seeth them. Now two things they do afford in recompense of men’s pains that they take in hunting and chasing them: to wit, their eggs, which are so big that some use them for vessels in the house; and their feathers, so fair that they serve for pennaches [decorative feathers] to adorn and set out the crests and morions [helmets] of soldiers in the wars.
Another description of the ostrich available to early modern readers would have been in the English translation of Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Historie of Africa, printed in 1600. This history, regarded as one of the foremost sources on the continent of Africa of the period, was well-known across Europe. The ostrich described in this text is a combination of observed behaviors and the common contemporary myths that proliferated, including that the ostrich could swallow iron.
Somewhat we will here say concerning the strange birds and fowls of Africa and first of the ostrich, which in shape resembleth a goose but that the neck and legs are somewhat longer so that some of them exceed the length of two cubits. The body of this bird is large, and the wings thereof are full of great feathers, both white and black, which wings and feathers being unfit to fly withal do help the ostrich, with the motion of her train, to run a swift pace. This fowl liveth in dry deserts and layeth to the number of ten or twelve eggs in the sands, which being about the bigness of great bullets, weigh fifteen pounds a piece; but the ostrich is of so weak a memory that she presently forgetteth the place where her eggs were laid. And afterward the same or some other ostrich hen, finding the said eggs by chance, hatcheth and fostereth them as if they were certainly her own; the chickens are no sooner crept out of the shell, but they prowl up and down the deserts for their food, and before their feathers be grown, they are so swift that a man shall hardly overtake them. The ostrich is a silly and deaf creature, feeding upon any thing which it findeth, be it as hard and indigestible as iron. The flesh, especially of their legs, is of a slimy and strong taste, and yet the Numidians use it for food, for they take young ostriches and set them up a fatting. The ostriches wander up and down the deserts in orderly troops so that a far off a man would take them to be so many horsemen, which illusion hath often dismayed whole caravans. Being in Numidia, I myself ate of the ostrich’s flesh, which seemed to have not altogether an unsavory taste.
In her Amplified Edition of And Must the Sword this Controverse Decide64, Elizabeth Sauer suggests that Pulter likely read George Sandys’s A Paraphrase Vpon the Divine Poems. Sandys was a popular author and translator of the early modern period, and Pulter was likely exposed to both this paraphrase and his translations of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Sandys follows the biblical description of the ostrich and compares the bird to a “step-mother,” implying through this metaphor that the ostrich’s behavior is consistent with a negative stereotype of an ‘unnatural’ mother.
- The peacock, not at thy command, assumes
- His glorious train, nor ostrich her rare plumes.
- She drops her eggs upon the naked land
- And wraps them in a bed of hatching sand:
- Exposed to the wandering traveler
- And feet of beasts which those wild deserts rear.
- She as a step-mother betrays her own,
- Left without care and presently unknown,
- By God deprived of that intelligence
- Which Nature gives, of all most void of sense.
- Her feet the nimble rider leave behind,
- And when she spreads her sails out-strip the wind.
The ostrich is described as a poor parent elsewhere in early modern sources, notably in William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622). He condemns the unnatural actions of any creature who would abandon her children. In a later section on breastfeeding, he highlights both the unnatural ostrich and the brood parasite cuckoo as birds who refuse to even nourish their own young.
The next degree of a child’s infancy while it is in the swaddling bands and remaineth a sucking child. In this also, the care especially lieth upon the mother, yet so as the father must afford what help he can.
The first duty here required is that sufficient provision of all things needful for a child in that weakness be beforehand provided. What the particulars be, women better know than I can express. For me, it is sufficient to lay down the duty in general which is commended unto us in that worthy pattern of the Virgin Mary, who though she were very poor and forced to travel far and brought to bed in a strange place where she was so little respected as she was not afforded a place meet for a woman in her case, but was fain to content herself with a stable in a common inn, yet she provided for her child. For it is said, she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, Luke 2.7.
Contrary is the practice of such lewd and unnatural women as leave their newborn children under stalls, at men’s doors, in church porches, yea many times in open field. It is noted as a point of unnaturalness in the ostrich to leave her eggs in the earth and in the dust, in which respect she is said to be hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers, Job 39. 14–16. Much more hardened are the aforesaid lewd women. The eagle is counted an unnatural bird because she thrusteth her young ones which she hath brought forth out of her nest. Are not then such mothers much more unnatural? They oft lay their children forth in public places for others to show that mercy which they themselves have not. The civil law judgeth this to be a kind of murder.
Other things are nourished by the same that they are bred. The earth out of which plants grow ministereth nourishment to the said plants; trees that bring forth fruit yield sap to that fruit, whereby it groweth to ripeness; unreasonable creatures, and among them the most savage wild beasts as tigers and dragons, yea sea-monsters, give suck to their young ones; whereupon the prophet sayeth of women that give not suck to their children that they are more cruel than those sea-monsters. Like the ostriches in the wilderness, for the cruel ostrich and the hateful cuckoo are the two kind of creatures which are noted to leave their young ones for others to nourish, the ostrich leaveth her eggs in the dust; the cuckoo leaveth hers in other birds’ nests. Other creatures (if nature afford them not milk and dugs, as to birds it doth not) feed their young ones other ways, yet by themselves.