Judge Bridoye's Ursine Litigations

Author(s): Theodore Ziolkowski

Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Feb., 1995), pp. 346-350
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/438784
Accessed: 07-12-2015 20:29 UTC

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 NOTES AND DOCUMENTS

Judge Bridoye's Ursine Litigations

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI
Princeton University

Surely no episode in Rabelais's oeuvre has been more densely anno-

tated than Judge Bridoye's trial in the Tiers livre (chaps. 39-42).
Following some forty years of service and some four thousand unim-
peachable decisions, one of the judge's verdicts has been appealed to
the High Court, which summons Bridoye to justify his finding. In the
course of the hearing it turns out, to the consternation of his judicial
colleagues, that Bridoye has always taken quite literally the ancient to-
pos of the alea judiciorum and, accordingly, decided all his cases by a
throw of the dice. In the case under appeal, he explains, it was not his
aleatory method that failed, but his aging eyesight: he simply misread
the numbers on the dice.
When the president of the High Court asks Bridoye to explain his
procedures, the judge readily complies, citing sources in civil and ec-
clesiastical law to support both the theory and the practice that have
served him, and the course ofjustice, so well for so many years and in
so many cases. Bridoye's explanation, a hilarious parody of legal petti-
foggery, constitutes one of the high points of Rabelaisian comedy.
Central to the comedy is Bridoye's manic citation of sources in Ro-
man law, the humor of which derives from the inappropriateness of
the references as well as the fussy pedantry of the citations. Rabelais
scholars have succeeded brilliantly in identifying the legal references.
J. D. M. Derrett has specified the original sources in contemporary
juridical literature for almost all (111) of the 121 citations.1 M. A.
Screech has gone further, making a convincing case for his argument
that the majority of Bridoye's references amount to legal maxims or
brocardsthat would have been instantly familiar to most of his human-

1. J. D. M. Derrett, "Rabelais' Legal Learning and the Trial of Bridoye," Bibliotheque

d'humanismeet renaissance25 (1963): 111-71.

? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026- 8232/95/9203-0004$01.00

346

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 TheodoreZiolkowski o Judge Bridoye'sUrsine Litigations 347

istically educated readers, and locating the passages in several readily

available handbooks of the age.2 In sum, the humor in this classic epi-
sode, which depends almost wholly on quotation and citational allu-
sion, has been extensively analyzed.
It is all the more surprising, therefore, to find that many scholars,
so scrupulous in identifying specific sources for the legal references,
have been content to cite only the most general allusions to explain
one passage that is central to the comedy. The president asks Bridoye
to explain why-since he bases his decisions on a toss of the dice-he
requires the litigants to produce bags full of documents and then
temporizes for days and weeks before bringing a case to closure. At
the beginning of chapter 42 the judge, who has a deep reverence for
the law, advances his view that a lawsuit must grow and ripen before it
reaches full maturity. Like a newborn bear, it is initially shapeless and
imperfect, a crude and unformed piece of flesh that must be licked
into shape by its mother until it attains perfection in all its limbs: "Un
proces, a sa naissance premiere, me semble, comme a vous aultres,
messieurs, informe et imperfaict. Comme un ours naissant n'a pieds
ne mains, peau, poil, ne teste; ce n'est qu'une piece de chair rude et
informe; l'ourse, a force de leicher, la meet en perfection des mem-
bres, ut no. doct., f: ad leg. AquiL, L ii, in fi."3 Screech has provided an
ingenious explanation for the concluding legal reference,4 but nei-
ther in his edition nor in his essay does he comment on the ursine
context upon which it depends.5 If we look elsewhere, we find that the
commentary has rarely gone beyond the variorum edition of 1823,
which states with straight-faced sobriety: "C'est Aristote qui dit cela, et
Pline apres lui, livre VIII, chapitre xxxvi; mais l'un et l'autre se sont
trompes."6 In his 1929 edition Jean Plattard repeats essentially the
same information: "Tres ancienne legende, a laquelle ont cru Aristote
(Hist. des Animaux) et Pline (Hist. Nat. VIII, 36, 59, etc.)."7 A recent

2. M. A. Screech, "The Legal Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bridoye in the 'Tiers
Livre' de Pantagruel," Etudes rabelaisiennes5 (1964): 175-95.
3. Francois Rabelais, Le tierslivre, ed. M. A. Screech (Geneva, 1964), p. 285.
4. Screech, pp. 187-88. Screech points out that the actual authority cited (Justini-
an's Pandects)contains nothing about bears; but one of the Italian glossators, apropos
of this law, alluded to bears in order to distinguish between wild beasts and domestic
animals. Bridoye, grasping for any judicial allusion to bears, chose this one from a fa-
miliar handbook-Albericus de Rosate's LexiconutriusqueJuris-even though it has ab-
solutely no relevance in this context.
5. Nor in Screech's splendid Rabelais(London, 1979), pp. 265-72, where he makes a
persuasive case for the sancta simplicitasof Bridoye, as opposed to the stupidity and pet-
tiness previously attributed to him by many scholars.
6. Oeuvresde Rabelais,ed. Esmangart and Eloi Johanneau, 8 vols. (Paris, 1823), 5:184.
7. Francois Rabelais, Le tierslivre, ed. Jean Plattard (Paris, 1929), p. 293.

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348 MODERN PHILOLOGY

scholarly edition retains the general comment but drops the specific
references in favor of a modern proverb: "Cette croyance etait repan-
due des 1'Antiquite. De la le dicton: un ours mal leche."8And the newest
scholarly translation in English adds nothing more: "This theory that
a bear had to be licked into shape was prevalent in R's time."9
The references to Aristotle and Pliny are correct, to be sure. Pliny
tells us that young bears are nothing but white, unshaped flesh, a bit
larger than mice, without eyes or hair, but with conspicuous claws-a
mass of flesh that the parents must lick into shape: "hi sunt candida in-
formisque caro, paulo muribus maior, sine oculis, sine pilo; unques
tantum prominent. hanc lambendo paulatim figurant" (Naturalis histo-
ria, bk. 8, chap. 54). Pliny's source is Aristotle's Historia animalium,10
and the legend was indeed widespread in classical antiquity and the
Middle Ages. In the Metamorphoses, for instance, Ovid relates that what
the female bear brings forth in birth is not a proper cub but almost
lifeless flesh, which must be shaped by the mother through licking and
molded into a form resembling her own: "nec catulus, partu quem
reddidit ursa recenti, / sed male viva caro est: lambendo mater in artus
/ fingit et in formam, quantam capit ipsa, reducit" (15.379-81). In the
great Rabelais edition supervised by Abel Lefranc the editors add a
further detail and, to explain the word 'informe', cite a passage from
Servius's commentary on Virgil's Georgics(3.247), where bears are
called informesursi. But Servius's gloss-"qui tempore quo nascuntur
forma carent: dicitur enim quaedam caro nasci, quam mater lam-
bendo in membra componit"-amounts to little more than a para-
phrase of Pliny.11
All of these annotations of the past two centuries miss the main
point: Bridoye is not simply citing a zoological fact (preposterous as
it may be) for its informational value. Indeed, to the extent that it is a
common topos, the "fact" is well known to his (and Rabelais's) audi-
ence. Rather, he adduces the familiar fact in order to clarify analogi-
cally a literary procedure: he molds his cases just as the bear shapes
its cubs. But here classical antiquity provides a precise source that
would have been instantly familiar to Rabelais and his humanistically
trained friends and readers: the life of Virgil that was prefixed to
most editions of Virgil's works from the fifteenth century on. This
life, the so-called Donatus auctus, is actually an expansion incorporat-

8. FranSois Rabelais, Le tierslivre, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris, 1966), p. 490, n. 2.

9. The CompleteWorksof FrancoisRabelais,trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1991), p. 863, n. 2.
10. C. Plinius Secundus, Naturalis historiae libri XXXVIII,ed. Roderich Konig, Samm-
lung Tusculum (Munich, 1976), 8:220.
11. OeuvresdeFranfois Rabelais,ed. Abel Lefranc, 6 vols. (Paris, 1912-55), 5:304.

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 TheodoreZiolkowski o Judge Bridoye'sUrsine Litigations 349

ing various medieval elements into the late classical vita Donatiana, a
life prefixed to the fourth-century commentary on Virgil by the gram-
marian Aelius Donatus.l2 Donatus's vita was based upon a lost life of
Virgil written early in the second century by Suetonius, who in turn
had access to memoirs by friends of Virgil.l3
In the passage describing the composition of the Georgics, Sueto-
nius quotes Virgil to the effect that he was accustomed each morning
to dictate a good number of verses, which in the course of the day he
revised and reduced to a very few, adding that he gave birth to his
poem after the fashion of a bear and then licked it into shape. "Cum
Georgica scriberet, traditur cotidie meditates mane plurimos versus
dictare solitus ac per totum diem retractando ad paucissimos redig-
ere, non absurde carmen se ursae more parere dicens et lambendo
demum effingere."'l4 In the vita Donatiana the familiar image of the
bear is adduced explicitly to describe a literary procedure. But we can
go a step further. In his Noctes atticae, written in the middle of the sec-
ond century, Aulus Gellius refers to the same incident (17.10.2-4).
Whether he was drawing on Suetonius's life or citing directly from
the accounts of Virgil's amici familiaresque, he provides a few addi-
tional details. After telling us that Virgil used to say he wrote his
verses after the fashion of a bear ("dicere eum solitum ferunt parere
se versus more atque ritu ursino"), the author adds a sentence that
does not occur in the vita Donatiana:

Namque ut illa bestia fetum ederet ineffigiatum informemque

lambendoque id postea quod ita edidisset conformaret et fingeret,
proinde ingenii quoque sui partus recentes rudi esse facie et
inperfecta, sed deinceps tractando colendoque reddere iis se oris et
vultus liniamenta.

(For just as that beast brought forth its litter shapeless and formless and
later formed and shaped it by licking, so too the new offspring of his
mind were rude in appearance and imperfect, but by working and
nurturing them he gave them distinct features and expression.)

Again we have a basic analogy, relating the zoological process to the

literary one, as in Suetonius. But here we detect for the first time

12. See Vitae vergilianae antiquae, ed. Colin Hardie (Oxford, 1966); Werner Suer-
baum, "Von der Vita Vergiliana uber die Accessus Vergiliani zum Zauberer Virgilius:
Probleme-Perspektiven-Analysen," in Aufstieg und Niedergangder romischenWelt,ed.
Hildegard Temporini (Berlin, 1972-), vol. 31, pt. 1:1157-1262; and Vergil-Viten,ed. Karl
Bayer, in Vergil, Landleben,ed. Johannes and Maria Gotte, 5th ed. (Munich and Zurich,
1987), pp. 212-59 (text) and pp. 407-69 (commentary).
13. Vergil-Viten,p. 416.
14. Ibid., p. 220, lines 85-88 (= vita Donatiana 22).

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350 MODERN PHILOLOGY

specific parallels of vocabulary. The vocables 'informe', 'imperfaict',

and 'rude' with which Bridoye describes immature bears and lawsuits
are anticipated precisely in Noctes atticae by informemque,rudi, and in-
perfecta.It looks as though Rabelais had the text in front of him or, at
least, retained it almost verbatim in his phenomenal memory.
To demonstrate Rabelais's familiarity with these various sources,
finally, we can turn to the third chapter of Gargantua, written more
than twenty years before the Tiers livre. There, in another passage
dealing explicitly with unusual births (in this case, with children who
like Gargantua are borne in the womb more than the usual nine
months), the author cites a number of sources including Aristotle's
Historia animalium, Pliny's Naturalis historia, Servius's commentary on
Virgil's Eclogues, and Aulus Gellius's Noctes atticae. It does not seem
unreasonable to assume that the general subject of birth again sum-
moned up in Rabelais's fertile imagination the same set of sources,
leading him from the general descriptions in Aristotle and Pliny to
the specific literary applications in the vita Donatiana and the Noctes
atticae.
In sum, a variety of factors-the application of the ursine analogy
to written documents, precise parallels of vocabulary, and the au-
thor's own explicit association of the same authorities in similar con-
texts-suggests that the source for Judge Bridoye's ursine litigations
is not simply Aristotle, Pliny, or general lore but specifically the saying
attributed to Virgil by Suetonius and Aulus Gellius. This conclusion
would be consistent with Screech's finding regarding the legal cita-
tions in the Bridoye episode. Rabelais was employing a familiar allu-
sion from a well-known source in the confident expectation that his
humanistically trained readers would immediately recognize it. As
in the case of the legal citations, it is the incongruity between the
source and its application, the disparity between Virgil and the sim-
pleminded but fundamentally decent Judge Bridoye, that evokes the
Rabelaisian laughter.

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