Throw Your Testicles⁠↗

The great popularity of bestiaries was due in part to the novelty of strange places and creatures – the griffin and the siren and the onocentaur – but also, and overpoweringly, to the opportunity these accounts provided for the transmission through allegory of the dominant cultural narrative of sin and salvation.

Some creatures seem to have defeated the allegorists. The bonnacon, we’re told, has the head and body of a bull, the mane of a horse and horns that turn inward. Its tactic of hunter-evasion (a preoccupation of bestiarists) is to emit a terrible fart, ‘three acres long [and] so hot that it scorches whatever it touches’. There is a fine manuscript picture in the Royal Danish Library of a disgusted looking hunter, holding up a shield in front of his face. One can’t help wondering where the notion of the bonnacon came from. Surely no one in medieval Europe could have encountered a skunk? And there are no clues to its meaning: as far as we can tell, the bonnacon escaped allegory (suggestions would be welcome).