Les stratégies olfactives chez les animaux et leur moralisation

When thinking about the experience of the five senses, quadrupeds come to mind quite prominently as to the sense of smell, nowadays as it was the case during the past, and the dog is a paragon for it. Accounts about its nature are given by ancient natural scientists, medieval authors of bestiaries and even philosophers, such as Adelard of Bath in his Quaestiones naturales. However, in classifications of the senses and of their animal “champions”, the species that has received prominent place is not the dog, but the vulture, credited to smell corpses beyond mountains or seas. This common opinion about the vulture will be brilliantly disproved in the De arte venandi cum avibus of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who actually recurred to experiences with captive birds. In the vast tradition of the bestiaries, one encounters an intriguing couple: the panther charms the other animals by the sweet smell of its mouth and is an image of Christ attracting mankind; the whale attracts little fishes by the same device, but symbolizes the devil since the late antique Physiologus. The literary career of this opposition is evoked here, until the moralized encyclopedias of the 14th century, such as the Reductorium morale of Petrus Berchorius, who applies a multitude of allegorical readings to the panther.