The Cardinal’s Frogs: Constructing Animal Imagery in Two Fourteenth-Century Curial Sermons

ABSTRACT Animals had a prominent place in the medieval symbolic imagination. A variety of sources, including scripture, classical and medieval naturalists, and bestiaries, helped to inform the construction of animal symbology and to establish what might be considered a canon regarding animal symbolism. Two preachers at the fourteenth-century Avignonese curia – Cardinal Pierre des Prés and the Dominican Pierre de Palme – made extensive use of animal imagery in their sermons, drawing on the established medieval ‘canon’ of such imagery while simultaneously demonstrating considerable originality, particularly in constructing moral interpretations of the animal images that they employed.