If there’s one indisputable thing to be said about the authors of the Middle Ages, it is that they were all liars.
Not — most of them, at least — in the important things. But scan through any medieval florilegium, any scholarly compilation or commentary, any commonplace book, and you’ll see:
Often as not, the quotes are misattributed.
Can’t remember quite who first made the point you want to repeat? Well, let’s just say it was, oh, Augustine. Need a weighty authority for an aphorism that you overhead at supper last week? Take Aristotle, he’s easy. Especially happy with a formulation that came to you out of the blue? It’s more likely to be remembered and recited if you credit it to Abelard, Ambrose, or Aquinas.
Parchment is patient.
With all those centuries of sloppy citation behind us, you’d think it wouldn’t bother me to see the same thing on the internet, again and again and again. But it does. Because it’s so easy now not to make the same mistakes, again and again and again, I find myself throwing up my e-hands in disbelief more than ever.
The one that has been driving me crazy lately is the absurd assertion that we owe the name of the demoiselle crane to — get this — Marie Antoinette.
Alas, this “fun fact” is neither fun nor factual. It’s a lie. And it requires neither erudition nor much bibliographic expertise to figure that out.
The one who would be queen was born November 2, 1755, in Vienna. A quick look at the dictionary, though, tells us that the English name “demoiselle” is at least 68 years older, first appearing in print in the translated account of the dissection of six of the birds at Paris.
The original French-language report had been published in 1676. That text, printed three years before the birth of Marie’s paternal grandfather the Duke of Lorraine, calls the birds “demoiselles,” and even explains the unusual name’s origin:
This bird is so called for certain behaviors that seem to mimic the gestures of a woman who affects a certain gracefulness in her gait, her compliments, and her dancing. This resemblance must be said to have some rational basis: for more than two thousand years now, the authors who have described this bird have given it names that reflect this peculiar habit of imitating the gestures and attitudes of humans.
The Linnaean binomial, coined when the princess was less than three years old, translates the French “demoiselle” into the Latin virgo. The “type” for Linnaeus’s description was provided by the famous painting by George Edwards.
Edwards had drawn the bird from a living specimen in June 1748, noting carefully at the bottom of the sheet that
the Numidian Crane [is] called in French Demoiselle….
Marie Antoinette would be born seven and a half years later.
This demoithelle (that’s French for “little myth”) was an easy one to bust. It will be more difficult, I suspect, to find out who first put the words in a French queen’s mouth. But it won’t be impossible.
