The resulting imagery became a visual commonplace throughout Europe over a span of several centuries. Aristotle's outrageous degradation evidently satisfied a variety of purposes. Rhetoricians of the cathedral schools saw the university scholastic brought low. If you were convinced that Christian education, faith and prayer are necessary to preserve a man from subordination to fleshly lust and its humiliations, then Aristotle on all fours made fine stuff for sermons. Rouen Cathedral Aristotle's Fall France Cathedral of Manchester Animals at Church.
Animals are numerous in choir stall carvings, but only a few belong to the iconography of education.
They are watched over by a larger fox who shoulders a hefty scourge. At the far right, a second large fox, isolated from the others but facing them, also holds an open book. A more complicated situation is depicted on the base of the misericord. There a fox makes off with a goose slung over his back, running past a woman outside a house where a smaller figure, presumably a child, stands in an open doorway. The scene approximates a passage in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's tale in which Russel Fox steals a poor widow's rooster.