Dr. Christopher de Hamel of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, shows us a bestiary (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College MS 22) and the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College MS 16) to illustrate the medieval view of the elephant.

 
Ah, to have Dr. de Hamel’s job…

In the middle of the thirteenth century, Richard de Fournival, a French cleric, scholar and surgeon, wrote the Bestiaire d’amour, the Bestiary of love. This fusion of courtly love literature and Bestiary allegorical “natural history” was supposedly written to win the favor of an unnamed woman who Richard was in love with, but who was [...]

This is the second in a series of posts about magical beast parts. Today: the beaver, the hyena, and the lynx.

Beavers losing valuable body parts.
British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 9r
Beaver: The beaver is hunted for one special body part, which, we are assured by the best authorities, is required for “medicine”. The body part [...]

A living unicorn has been discovered in the Tuscany region of Italy – that is, if you define “unicorn” as a beast with a single horn.

Italian unicorn deer.
ROME – A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature [...]

A surprising number of medieval animals were thought to have a magical body part, or to have a magical object embedded in them, or to be able to produce a magical object. These magical beastie bits were, of course, much sought after, and often doomed the beastie that had them. In this ?-part series, we [...]

British Library, Royal MS 12 F. xiii, Folio 10v.
So, you want to catch a unicorn. As we all know, the unicorn is a swift and fierce beast, not to be caught by ordinary means. But there is a way: find a pure and virgin girl, sit her down in unicorn habitat, hide in the bushes [...]

A new text is available in the Digital Text Library: Jacob and the Mandrakes by James George Frazer, originally a paper read to and published by the British Academy in 1917. Frazer was a social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion, and is most famous [...]

The idea that elephants are afraid of mice has been around for a long time, and persists today. Pliny (first century CE) says that elephants “hate mice and will refuse to eat fodder that has been touched by one.” Eustathius (fifth century CE) says “one is not so greatly amazed at the vast size of [...]