I am aware that some of the image pages don’t display very well. I have started using larger images, and they sometimes break my primitive layouts. I see I will have to do some recoding of my templates; the underlying HTML of the site is showing its age.

For those who have sent me corrections and new information: thank you! It may seem to take forever for it to appear on the site, but it will get there eventually. I welcome all contributions: new items for the bibliography (if you are the author, please include a brief abstract); web sites worth plundering referring to; manuscripts I may have missed (the name/location of the manuscripts, not the manuscripts themselves, though if you have some to spare, do send them right along); and, of course, corrections.

This update is mostly about images, with an addition of about 400 from various sources. I have decided to use whatever images I can get my hands on; previously I was only using public domain images or images I had permission to use. I have now decided that art produced hundreds of years ago does not properly belong to anyone (or belongs to everyone), that copyright claims on such art or reproductions of it are bogus (a view upheld by the courts), and I have the right (nay, even a duty) to make the images available to all. This gives me a much larger stock of images to work with, and I am ever so slowly (a lot of work, remember?) adding more of them to my database.

A note on image quality: I grab medieval animal images from a lot of sources, and in many cases I have no control over the quality of the image. The digital facsimiles of manuscripts that libraries and museums publish  on the web are often of surprisingly low quality, and while I can (and do) use Photoshop tricks to improve the images somewhat, there is a limit to what can be done. This means you will see a wide variation in image quality here; I include these less than ideal images in the hope that they will be of some use. By the way, my use of Photoshop is only to enhance the appearance of images; I do not alter the image content on the main site, though I do sometimes take liberties on the Chimaera blog.

This update also fixes a bunch of broken links. People will move web pages around, leaving my links dangling. Unfortunately, a few of the pages I linked to have vanished entirely, so I have had to remove the links.

There are also updates to most sections of the site, but nothing major. I have plans for site revisions, but they will also be a lot of work, so don’t stay up waiting for them to appear.

Statistics! Everybody likes numbers, right? Right? Well, never mind, I like them, so here’s a bunch:

Number of visits to bestiary.ca in 2008: 454,238   
Number of page views in 2008: 1,478,193
Number of beasts: 141
Number of manuscripts: 257
Number of bibliography entries: 1521
Number of beast images: 1303

Do try the “wall of beasts” on the Beasts page; it goes on forever now.

Sound like fun? Well, now you can do it! Virtually, anyway. The Medieval Bestiary is now Cooliris enabled, giving you the wall of beasts.

Cooliris? What’s Cooliris, you ask plaintively. Cooliris is a browser extension that lets you browse a set of images displayed on the virtual wall of beasts described above. The extension is free, easy to install, and safe. It is available for Windows and Mac (sorry, penguinites, no Linux version yet), and for the more common browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari). Of course the highly intelligent readers of this blog only use Firefox, but if you are forced by unfortunate circumstances to use the inferior Internet Explorer, it will still work.

Anyway, the Firefox logo shows a fox with its tail on fire, which is something that could readily happen to Reynard, and thus Firefox is the right browser for this site. QED.

Back to Cooliris. You can download and install it from the Cooliris site; instructions are here. Once you have it installed (mere seconds for blissful Firefox users, longer for sad Internet Explorer users), you can go to the Beasts index page (the only page Cooliris enabled so far), then click the Cooliris icon in your browser’s toolbar or click the Cooliris icon near the bottom of the page. The wall of beasts will appear;  the pictures are in alphabetical order by beast name, from Amphisbaena to Yale. You can “walk” along the wall by dragging the slider at the bottom of the page. When you see a beast you would like more information about, click the picture to zoom in and see the notes; you can also click the “Jump to page” icon near the bottom of the screen to zip to the main page for that beast.

More pages will be Cooliris enabled in the future. Problems? Tell the Beastmaster!

This short article is a general introduction to natural history in the Middle Ages. It is of interest as an early example of the nineteenth-century scholarship on animals in the Middle Ages; it also has useful information on the unicorn, elephant and mandrake, as well as some images from manuscripts.

Fifteenth-century elephant
British Library, MS. Reg. 15 E. VI.

Thomas Wright was an English antiquarian and writer. He was born in 1810 near Ludlow, in Shropshire. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1834. In 1835 he came to London to begin a literary career. Over the next forty years Wright produced an extensive series of scholarly publications. He helped to found the British Archaeological Association and the Percy, Camden and Shakespeare societies. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (F. S. A.) as well as a member of many other learned British and foreign bodies. He died in 1877 at Chelsea, at the age of 67.

Another text edited by Wright is available in the Digital Text Library: The Bestiary of Philippe de Thaon, a transcription and translation of an Anglo-Norman bestiary of the twelfth century.

Mandrake root

The mandrake is, of course, a real plant, found around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and in China. To quote Wikipedia:

Mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora belonging to the nightshades family (Solanaceae). Because mandrake contains deliriant hallucinogenic tropane alkaloids such as hyoscyamine and the roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures, their roots have long been used in magic rituals, today also in neopagan religions such as Wicca and Germanic revivalism religions such as Odinism. … The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, is a plant called by the Arabs luffâh, or beid el-jinn (“djinn’s eggs”). The parsley-shaped root is often branched. This root gives off at the surface of the ground a rosette of ovate-oblong to ovate, wrinkled, crisp, sinuate-dentate to entire leaves, 6 to 16 inches long, somewhat resembling those of the tobacco-plant. There spring from the neck a number of one-flowered nodding peduncles, bearing whitish-green flowers, nearly 2 inches broad, which produce globular, succulent, orange to red berries, resembling small tomatoes, which ripen in late spring. All parts of the mandrake plant are poisonous. The plant grows natively in southern and central Europe and in lands around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as on Corsica.

The “Jacob” of the title is a character from the Judeo-Christian biblical book of Genesis, the son of Abraham Isaac, husband of Leah and Rachel. Leah’s son Reuben finds a mandrake plant during the wheat harvest and brings it home to his mother. Second wife Rachel, then childless, wants the mandrake because it is thought to aid conception; Leah trades an extra night with Jacob for the plant. Rachel eats the mandrake berries and soon conceives a child with Jacob.

While aiding conception is the mandrake’s best known use, it had several other uses. If the plant is given a coin, the next day it will return two coins, thus making the owner rich, though “you must not overwork [the mandrake], otherwise he will grow stale and might even die.” The berries of the plant were used as a soporific and narcotic; the ancient Greeks and the medieval Arabs used them as an anesthetic during surgery. Some figures made from the root of the plant were said to be “infallible love-charms, others make the wearer invulnerable or invisible; but almost all have this in common that they reveal treasures hidden under the earth, and that they can relieve their owner of chronic illness by absorbing it into themselves.”

The source of the mandrake plant had its own rather gruesome mythology. In Germany the plant was called the “Little Gallows Man”, and it was said

that when a hereditary thief, born of a family of thieves, or one whose mother stole while he was in her womb, is hanged on a gallows, and his seed or urine falls on the ground, the mandrake or Little Gallows Man sprouts on the spot. Others, however, say that the human progenitor of the plant must be, not a thief, but an innocent and chaste youth who has been forced by torture falsely to declare himself a thief and has consequently ended his days on a gallows. Be that as it may, the one thing about which all are agreed is that the Little Gallows Man grows under the gallows tree from the bodily droppings of a hanged man.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 14969, f. 61v

Uprooting a mandrake is a dangerous task, as seen in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where the students take special precautions when transplanting mandrakes. The mandrake resents being pulled from the ground, and its screams are deadly, killing anyone nearby. To safely get the mandrake, you must dig all around it with a sword until it is attached to the ground by only a few small roots. Then you tie a dog which has been starved for several days to the root, and offer food to the dog from a distance; the dog, in rushing to get the food, will pull the mandrake root out of the ground. Once the root is out of the ground it is harmless and you can collected safely. It is not recommended that you use the family pet for this task, since the dog is killed by the screams of the angry mandrake. The dog, having nobly sacrificed itself so you can get the mandrake, is to be buried with honors in the place where the mandrake was. Then

all you have now to do is to pick up the plant, wash it clean in red wine, wrap it in white and red silk, and lay it in a casket. But you must not forget to bathe it every Friday and to give it a new white shirt every new moon. If you only observe these precautions, the mandrake will answer any question you like to put to it concerning all future and secret matters. Henceforth you will have no enemies, you can never be poor, and if you had no children before, you will have your quiver full of them afterwards.

It is said that if you forget to give the mandrakes their weekly bath, they would “scream like children till they got it.”

The human form of the mandrake root was particularly attractive, and since the natural root is only vaguely humanoid, some enhancement was needed:

To this day there are ‘artists’ in the East who make a business of carving genuine roots of mandrakes in human form and putting them on the market, where they are purchased for the sake of the marvellous properties which popular superstition attributes to them. Antioch in Syria and Mersina in Cilicia particularly excel in the fabrication of these curious talismans. Sometimes the desired form is imparted simply by cutting and pressing the roots while they are still fresh and juicy, or while they are in process of desiccation. But sometimes, when a root has been thus moulded into the proper shape, it is buried again in the ground, until the scars on it have healed, and the parts which had been tied together have coalesced. When such an effigy is finally unearthed and allowed to dry and shrivel up, the traces of the manipulation which it has undergone are often hard to detect. A skilful ‘artist’ will in this way turn out mandrake roots which look so natural that no native would dream of questioning their genuineness.

So watch where you get your mandrake roots, don’t sacrifice the family pet, and remember the weekly bath!

There are also a couple of new digital texts available, and some other general updates.