Maerlant's Sea Monsters. A study of three hybrid sea monsters in manuscripts by Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme in relation to the thirteenth-century 'animal turn'

In the thirteenth century a scientification (the 'animal turn') of the description of nature took place. This was influenced by, among other things, the translation of Aristotle's zoological works by Michael Scotus (De animalibus, c. 1220), through which Aristotle's ideas were rediscovered. Thomas of Cantimpré's~ Liber de natura rerum (ca. 1245) arose from this development. This Latin source was edited into Middle Dutch by Jacob van Maerlant: Der Naturen Bloeme (ca. 1270). The 'animal turn' can be seen in these sources in various aspects, such as the large number of subjects, the systematic ordering of these subjects in 'books' and the large amount of information about the subjects themselves. In this paper, this scientification after the thirteenth century is examined on the basis of a case study of the text and images of three hybrid sea monsters in illustrated copies of Maerlant's text, which were made in the Low Countries in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The substantive information changes little in the Der Naturen Bloeme copies. On the textual level, there are several variants, from which a common shelf for the Leiden, Berlin-Vienna and Bremen manuscripts can be recognized. In the images a change is visible with the sea monk and sea knight in the later manuscripts, but this could also be traced back to the joint shelf. The lack of contemporary iconographical comparison material for the sea monk and sea knight and the similarities between the mermaids in the manuscripts make it likely that the imagery of these two creatures is derived from the mermaid. The 'scientification' cannot be seen in the Der Naturen Bloeme copies on the basis of the text and images. However, this does not mean that this development did not exist. - [Abstract]

Language: Dutch