Under the authoritative name Physiologus, a series of texts from late antiquity and the Middle Ages transmit allegorical primal tales of animals, plants and stones, the fascination of which continues into modern times. The Physiologus tradition is not only based on the historical interest in natural history texts before the invention of natural science. In addition to theological and anthropological aspects, it is also the media dimensions of medieval text culture that underlie the fascination of Physiologus and its narrative subjects. In the interplay of text-bound meaning, visual meaning and materiality of manuscripts, the medieval Physiologus tradition creates constellations of meaning that make literature a specific field of interaction for media forms of knowledge. Characteristic of these types of media meaning creation are processes that run across the "Protestant" decoupling of medium and form, of material signifiers and spiritual signifieds and their hierarchization in modern sign orders: They bear traces of the indissoluble mediality of meaning, which the following attempt to describe would like to follow up on a specific example. The Codex Bongarsianus 318 of the Burgerbibliothek in Bern, which can be found on fol. 7r -22v a short Latin version of the Physiologus has survived, is in many respects one of the outstanding textual witnesses of the European Physiologus tradition With its creation in the middle of the 9th century, the manuscript is not only one of the oldest surviving texts of the Physiologus Tradition at all - the oldest manuscript of the Greek archetype, which dates back to around 150/170, dates from the 10th century - The Bern Physiologus manuscript Cod. Bongarsianus 318 is also the earliest manuscript to offer extensive illustrations of the short stories that come from the Greek corpus of Physiologus as well as additional sources such as the Hexaemeron of Ambrose of Milan and the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville. In particular, the “antique character” of the illuminations as well as their remarkable stylistic variance in the image design attracted the interest of previous research who associated the codex with the ambitions of Carolingian book art to build on the book illumination of late antiquity.

Language: German

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