The Latin translations of the Greek work known after the name of its presumed author as Physiologus provoked Latin adaptations across (at least) what are now England, France, and Germany; and these in turn inspired the copying and often illustrating of manuscripts across an even wider area. From these Latin works sprang vernacular texts in (at least) English, Icelandic, German, French, Italian, Occitan, and Catalan. In researching these varied and far-flung developments, specialists have often unintentionally further dispersed and even fragmented the tradition from which they stem, Anglophone scholars call the texts on which they work 'bestiaries' whereas their continental colleagues continue to refer to them as manifestations of 'Physiologus'. In French, 'bestiaire' may be used in the title of texts (Le Bestiaire de Pierre de Beauvais) but it does not designate a textual tradition so much as any set of animal representations possessing meaning, in any medium.* Continental scholarship has been driven mainly by philological concerns whereas in the anglophone world it has been dominated by art historians. Ways of categorizing texts have changed over time as well as place, creating further inconsistencies in nomenclature. The result has been a historical fracturing of what was, at least initially, a unified literary phenomenon. At the most fundamental level, this affects how manuscripts are recognized, described, and catalogued. The fluctuations in medieval designations, and the variations which individual texts manifest from one copy to another, would be enough to make identification challenging even without these differing apprehensions of the Physiologus tradition and their conflicting terminology for designating its components. This article is the outcome of my struggles with these hydra-like difficulties. It has two main aims: first, to integrate the conflicting accounts of the bestiary/ Physiologus put forward by anglophone and continental scholarship, marshalling them into a single narrative; and second, to identify some of the points of interaction between the kinds of text more typical of the Anglo-Norman domain and those more prevalent further east, in the parts of France less exposed to Anglo-Norman influence and in territories which, in the period relevant to this study, lay within 'the Empire', such as the present Low Countries, Germany, and northern Italy. - [Author]

Language: English

DOI: 10.2307/26396473