Bibliography Detail
Doubts and Ambiguities in the Transmission of Ideas in a Medieval Latin Bestiary: Canterbury Cathedral Archives Lit. Ms D. 10
University of Kent - Skepsi / Academia, 2019; Series: Volume 2(2)
This article connects medieval bestiary studies to current thinking on doubts and the ambiguity of memory to examine how these issues problematise the transmission of ideas.1 How did concepts and ideas from Late Antiquity imbricate and contest medieval cultural and literary norms in the bestiary? How does examining these tensions challenge our own perceptions? These questions are discussed via an examination of a Latin bestiary manuscript from c.1300. This is a thirty-folio fragment in Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Lit Ms D.10, and this article focuses on just one chapter, that describing the ursus or bear. The reason for choosing D.10 lies in its unusual discourse on accepted medieval and late antique thought modes. To contextualise this analysis, two other ursine examples are used. One is a decorated initial in Jerome’s Commentary on the Old Testament from c. 1120. The other comes from an illustrated chapter on the bear in an early bestiary manuscript of c. 1180, London, British Library Additional 11283. How should the doubts in D.10 (which are expressed in the marginal notations of dubito, meaning ‘I doubt that’, in the same hand ! as the text) be interpreted? How does this manuscript’s scribal scepticism, as well as the ambiguity of those doubts, undermine the normative evidence for piety and authority contained in the bestiary? - [Abstract]
Language: English
Last update January 21, 2024