Bibliography Detail
Some ants go marching two by two, others dig for gold : the textual descriptions and visual depictions of ants in the Medieval bestiary tradition
Vienna: Central European University Library, 2022
Legends of dog-sized ants that dig up gold in the desert or of ants with lion heads are only two examples of the fantastic and fictitious creatures that exist within medieval Latin bestiaries. Their appearances in these bestiaries are rare and are often overshadowed by their harmless insect counterpart, the ant. Not all chapters on the ants in Latin bestiaries include descriptions of ant-lions or gold-digging ants. However, the chapters that do pull on the literary and moral collective knowledge of these creatures to provide negative counterparts to the positive Christian exempla emphasized in the descriptions and illustrations of the three characteristics of the ant. This use of ant-lions and gold-digging ants is seen through a three-part comparative analysis of the chapters on ants in Latin bestiaries. The first part of the analysis focuses on the intertextuality of classical and medieval descriptions of ants, ant-lions, and gold-digging ants in comparison to the bestiarial descriptions of these ants. The second part is a comparative analysis of the chapter on ants in forty-one Latin bestiaries produced between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries in Northern Europe. The third part is a comparative analysis of the iconography of these three ants within sources in the bestiary tradition. This thesis also attempts to provide an answer to explain the inconsistent iconography of the physical features of gold-digging ants. - [Abstract]
Language: English
Last update May 22, 2024