Bibliography Detail
Learning from Nature: Lessons in Virtue and Vice in the Physiologus and Bestiaries
in Colum Hourihane, ed., Virtue & vice: the personifications in the Index of Christian art, Prionceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, 29-41
A discussion of the virtues and vices in the Physiologus, with a list of the animals associated with them. "The Physiologus is not an allegorical treatise on virture and vice; nowhere do virtues and vices actually appear appear as personifications either in the text or in the miniatures of any illustrated Physiologus or bestiary. ...the Physiologus uses examples from the natural world to convey lessons in Christian behaviour. The point, of course, is not that birds, beasts, and stones are more virtuous than humans, but that God has provided them as lessons and as warnings for the attentive human to read. ... Of the thirty-six chapters of the Physiologus B-text, most deal, some broadly, some more specifically, with virtue and vice." - Baxter
Language: English
ISBN: 0-691-05036-8
Last update December 6, 2021