What you see above is the Beastmaster’s hands holding a facsimile of a bestiary, MS. Bodley 764, to be exact, from the Bodleian Library. It is my very first full, printed bestiary facsimile, and I am very pleased with it. The reproduction quality is outstanding; the only way the facsimile could be better would be if it was printed on vellum, and I think there may not be enough sheep in all of England for that. The colors are wonderful, and the gold backgrounds look like real gold. Everything is perfectly reproduced, down to the finger smudges of long dead readers and imperfections in the vellum. The book is almost the same size as the manuscript. The introduction by Christopher de Hamel is very good as well, explaining the bestiary genre in general, and the manuscript in particular.

Bodley 764 is a typical second family bestiary. In addition to the usual text for the Physiologus, it draws on the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, as well as from Solinus, the Hexaemeron of Ambrose, and Rabanus Maurus. This manuscript is unusual in that it includes the story of the barnacle geese taken from Gerald of Wales. There are 135 miniatures in the manuscript’s 137 folios, all painted with great skill and bright colors. Most of the illustrations have gold backgrounds, something that the facsimile renders very well. The text and illustrations are quite similar to another second family bestiary, Harley MS 4751 in the British Library, similar enough that one was probably copied from the other, a common practice.

The text of Bodley 764 has previously been published in an English translation by Richard Barber (Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Bodley 764), which includes good copies of the illustrations (though not as good as the facsimile). Barber’s translation is very readable; it was originally published by the Folio Society in Britain, but has been republished several times since and is commonly available. The facsimile, Book of Beasts: A Facsimile of MS. Bodley 764, is available from the Bodleian or from Amazon or from the David Brown Book Company, where you can see a few more pages from the book.

This short article is a general introduction to natural history in the Middle Ages. It is of interest as an early example of the nineteenth-century scholarship on animals in the Middle Ages; it also has useful information on the unicorn, elephant and mandrake, as well as some images from manuscripts.

Fifteenth-century elephant
British Library, MS. Reg. 15 E. VI.

Thomas Wright was an English antiquarian and writer. He was born in 1810 near Ludlow, in Shropshire. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1834. In 1835 he came to London to begin a literary career. Over the next forty years Wright produced an extensive series of scholarly publications. He helped to found the British Archaeological Association and the Percy, Camden and Shakespeare societies. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (F. S. A.) as well as a member of many other learned British and foreign bodies. He died in 1877 at Chelsea, at the age of 67.

Another text edited by Wright is available in the Digital Text Library: The Bestiary of Philippe de Thaon, a transcription and translation of an Anglo-Norman bestiary of the twelfth century.

Jennifer Lynn Jordan, author of the blog Per Omnia Saecula, says our beloved medieval animals are weird — at least on Mondays. The bonnacon would like to inform Ms. Jordan that he is not especially weird on Mondays, though he admits he is inclined to be grumpy and to have particularly poor sphincter control on that day. He does think that the ant-lion is rather weird, but ascribes that to an unfortunate choice of parents; and the beaver’s response to danger he finds altogether inappropriate, noting that a vastly superior defense was perfected by his [the bonnacon’s] ancestors long since, one not so likely to lead to the extinction of the species.

Ms. Jordan has been commenting on “weird” medieval animals in the Weird Medieval Animal Mondays (or WMAM) section of her blog for some time now. The comments are witty yet often insightful, and since Ms. Jordan so kindly refers to the Beastmaster’s own The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages site, he [that is, David Badke, aka the Beastmaster] and the bonnacon are inclined to forgive the slightly pejorative term “weird” and recommend Per Omnia Saecula to readers of this blog.

“It is a dragon egg, then?” Laurence said. It required an effort to restrain the triumph in his voice.

“Oh yes indeed, Captain, the size alone shows that.” Mr. Pollitt had wiped his hands on his apron and was already brushing more straw away from the top, trying to see the extent. “My, it is quite hardened already; I wonder what they can have been thinking, so far from land.”

This did not sound very promising. “Hardened?” Laurence said sharply. “What does that mean?”

“Why, that it will hatch soon. I will have to consult my books to be certain, but I believe that Badke’s Bestiary states with authority that when the shell has fully hardened, hatching will occur within a week. What a splendid specimen, I must get my measuring cords.”

This excerpt is from His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, part of the Temeraire series, a historical fantasy series set in the Napoleonic era. The storyline is like the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian of the British Navy vs. Napoleon, crossed with the Dragonriders of Pern series of novels by Anne McCaffrey. This is a well-written series of novels with a clever and interesting use of dragon lore, along with more-or-less accurate historical details; imagine the Napoleonic wars with both sides having an air force consisting of various breeds of large, intelligent, speaking dragons ridden by crews of men and women. An entertaining series; if you like dragons and O’Brian novels, you will like these.