Encyclopedic Beasts

on 04 Mar 2023

Well, that was a lot of work!

With this update I have added all of the animal chapters (470+) from the Liber de natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth century encyclopedia. That includes over 100 new and newly identified beasts, an English translation/paraphrase of the Latin text from each chapter (seen under the Sources tab for most beasts), all of the images from manuscript Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes MS 320, a list of animals that are described in the encyclopedia, and more information on Thomas himself. I had been putting off tackling any of the medieval encyclopedias, because they have a lot of very strange and difficult to identify animals not found in bestiaries. Working on Thomas’s book forced me to identify the many beasts I had found in various manuscripts but had not found any information on; there are now only about five mystery beasts left in my database. Having all the animals in Thomas’s encyclopedia in my database will make working on other medieval encyclopedias much easier, since many of the other encyclopedias are based on the Liber de natura rerum.

In the Beast pages Sources tabs, in addition to Thomas’s descriptions I have added/updated the text from many of Thomas’s sources, like Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Solinus and Isidore of Seville. I have also done a full proofreading and edit of all of the Beast pages to correct the many (many!) typos, textual errors and formatting problems.

Two of Thomas’s sources are the mysterious Experimentator and the even more mysterious Liber rerum, both of which he quotes from, neither of which have been identified. The only existing source of either text is Thomas’s quotes. For the encyclopedia entries for both of these, I have extracted the Latin quotes from the Liber de natura rerum and roughly translated them to English. The complete set of quotes can be found under the Texts tab for the Experimentator and Liber rerum encyclopedia entries. As far as know, this is the first time this has been done.

There are also numerous updates to the Manuscript pages, Encyclopedia pages, and the Bibliography, plus a bunch of new images – over 5500 of them are online now. I have corrected many errors throughout the site in a desperately-needed review; with hundreds of pages of text it can be difficult to spot errors, so if you see any, please let me know.

There will be a delay in the next update while I catch up on all the things I have been neglecting for the last two months of arguing with Thomas.

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Thanks, and an Explanation

on 03 Mar 2023

Thanks to those who have sent me new information, updates and corrections. All such assistance is greatly appreciated.

So why have you not seen your contributions online? Well… I am just one old man with database that needs to be updated, and that takes time. I have an enormous backlog of stuff waiting to be entered into the database, hundreds of manuscripts and beasts and bibliography and encyclopedia stuff and more and more and more… While I can’t possibly keep up with it all, I will get to it eventually, and in the meantime I have it all stashed in Zotero, a “personal research assistant”, as they call it – I call it some very useful software! Nothing is being lost, so in the fullness of time it will appear on the site.

So if you have new or updated information, corrections for my many mistakes, suggestions for encyclopedia articles, or anything else of interest, please send them along! And then please be patient…

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Psalters!

on 06 Dec 2022

This update is mostly about manuscripts called Psalters (see below), with a bit about Gerald of Wales.

Manuscripts

A few more manuscripts have had their illustrations loaded and/or beast lists completed.

Encyclopedia

There is one updated and one new article.

  • Gerald of Wales: A few updates to the article and manuscript list, and more of Gerald’s text added to various beast entries.
  • Psalters: Manuscripts containing the biblical book of Psalms – and usually many images of a curious nature.

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Miscellany

on 18 Nov 2022

This update has new and changed stuff in several areas.

Manuscripts

A few more manuscripts have had their illustrations loaded and/or beast lists completed.

Encyclopedia

There are some new or updated articles.

  • Engelbert of Admont (1250-1331) was a scholar and monk in Austria. He wrote on many topics, but he is included here for his Tractus de naturis animalium. The full animal lists of two of the three manuscripts of this text have been loaded (there is no facsimile for the third one):
  • Isidore of Seville: Excerpts from his Etymologies have been added to the article, and many of the beast Sources pages have new or updated accounts from that text.
  • Gossuin de Metz: (13th century) wrote a very popular encyclopedia called L’Image du monde, the Image of the world or the Mirror of the world. Its popularity is shown by the 68 or so manuscripts that still exist. One notable thing about this encyclopedia is its statement (with supporting diagrams) that the Earth is most definitely a sphere, not flat as the ignorant Flat Earthers would have you believe. If you hear anyone saying that medieval people thought the Earth was flat, point them to one of the Image du monde manuscripts; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 574 has nice colorful diagrams to prove that they did not.
  • Guillaume le Clerc: There is some additional information on the Bestiaire divin, excerpts from the Norman-French text, and images from more manuscripts.

Beasts

While working on the texts by Engelbert of Admont and Isidore of Seville, I found and identified several new animals, and identified some of the mysterious existing ones. Isidore was very helpful in determining what those curious beasts were supposed to be (though often not what they actually are!). There are still over 100 animals in my database that I found in one or more of the medieval encyclopedias but have not been able to identify; the text is often illegible or so heavily abbreviated as to be unintelligible, and the illustrations (if any) are usually no help at all since the artist didn’t know what the animal was either, and just made something up.

Statistics, or Fun with Numbers

The latest numbers for the website, for those who like statistics. The rest of you, look away now!

  • Beasts: 267
  • Manuscripts: 425
  • Bibliography items: 1671
  • Images: 4746
  • Encyclopedia articles: 34
  • Digital Text Library items: 30

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Oops…

on 10 Oct 2022

There was a bug in my gallery script that caused all Beast galleries to fail to load if the Manuscript or Encyclopedia gallery image order was set to “Manuscript order”. I fixed it, but you may need to refresh the page in the browser before it works (that’s Control-F5 in Firefox or Chrome for Windows; check your browser’s help for others).

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Latin Bestiaries

on 09 Oct 2022

This update is about manuscripts, mostly bestiary manuscripts from the Latin families. The Latin family manuscripts include the better known bestiaries such as the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Manuscripts

These manuscripts have had all of their illustrations loaded, descriptions updated, and beast lists completed.

These manuscripts do not have a complete digital facsimile online. All available illustrations have been loaded, but there are probably some images missing and the beast lists may be incomplete.

There are now over 4500 images online.

The descriptions for most manuscripts have been cleaned up and regularized.

Beasts

Many new beasts have been added. Most of these come from Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25, a third family bestiary with an embedded encyclopedia. Some of the new beasts have not been identified, and others have very limited information. I will be updating those beasts with more information as I find it. Some are pretty obscure! A bird called “Furfurio”? A fish called “Melanurus”? The illustrations (if any) are not at all helpful, of course. Still, I figured out some of them (silkworm! slug!) and I will eventually figure out the rest.

Enhancements

Many manuscripts are “miscellanies”, with two or more texts bound together. Often the texts are unrelated – they were bound into one codex for convenience, not because they had anything in common. Some of the manuscripts on the Medieval Bestiary site have two or more animal texts, sometimes related and sometimes not. Previously, the beast lists on the manuscript page lumped all beasts from all of the texts together into one list, which made it look like the beasts were all part of one text instead of multiple unrelated texts. With this enhancement, where the manuscript contains two or more parts, each part has its own separate set of lists, with each list only containing beasts from a single text. For examples of this, see Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine, H. 437 or British Library, Royal MS 2 B VII.

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General Update

on 26 Aug 2022

A bunch of stuff both new and updated, including several enhancements to the Medieval Bestiary site structure and functionality.

Site Enhancements

  • Image galleries for Encyclopedia entries and Manuscripts can now be displayed in beast name order or in manuscript appearance order. (Beast image galleries are always in manuscript appearance order.) Beast name order is the same as it was before: images displayed in alphabetical order by the name of the beast (e.g. Amphisbaena, Ape, Asp … Unicorn, Viper, Vulture, etc.). With manuscript appearance order the images are displayed in the order they appear on the manuscript pages. This is like how beasts are displayed on the Manuscript Beast pages, where beast name order is on the left and manuscript order is on the right. More information on how to switch between beast name order and manuscript appearance order can by found on the Gallery Help page.
  • The Manuscript Beast page manuscript appearance order list (the list on the right) was not correctly displaying beasts that appeared on more than one page in the manuscript. The beast was only shown once in the list; each appearance will now be shown in the correct order, so if a beast appears two or more times in the manuscript it will appear the same number of times in the list.
  • The Encyclopedia now has an Index. The “Subject Index” tab (which wasn’t an index) has been renamed to “Topics”, and there is a new “Index” tab. The index lists words and phrases related to Encyclopedia entries with links to the entries they refer to; click a link to go to the page for the entry. There’s not a lot in there yet, but it will grow.
  • Some pages (Bibliography and Institute details, image information) are normally displayed in a popup window when a link is clicked. When clicking on such a link in the Search results, the detail page cannot be shown in a popup (Google controls those links), so it was displayed as a normal, unformatted page, which was ugly. It will now be displayed as a proper (though non-standard) Bestiary site page. This is also true if you right click on a link that would normally open in a popup window and select “Open in new tab/window”. Not a perfect solution, but an improvement.
  • There are several other fixes/enhancements that you will probably not notice, that maybe make the site a bit easier to use or look better, or remove something that annoyed me, or maybe I just like it better the new way.

Manuscripts

More manuscripts have had their entire sets of images loaded. There are now over 3700 images online. Some manuscripts also have new and updated information.

Encyclopedia

  • The article on Gervaise and his Bestiaire has been updated with more information, images from the only manuscript where it appears, and some sample text.
  • The article on Lambert of Saint-Omer and his Liber Floridus (an encyclopedia) has a lot more information, a few images, manuscript lists, etc.
  • The article on Pierre de Beauvais and his Bestiaire has been updated with some new information, a bunch of images, several lists and tables and other goodies.

Thanks

Thanks to bestiary superfan “Wonderlandia” who found several online manuscript facsimiles that I had missed, mostly of the Liber Floridus of Lambert of Saint-Omer. Which got me started on the Lambert encyclopedia article and kept me busy for several days!

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Bestiaire d’amour

on 17 Jul 2022

The Bestiaire d’amour or Bestiary of Love is not a traditional bestiary. It has bestiary animals doing bestiary things, but it has a much different purpose. Where the traditional bestiary is a tool for teaching Christian morality, the Bestiaire is a desperate attempt by the author, Richard de Fournival, to win the love of a lady. It is a peculiar concept, radical for its time: A merging of a religious text with courtly love literature.

Richard de Fournival was a thirteenth century French writer, poet, songwriter, surgeon and Catholic church cleric. He was also, in modern terms, a misogynistic jerk. In any court today the lady would have no problem getting a restraining order against him. We don’t know who the lady was, but she wrote a spirited Response to Richard’s Bestiaire in which she made her distaste for his advances very plain.

There are around 24 manuscripts currently known which contain the Bestiaire; four of them also contain the lady’s Response. The text is in one of the dialects of Old French, in prose, though Richard did produce a version in verse. Most of the manuscripts are illustrated, and manuscript images have been loaded for three of them so far:

There is a new and fairly long article on Richard de Fournival and his Bestiaire in the Encyclopedia, with samples of the text from some of the manuscripts and excerpts from an English translation of both the Bestiaire and the Response. There is also a surprisingly large bibliography; lots of people have written about the Bestiaire, often from a feminist viewpoint. The Bestiary Family French page has also been updated with a list or the Bestiaire manuscripts.

This update is almost entirely about Richard, the Bestiaire, the lady and the Response. There are a few changes in other areas, and several corrections here and there, but little other unrelated new content. Finding and entering all of the data for this update was a big, time-consuming job, and I am now very tired of Richard, so I won’t be adding much more about him for a while.

The next update will be mainly structural and functionality changes to the site itself; there are several areas I am not yet satisfied with. Of course I will probably sneak in some new content along the way.

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Manuscript Update

on 09 Jun 2022

Though there several new things in this update, it is mostly about manuscripts and their images.

Manuscripts

I have been examining manuscripts, trying to find information on some elusive ones, and updating descriptions and images for the some of the ones I already knew about.

  • Arnamagnæanske Institut, AM 673 a 4º (Icelandic Physiologus): This is the only known copy of the Physiologus written in Old Norse. The manuscript has not aged well; it has darkened and is riddled with holes. Some of the images are barely visible, or have parts that are not visible at all. To make the images usable I have done some digital enhancement to increase the contrast; the content itself is unchanged. The digital facsimile of this manuscript was very well hidden! I finally found it on the Arnamagnæanske Institut web site, attached to the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP), as an example of Old Norse text. The usual link to the facsimile is on the manuscript page, so you don’t have to search endlessly for it.
  • Biblioteca Ambrosiana, E. 16 sup.: Switching languages, a Greek Physiologus with some odd illustrations. Because I can’t read Greek, and because many of the images are strange, there are several beasts, birds and serpents I have not been able to identify. All of the animal images have been loaded, with the unknown ones marked “unidentified”. The manuscript has darkened and the line drawing images have faded, so a little digital enhancement was needed to increase contrast. No image content was changed.
  • Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS gr. IV. 35: The last few missing images have been loaded. These are most birds that I have not been able to identify.
  • Bibliothèque Municipale de Cambrai, MS 259: The part of this manuscript of interest here is the Aviary (book of birds) by Hugh of Fouilloy. I can’t be sure I have all of the images because the facsimile is not complete, but it is likely they are all loaded. The facsimile images are not of the highest quality.
  • Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, MS. PA 78: All images updated/uploaded. The online facsimile is of low quality, so I had to digitally enhance the images (color correction, enlargement), but the content of the images was not changed.
  • Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 6838B: A bestiary, not included in the older Bestiary Family lists, but probably Second Family. There are around 120 images, mostly simple colored line drawings.
  • British Library, Harley MS 1585: This manuscript is a collection of medical texts, including a section on the use of animals in medicine. That section looks like a bestiary, except where the bestiary has animal descriptions and allegory, this manuscript has descriptions of medicinal uses for the animal. All of the animal section images have been loaded, as well as a few oddities from the rest of the manuscript.
  • British Library, Harley MS 3244 : Existing images updated to high resolution and all missing images added.
  • British Library, Harley MS 4751 (Harley Bestiary): Existing images updated to high resolution and all missing images added.
  • British Library, Royal MS 12 C XIX: Existing images updated to high resolution and all missing images added. Also some additions to the manuscript description.
  • British Library, Royal MS 12 F XIII (Rochester Bestiary): Existing images updated to high resolution and all missing images added. Also some additions to the manuscript description.
  • Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig XV 3: All images added (probably; the online facsimile is incomplete, so images may be missing).
  • Museum Meermanno, MMW, 10 B 25: All images updated to higher resolution.
  • Museum Meermanno, MMW, 10 D 07: This is a herbal and a treatise on the medicinal use of animals. All of the animal illustrations have updated to high resolution.
  • Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.81 (The Worksop Bestiary): All images have been added in high resolution. There are also some updates to the manuscript description.
  • Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, BPL 1283: This manuscript contains a herbal and a treatise on the medicinal use of animals. All of the animal illustrations have been loaded.
  • Yale Center for British Art, Helmingham Herbal and Bestiary: This late fifteenth century composite manuscript contains a herbal (book of plants) and a bestiary in pictures. It is an unusual bestiary in that there is no text describing the animals, only a one or two word label for each entry. All of the animal images have been loaded.

Beasts

  • The Sources section on the main beast pages has gotten too long, so I moved the whole section to its own page, accessible by clicking the Sources tab.
  • Animal tales from the Histories of Herodotus (fifth century BCE) have been added to Sources for relevant beasts.
  • Several beasts now have excerpts (in Sources) from The wonders of the world by Solinus (third century CE). This is another encyclopedia on various subjects, but less chaotic than that of Aelian.
  • Quotes from The Metamorphoses by Ovid have been added to Sources for the relevant beasts.
  • A few Aesop’s Fables have been added or updated on some beast pages.
  • Multiple beasts have updates to descriptions and lots of new images.
  • A few beasts have been added (water-horse, rat, etc.) and some have had their bounds widened (for example, “Stag” is now “Stag (Deer)”, because I found some deer images that were does and not stags).
  • I have added a new category of animals to handle beasts, birds and serpents I cannot identify. These do not appear as entries in the Beast pages, but they do (usually) appear in manuscript galleries; this lets me add all available images for a manuscript, even if I don’t know what the peculiar beast is. If you run across one of these mystery animals while looking at manuscript images, and you know what it is or can offer a suggestion, please tell me about it.

Images

Many images from various manuscripts and other sources have been added. There are now over 3000 images available on the site, most at a reasonably high resolution.

Encyclopedia

  • New article on Herodotus (fifth century BCE) with excerpts from his book Histories.
  • New article on Solinus, a third century Roman writer, author of De mirabilibus mundi (The wonders of the world), an encyclopedia.
  • Updates to the article on Aesop’s Fables.
  • Updates to the article on Ovid (first century CE).

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Something for Everyone

on 29 Apr 2022

This is a general update, with something for everyone. I have added a lot of new data this time.

My workshop doesn’t look like this; there is a computer instead of a writing desk.

Images: There are several hundred new and updated images, bringing the total to almost 2200. This batch are all from manuscripts, and some are spectacular; see Bodleian Library, MS. Ashmole 1511, for example. Several manuscripts and beasts now have much better images, freshly pillaged from the InterWebs.

Manuscripts: There are a few new manuscript descriptions, and many existing descriptions have been updated with new information. The Bestiary Families section has also been updated, with almost all of the listed manuscripts having links to the manuscript descriptions. There are still a few manuscripts I have not been able to find; if you know anything about any of the manuscripts on the Family pages that do not have links (or any manuscripts I don’t yet list), contact your friendly neighborhood Beastmaster. There is one change to the manuscript index lists: I have removed the Shelfmark list (not all that useful, and you can use the Filtered List to get the same information), and replaced it with a manuscript Type index, where manuscripts are sorted by location and shelfmark, and grouped by type (Bestiary, Encyclopedia, Miscellany, and others). See the manuscript Help page for more information.

Beasts: There are a few new beasts, mostly obscure. The big update in Beasts is the addition (in the Sources section) of many excerpts from authors that influenced the bestiaries. These include Aristotle (De animalibus, 4th century BCE), Claudius Aelianus (De Natura Animalium, 2nd century CE), and Saint Ambrose (Hexameron, 5th century BCE). They all had interesting (if sometimes absurd) things to say about animals.

Encyclopedia: There are a few new articles, including those about Aristotle, Claudius Aelianus and Saint Ambrose, with updates to others. If your favorite ancient author is not yet represented, be patient; I will be adding more over the next few months. Or you can contact me to let me know someone is missing.

Bibliography: There are several new entries, and some existing entries now have links to digital resources.

I am trying to do an update once a month, but the May update might be delayed. I do have a life that doesn’t involve bestiaries!

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