Bestiary.ca is now up to date, if such a phrase is meaningful for a site that deals only with stuff at least 500 years gone. There is a bit more of everything, but mostly pictures – about 300 new ones, some of them spectacular. The best overview of what pictures are here is to be had by using the Cooliris extension to your favorite browser; you can display all of the pictures on the site by clicking the appropriate button the the Beasts page.

Dr. Christopher de Hamel of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, shows us a bestiary (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College MS 22) and the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College MS 16) to illustrate the medieval view of the elephant.

Ah, to have Dr. de Hamel’s job…

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.

I updated the Bestiary site today. If you are wondering why I update so infrequently, well… it’s a lot of work!

This update is mostly about images, with an addition of about 400 from various sources. I have decided to use whatever images I can get my hands on; previously I was only using public domain images or images I had permission to use. I have now decided that art produced hundreds of years ago does not properly belong to anyone (or belongs to everyone), that copyright claims on such art or reproductions of it are bogus (a view upheld by the courts), and I have the right (nay, even a duty) to make the images available to all. This gives me a much larger stock of images to work with, and I am ever so slowly (a lot of work, remember?) adding more of them to my database.

A note on image quality: I grab medieval animal images from a lot of sources, and in many cases I have no control over the quality of the image. The digital facsimiles of manuscripts that libraries and museums publish  on the web are often of surprisingly low quality, and while I can (and do) use Photoshop tricks to improve the images somewhat, there is a limit to what can be done. This means you will see a wide variation in image quality here; I include these less than ideal images in the hope that they will be of some use. By the way, my use of Photoshop is only to enhance the appearance of images; I do not alter the image content on the main site, though I do sometimes take liberties on the Chimaera blog.

This update also fixes a bunch of broken links. People will move web pages around, leaving my links dangling. Unfortunately, a few of the pages I linked to have vanished entirely, so I have had to remove the links.

There are also updates to most sections of the site, but nothing major. I have plans for site revisions, but they will also be a lot of work, so don’t stay up waiting for them to appear.

Statistics! Everybody likes numbers, right? Right? Well, never mind, I like them, so here’s a bunch:

Number of visits to bestiary.ca in 2008: 454,238   
Number of page views in 2008: 1,478,193
Number of beasts: 141
Number of manuscripts: 257
Number of bibliography entries: 1521
Number of beast images: 1303

Do try the “wall of beasts” on the Beasts page; it goes on forever now.

In the middle of the thirteenth century, Richard de Fournival, a French cleric, scholar and surgeon, wrote the Bestiaire d’amour, the Bestiary of love. This fusion of courtly love literature and Bestiary allegorical “natural history” was supposedly written to win the favor of an unnamed woman who Richard was in love with, but who was resisting his advances. Courtly love literature was common in thirteenth century Europe, as was the Bestiary, but never before has the two been combined. The result is a strange blend of the two genres, with the standard Bestiary stories co-opted to serve the interests of courtly love, and the usual allegories bent to serve Richard’s needs.

“Courtly love” is a nineteenth century term used to describe a type of medieval literature, in which a man professes his eternal love for an inaccessible woman, usually of noble class and often married to someone else. Most courtly love literature has several common features, which are present in Richard’s book. (All quotes from the Bestiaire d’amour are taken from Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love by Jeanette Beer, a noted Bestiaire scholar.) Some examples: Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes (“Did sight help to capture me? Yes, I was more captured by my sight than the tiger in the mirror.”); declaration of passionate devotion (“…I have abandoned my own will in pursuit of hers, like the beasts that, after they have sensed the odor of the panther, will not abandon it.”); virtuous rejection by the lady (“…I have no earthly hope in the future of your good will…”); renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty (“For if I have spoken and sent you many fine words and they have not served me as much as I needed, I must now assemble my resources in the arrièr-ban of this last composition. I must speak as best I can to know if it might win your favor.”); and moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire (“…you have thrown me into the sort of distress that accompanies utter despair without hope of mercy. That is death by love.”).

Richard’s Bestiaire was very popular, and many manuscript copies still exist. In a few of the manuscripts the Bestiaire is followed by a response, supposedly from the woman Richard was writing to. Whether the response was written by Richard’s unattainable love, or by a woman at all, is not known and is still debated; Jeanette Beer says “Its author was a woman of exceptional ability who could reason with cogency and argue with style; her philosophical and theological background differed markedly from Master Richard’s; and her feminist defense of woman may have been a personal response directed specifically against Richard de Fournival.” Whether or not this is so, the response to Richard’s protestations of love was scathing, as can be seen from the excerpts below.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Français 1951 f3v.

He says: The nature of the wolf is such that when a man sees it before it sees the man, the wolf loses all its strength and courage. If the wolf sees the man first, the man then loses his voice so that he is speechless. This nature is found in the love of a man and woman. For when love exists between them, if the man can perceive first, from the woman herself, that she loves him, and if he knows how to make her aware of it, from that moment she has lost the courage to refuse him. But because I could not hold back or refrain from telling you my heart before I knew anything of yours, you have escaped me.
She replies: I must truly say that I was seen first by you whom I must for this reason call the wolf. For it is with difficulty that I can say anything to counter your words. Wherefore I can truly say that I was first seen by you, and I must thus be on my guard if I am prudent.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Français 1951 f5r.

He says: [The viper] is of such a nature that it is frightened and insecurely flees when it sees a naked man, yet it attacks him and has nothing but contempt for him if it sees him clothed. You have acted in exactly the same way with me, fair, sweetest love. For when I met you I found you to be of a gentle disposition and somewhat modest, as is fitting – as if you were a little fearful of me because of the newness of our acquaintance. Yet when you knew I loved you, you were as proud as you wished toward me, and you attacked me sometimes with your words. … I should have been better treated by you when you saw me clothed with your love than when I was naked of it.
She replies: Do you think I am bound to attack you because you say you are clothed by your love for me? I have not clothed you with my love, rather you are quite naked of it. Therefore I fear you, which is not very surprising…

Master Richard comes across as rather a cad, nay even a jerk, and his methods cannot be recommended as an example to a man hopeful of Valentine love.

The woman has the last word, and shows just what she thinks of Richard:

…the dragon for its tongue that is envenomed to kill all the animals it touches with it. Ah master, have we any such dragons among us? I truly believe and know we have, and I know well that they are worse than the feared dragon. And I shall tell you who they are and in what way they are worse, as I spoke above of those who act lovelorn till they die of it. They are calamitous. But I say upon my soul that a man may say he is dying of love when he does not even know of it as I, who by the grace of God am free of it, know love. And I say assuredly that these men are worse than the dragon mentioned above. For the dragon poisons only what it touches, but this false liar with his filthy, venomous old tongue spreads what he hopes will get him his way with the woman he covets, no matter how she may be damaged by him. Is there worse? Yes, indeed! … the evil dragon, the traitor, the wretch, now boasts that he has had his way. Is that an evil dragon? Certainly I say that no mortal man could take too cruel a vengeance on that dragon.

So much for Master Richard.

St John’s College (Cambridge) Library
A.15 f103v.

The Bestiary does not generally encourage romantic love, courtly or otherwise, or any sort pleasure for that matter. The self-sacrifice of the beaver can be seen as a reference to the value of clerical celibacy; the fate of the antelope warns us not to play in the “thickets of worldliness” where pleasure kills body and soul; the story of the blackbird should remind us that we must discipline ourselves and thus rid ourselves of pleasures of the mind by inflicting pain on our flesh; the story of the sirens shows that those who take delight in worldly pleasures will become the devil’s prey. The most obvious admonition to avoid the perils of lust is found in the story of the fire stones (lapides igniferi), which burst into flame if brought too close together; likewise, says the Bestiary, will the flames of lust erupt when man and women are too close to each other. The couple at the right have discovered the truth of this for themselves: In the top panel, they are fiercely and resolutely resisting the lure of lust, even holding out their anti-lust devices, but to no avail, for in the lower panel they are passionately in each other’s arms, and the fires of lust (and hell) roar around them. They do seem happier in the bottom panel, so perhaps not all is lost.

Finally, the Aberdeen Bestiary has some advice for the married couple, based on the risque mating of a male viper with a female lamprey:

Let him be harsh, deceitful, uncouth, unreliable, drunken: are any of these things worse than the poison from which the lamprey, in intercourse, does not shrink? When she is invited, she is not found wanting and embraces the slimy snake with sincere affection. The man puts up with your mischief and your feminine tendency towards triviality. Can you, o woman, not stand by your man? … But you too, O man, for we can also bring you into the discussion, set aside the passion in your heart and the roughness of your manner when your loving wife comes to meet you, get rid of your ill-humour when your wife sweetly rouses you to express your love. You are not her master but her husband; you have gained not a maidservant but a wife. God wished you to govern the weaker sex, not rule it absolutely. Return her care with attention; return her love with grace. The viper pours out its poison; can you not get rid of your harsh attitude?

Click the image for a larger and higher quality view.

The manuscript images used for this illustration have been rudely ripped from their context and mercilessly modified to fit my mad scheme. To see the originals, follow the links below.

Credits:

Collage, background, other bits – David “Beastmaster” Badke © 2009. Sign (from Snake Park in Pune, India) – Engrish.com. Manuscripts: Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 264, marginalia: Miscellaneous little birds; Storks on nest; Three owls; Bunch of bunnies; Rabbit with crossbow; Fence-sitting owl. British Library, Harley MS 4751: Cranes (f.39r); Caladrius (f.40r); Bear (f.15r); Barnacle geese (f.55r); Antelope (f.5v). Partridge (f.48r). Harley MS 3244: Dragon (f.59r). Royal MS 12 C. xix: Tiger (f.28r). Royal MS 12 F. xiii: Unicorn (f.10v). Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º: Lizard (f.56r); Green scorpion (f.58v); Boa (f.33v); Parrot (f.33v); Panther (f.3v); Bonnacon (f.10r). Gl. kgl. S. 3466 8º: Asp (f.39r). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1951: Lion (f.32r). Aberdeen University Library, Univ. Lib. MS 24: Amphisbaena (f.68v). Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16: Pygmies (f.42v). Museum Meermanno, MMW, 10 B 25: Crocodile (f.12v); Hunters (f.8r); Ape (f.8v); Startled owl (f.32v).

This is the second in a series of posts about magical beast parts. Today: the beaver, the hyena, and the lynx.

Beavers losing valuable body parts.
British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 9r

Beaver: The beaver is hunted for one special body part, which, we are assured by the best authorities, is required for “medicine”. The body part is its testicles, and the “medicine” is likely the medieval version of Viagra. The beaver knows what the hunters want, and evidently valuing life over love, bites off the desired items and throws them to the hunter, who being satisfied with his prize leaves the beaver alone. And alone he will probably stay, without hope of offspring and, most likely, a mate. I suppose he can always become a monk, the clerical class the moral of this awkward story was aimed at. In future encounters with hunters, the beaver merely has to reveal his lack of magical beastie bits to be spared any further harassment. In the illustration, the happy hunter on the right has already bagged his quota, while the others squabble over the second beaver’s offering. The lad in red, pointing at the busy beaver, is saying “Dibs on that set!” while the one in blue, who brought his best sword and a fine pair of hunting dogs, looks sorely disappointed.

A hyena munches a corpse.
British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 10r

Hyena: There is a stone in the hyena’s eye (some say in the stomach of its young) that will give a person the ability to predict the future if the stone is placed under the person’s tongue. According to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “And also witches use the heart of this beast and the liver, in many witchcrafts”. The hyena-stone was said to prevent fever and the gout. Hyenas like to hang around graveyards, where they snack on human corpses. Perhaps this diet gives the stone its predictive power:  the dead presumably know the future. The hyena is an unstable beast, sometimes male and sometimes female; Aesop says “A female hyena wanted to have sex with a male fox, but the fox rejected her, saying that he could not be sure whether she would become his girlfriend or boyfriend.” The fox could have used the future telling stone to discover in advance how the relationship would turn out. The bestiaries do not say how (or whether) the hyena protects its future-telling stone from humans.

A lynx producing a stone; a chunk of amber.
Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º, Folio 6r

Lynx: The urine of the lynx is said to harden into a stone appropriately called the lynx stone (lapis lyncurium in Latin). It is also sometimes called “lynx-water”. The lynx, knowing the stone is valued and due to a natural jealousy (according to Isidore) they do not want humans to have it, they cover their urine with sand to hide it. The stone is most likely amber, but has also been identified as iolite, tourmaline and other semi-precious stones. If it was indeed amber, its medicinal uses were many. According to the Amber Portal: “Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1178), the prioress of the local Benedictine convent, a renowned German mystic and poetess, recommended taking amber as a beer, wine or water tincture for stomach ache, and as a milk tincture for bladder conditions. Powdered amber mixed with wine was also supposed to protect from the Black Death. Albert the Great, a 13th-century Dominican theologian and philosopher, listed amber among six medications of the utmost effectiveness.”

A living unicorn has been discovered in the Tuscany region of Italy – that is, if you define “unicorn” as a beast with a single horn.

Italian unicorn deer.

ROME – A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday. The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed “Unicorn” — was born in captivity in the research center’s park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said. He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns. Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said. “Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case,” said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome’s zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal’s life. (MSN-AP, June 11, 2008)

Apparently the mother deer was injured by a car while pregnant with the twins, possibly causing the horn to be shifted to the middle of the head. The deer may not be a “unicorn” for long; it will soon shed its horn, as deer generally do, and it is not certain that the single horn will regrow as it is. A good video of the deer in the Tuscany park can be seen, with useful commentary, on the Discovery Chanel web site.

Otter G’Zel and Lancelot, the unicorn goat.

Other unicorn animals have been created, notably the unicorn goat produced by Morning Glory and her husband Otter G’Zell, in the 1980s. The exact technique was not revealed, but it most likely involved surgically removing one horn bud and moving the other to the center of the head, while the animal was very young. This may be what happened accidentally to the Italian deer.

In the early 1900s several Nepalese one-horned sheep were given to the Prince of Wales and exhibited at the London Zoological Gardens in 1906. It is thought that these were also surgically manipulated in an effort to make them more valuable.

In the 1930s, Dr. W. F. Dove of Maine University did unicorn experiments with a bull. According to The Unicorn Garden:

Dr. Dove’s unicorn bull.

In 1933 Dove took a day-old Ayrshire calf, surgically removed its horn buds, trimmed them to fit together and replanted them in the centre of its forehead. As the young bull grew, the buds fused and produced a single solid, straight and pointed horn a foot or so in length which proved equally useful for fighting and uprooting fences, far superior in fact to the usual brace of curved ones when it comes to confronting a rival. Dr Dove’s Unicorn bull became the leader of its herd and was very rarely challenged by other males. Which is not altogether surprising if you think about it. When bulls charge each other the main aim (as with male deer) is to crack skulls until one or other can take no more. Charging towards an enemy who has a spike aimed right between your eyes is a different game altogether. So effective was the single horn that one almost wonders why evolution did not do Dr Dove’s work for him. An interesting side effect of the experiment was the nature of the bull’s temperament. Being secure in his strength led him to become unusually gentle and mild mannered, echoing what has so often been said of the true Unicorn’s nature.

Dr Dove published the results of his experiment in an article titled “The Physiology of Horn Growth” in the Journal of Experimental Zoology (Jan 1935, Vol 69, No 3); and another “Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn” in Scientific Monthly (May 1936, Volume 42; pages 431-436).

So perhaps we can add to the more commonly assumed sources of the unicorn legend – the rhinocerus and the narwhal – this sort of natural or artificial “unicorn”, ordinary horned beasts that sometimes, by accident or by design, produce only a single horn.

Update January 12, 2022: Cooliris no longer exists, so no more Wall of Beasts.

Imagine you are standing in front of a wall. If you look to your left or right, you can see that the wall stretches out far into the hazy distance. On the wall are arranged a series of pictures, all of bestiary beasts. If you move closer, you can see more detail, and a note appears below the picture to explain what you are seeing. You can walk along the wall in either direction, and as you do, more pictures come into view. You can stroll along looking at the beasts, stopping to examine one here and there.

Sound like fun? Well, now you can do it! Virtually, anyway. The Medieval Bestiary is now Cooliris enabled, giving you the wall of beasts.

Cooliris? What’s Cooliris, you ask plaintively. Cooliris is a browser extension that lets you browse a set of images displayed on the virtual wall of beasts described above. The extension is free, easy to install, and safe. It is available for Windows and Mac (sorry, penguinites, no Linux version yet), and for the more common browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari). Of course the highly intelligent readers of this blog only use Firefox, but if you are forced by unfortunate circumstances to use the inferior Internet Explorer, it will still work.

Anyway, the Firefox logo shows a fox with its tail on fire, which is something that could readily happen to Reynard, and thus Firefox is the right browser for this site. QED.

Back to Cooliris. You can download and install it from the Cooliris site; instructions are here. Once you have it installed (mere seconds for blissful Firefox users, longer for sad Internet Explorer users), you can go to the Beasts index page (the only page Cooliris enabled so far), then click the Cooliris icon in your browser’s toolbar or click the Cooliris icon near the bottom of the page. The wall of beasts will appear;  the pictures are in alphabetical order by beast name, from Amphisbaena to Yale. You can “walk” along the wall by dragging the slider at the bottom of the page. When you see a beast you would like more information about, click the picture to zoom in and see the notes; you can also click the “Jump to page” icon near the bottom of the screen to zip to the main page for that beast.

More pages will be Cooliris enabled in the future. Problems? Tell the Beastmaster!

A surprising number of medieval animals were thought to have a magical body part, or to have a magical object embedded in them, or to be able to produce a magical object. These magical beastie bits were, of course, much sought after, and often doomed the beastie that had them. In this ?-part series, we will examine some of these magical thingies.

Asp eying a large carbuncle, which
clearly did not come out of its head.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KA 16.

Asp (or adder): The asp, aka adder, was said to have a blood-red, glowing stone in its head, called the carbuncle. “Carbuncle” means something like “little glowing coal”; it may have been the garnet or almandine. Exactly what the carbuncle was used for is not stated, but that its use was magical is implied by who is said to seek it: conjurers or enchanters. Magicians, in other words. According to some accounts, the carbuncle was said to be in the dragon’s head — there was general confusion between dragons and other serpents — and that it had to be taken from a live dragon, since it would turn to dust if the dragon/asp stopped breathing. Taking a stone from the head of a live, breathing dragon — or a venomous asp, for that matter — would have been a bit impractical, so the beast had to be put to sleep. For the dragon, this was done by burning drugged grass outside the dragon’s den; for the asp, the enchanter would sing or recite a spell in the asp’s hearing. The asp knew full well what those tricky magicians were after and how they meant to get it, so it would press one ear to the ground and plug the other one with its tail to avoid falling under the spell and losing its carbuncle. A good strategy for a beastie with no thumbs to stuff in its ears.

Imperious eagle with a geode.
Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º.

Eagle: Some kinds of eagles have a stone called the eagle-stone (aëtites or gagites) built into their nests; this stone can survive fire without loss of virtue, and is useful in many cures. The stone is large and has another stone inside it, which can be heard to rattle when shaken. It may be the geode, which is hollow and can have loose rattly things in it. Says CW King in The Natural History of Precious Stones and Gems (1865): “The best kind were asserted to be only found in the nests of eagles, which could not breed without their aid; hence their name. They, for this reason, were of the greatest benefit to women in labour; a notion which even Dioscorides appears to endorse. The substance itself … was one of those calcareous hollow concretions, sometimes white, sometimes tinged with iron, well known to geologists; and which appear to be accidental for­mations, not petrifactions of older organised bodies.” The eagle-stone was called the pregnant stone, because of the second stone inside it, and was said to promote successful birth. The stone is also useful, according to Dioscorides, in detecting thieves: bread is made containing the stone, or sprinkled with powder made from the stone, and suspected thieves are made to eat the bread; the guilty one will be unable to swallow even a mouthful.