{"id":718,"date":"2023-03-04T13:22:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T20:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/?p=718"},"modified":"2023-03-04T13:22:07","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T20:22:07","slug":"encyclopedic-beasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/718","title":{"rendered":"Encyclopedic Beasts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, that<\/em> was a lot of work!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this update I have added all of the animal chapters (470+) from the Liber de natura rerum<\/em> of Thomas of Cantimpr\u00e9<\/a>, a thirteenth century encyclopedia. That includes over 100 new and newly identified beasts<\/a>, 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 Biblioth\u00e8que Municipale de Valenciennes MS 320<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Beast<\/a> 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!<\/em>) typos, textual errors and formatting problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of Thomas’s sources are the mysterious Experimentator<\/a> and the even more mysterious Liber rerum<\/a><\/em>, 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<\/em> and roughly translated them to English. The complete set of quotes can be found under the Texts tab for the Experimentator<\/a> and Liber rerum<\/a><\/em> encyclopedia entries. As far as know, this is the first time this has been done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also numerous updates to the Manuscript<\/a> pages, Encyclopedia<\/a> pages, and the Bibliography<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Cantimpr\u00e9, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whatsnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestiary.ca\/chimaera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}