The Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc
Available Text Formats
About this Text
The Bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc was written around 1210. It is in rhyming verse in the old Norman-French language. It was translated into modern English by George Claridge Druce (1860-1948), a member of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Druce wrote extensively on Bestiary subjects; many of his articles are available in the Digital Text library.
The book this text is taken from was printed in 1936, but was not actually published. As it says on the cover, “Printed for Private Circulation”, meaning Druce had it printed and distributed it himself, presumably to other members of the Society of Antiquaries and other interested parties. There is no indication of how many copies were printed, but it cannot have been a large number; the book is now quite rare. This is the first known digital facsimile of the book.
Druce based his English translation on the Norman French edition produced in 1892 by Dr. Robert Reinsch (Le Bestiaire. Das Thierbuch des Normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc). Reinsch primarily used the manuscript British Library, Egerton MS 613 for his transcription of the poem.
The book by Druce was digitized by David Badke in 2024 from one of the printed copies, which has a presentation from Druce written on the cover: “Capt. Herbert Procter with the translator’s kind regards, October 1936”. Scans were made of each non-blank page, including the seven pages of plates. The scans were then processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, to make the final PDF file searchable, and the plates were digitally enhanced to make them clearer.
There are three versions of this edition available.
- The facsimile edition has scanned images of every page, including the illustrations. It is a searchable PDF file.
- The text edition has only Druce's introduction and the text of the poem, and does not include the illustrations. It is normal text, not scanned page images. The page numbers do not match the original Druce book, though the line numbers in the poem do.
- The parallel text edition has the Norman-French poem from the Reinsch edition, displayed side-by-side with Druce's English translation. It includes only the poem, not the introductions or other text from either book. It is normal text, not scanned page images. The page numbers do not match the original books, though the line numbers in the poems do.
Copyright
The print edition of this text was printed in London in 1936; the digital facsimile and text edition were produced from a copy of the original book in 2024 by David Badke. The original print edition by George Claridge Druce is believed to be in the public domain.
The print edition of Le Bestiaire. Das Thierbuch des Normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc by Robert Reinsch was published in Leipzig in 1892, and is in the public domain.
This digital facsimile and text editions are released under a Creative Commons license, which allows for any non-commercial use without further permission.
Creative Commons Licence
