Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T14:25:23.600Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The Book of the World at an Anglo- Norman Court: The Bestiaire de Philippe de Thaon as a Theological Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2016

Marco Nievergelt
Affiliation:
Lecturer (Maïtre Assitant) in Early English Literature and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Universit� de Lausanne.
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Bestiaries, which describe the natures of animals, birds, and stones and derive allegorical meanings from them, occupy a curious position in relation to medieval theology. The content of these books, almost always illuminated, often lavishly so, saw an explosion in popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly, but not exclusively, in Northern Europe. Up to that point bestiaries had circulated widely in clerical circles, but lay audiences increasingly sought the improving pleasure that came from learning about the wondrous creatures of the world and the spiritual messages inscribed in their behaviour by God. Increasingly translated into the vernacular, bestiaries became hybrid and mediational texts, situated between clerical and lay spheres, between theology and natural history, and between the school and the court. The diversity of their uses can be seen in the variation in form, language, and manuscript context and makes it difficult to confine them to any one modern disciplinary category. Such variety, moreover, makes it hard to offer generalizations about their content, meaning, and purpose. This article arises out of a desire to explore the relationship between bestiaries and medieval theology, particularly the question of how the allegories of beasts (seeing in the unicorn a sign of Christ or in the hedgehog a sign of the devil) were informed by ideas of a signifying natural world found amongst authoritative theologians. Bestiaries, in which creatures are sometimes read allegorically, sometimes read for moral messages, and sometimes simply described literally or proto- zoologically, can partly be explained by the fact that they imply an understanding of a created world that signifies in a similar way to the book of Scripture. The Bible describes events according to different modes of signification: the historical (the literal account of what happened), the allegorical (when what is described signifies another event in the past, present, or future), and the tropological (when what is described offers moral lessons). Even if the surface appearance, the literal sense, may seem confusing or disjointed, the exegete who has, over time, acquired knowledge of the hidden senses will begin to discover a hidden unity and coherence to the Bible.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×