kykvendi

I have yet to write a post that pertains to the reason for which I created this blog (although I've had a long-harboured desire to start one, albeit one devoted to my passion for food, sharing recipes, talking about chocolate a lot etc.). That reason being to study medieval bestiaries! ... in the context of digital humanities which I'm still not sure about but willing to eventually try!

I have never conducted research, nor read up on bestiaries much at all, until choosing to make them my focus for this course. I don't suppose my interest in bestiaries stems from anything more peculiar than what any human being would find intriguing about them. The more illuminated a manuscript is- the more decoration and imagery it contains, is all the more a wonderful an object to behold. Because bestiaries are moral as well as visual tools, most of them bear drawings of the creatures discussed in the text. As inveterately curious beings, we humans have always desired and sought to understand the world around us, including the myriads of creatures who dwell in every ecosystem on earth. I have always been an animal lover and when I was wee(er) I planned on becoming a veterinarian when I grew up! That was until science and math became a plague o'er my existence. But I was (am) the little girl who picked up the tiny broken bodies of birds that got drunk off the fall-fermented berries on our trees and flew into the sky that tragically did not continue through our living room window-pane...  and buried them with all the funerary rites our backyard afforded amidst my own pained ululations. I used to dig up worms, catch frogs and snakes, give them a cute name and then proceed to mercilessly chase my little sister (she is not as fond of the supra dictus) around the yard with them.  When I was five or six my Dad started taking me horseback riding at the Marten's ranch outside of town, and either stupidity, audacity, or naiveté would inspire me to crawl under the corral gate when he wasn't looking and toddle right into the centre of a gathering circle of geldings. I would rub their velvety noses with my little doting hands and giggle when they tried to eat my hair. I have a useless talent for recognizing obscure breeds of dogs and may jump and point in the excitement of spotting an 'irish setter' or a 'lakeland terrier'. Everyone always said I had an odd, disney princessque 'way with animals' and it's true, like many people, I love animals and I believe somehow, they can sense our emotions. It's the only reason I have for why I wasn't trampled by horses in true Svanhildr fashion. Humankind can and has learned a lot from animals or at least has used them didactically- a process that began before antiquity, was carried on into the Middle Ages and very much exists in modern and post-modern culture. This is a notable feature of bestiaries, which provide their audience not only with a description of the nature of an animal (as it was then understood), but moreover with how and what this creature tells us about good and bad which, to medieval folks, was heaven and hell, salvation and sin, ThePopeGod and Devil. But providing actual pictures of the creatures was imperative to the function of bestiaries as a didactic tool. The author of The Aberdeen Bestiary writes that he paints the pictures of the beasts "to improve the minds of ordinary people, in such a way that their soul will at least perceive physically things which it has difficulty in grasping mentally; that what they have difficulty comprehending with their ears, they will perceive with their eyes." This quotation also sounds curiously similar to the purpose assigned to the stain glass windows of medieval minsters and cathedrals all over Europe and Britain...

So what is it about animals that makes them apt subjects for teaching us about morality? Why does Aesop use a lion and a mouse to show that clemency does not go without reward or that one should "treat others as you would have them treat you"? How does Beatrix Potter's "Tale of Benjamin Bunny" teach children to heed their parent's word?

Thoughts?