This iconographical study in French examines BNF français 14969 of the versified Bestiaire divin of William clerk of Normandy, associated with Kenilworth, which was produced in southern England circa 1265-1270 for a noble patron, Eleanor de Quincy, widow of the Count of Winchester, coming to France in the fourteenth century. It is one of twenty-five witnesses of the moralizing text based on the Greek Physiologus,derived in turn from the Greek Septuagint, and the Vetus Latina, rather than the Jerome Latin Vulgate. Besides Le Bestiaire divin, William also wrote Le Besant de Dieu, Les treis mots and La Vie de Tobie, among other works in octosyllabic verse, filled with Biblical allusions, moralizing allegories and satires involving all the social classes.
The Alexandrian Physiologus in Greek became the Latin version in four families of which this version is B, specifically H-B-Is, having additions from Isidore of Seville, functioning both as Bestiary and as a Dictionary of Biblical life forms, for exegetical use in sermons (in this text called sarmun), translated into European vernacular languages often with exotic images. Another Norman, Philippe de Thaün, a century earlier had already translated the Physiologus Bestiary into French verses, and more faithfully. This manuscript under study has both theBestiaire divin and a Lapidary by different scribes. The Bestiaire has 3669 verses with miniatures in the court style of tinted drawings of the Franciscan-inspiredDouce, Lambeth, and Gulbenkian Apocalypses of this period, and 90 decorative capitals. It is compared with all the other illuminated manuscripts of this text in Cambridge, London, Lyon, Oxford, and Paris. The book has copious footnotes.
Bestiaries, related to Aesop’s Fables and Ambrose’s Hexameron, as well as Isidore’s Etymologiae, came to be seen as books written by God with their moralizing lessons to teach virtues and vices, as a Biblical meta-language, a hermeneutic leap from the literal to the allegorical sense. This manuscript of thirty-five chapters illustrated with 77 miniatures which couple together in larger form the allegorical reading to the smaller miniatures of each animal in question, has the double images being seen simultaneously on the page. The book proceeds by describing each animal, such as the lion, antelope, swordfish, calandra, pelican, eagle, phoenix, ant, siren, ibis, fox, unicorn, beaver, hyena, crocodile, serpent, deer, ass, monkey, panther, whale, ostrich, dove, salamander, dragon, elephant, mandragora, etc. and their interpretation in turn, giving their sources. The manuscript witnesses are then listed on pp. 141-142, followed by a 23-page bibliography, then by the 13 plates of 74 rather small but beautiful figures in color.
This work parallels one I am editing on the illustrated Bestiary sections in Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor/Il Tesoro, in French and in Italian. Brunetto’s version depends far less on allegorizing, instead seeing its encyclopaedia as a kind of empowerment menagerie, such as assembled by Frederic II, as an Adamic controlling and naming of animals, which is well discussed in the two volume facsimile edition of St Petersburgh National Library MS Fr. F.v. IIIn 4, published by M. M. Moleiro in Barcelona in 2000, and its four accompanying essays by Russian and American experts presented in Spanish and English, with the text translated into Spanish. A simultaneous publication, interesting for its source studies but lacking the necessary iconographical study, is Davide Chiolero, Il Bestiario del Tresor di Brunetto Latini (Fano: Il Cerchio SRL, 2022).
Rémy Cordonnier has provided a useful volume for art historians, manuscript scholars, Anglo-Norman scholars and particularly for scholars of medieval Bestiaries.