Elephants were said to have no knees; when they slept, they had to lean against a tree, and the tree in turn symbolized “tree of life,” or the pillar offaith. Lions were said to give birth to stillborn cubs, which came to life only on the third day after their birth, symbolizing the Resurrection. And so on. The
Physiologus
made no pretense at scientific accuracy; these were allegorical tales, meant to illustrate symbolic rather than literal truths.
The
Physiologus
traveled through successive generations of copyists from ancient Greece to libraries as far away as Ethiopia, Armenia, Syria, and Rome. It was in its last translation to Latin that the text took on a relatively stable form that would shape the template for a thousand-year run in successive copyists’ hands across the monasteries of Europe, eventually finding its way into Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English. During this period of northward migration, the work passed through the hands of generations of monastic scribes, evolving along the way to incorporate local nuggets of animal lore and superstition. With each successive copying, both text and image would change slightly as scribes made alterations from the original. One copy served as the basis for the next, and hundreds of small alterations eventually accumulated into significant changes. By the eleventh century, the work contained descriptions of almost double the number of beasts found in the original
Physiologus
, evolving over time through a long process of mutation. Eventually, these iterations turned the work into a whole new book, no longer called the
Physiologus
but instead the
Bestiarum
(“Animal Book”). By the time the genre reached its English heyday, it began to expand toward a proto-scientific form, including entries that found their way into the work with no apparent religious significance. Isidore of Seville’s famous
Etymologies
, for example, contained descriptive materials similar to those found in the
Physiologus
but without the Christian allegories. In these larger works, doctrine and religious interpretation had to share the stage with a more secular and straightforward view of the natural world. Thus, the
Bestiary
began paving the way for the more formal classification systems that would come later at the hands of naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon (see Chapter 9 ).
Popular demand for copies of the
Bestiary
fueled the development of inventive new reproduction techniques in the monastic scriptoria, methods that in turn allowed the work to reach even wideraudiences. English bestiaries of the thirteenth century bore remarkable similarities to one another. The text and illustrations mirrored each other so closely, in fact, that book historians have surmised that they must have been produced from common master copies. The practice of using such “model books” for the production of popular manuscripts flourished in European scriptoria of this period. In the well-known K manuscript, illustrations reveal small puncture marks tracing the periphery of each figure, along with one hole in the middle of the page—some pricked so forcefully that they penetrate through to the following pages. Samuel A. Ives and Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt have tried to trace some of these techniques through a careful examination of the physical evidence:
The central hole in the miniatures probably served to keep the leaves in exactly the same position during the puncturing process. After they were pricked, the loose sheets were laid onto the pages of the new copies of the Bestiary that were being produced at the workshop. Powder was dusted through them, the dots [were] joined, forming a fine outline drawing perhaps in light pen or thin brush stroke. This was then painted in by illuminator, using the originals as color guides. 2
This process of replication, known as the “punch-transfer” technique, marked an important breakthrough in the technology of book production. Now, scriptoria could
Physiologus
made no pretense at scientific accuracy; these were allegorical tales, meant to illustrate symbolic rather than literal truths.
The
Physiologus
traveled through successive generations of copyists from ancient Greece to libraries as far away as Ethiopia, Armenia, Syria, and Rome. It was in its last translation to Latin that the text took on a relatively stable form that would shape the template for a thousand-year run in successive copyists’ hands across the monasteries of Europe, eventually finding its way into Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English. During this period of northward migration, the work passed through the hands of generations of monastic scribes, evolving along the way to incorporate local nuggets of animal lore and superstition. With each successive copying, both text and image would change slightly as scribes made alterations from the original. One copy served as the basis for the next, and hundreds of small alterations eventually accumulated into significant changes. By the eleventh century, the work contained descriptions of almost double the number of beasts found in the original
Physiologus
, evolving over time through a long process of mutation. Eventually, these iterations turned the work into a whole new book, no longer called the
Physiologus
but instead the
Bestiarum
(“Animal Book”). By the time the genre reached its English heyday, it began to expand toward a proto-scientific form, including entries that found their way into the work with no apparent religious significance. Isidore of Seville’s famous
Etymologies
, for example, contained descriptive materials similar to those found in the
Physiologus
but without the Christian allegories. In these larger works, doctrine and religious interpretation had to share the stage with a more secular and straightforward view of the natural world. Thus, the
Bestiary
began paving the way for the more formal classification systems that would come later at the hands of naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon (see Chapter 9 ).
Popular demand for copies of the
Bestiary
fueled the development of inventive new reproduction techniques in the monastic scriptoria, methods that in turn allowed the work to reach even wideraudiences. English bestiaries of the thirteenth century bore remarkable similarities to one another. The text and illustrations mirrored each other so closely, in fact, that book historians have surmised that they must have been produced from common master copies. The practice of using such “model books” for the production of popular manuscripts flourished in European scriptoria of this period. In the well-known K manuscript, illustrations reveal small puncture marks tracing the periphery of each figure, along with one hole in the middle of the page—some pricked so forcefully that they penetrate through to the following pages. Samuel A. Ives and Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt have tried to trace some of these techniques through a careful examination of the physical evidence:
The central hole in the miniatures probably served to keep the leaves in exactly the same position during the puncturing process. After they were pricked, the loose sheets were laid onto the pages of the new copies of the Bestiary that were being produced at the workshop. Powder was dusted through them, the dots [were] joined, forming a fine outline drawing perhaps in light pen or thin brush stroke. This was then painted in by illuminator, using the originals as color guides. 2
This process of replication, known as the “punch-transfer” technique, marked an important breakthrough in the technology of book production. Now, scriptoria could
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