Bestiary (York, early 13th century)
MS 61
Omnibus animantibus adam primus vocabula indidit ‘Adam, the first man, gave names to all living beings’
Bestiaries were such popular illustrated books in the Middle Ages that manuscripts survive in a relatively large number and in a variety of languages. St John’s Library holds two very beautiful, but very different bestiaries. This one from York is the older and more luxurious of the two. The content is based primarily on Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae but also includes significant materials from Ambrose, Rabanus Maurus, and Solinus, who relied heavily on Pliny (Badke). Natural history components and etymological descriptions of the animals’ names are often accompanied by Christian allegorical interpretations. For example, the lamb (agnus) recognises (agnoscere) its mother anywhere by her voice, while the he-goat (hircus) looks out of the ‘corners of the eyes’ (hirqui) because of his lustful nature (and his blood is so hot that it melts diamonds). There is no distinction between real-life animals and fantastical creatures, such as the griffin, mermaid, phoenix, and unicorn. In the mid-16th century, ‘the era of the bestiaries ended […] marked by the wide-spread dissolution of monasteries in Europe’ (Dines, p. 2). As we shall see, another factor that contributed to the end of the bestiary genre may have been the introduction of a shift away from purely traditional knowledge to new observations or, perhaps more accurately, the beginning of a rethinking in which new observations would contest and gradually supersede traditional knowledge.
The York Bestiary is believed to be the only surviving book from the Benedictine Priory Holy Trinity in York (Hanna, p. 82). It is not known how the manuscript ended up in the possession of William Paddy, royal physician and St John’s alumnus, who bequeathed it to the College as part of his large private library in 1634. Like some of the first manuscripts given to St John’s, the York Bestiary appears to be one of the comparatively small number of books that survived the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.
Further Resources
Full digitization available at Digital Bodleian
Descriptive catalogue record available at Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries
Blog post available at St John’s College’s Library website