bestiary

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Folio 7r from the Rochester Bestiary (13th century, British Library , Royal MS 12 F XIII)

A bestiary ( neuter from Latin bestiarius 'concerning animals, animal' ; from Latin bestia '[wild] animal' ) is a medieval animal poetry that allegorically combines actual or assumed properties of animals, including mythical creatures , with Christian doctrine of salvation. The description of creatures such as the dragon , the unicorn , the basilisk and the caladriuscan be found in the bestiaries between the representations of bears, lions and elephants. Bestiaries are often richly illustrated.

history

The forerunner of the bestiaries was the Physiologus from the 2nd century. B. by the bestiaries Philippe de Thaons , Guillaume le Clercs and Gervaise de Fontenays became popular again.

Effects

With Richard de Fournivals' prose "Bestiaire d'amour", which allegorically depicts Fournival's love for a lady, the first secular bestiary was created.

In the 19th century, Aloys Zötl , a master dyer of the Danube Monarchy from Upper Austria, created a richly designed bestiary.

In the 20th century the form of the bestiary was freely taken up again, among others by Guillaume Apollinaire with “Le bestiaire ou le cortège d'Orphée” (1911) and Franz Blei with the “great bestiary of modern literature” (1924). Nowadays, many artists design their own bestiaries, with detailed, often fantastic, animal drawings.

In pen and paper role-playing games , books about the creatures that appear in the game are also known as bestiary.

Bestiaries

Web links

Commons : Bestiaries  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Bestiarium  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

literature

  • N. Henkel, Chr. Hünemörder, W. Seibt, GR Mermier, WP Gerritsen, RH Robbins, Chr. Hannick, JM Plotzek: Bestiarium, -ius, Bestiarien . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages (LexMA). Volume 1, Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-7608-8901-8 , Sp. 2072-2080.
  • Franz Reitinger: Aloys Zötl or the animalization of art. How a dyer of the Danube Monarchy became a surrealist . With a text by André Breton. Brandstätter, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85498-358-1 .
  • Matthias Bumiller: Bestiary. Kind, nature & quality of all animals . Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2007, ISBN 978-3-7995-3537-3 (using old animal books, Matthias Bumiller tells interesting and curious things about native and exotic animals)
  • Michel Pastoureau: The Medieval Bestiary. Translated from the French by Birgit Lamerz-Beckschäfer. Primus, Darmstadt 2013, ISBN 978-3-86312-050-4 .
  • Kerstin Borchhardt: Böcklins Bestiarium: Mixed creatures in modern painting (= Bestiarium Böcklinarum: Myth and Evolution in the Work of Arnold Böcklin ), Reimer, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-496-01565-9 (Dissertation University of Jena 2013, 310 pages, 32 countless pages of plates, illustrations; 24 cm).
  • Annette Simonis: The kaleidoscope of animals. On the return of the bestiary in the modern and present. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8498-1207-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Ernst Georges : Comprehensive Latin-German concise dictionary . 8th, improved and increased edition. Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1918 ( zeno.org [accessed November 27, 2019]).
  2. ^ Ps.-Hugo von St-Victor: De bestiis et aliis rebus. In: German National Library. German Digital Library, accessed on November 27, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Ana Roldán: Bestiary Chapter III, 2013 , accessed February 4, 2016