![]() Take another sheet: fold it in half again, into quarto shape. It should still already be folded in the middle: try to have the coloured side facing in. It was often used for very large volumes. ![]() This is the simplest method of forming a quire, but it relies on the sheets being cut independently to almost exactly the same size, which is hard to achieve. ![]() Were these leaves to be written up and bound, the gathering would be called a quire. Depending on the number of sheets of paper you have used, it will have either 8 leaves or 10 leaves. Each folded sheet is a bifolium, that is, two folios (leaves), and the whole pile is called a gathering. With a crease in the middle, you now have a pile of bifolia. Once you have a pile of 4 or 5, fold them all in half, putting the short ends together. Take your sheets of paper and place them one on top of another, making sure that you have blank against blank, colour against colour. This is to replicate the difference in colour and texture between the flesh side of the parchment, and the hair side. You will need several sheets of paper which are either coloured or marked in some way on one side only. The descriptions below are derived from Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (London: British Museum Press, 1992, pp. There are two ways in which this can be done. Most manuscript books contain several quires bound together. This generally involved forming them into quires or gatherings, rather like booklets. You can explore the whole menagerie at The Medieval Bestiary and in Janetta Rebold Benton’s book The Medieval Menagerie: Animals in the Art of the Middle Ages (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992).Once in possession of the sheets of parchment or paper, a scribe would make them into usable units for writing. The medieval bestiary may seem naïve to modern viewers, but it’s still a great source of delight and can inspire imagination. If an elephant could exist with massive ears and a long trunk, why not also a phoenix, who resurrects itself from its own ashes and makes such a great Christian allegory?Ī Phoenix, c 1270, The Bestiary, The J. Medieval bestiaries also include many creatures that are just plain fiction, because people had no way to distinguish between the mythical and the merely exotic. It’s no wonder then that medieval representations of crocodiles look more like wolves or lions than reptiles.Ī Crocodile, c. ![]() Most medieval Europeans, including bestiary creators, had never encountered creatures native to other lands, so they had no idea how such animals would look or act. Such tales could hardly be reliable, which is perhaps why bestiaries included animals like the bonnacon, which was thought to fling its own flaming poop in self-defense.Ī Wild Boar a Bonnacon, c. Legends, folk beliefs, and travel accounts were the main sources of information. That’s because bestiaries weren’t based on scientific observation, a concept that didn’t even exist in the Middle Ages. Turn the pages of a medieval bestiary, and you’ll encounter creatures, illustrations, and statements that would definitely surprise any zoologist today. On the other hand, the monkey had strongly negative connotations, and its lack of tail was seen to parallel the devil’s lack of Scripture.Ī Monkey, c. This was good since it was an allegory of Christ’s Resurrection. For example, the pelican was believed to peck its own breast to resurrect its dead children with its own blood. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA.Īnimals could have positive or negative attributes. So, the medieval bestiary attributed traits to animals and then made Christian moral lessons from them.Ī Pelican Feeding Her Young, c. All of these texts contained moralizing allegories about animals and other features in the natural world. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA.īestiaries were based on an early Christian text called the Physiologus and works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Aesop, and others. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA.Ī Crocodile and a Hydrus, c. It’s full of unusual information and charming illustrations about a variety of creatures. A medieval bestiary is a book about animals. Of all the medieval manuscripts, bestiaries are definitely the most fun.
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