5

Long-Leggedy Beasties

Memory as Classification

Imagine a dragon.

Chances are, if you live in the Western world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) you likely picture in your mind a huge, lizardlike creature with a short snout that breathes fire; a long tail with a spearlike end; a pair of giant, leathery bat wings; and possibly a second, smaller pair of wings on the creature’s neck.

It is one of the great shared images of mankind. And it pops up almost everywhere, in numerous movies, in television programs, and in literature. It shows up in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, where the dragon Smaug guards the One Ring and, later, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where the Ringwraiths ride dragons across the sky in search of Frodo. Most recently, this archetype of dragonhood shows up in the Harry Potter series, the most popular collection of children’s books ever written.

One of the most unusual and unforgettable images of this type of dragon appears in yet another classic children’s book, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this time as the Jabberwock. Carroll’s illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, already a famous political cartoonist, had some fun with this fearsome creature by putting it in a waistcoat and giving it the buckteeth and myopic eyes of a Victorian Oxford don (which Carroll, in fact, was). But note, despite these appurtenances, the Jabberwock still retains the conventions of the dragon we all know.

So where did this image of a dragon that we all carry around in our minds come from? What was the source for these very similar images from fantasy novelists to Hollywood spanning more than one hundred years?

In fact, the idea of dragons may be as old as mankind—and centuries old in their current form. The first written stories of dragons come from the Hittites in about 1500 B.C. Dragonlike creatures—Leviathan, the red beast in the book of Revelation—show up in the Bible as well. So, too, do they appear in Greek myth—most famously the Hydra. Add to that the rich history of the wingless but flying snakelike dragons in India, China, and Japan, each with its own unique iconography, and the strange dragonlike worms and serpents that show up everywhere from Scandinavia (the lindworm) to Aboriginal Australia (the rainbow serpent) to the Aztecs (Quetzalcoatl), and you have what seems to be an image of some kind of dragon in the collective unconsciousness of mankind.

This universal appearance of dragons in all of the world’s cultures has actually convinced some people that dragons must have once existed in the flesh. But even if dragons have never been real, the question still remains just where the notion of such creatures came from. Theories range from actual dinosaurs surviving into the age of Homo sapiens, to exaggerations about existing large reptiles such as crocodiles, large snakes, and monitors, to early attempts to make sense of huge fossil bones.

Probably no single explanation will ever be found. What we do know is that dragons took on very different personas in different cultures. In the Far East, dragons often represent good luck and health. They are also typically benevolent. In Mesoamerica the feathered serpent represents resurrection and knowledge. American Indians saw the dragon as a symbol of wisdom and immortality; to the Australian Aborigines, the dragon ruled the natural world.

But beginning in Sumer and Babylon, and moving across the Levant and into Europe—and then around the world—the dragon was a markedly different creature: dangerous, evil, representing the forces of darkness. Some of mankind’s oldest stories involve various Hittite and Sumerian heroes fighting and defeating dragons.

It is a story that never seems to grow old. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings aside, consider the run of dragon movies over the last twenty-five years, from Dragonheart and Dragonslayer to the science-fiction Reign of Fire. Indeed, such iconic films as Alien and (ironically) Godzilla are essentially variations on the theme of the Western dragon. Dragons also make regular appearances in modern fantasy novels and, of course, in the hugely popular cult role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

So, if we are unlikely to ever really know where or when the idea of “dragon” arose, is it at least possible to determine where this enduring image of the bat-winged, fire-breathing evil dragon came from? Considering it is likely to be the single most important mythical creature in the fantasy menagerie of mankind’s collective memory, wouldn’t it be nice to know the source of this image?

Well, as it happens, we can almost precisely date that moment: A.D. 1260. And we can see the birth of the modern dragon. (See frontispiece.)

It’s a little longer in the tail than the stereotypical dragon we know, though the finlike projections, similar to those found on Chinese and Japanese dragons, are an interesting addition. The extra set of wings, now on the pelvis, is in the wrong place, too. But those are minor differences. What matters is that, unquestionably, this is very much the dragon of our collective memory. It is also astoundingly similar to Tolkien’s drawing of Smaug, from its chin whiskers right down to the trefoil tip of its tail.

And yet, this paradigmatic image of a dragon, the wellspring of a million images and a billion nightmares, was created eight hundred years before Tolkien put pen to page.

This image of a dragon is, in fact, a hand-painted illustration—an “illumination”—in a thirteenth-century book buried in the medieval collection at the British Library in London. The book itself goes by the distinctly unexciting name of MS Harley 3244, and it is one of a class of books known as medieval bestiaries.

As the dragon illustration suggests, these bestiaries are among the most remarkable books ever created. And although few people have ever heard of them, much less held one of these books in their hands, the bestiaries not only are key players in the history of memory, but, as with the dragon, they haunt our memories even today. And as much as the great Gothic cathedrals do, they capture the spirit of the thirteenth century—when the belated arrival of the recorded memories of the ancient world suddenly poured into a Western Europe already regaining its cultural strength. The Middle Ages, begun in darkness and misery, would come roaring out in glory and set the stage for perhaps the most celebrated era in human history: the Renaissance.

A VIGOROUS NEW WORLD

Though they are not generally known, historians often recognize three distinct periods of renewal and prosperity during the seven hundred years of the Middle Ages. The first was the Carolingian era under Charlemagne, that brief light in the Dark Ages. The second, far more obscure, was the even shorter-lived Ottonian dynasty—also known as the “Year 1000 Revival”—in Germany and Italy. It is best known for its production, in “scriptoria” in monasteries at places like Lake Constance, of some of the most beautiful miniatures and illustrated books ever.

But it was the third of these eras, which took place in the twelfth century, that would prove to be the most enduring and influential. The description of this remarkable era by early twentieth-century medievalist Charles H. Haskins still says it best:

[It] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry.1

Even Haskins, in studying the era, was astonished by the pace of change—all of it driven by the arrival of waves of ancient texts found in Arabic and Byzantine libraries:

The century begins with the flourishing age of the cathedral schools and closes with the earliest universities already well established at Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford. It starts with only the bare outlines of the seven liberal arts and ends in possession of the Roman and canon law, the new Aristotle, the new Euclid and Ptolemy, and the Greek and Arabic physicians, thus making possible a new philosophy and a new science. It sees a revival of the Latin classics, of Latin prose, and of Latin verse … and the formation of liturgical drama. New activity in historical writing reflects the variety and amplitude of a richer age—biography, memoir, court annals, the vernacular history, and the city chronicle.

A library of ca. 1100 would have little beyond the Bible and the Latin Fathers, with their Carolingian commentators, the service books of the church and various lives of the saints, the textbooks of Boethius and some others, bits of local history, and perhaps certain of the Latin classics, too often covered with dust.

About 1200, or a few years later, we should expect to find, not only more and better copies of these older works, but also the Corpus Juris Civilis and the classics partially rescued from neglect; the canonical collections of Gratian and the recent Popes; the theology of Anselm and Peter Lombard and the other early scholastics; the writings of St. Bernard and other monastic leaders … a mass of new history, poetry, and correspondence; the philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy unknown to the earlier mediaeval tradition and recovered from the Greeks and Arabs in the course of the twelfth century. We should now have the great feudal epics of France and the best of the Provencal lyrics, as well as the earliest works in Middle High German.2

Cultural collisions—Alexander conquering the Babylonians and assaulting India, Marco Polo’s opening of trade to China, the European discovery of the New World, Commodore Perry’s voyage to Japan—are almost always times of great change and innovation. But the twelfth century may have been unique because it was European culture colliding with its own past. The result was a four-hundred-year encounter whose implications extend to the present, and reach around the Earth … and even into outer space.

In the words of historian of science Lawrence M. Principe, “European scholars embarked on a great ‘translation movement’ in the 12th century. Dozens of translators, often monastic, trekked to Arab libraries, especially in Spain, and churned out Latin versions of hundreds of books. Significantly, the texts they chose to translate were almost entirely in the areas of science, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy.”3

The resulting flood of books that poured into Europe profoundly affected European memory in a number of different ways. One was completion: Many of the ancient texts that had managed to survive the centuries in Europe were only fragments of larger texts; the new discoveries completed many of those texts … and sometimes transformed their meaning in the process. Another was expansion: European scholars of the Middle Ages often saw only one or two works in the corpus of the greatest ancient writers—such as the Greek playwrights—and thus sometimes diminished those figures in relation to other, lesser writers. Finally, there was substitution: Europeans naturally learned to admire the best of what they had, only to find what appeared to be superior competitors to those works.

The classic example of this last was the discovery by twelfth-century academics of the works of Aristotle. They had long since learned to exalt Socrates and Plato above all other ancient philosophers—even at the risk of being accused of heresy. The cost of that mind-set had been centuries of single-minded focus on dialogue, governance, and moral decisions.

But the rediscovery of Aristotle, with his concentration on empiricism, classification, and natural science, galvanized Medieval Europe. Here was a philosopher whose orientation was perfectly attuned to the new pragmatic and results-oriented Europe of the High Gothic age. In short order, Aristotle became the de facto presiding secular spirit over the era, his grip on the emerging young universities almost complete, and his perspective, while initially liberating, in time becoming its own constraint on innovation.

But that was three hundred years down the road. For the late Middle Ages, the discovery of Aristotle (and Euclid, Archimedes, Thales, and scores of other ancient worthies) was a staggering act not only of recovery of the continent’s cultural patrimony but also of unprecedented liberation. Not only were great thoughts and ideas, instructions, and exegeses almost always more impressive than what was already in the libraries of Europe, but as often as not they also contradicted established views. Having been taught to worship the wisdom of the ancients, the more maverick minds of Europe quickly realized that these new texts freed them from the constraints of the status quo.

But first, the thinkers of twelfth century Europe had to get their arms around just what treasures lay in those thousands of “new” volumes. As one might imagine, given the small number of academics in Europe at the time, and the mountain of texts to be explored, this was no easy task. Indeed, it took the rest of the century … and even then the work was incomplete and often inaccurate.

THE MEMORIES YOU KEEP

Three immediate tasks faced twelfth-century academics. The first was selection. Where should they start? In a culture that was in the process of rebuilding itself, and which was also dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, the choice was inevitable: religion and science.

The second was translation. Now that they knew what they were looking for, the researchers had to convert the texts to readable form as quickly and as accurately as possible. This translation triage gave first priority to Latin, as there was no shortage of priests who spoke the language; then Arabic because that was the language of the rewritten texts; and only after that, Greek. This priority system had one very important side effect: It led one of these academics, Leonardo of Pisa, to import Arabic numerals—and thus at last give Europe a system of numbers and mathematics as powerful as its words and writing.

But there was a downside to this translation prioritization as well: Other than Latin-speaking scientists and philosophers, almost everything being translated was already a secondhand translation to Arabic from Latin or Greek—or worse, third-hand from Greek to Latin to Arabic and now back to Latin or the vernacular. Like the childhood game of “telephone,” all of this translation and retranslation inevitably allowed a lot of error and confusion to enter into the texts. And in their headlong rush to absorb all of this new information, twelfth-century academics didn’t have time to do much fact-checking.

The final joint task was compilation and interpretation. Europe was suddenly awash in texts, an ocean of memories—Greek philosophy and mathematics, Roman scientific treatises, ecclesiastical texts recovered from the wilder shores of western Europe, Byzantine histories, Arab medical documents based upon the core texts of the Romans Galen and Ptolemy, regional histories across the continent from the Venerable Bede in the British Isles to the Byzantine court archivists … as well as a new kind of long-form poem—the national epic—that was arising from the growing sense of nationalism among Europe’s kingdoms. These national epics included France’s The Song of Roland, the King Arthur stories that begin with Godfrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, the definitive written versions of Beowulf, Germany’s The Song of the Nibelungs, and (perhaps not coincidentally) Japan’s The Tale of the Heike.

Everyone knew the overload situation was going to get worse. Nobles and churches were building private libraries—making the job of scholar or scribe a well-paid profession … and thus attracting more talent. A new paper mill had been built in Spain at the beginning of the century, and new ones were popping up all over southern Europe. Meanwhile, the first great commercial empire, the Hanseatic League, was forming across northern Europe. It would ultimately spread goods, knowledge, and accounting books across the continent. And when, a few generations hence, Marco Polo would open the path to China, this trade would go global. Finally, and not least, a wholly new set of social mores—“chivalry”—was sweeping the nobility with its implicit directive to not only be more heroic and virtuous but also be at least marginally literate.

There was so much diverse and unorganized information suddenly available (not to mention the growing demand) that it was almost impossible to simply dive in and explore without getting utterly lost. What was needed was a kind of “metaorganizational” scheme that could be laid over all of this knowledge to organize it by its major themes and then pigeonhole each item within those themes. The two solutions devised by those twelfth-century scholars are still with us today.

The first of these was the university. Centers of learning, in the form of cathedral and monastic schools, had been around since the sixth century, acting as a kind of oasis of learning amidst the growing chaos around them and as repositories for books and records. Thus, even from the beginning, the proto-universities were in the memory business.

It would be five hundred more years before real universities emerged in places like Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Padua. This was not a coincidence: The explosion of new knowledge and memory begun in the twelfth century had suddenly given schools of higher learning a new and much greater purpose. Now their task was not just to educate but to preserve, translate, and investigate.

The students at these universities were no longer taught just the old trivium but a second phase, the quadrivium—arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music—much of it made possible by the newly discovered texts of the ancients.4 The best students were even invited to continue on into the study of philosophy and theology—meaning that the very best scholars were not only trained in the higher arts but also skilled in practical science.

The first known university “class” actually took place at the University of Bologna in about 1087 and was taught by a professor named Imerius. His subject was, appropriately enough, that of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s update of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which had just been rediscovered less than two hundred kilometers away in Pisa, where it had likely sat unnoticed for centuries until the city was conquered by Florence.

But more than teaching these recovered texts, the faculty and scholars at these new “guild” universities (many of them financially supported by royalty in the latest intellectual arms race) were also heavily involved in the recovery process itself. Professors joined monks on the trips to Spain, Rome, and Constantinople in search of lost books, and increasingly it became their task to perform the translations and interpretations of what they found.

In the short term, this made universities the new centers of memory in European culture, enshrining the book, and more particularly the library, as the new heart of university life. This was true both metaphorically and literally. Look at Oxford, arguably the world’s first true university: Even today, rising above the city’s “dreaming spires” is the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the circular Palladian masterpiece originally designed not just to hold the university’s science library but to stand like a beacon for the library and ultimately the university it represents.

DIGESTING THE PAST

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the primary task of Europe’s scholars was to capture and collate all of this newly recovered memory—and there was more than enough to keep every professor, monk, and university student on the continent busy. But what then did you do with all of this digested knowledge? It was too expensive and labor intensive to try to reprint everything in Latin or the vernacular, and there simply weren’t enough accomplished readers around to use such books. The next best solution turned out be the other enduring institution: the encyclopedia. The twelfth century proved to be the second great Age of Encyclopedias, perhaps even greater than the third, six centures hence. The world was hungry for all of this new knowledge—and impatient to put it to use. And it proved an almost insatiable market for digests, compilations, books of aphorisms, religious histories, lives of saints, natural histories (surveys of mechanics, zoology, and so on) and encyclopedias.

Now, encyclopedias had been around since Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in the early days of the Roman Empire (he appears to have been editing it when he died investigating the eruption of Vesuvius). And though there were other similar works of writing by Romans in the years afterward, only Pliny’s treatise made it through the Middle Ages. Isidore’s Etymologiae also made it—and would prove even more influential than Pliny’s work as a template for encyclopedias. One of the features that made Isidore’s work so valuable was that the great scholar, in his race to save the world’s memory, had done little transformation on his source material, often just grabbing entire chunks of text from other writers and stuffing them into the Etymologiae … a boon to scholars five hundred years later because they could read snippets of important, but still-missing works.

There were also newer encyclopedias available, including the giant Byzantine lexicon, the Suda; an encyclopedia of science by the Arab physician and pharmacist Abu Bakr al-Razi, and an encyclopedia of medicine by Ibn Sina. As noted, the Chinese had also created The Four Books of Song, though it was still unobtainable. And the Ming dynasty, under Emperor Yongle, was about to embark on one of history’s greatest feats of memory recording: the 370-million-handwritten-character, 11,000-volume Yongle Encyclopedia.5

But the recovery of older compilations wasn’t the only scholastic work undertaken in this encyclopedic century. It seemed like every university in Europe was also busy preparing whole new encyclopedias and compendia. Many of these new works not only imitated the form of the older works but also borrowed a lot of their content. One of the most commonly used sources, especially for the new natural histories, was Isidore, and it was especially true for the bestiaries that began capturing the popular imagination at the end of the twelfth century.

GOD’S ZOO

The bestiary, or more precisely Bestiarum vocabulum, was an extremely popular type of book that enjoyed a brief interval of influence from about 1180 to 1290. Breathtakingly expensive—many would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money—few were ever created. Today, only a couple hundred survive as cherished possessions of some of the world’s greatest libraries and museums.

A simple description of a bestiary is that it is a book that combines pictures of animals from around the world with descriptions of their behavior and their role in the larger ecosystem.

But that doesn’t begin to describe the experience of actually reading one of these volumes. The best of them contain dozens of exquisite miniature paintings, many of them masterpieces. As for the animals themselves, this isn’t some modern field guide: Rather, the selection of creatures ranges from the prosaic (mouse, cat, and dog) to the fabulous—unicorn, phoenix, manticore, and, of course, the dragon. Indeed, the very fact these mythical creatures continue to survive in our common memory and are so deeply embedded in our culture that they are likely to survive for at least another millennium is in large part thanks to these bestiaries.

But there is much more. For modern man, reading a medieval bestiary can be a profoundly disorienting, even disturbing, experience.

This is the medieval mind at full flowering, a glimpse of how sophisticated and elegant a society can be constructed without the rigors of experimental science. The epistemology that underlies the bestiaries is as complex as any modern scientific taxonomy, and the metaphysics of the world it portrays are as subtle, irrational, and counterintuitive as anything found in string theory or particle physics.

Just as the modern mind often conflates the early Middle Ages (the Dark Ages) with the later, so, too, it often mistakenly assumes that the people of the Middle Ages were simple and ignorant. That is, as stupid serfs at the mercy of a brutal nobility. But medieval society was as multilayered (if not as specialized) as our own. And to dismiss that world as solely one of fat, stupid, and drunk farmers dancing and groping in a Breughel painting; otherworldly and self-obsessed clergy; and haughty, overjeweled nobles in tights and codpieces is to ignore their present-day counterparts at NASCAR races, Hollywood celebrity events, Congressional subcommittee hearings, and university faculty meetings. Knowledge changes, but intelligence does not. Medieval man, though usually less literate and numerate than modern man, had a mind, and an imagination, as powerful as our own.

Indeed, over the last two centuries, a number of important writers, artists, and philosophers—Henry Adams, G. K. Chesterton, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Henri Bergson to name a few—have suggested that we have lost a lot with the rise of the modern industrial world and that it is quite possible that for all of the difficulties of that era, medieval man had a richer inner life, a deeper and more comfortable relationship with the natural world, and most likely was even happier than we are.

But entering into the medieval mind, experiencing the world through those eyes, and dreaming the dreams of a man or woman of the Middle Ages grow ever more difficult by the year. The pace of life has accelerated almost continuously for the last eight centuries, and now—thanks to the World Wide Web and the microprocessor—has begun to move at a pace beyond any biological system, including the human brain. In our world, a single image may draw fifty million viewers in the course of an hour on the Web, our telescopes can look back 6 billion years to the beginning of the universe, and we plot the trajectories of particles so small that they compare in size to a human being as we do to the solar system.

We also live in a universe where God, if He exists at all, has retreated to the dimmest corners of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the cosmological constant. Thanks to quantum physics, we are no longer sure about the existence of anything, much less able to describe it with certainty. Once-obvious truths, such as causality, are now gone. In fact, the very notion of truth itself is under assault from every side. Darwinian selection and genetics tell us that human beings are merely a chemical accident. We are a tiny mistake in a far corner of a universe that we probably won’t ever understand, and that itself seems to have no meaning and no purpose.

But for medieval man, humanity, at the indulgence of a watchful God, stood at the very center of the cosmos. Man was the master—and custodian—of all living things. Even the sun and stars wheeled around him, their orbits as perfect as the mind of the Creator Himself. Moreover, all of Nature was a vast puzzle palace created for man to decipher God’s will—a theater in which every creature exists to offer lessons, good and bad, about God’s grace, Christ’s salvation, and of the Resurrection.

This was the world of the bestiaries. Because of their rarity, their beauty, and most of all their strangeness, they have long been the subject of academic research and speculation. Yet there are still huge holes in our knowledge about them.

For example, we don’t really know who invented them, who owned them, even exactly what they were used for. It had long been assumed that they were created by artisans for very wealthy families (or groups of neighboring families), mostly in England but also in France. In this theory, bestiaries were a combination of prestige object, travel book, cabinet of curiosities, and theological instruction book. They might be displayed to impress visitors, entertain adults, and instruct children—via stories and images that both thrilled and delighted—on the importance of becoming good Christians.

But there is a second, newer theory that holds that few families—even the wealthiest nobles—would have been willing to pay the price for such a volume, and that the bestiaries were instead commissioned by the wealthiest abbeys and monasteries. There they would have been used, perhaps, for the moral instruction of aristocratic novices and the entertainment and edification of the priests and monks.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. The bestiaries were hugely expensive, and thus their prospective audience, in a world without much of a commercial class, would have been restricted to a very small number of very powerful people, be they noble families or large institutions—the way, say, a private jet is today.

NATURE’S PRIMEVAL REALM

Novelist T. H. White, best known for his sequence of novels about King Arthur, The Once and Future King (the basis for the movie The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot), was also an important medievalist. And he was entranced by medieval bestiaries—especially the copies at his alma mater, Cambridge. In 1954 he published the only book on the subject ever written for the average reader, The Book of Beasts, about the best of the Cambridge bestiaries, “MS. li.4.26.”6

Besides being one of the finest-illustrated—and, thanks to White, best known—of all of the bestiaries, the MS. li.4.26 (hereafter the Cambridge Bestiary) is also one of the few whose origins can be fairly accurately placed. Its story is a glimpse of what the memory business was like at the end of the twelfth century.

As tradition tells it, the Cambridge Bestiary was created at the Abbey of Revesby in the North Midlands—a region in north-central England that today has no official status but is usually considered to include the northern parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire (the latter of which has its own historic resonances: Robin Hood reputedly began operating out of Sherwood Forest not long after this bestiary was written).

White believed the Cambridge Bestiary to have been created about A.D. 1130. He based this date on several features of the book, including the appearance (and nonappearance) of some animals in its pages, and the apparent transition in its pages from illuminated to nonilluminated initial letters—the former technique forbidden at that time by the abbey’s very austere order, the Cistercians.

That would put the book’s creation during the reign of the last Norman king of England, Stephen. But later scholarship has moved that date later, to the end of the twelfth century. That would put it during the reign of a much more famous king, Henry II—one of the greatest English monarchs, the first Plantagenet, the husband of the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the man who ordered the death of Thomas à Becket. Some contemporary researchers suggest that the Cambridge Bestiary might even have been written as late as the reign of Henry’s son, the less impressive but even more famous Richard the Lionheart.

Those illustrious names may provoke specific images in the mind of the reader: crenellated castle walls, elegant ladies in waiting, colorful and rowdy jousts, and, perhaps, Errol Flynn in green tights. The reality was much different. White quotes the Edwardian historian George Macaulay Trevelyan:

What a place it must have been, that virgin woodland of old England, ever encroached on by innumerable peasant clearings, but still harboring God’s plenty of all manner of beautiful birds and beasts, and still rioting in a vast wealth of trees and flowers.…

In certain respects the conditions of pioneer life in the Shires of Saxon England and the Danelaw were not unlike those of North America and Australia in the nineteenth century—the lumberman with his axe, the log shanty in the clearing, the draught oxen, the horses to ride to the nearest farm five miles away across the wilderness, the weapon ever laid close to hand beside the axe and the plough, the rough word and ready blow, and the good comradeship of the frontiersman.

… Every one of the sleepy, leisurely garden-like villages of rural England (today) was once a pioneer settlement, an outpost of man planted and battled for in the midst of nature’s primaeval realm.7

This may sound idyllic, but there’s much more. This was not too much longer than one human lifetime after William the Conqueror, the Norman invasion, and the slaughter and purges that followed. England still felt like an occupied country, the Anglo-Saxon natives seething under the rule of a French-speaking nobility.

Thanks to the disputed succession—and the subsequent weak leadership—of Stephen, England collapsed into a civil war called, tellingly, “The Anarchy.”

The Anarchy is the world of the Brother Cadfael novels: nobles switching loyalties back and forth, forcing their serfs into service as soldiers and for sieges, wholesale slaughter, and torture. According to Trevelyan, entire districts in the country were “depopulated.” A few miles away from the Abbey of Revesby, in the Fenland, Geoffrey de Mandeville and his army were living off the countryside, plundering, raping, and murdering everyone in their path.

In Peterborough, a monk whom White suspects may have known the authors of the Cambridge Bestiary captured the horrors of the era in the last, tragic entries to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the great history first commissioned by King Alfred four centuries earlier:

They greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work [building] castles, and when the castles were finished they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they took those they suspected to have any goods, by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for the gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable, for never were any martyrs tormented as these were.8

This is a world of random violence, social chaos, and desperate prayers for salvation: to the local lord, to the king, and most of all, to God.

Thus, in picturing the Abbey of Revesby, we should be imagining less a quiet and ordered place—its peaceful monks toiling away, day after day, to the precise schedule set by the prayer bells—and more a walled bastion, the men struggling through long hours to create products that would earn the abbey money and save their souls in the process. The monks creating the Cambridge Bestiary were probably less contemplative than vigilant, even as they worked regularly scanning the horizon for men in helmets or on horseback.

A CIRCLE OF SCRIBES

The actual production of the Cambridge Bestiary and other bestiaries is also different from what most people might imagine it to have been. The lone monk scribe toiling away in a tiny cell is mostly a myth. Producing bestiaries was a business, for which an abbey could take advantage of its intellectual capital—literate men with artistic skills and a lot of time on their hands—and turn it into operating capital. Given that the abbey could earn the modern equivalent of $50,000 to $200,000 per book, all with a labor overhead of essentially zero, it’s not surprising that production was less like a solitary craftsman and more like a proto–assembly line.

White suggests that most bestiaries were created by dictation: “Since books could only be duplicated by hand, it was reasonable to duplicate as many as possible at the same time, by dictation. Several scribes seated at their desks round the Scriptorium could produce a limited edition as the text was read out to them.”9

Among the evidence in support of this argument is that the errors that regularly crop up in the bestiaries are typically those—“eximiis” instead of “et simiis,” is White’s example—that most probably result not from a misreading, but a mishearing. There is also the fact that the surviving bestiaries can be neatly lumped into a handful of “families”—that is, groups of three or four that feature similar narratives and images.

The notion of a single author is also wrong for many of these books. White notes that the Cambridge Bestiary appears to have been written by two scribes, whose handwriting differed slightly. One can almost picture dictation teams working in shifts, those not writing perhaps working the fields or cooking meals.

This image of an early assembly line is further supported by the fact that the writers of the bestiaries had no part in the illustrations. That work was done by the “limner”—the artist. We don’t know for certain which came first, the pictures or the words—whether the scribes wrote the text leaving holes to be filled later with pictures, or vice versa. But certainly there must have been rules about the apportionment of real estate on the pages. That there are often divergences between the descriptions of animals in the text and the way they appear in the accompanying illustration suggests that communication between the two parties was probably rare, and competition was not unknown. And in keeping with the notion of mass illustration, it is also important to keep in mind that while many of the illustrations are superb, occasionally approaching genius, they are not artistic masterpieces of the highest order like those found within the next great publishing fad, the Book of Hours—a notable example being that of Jean, Duc du Berry, a masterpiece that took a century, and cost a true royal fortune, to create.

No, the greatness of bestiaries lies in the fact that they aren’t the creation of specialized court painters and isolated academics but skilled craftsmen immersed (whether they liked it or not) in the daily life of the society around them. Those same monks and illustrators likely milked the cows that morning before settling down at their easels, and might have spent part of the afternoon out in the fields. Moreover, as wealthy as their clients might be—whether it was an abbey or a wealthy noble family—the authors and artists of the bestiaries knew they were creating for a popular, rather than a scholarly, audience. This led them, to the benefit of readers then and now, to give barely hidden priority to the entertaining over the edifying, and the sensationalistic over the educational.

It was not an easy life, but by the standards of twelfth-century England (and France), it was a bearable one. And though their work would remain anonymous, the monks must have taken satisfaction that they were producing work of the highest order in the eyes of both man and God.

Imagining this world sends White into a reverie of impressions:

Seated at their high desks like the professional craftsmen that they were; with quill pens and knives to trim them; with iron-gall inks, on skins which were difficult to prepare; with the strong downward strokes of their ‘I’s … with their attention concentrated upon the lector who dictated to them, or not concentrated, according to the mood of the moment; with no pauses to indicate the pauses of the dictation; with their words running over from one line to the next or

b e i n g s t r e t c h e d o u t

like this to fill up a space; with their quotations from scripture, which, if well known, were merely indicated by the initial letters of the words; immured in not comfortable barracks, since the Cistercians were a self-denying order; surrounded by the dangers of a civil war and the difficulties of frontier life; with their tongues between their teeth and their blunt, patient, holy fingers carefully forming the magic of letters …10

THE BEST BESTIARY

Arguably the greatest of the bestiaries is called Bodley 764. Probably created in Salisbury, it appears to be a cousin of the Cambridge Bestiary that entranced T. H. White.

It isn’t the most beautiful of the bestiaries—in fact, it isn’t even the most beautiful at Oxford: Faculty members sometimes jokingly referred to it as “our second-best bestiary” after the older and flashier one at the Ashmolean Museum nearby.11 But in terms of completeness and the overall quality of illustrations, its balance between text and art, and most important, its immeasurable influence on literary history, Bodley 764 has no equal among the bestiaries. It is the sourcebook for much of our modern fantasy.

There is a wonderful, almost supernatural symmetry to Bodley 764. For one thing, as an ultimate creation of the encyclopedic aspect of its era, it has made its home for the last six hundred years within the ultimate manifestation of the university aspect of that same era: the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

And if, unlike the dragon in MS Harley 3244, it features no single illustration that we can point to and say that is the source of some modern iconic image, Bodley 764 is even more important in its influence on human memory. Residing as it did in the “Bodley,” it served as the portal into the world of bestiaries for generations of students and academics—among the latter being Professors Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.

If you wanted to list the prime sources of modern fantasy, you wouldn’t have to look much further than Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia—and, to include Lewis’s most famous descendant—the Harry Potter books. In other words, the multiplicity of modern, nearly identical-looking dragons, phoenix birds, and other mythical creatures in the modern world is no coincidence. Nor is the fact that, again with perfect symmetry, Bodley 764 can be found in the oldest part of the Bodleian: Duke Humfrey’s Library. The first “modern” library, it was donated by the brother of King Henry V in 1487 and was used in the filming of the Harry Potter movies.

Held in one’s hand, Bodley 764 is a normal-sized, unimpressive, leather-bound book, and in heft surprisingly light given that it is both made of animal-skin parchment and acknowledged as the most complete bestiary in the British Isles. Despite being most complete, it is still missing its title page, which has denied generations of researchers the name of its original owner.

Martin Kauffmann, the librarian who watches over Bodley 764, describes it as being “almost alive.”12 Thanks to its parchment pages, the book swells slightly in size and its pages soften on humid days; then it becomes stiff and bristly when it is dry.

Leafing through the book is to fully appreciate that Bodley 764 is indeed memory made flesh. The parchment pages are shockingly supple for their age, and one can feel the crisp face of one side of each sheet and the soft, slightly fuzzy side of the other. In a world of photolithography it is sometimes easy to forget that each of the exquisite miniatures within is in fact an original painting, the work of an artist’s hand at the time of Crusades. Only the luminescent colors, made from ground jewels, and the gold-leaf highlights, brighter than any reproduction, remind the viewer that these pages were written nearly two hundred years before Gutenberg.

The illustrations themselves, and the narratives that describe them are an entertaining, eccentric, and sometimes confusing mélange of accurate protoscientific observation, sheer fantasy posited as reality, and an overarching (and often, to modern eyes, maddening) need to present everything in the natural world as a lesson devised by God to edify mankind. And while it can be interesting to find mermaids described in the book as naturally as geese, or to see boar tusks sprouting out of the trunk of an elephant, what is most surprising is to find the behavior of common European creatures so inaccurately described. Thus the pelican draws blood from its own breast to bring its dead young back to life; bears lick lumps of flesh into cubs; hedgehogs catch falling fruit on their spines; and the salamander crawls through a fire unburned. The modern reader can’t help but ask: How did they get these everyday events so wrong? Didn’t they see?

The fact is, they saw what they wanted to see—as do we. And the world they wanted to see was one suffused by the glory of a loving but stern god. The descriptions they chose to believe in the face of real-life evidence were those of the ancients: much of them derived from Isidore’s Etymologiae. Eight hundred years before, Isidore had set out in a desperate attempt to save the world’s memory, and now his dream—mistakes and all—had been realized.

Medieval men and women believed in absolute truth, in the Word of God, and in redemption. Those beliefs gave their lives meaning, they provided succor in the face of the world’s hardships, and especially offered hope of a better world beyond. In that world, even the lowliest person mattered: After all, hadn’t God filled the Earth, sea, and sky with creatures to bring the Word to all men, just as Christ had died for all of mankind’s salvation? You had only to decipher the messages delivered in the world around you, as explained by a book like the bestiary, and you could find the answer, you could learn God’s plan for you. To the medieval reader, the bestiaries were a pathway to mankind’s memory of God. For modern man, the bestiaries are a unique glimpse into the memory of medieval man.

If a single book seems a fragile vessel for us to sail upon to another world, keep in mind that Bodley 764, like its counterparts, has already managed to survive nearly a millennium. Entire empires have risen and fallen in that time; buildings constructed to last forever have crumbled to ruin; even some of the stars the scribes looked at in the sky as they huddled off to vespers have dimmed in that time. Yet Bodley 764 still looks fresh and bright with color—probably better than the book you bought last week at the mall. It may well survive as long as our dreams of dragons.

THINKERS’ THINKERS

The bestiaries weren’t the only new phenomenon created at the nexus of encyclopedias, universities, and faith. The early thirteenth century also saw the rise of a new form of learning: scholasticism.

Scholasticism was a dialectical system; it, too, was derived from the ancients—in this case, the Athenian Academy. Like Plato’s school, it thrived on argumentation, rational thinking, and precision; and like Aristotle, it sought logical and self-contained systems that could encompass all knowledge. This new philosophy swept through European universities so completely that its echoes are still heard today in college lecture halls and the “Socratic method” of teaching.

Scholasticism had been around, in nascent form, since the eleventh century, when leading scholars such as Peter Abelard and Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury had been inspired by the first translations of Greek philosophy coming out of Ireland (where the monks had been the last to preserve the language in the British Isles).

But scholasticism reached its full flowering in the thirteenth century when a flood of translated Greek works—most notably Euclid’s Elements, with its rigid logic—reached the universities of Europe. There they were read by the scholastics, among them some of the most powerful thinkers in history: Duns Scotus, William of Ockham (from whom we get “Occam’s razor”), Saint Bonaventure, and greatest of all, the Italian Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas. And it wasn’t only among Christian scholastics that these translations proved a revelation: In Spain, they were read by a young rabbi and physician named Moses ben-Maimon: Maimonides.

For each of these scholars, the Greek philosophers offered a vision of seeing and organizing the world in a new way: logical, rational, and precise. Free of all of the ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties of the medieval world. Self-contained and intellectually impregnable. And all for the glory of God. Scholasticism was, in the end, not an act of radical revolution but reactionary purification. The scholastics set out to prove that not only did God exist but that His universe was both rational and comprehensible to the mind of man.

It was one of the most difficult intellectual challenges ever undertaken—and the results remain both staggering in their ambition and stunning in their achievement. Maimonides’s fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, his codification of Jewish law, still carries canonical authority in the Jewish faith. That’s why he’s called the “haNesher haGadol” (the Great Eagle) of Judaism.

Aquinas’s influence may have been even greater. His Summa Theologica was recognized even by his contemporaries as the zenith of scholasticism, and it remains the single greatest intellectual edifice of the Roman Catholic Church—indeed, the doctrines of Saint Thomas are the Church’s own. In this amazing work, Aquinas seemed to gather together all of human memory to that date, insert it neatly into a great logical matrix, and tie it to the will of God. And like the brilliant intellectual craftsman he was, Aquinas dovetailed it all together so seamlessly that it was hard to find even the tiniest opening to attack it. One can even credibly make the claim that all Western philosophy (and certainly theology) since the publication of the Summa Theologica has been one long argument against that work.

THE END OF CERTAINTY

It can be a sad experience to speculate on what might have happened if this world of universities and encyclopedias had continued to flourish, and if the medieval world had evolved into our own along a more linear path. Would we have still had a scientific revolution but also somehow retained the richness and majesty of the Middle Ages? Would we have found a better way to integrate faith and reason? Would we still have all of the technologies that improve our daily lives while also enjoying the honor, the romance, and the courtliness? Would we still be looking at the natural world filled with both wonder and purpose—and the comfort of an awaiting heaven—that has been lost?

We will never know, because it all ended within a matter of decades. The fourteenth century would prove to be one of the most horrible and destructive periods humanity has ever known: The Byzantine Empire collapsed, as did the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China. The Catholic Church split into three parts, each with its own pope. England and France entered into the devastating 100 Years War and, thanks to the beginning of the Little Ice Age, famine killed millions.

And all of that was merely a sideshow. The worst arrived in 1347: the Black Death, killing one-third of the population of Europe.

The Europe that emerged after this series of catastrophes was very different from the one that entered it. Unlike in the fall of Rome, this time mankind’s memory had not been lost; it endured not only in the minds of survivors but also in the sturdy books that now filled royal, ecclesiastical, and private libraries throughout Europe and Asia. This time, mankind would come back—and fast.

But when it did, things had changed. God had proven Himself to be more inscrutable, and perhaps less amenable to rational thought, than the scholastics had imagined. This time, when Europe came back, its philosophy would be centered on man himself. The new goal would not be to suffuse the universe with faith, but with science.