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Bestiaries, Past and Future

2017; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02773945.2017.1309929

1930-322X

Debra Hawhee,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Included within the folios of a seventeenth-century "commonplace book" manuscript held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, tucked between, on one side, a 98-item book list and excerpts copied from St. Augustine's City of God, and on the other, a gathering of apothegms and a tract on "How that the Law of the Gospell is more perfect than all other lawes," is a mini-bestiary. 1 The keeper of the commonplace book, Lady Anne Southwell of Cornworthy (England), frames the bestiary entries as outtakes from The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, a translation made by Edward Topsell, of Conrad Gesner's Historia Animalium, the most widely read encyclopedia of animals during the Renaissance (Ashworth 17; Ogilvie 38).Her mini-bestiary, together with her reflections on it, runs a little more than 500 words, and includes details drawn from a dozen of Topsell's 94 entries: the Manticora, the Lamia, the Turtle, the Rhinoceros, the Beaver, the Ape, the Bison, the Buffe (an elklike mammal), the Dromedary (a kind of camel), the Cat, and the Colus (a snail).Southwell's bestiary, its source, and her commonplace book itself all warrant further attention from scholars of rhetoric's histories, especially those interested in natural history, manuscript culture, women and rhetoric, rhetorical invention in the Renaissance, and of course the ever-compelling genre of commonplace books. 2 But Lady Anne's bestiary may have another illuminating capacity, inscribed as it was at the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch.