Beasts and birds of the Middle Ages. The Bestiary and its legacy (review)

Reviews 133 and graphically described on the basis of ecclesiastical and literary accounts. It is a batde for survival in which the elite does notfigure,except occasionally as antagonist and sometimes as benefactor. On balance the book is wrongly tided. It is the absence of food and the allpervasiveness of death, decay, and degradation which assume the clearest dimensions as the book unfolds. Camporesi has to resort to literary sources in order to exemplify in some way the popular response to the vicious predicament he describes. Those afflicted by it had no voice, let alone one that might have survived as a retrievable source. Camporesi's theses may be 'alluring', as Porter claims, but the reader, 'stolid Anglo-Saxon' or not, could be forgiven for a lack of patience with Camporesi's rambling presentation. He is short on analysis, however impressive his array of source material. His intuitive leaps are stimulating as much as they are arresting and sometimes frustrating. Camporesi is an eclectic and original writer. H e is not a writer anyone interested in Italian popular culture can afford to neglect and his influence on the progress of Italian social history has been considerable. Later works, including La casa dell'etemitd (a study of Hell) and La came impassibile (on death and the flesh), have added to the author's influential corpus. The scale of these works is just as sweeping. Camporesi leaves the way open to scholars and researchers to take up and elaborate the many leads and intuitions which he offers the reader. Anne Reynolds Department of Italian University of Sydney Clark, W. B. and M. T. McMunn, eds, Beasts and birds of the Middle Ages. The Bestiary and its legacy, Phdadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989; pp. 224; 35figures;R. R. P. ? Florence McCulloch, Professor of French at Wellesley College in Massachusetts made signal contributions to the study of books about beasts and birds in the Middle Ages. Inspired by her endeavours, eleven scholars have written papers on the same subject and dedicated them to her memory. The volume opens with an Introduction by the editors which surveys the origin and rise of the prose and verse bestiaries as accepted literary vehicles for edification and divertissement. After a statement of current investigative trends, the broad aims of the collection become clear: to serve as a 'methodological paradigm for future bestiary research'. One may categorise the topics as mnemotechnical, codicological, iconographical and literary, although any suggestion that these subjects are treated in isolation from each other would be far from the truth. 134 Reviews Beryl Rowland's essay concerns the ramifications of the memory treatises of Antiquity, principally their adaptation by authors of bestiaries to strengthen their own didactic purposes. However, post-medieval and modern experiences involving artificial memory, as detailed in footnote 4, seem curiously out of place. Codicological problems are laid bare for a Harvard College aviary bestiary by Willene B. Clark. Xenia Muratova presents issues concerned with the production of luxury manuscripts. Specific iconographical images are investigated by Guy R. Mermier (the phoenix), Wendy Pfeffer (the nightingale), and Ldian M . C. Randall (the elephant). The relationships between bestiaries and other literary genres produce a diversified range of papers. The disputatio or debate lies behind the tide 'The duel of Bestiaries' by Jeanette Beer. The two thirteenth-century romances of Kanor and the Chevalerie de Judas Macabe provide Meradith T. M c M u n n with striking leonine characters and images. Michael J. Curley writes on animal symbolism in political prophecy as practised by Merlin. Historiography is served by Mary C. Joslin's article on the creatures that populated the Ancient World of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'd Cesar. John B. Friedman invokes praedicatio and peacocks when examining the analytical structures of the Liber de moralitatibus by Marcus of Orvieto. The volume concludes with a very informative Appendix comprising 'Manuscripts of Western medieval Bestiary versions' and 'Bibliography of Bestiary studies since 1962', the year of McCulloch's Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. Throughout the critical essays there is a pleasing absence of 'jargon'. On the other hand, a traditionalist may object to the first two persons of the Trinity being mentioned by words...