Lee Raye's Blog

These maps show the distribution of wildlife in Britain and Ireland around 250-500 years ago. They come from The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife (preorder a copy here). They are under copyright and should not be copied or reposted without permission. If you refer to them in your work please cite me (Raye, 2023). A new map will be added to this list each month, so please follow me on Twitter or Mastodon to get updates. These versions of the maps are provisional – they are subject to change in publ...

My latest book is now available to buy on Amazon!

ANIMALS OF SCOTLAND
By Robert Sibbald
Translated by Dr Lee Raye

Ancient Scottish nature comes to life in this new translation of Robert Sibbald’s classic natural history. Animals of Scotland was the first ever wildlife handbook for Scotland. Written in Latin three hundred and fifty years ago, this forgotten text has only now been translated into English by Dr Lee Raye of the Linnean Society.

This text describes a pivotal moment in Scottish hi...

Badger (Meles meles) photographed by Mark Robinson, CC-BY 2.0. Colour analysis is mine.

I’m currently working on translating and analysing a seventeenth century natural history text called Scotia Illustrata by Robert Sibbald. It’s lots of fun but there are occasional bits I have trouble with. This week I looked at how sophisticated his colour terminology is, and found something very surprising…

Sibbald uses some colours which are easy to understand like caeruleus (‘cerulean’, blue). However,...

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In my last blog post I announced I had found funding to start a research project looking at a seventeenth century Latin Natural History text. I am now well underway, kindly sponsored by the Antiquaries of London and the Alice McCosh Trust.
Robert Sibbald’s (1684) Scotia Illustrata is a really important text. One of the reasons for this is that it gives a full catalogue of wildlife found in seventeenth century Scotland. Most naturalists of the time period wanted to just write down every spe...

A journal article I wrote last year has just been published in Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research! The article discusses the environmental aspects of a modern fantasy novel called the Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings.

You can read the full article here for free, or read an explanation if you keep reading:

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If you are a regular reader you will know that modern literature is not one of my usual research interests. I do really enjoy reading fantasy novels thou...

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Scotia Illustrata: pre-industrial Scotland, is a postdoctoral research project run by recent Cardiff University postgraduate Lee Raye, starting on July 1st 2016.

This will be the first ever project to fully translate and comment upon a pre-Linnean Natural History from Britain.

Robert Sibbald’s Scotia Illustrata (1684) provides a full record of Scotland’s natural resources in the years before the Industrial Revolution.

The first phase of the project has been generously funded by the Society...

Species: Some cold turtles, seen off the coast of the Orkney Islands, probably leatherbacks (Demochelys coriacea), also some chilled-out pet tortoises (sp. unclear).

Source: Scotia Illustrata (Scotland Illustrated), a complete geography of Scotland written in early enlightenment Scotland by Robert Sibbald.

Date: First published 1684 CE.

Highlights: This blog post introduces, translates and comments what I believe to be the earliest record of a marine turtle (most probably a leatherback) from...

Species: Several, most importantly seagull (Larus argentatus) and cuckoo (Cuculus canorus).

Source: Two Old English lyric elegies: ‘The Seafarer’ and ’The Wanderer’.

Date: Seafarer c.850, Wanderer c.900 AD. (Klinck, 1992:13-21)

Highlights: Tolkien’s totally stole the idea of “sea-longing” from medieval poetry.

Species: Pests, game,  scavengers and royal beasts.

Source: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, The Acts for the Preservation of Grain, The Values of Wild and Tame.

Date: Medieval to Early Modern, c.1100-1566.

This week’s blog post is a guest post at the Academy for Distance Learning, where I have been challenged to provide a summary of Britain’s strangest laws in 500 words or less

Species: One black hauthorne (unearthly Crataegus monogyna / Crataegus laevigata) and one generic thorn (most likely the same species). These bushes are, strangely both used by knights to store their weapons.

Source: ‘Sir Gareth’ one of the tales from Le Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory.

Date: Le Morte Darthur was probably complete in manuscript form by 1460 CE, and was first published by Caxton in 1485.

Highlights: A significant portion of the plot of ‘Gareth’ is concerned with the main charac...