Lovely green whale - The first of hopefully many Tumblr posts by the students in my and JJ’s manuscript course at Leiden University.

manuscriptbook:

Worrisome Whales

This beautifully illustrated manuscript page comes from a thirteenth-century Latin bestiary, made in England, and now housed in the collections of the British Library (Harley 3244, f. 61r). The inky gothic script surrounds two images: one of a slightly troubled looking illustrator drawing a somewhat startled looking whale, and another depicting the whale on its own, emerging from the waves. 

The bestiary was a medieval book of animals, the stories of which were used for teaching issues of theology and morality to its reader. Hence we have a reason for the possibly troubled expression of the poor illustrator: in the tradition of the bestiary the whale was seen as a deceitful, monstrous creature, whose nature it was to lure sailors into its mouth and then swallow them. The whale was ultimately an allegory of the Devil, who would lure you into the depths of hell - or in the case of the whale, its belly. Another ability of the whale, according to the bestiary, was tricking sailors into thinking that it is an island. When the sailors then anchored their ship onto the whale and lit a fire for cooking, they would be dragged along and drowned when the whale dove into the depths of the ocean.

- Anna Käyhkö