As repositories for knowledge received about the natural world from Greco-Roman texts and traditions of learning, and Christian allegorical interpretations from the Physiologus, they were enormously influential. their specific iconic markers) and context – as well as in some of the content included in sermons preached in monastic and secular spheres. 24 (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020), 607-36.īestiaries developed the richness of the medieval Christian imagination, the nature of contemplatives’ memory, and their spiritual literacy – that is, their ability to discern the meaning of images of beasts in art, architecture, and other medieval material cultural media based on the beasts’ depiction (esp. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Vol.
My peer-reviewed chapter, “ The Life of Christ in Medieval Bestiaries: Imagining the Griffin, Lion, Unicorn, Pelican, and Phoenix,” now appears in Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time: Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions, ed. From my mother, I learned that mothers are artists. Her pens had special, pointed nibs that she dipped in black inkwells, from which flowed many precious words, often from scripture and sometimes from poetry. She would write fancy scripts and make lovely flowers, gilded with silver or gold from her tiny paint pots, and create something beautiful: a wedding invitation, a birth announcement, a wall hanging, a bookmark. The light table illuminated a lined page behind an unlined parchment page so that my mother could write a straight script across the parchment without marking lines on the parchment itself.
My father made a light table for her where she laid down her pages and, bent attentively over the light, she wrote. When I was a little girl, I used to watch my mother. My article, “ Mothers as Artists,” with my poem, “Gold Sparrows,” now appears in Midwifery Today 135 (Fall 2020).
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