Being a translation from a Latin Bestiary of the twelfth century, made and edited by T. H. White (1954).
The crocodile is an animal with four feet, amphibious, generally about thirty feet long, armed with horrible teeth and claws. Its dung provides an ointment with which old and wrinkled whores anoint their figures and are made beautiful, until the flowing sweat of their efforts washes it away.
The fox is a fraudulent and ingenious animal. When he is hungry and nothing turns up for him to devour, he rolls himself in red mud so that he looks as if he were stained with blood. Then he throws himself on the ground and holds his breath, so that he positively does not seem to breathe. The birds, seeing that he is not breathing, and that he looks as if he were covered with blood with his tongue hanging out, think he is dead and come down to sit on him. Well, thus he grabs them and gobbles them up.
The Sirens are deadly creatures. They entice the hearing of sailormen by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep. At last, when they see the sailors are deeply slumbering, they pounce upon them and tear them to bits. It used to be common belief that everything on the earth had its counterpart in the sea. Why should there not be men in both? Mermen? And if men, why not kinds of men? Why not bishops, for instance? The Bishop-fish was accompanied by the monk-fish in his retinue.
There is an animal called the Hyena, which is accustomed to live in the sepulchres of the dead and to devour their bodies. Its nature is that at one moment it is masculine and at another it is feminine, and hence it is a dirty brute.
It was Adam who first gave names to animals, calling each and all of them something or other, by trial and error, according to the sort of nature which each of them had.
There is an animal called an Elephant, which has no desire to copulate. Elephants protect themselves with ivory tusks. No larger animals can be found. The Persians and the Indians, collected into wooden towers on them, sometimes fight each other with javelins as if from a castle.
Bees have stings and can produce poison as well as honey, if provoked. In their thirst for revenge, they lay down their lives in the wounds which they make.
Horses and men fighting. The spiritedness of horses is great. They exult in battlefields; they sniff the combat; they are excited to the fight by the sound of the trumpet. Inflamed by the war-yell, they are spurred to charge. They are miserable when conquered and delighted when they have won. They recognize their enemies in battle to such an extent that they go for their adversaries with a bite.
There is a bird called the Ibis which cleans out its bowels with its own beak. It enjoys eating corpses or snakes' eggs, and from such things it takes food home for its young, which comes most acceptable.
The whale lifts its back out of the open sea above the watery waves, and then it anchors itself in the one place. Sailing ships that happen to be going that way take it to be an island, and land on it.
The Perindens is a tree in India. Doves delight in the produce of this tree, and live in it, feeding on its fruits. Now the dragon is an enemy of doves, but it fears the tree they live in, and its shade too, nor can it approach either the tree or its shadow. If, however, a dove happens to be found outside the tree-shade then the dragon kills it.
A beast is born in the Indies called a Manticore. It has a threefold row of teeth meeting alternately: the face of a man, with gleaming, blood-red eyes: a lion's body: a tail like the sting of a scorpion. It hankers after human flesh most ravenously.
A B C
The New England Primer taught American Puritans how to read. Published in the late 17th century (and used as a teaching manual into the early 1900’s), the Primer is composed of stark moral texts, prayers, rudimentary spelling aids, and simple, evocative, woodcuts. The Primer’s alphabet, where each letter is represented by a rhyming couplet or triplet, has received the most critical attention.
The alphabet exists in a number of different editions—my illustrations combine couplets from the 1727 and 1768 texts. While many rhymes remain unchanged (the entry for Z, “Zaccheus he / Did climb the tree / His Lord to see,” features in every known edition), early secular lines are abandoned in favour of Biblical lore. For example “The Cat doth play / And after slay” (for C) becomes, in 1768, “Christ crucified /For sinners died.” Similarly, “Nightingales sing / In time of spring” has been replaced with “Noah did view / The Old world and new.” My selection in these cases is guided by personal preference. Where more subtle differences exist, I have consistently used the later, more sinister or severe rhyme. For example, H’s “My book and Heart / Shall never part” becomes “My book and Heart / Must never part.” My favourite example of these small, but telling, alterations involves a tense change: “Peter denies / His Lord and cries” reads in the 1768 edition as “Peter denied / His Lord and cried.” There is a sense of finality in the later text—Peter’s act of betrayal is complete. In the earlier edition, he may deny, cry, and simultaneously hope for Divine intervention or forgiveness. He is still in the process of transgression, and may therefore alter his behaviour and redeem himself. By 1768, the reader is confronted with a man who has wholly committed himself to sin, a man who has been forced to look back on his actions and weep with despair.
The finality conveyed by the verb’s past tense is indicative of the Primer as a whole. One of the themes that remains unchanged over the text’s various incarnations is the seriousness of childhood sins. Children are reminded throughout of the imminence of death (“Youth’s forward slips / Death soonest nips”), that there is a point at which it will be too late to repent.
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