Dragons, Dogs & Amadillos?

[Koen G]

Hi Linda
My own interest in these creature is mainly in the illustrative tradition: where did these images come from? It is clear that the entire Cantimpré tradition (i.e. later Cantimpré manuscripts but also translations/adaptations like the Buch der Natur and others) can all be traced back to Valenciennes 320.

If you look at it starting from Valenciennes 320, you see that the images from this manuscript got spread far and wide. Somewhere along the way a few of them were used in the VM: the armadillo, the lobster, possibly also the mermaid, the bull, the large feline... all of the relevant types are found in the Cantimpré tradition. Stylistically the best matches are found especially in 15th century German/Alsatian circles. My fascination has been for a while to find out more about the exact source that was used for those VM images.

As you and Nick suggest, text may help in finding better sources. But this is not something I have researched yet (been spending most of my research time on TTR).

As I wrote in the blog post, Marco translated the Kylion as follows:

Kylion is a rather marvelous sea animal, as Aristoteles says, in which it is believed that either nature erred or changed its usual order. But it is not the case to believe that nature erred: indeed it designed everything well and all things were created in a right and appropriate way. In fact, while in all the animals on earth, small all large, it placed the liver at the right and the spleen at the left, in kylion it placed the spleen at the right and the liver at the left.

Now, the Karabo is from the Valenciennes MS and it has the "head down" feature people are often looking for, so it may be interesting to know what this text says as well. I'll attach it below (text from: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )