Medieval Animal Lore.

White, Beatrice

doi:10.1515/angl.1954.1954.72.21

Angl

1954

DOI: 10.1515/angl.1954.1954.72.21

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Medieval Animal Lore.

Beatrice White¹

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“…10,1o 21,35,36,37,61,62 U4 Even the unsophisticated churchgoer, overwhelmed by a sermon inspired by a bestiary tale, could seek relief by gazing up at a unicorn in the stained glass window or resting his head against a lion carved on the end of the pew.…”

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Medical Lore in the Bestiaries

Forbes¹

1968

Med. Hist.

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SoME time in the first part of the Christian era, perhaps as early as the second century, there emerged a curious collection of zoological fables and religious moralizations called Physiologus."5 It may have begun as a group of tales about animals and their attributes. The number of different creatures originally was about forty.'67 The Physiologus was copied repeatedly and, in time, was greatly expanded, clerical compilers adding to the moralizations, which became more and more elaborate-and lengthy. Because such a manuscript was a kind of 'book of beasts', it acquired the name bestiarium or bestiary. Physicians took a hand with it, which was not surprising, since in the Middle Ages educated medical men were also clerics.57 They were familiar with the ideas of Pliny, Solinus, Placitus Sextus, Isidore, and others about animals, their habits, and the supposed virtues of animal preparations in medicine. As a result, some of the special curative powers described by classical authors were gradually attributed to certain of the bestiary animals.** Finally the moralizations disappeared from the bestiaries and there was left a welter of fact and fiction, hearsay and imagination, about a whole zoological garden of real and supposed creatures ranging from ants to dragons to elephants, as well as about healing plants and stones. From all this eventually emerged, thanks to the labours of indefatigable if credulous encyclopedists, the first zoology books since the classical period. Such, for example, were the De animalibus of Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, the Buch der Natur of Conrad von Megenberg in the fourteenth century, and Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium in the sixteenth century.1'25"49 Authorities agree that the bestiaries were widely read. The original Greek Physiologus is lost, but its earliest descendants, a sturdy progeny, exist today in manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgic, and Arabic, most of these versions and translations having been made by the fifth century.'5 The * This research was supported by a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies and by grant LM-O019,

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Medical Lore in the Bestiaries

Forbes¹

1968

Med. Hist.

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Endomeiosis in parthenogenetic lines of Aphids

Cognetti

1961

Experientia

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The genic view of the process of speciation

2001

Journal of Evolutionary Biology

1,127

1,254

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The unit of adaptation is usually thought to be a gene or set of interacting genes, rather than the whole genome, and this may be true of species differentiation. Defining species on the basis of reproductive isolation (RI), on the other hand, is a concept best applied to the entire genome. The biological species concept (BSC; Mayr, 1963) stresses the isolation aspect of speciation on the basis of two fundamental genetic assumptions – the number of loci underlying species differentiation is large and the whole genome behaves as a cohesive, or coadapted genetic unit. Under these tenets, the exchange of any part of the genomes between diverging groups is thought to destroy their integrity. Hence, the maintenance of each species’ genome cohesiveness by isolating mechanisms has become the central concept of species. In contrast, the Darwinian view of speciation is about differential adaptation to different natural or sexual environments. RI is viewed as an important by product of differential adaptation and complete RI across the whole genome need not be considered as the most central criterion of speciation. The emphasis on natural and sexual selection thus makes the Darwinian view compatible with the modern genic concept of evolution. Genetic and molecular analyses of speciation in the last decade have yielded surprisingly strong support for the neo‐Darwinian view of extensive genetic differentiation and epistasis during speciation. However, the extent falls short of what BSC requires in order to achieve whole‐genome ‘cohesiveness’. Empirical observations suggest that the gene is the unit of species differentiation. Significantly, the genetic architecture underlying RI, the patterns of species hybridization and the molecular signature of speciation genes all appear to support the view that RI is one of the manifestations of differential adaptation, as Darwin (1859, Chap. 8) suggested. The nature of this adaptation may be as much the result of sexual selection as natural selection. In the light of studies since its early days, BSC may now need a major revision by shifting the emphasis from isolation at the level of whole genome to differential adaptation at the genic level. With this revision, BSC would in fact be close to Darwin’s original concept of speciation.

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Medieval Animal Lore.

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Medical Lore in the Bestiaries

Medical Lore in the Bestiaries

Endomeiosis in parthenogenetic lines of Aphids

The genic view of the process of speciation

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