The Northumberland Bestiary and the Art of Preaching

Abstract

The thirteenth-century Northumberland Bestiary (NB ), one of the richest bestiaries of all English-Latin manuscripts, preserves an unidentified sermon on "How the Sinner May Be Pleasing to God," which begins "quotienscumque peccator," and which, according to many scholars, is totally irrelevant to any bestiary. This paper will isolate four kinds of ars praedicandi models in NB to argue that not only is the quotienscumque sermon not irrelevant, but that sermon material in this bestiary forms a pervasive subtext that reflects the themes and rhetorical directives of the artes praedicandi handbooks and is responsive to the contemporaneous papal injunctions regarding clerical instruction. Several passages in NB are explicitly interpreted for boni precatores, and these passages often relate to its quotienscumque peccator sermon. All of this suggests that NB was a preaching tool -a source of exempla in sermons and a teaching resource for anyone responsible for training clerics in the cura animarum. As beasts serve man in nature, so the bestiary text serves his salvation, as fodder for the didactic sermon that clerics will preach to their flocks. Cynthia Whiteand secular anecdotes from a wide array of sources. Why the character of the Physiologus changed so dramatically in this period, who used bestiaries, many of them gorgeously illuminated, and what their intended purpose was are questions that scholars talk around. This paper will study closely the organization and disposition of material in the thirteenth-century Northumberland Bestiary (NB ), a unique and exquisite English-Latin example, to suggest that bestiaries were rich sources of sermon material, and that they were either designed as, or evolved into, homiletic aids for preachers. 2 Written about 1250, in a small, early gothic book hand, NB is one of the richest of all English-Latin bestiary manuscripts. Its 74 leaves (it is missing two) contain 112 finely drawn and colored miniatures (one full-page and several half-page or larger) and a few marginal notes in hands of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. There are blank pages at the end with sixteenthand seventeenth-century notes that allow us to trace the manuscript's later history. On fol. 73v are pen trials presumably written by the Robert Turges named in the document, a bailiff of Dorsetshire in 1508-09. On the opposite page is the seventeenth-century signature of Grace Fitzjames (d. 1725) whose great-granddaughter Elizabeth (1716-76) brought the manuscript to Alnwick Castle when her husband, Sir Hugh Smithson (1714-1786), was created first Duke of Northumberland in 1766. Thus its history can be traced from Dorset ca. 1500, to 1950, when the manuscript was first made public at the anniversary meeting of the Roxburghe Club at Syon House. 3 There, according to E.G. Millar, the then keeper of manuscripts of the British Museum, the Duke of Northumberland produced "a splendid and quite unknown English bestiary of c.