Love, the bestial kind
It’s criminal how infrequently David Badke updates his blog on medieval bestiaries, given that it’s the only blog on medieval bestiaries, and of the few people in the world that are interested in the topic (myself being one of them), we’re starved for content. No matter! I’ll just have to be satisfied with this latest piece.
It’s a sweet discussion of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love (Bestiaire d’amour). This rare treatise on courtly love is told using stories commonly found in bestiaries, which makes for some incredibly odd ‘advice’ on romance. For example:
“[The viper] is of such a nature that it is frightened and insecurely flees when it sees a naked man, yet it attacks him and has nothing but contempt for him if it sees him clothed. You have acted in exactly the same way with me, fair, sweetest love.”
Check out the rest of the story here, or the Bestiaire here, or lose yourself in Badke’s amazing image collection here.
