In the occidental medieval literature, the literary genre of bestiary can be considerate a collector of mirabilia. After a short resume on the general features of this genre, in this paper I try to identify the addressees of the late XIII century prose bestiary Libro della natura degli animali and its cultural provenance. The widespread presence of preachers’ image in a lot moral interpretation of animals features (particularly in the cock, the panther, the swan, the partridge and the calandra lark’s chapters), which are different compared to the traditional interpretations of Latin bestiary, points out that this work was destined to assist this category in their preaching activity, but in a second phase the numerous connections to many aspect of the middle class and merchants’ life, contained in some chapters (especially the chapters of stork, crow and wolf), allowed a direct fruition within these social classes, as the codicological characteristics of the witnesses written after the middle of XIV demonstrate. So this bestiary was conceived to make accessible the interpretations of animal world to a low educated audience, and its anonymous author had to remove all the theological, exegetic and mystic references usually employed to explain the animal features that could be referred to the world of mirabilia. This action was achieved through the elimination of the words relates to the semantic sphere of meraviglioso, and interpreting the only two occurrences of these words (in the chapters of phoenix and weasel) as a testimony of God’s power and glory. - [Abstract]

Language: Italian

Locators: ISBN: 978-2-503-55515-7