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Darrera modificació: 2021-08-30
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Chardonnens, László Sándor, "Do Anglo-Saxons Dream of Exotic Sheep?", dins: Bintley, Michael D. J. - Williams, Thomas J. T. (eds.), Representing Beast in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia, Woodbridge, The Bodelly Press (Anglo-Saxon Studies, 29), 2015, pp. 131-150.
- Resum
- Even in view of the fact that early medieval ideas about the natural world are far more integrative than modern attempts to categorise it into discrete taxonomic ranks, there would seem to be a divide between the animal world that Anglo-Saxons could readily observe and the beasts that they knew about only by proxy, through religious and learned sources from the Mediterranean and the Near East. While indigenous creatures were domesticated, processed, hunted, avoided, feared or venerated, exotic animals were read about and marvelled at, and their absence from the Anglo-Saxon natural world led to them becoming the subject of metaphor and allegory. A similar distinction between animals as the output of God's creation and animals as the input for symbolic thought can be discerned in early medieval techniques to foretell the future. Taking dreams, natural phenomena, and significant moments in time as signs for future events, prognostication places that which has yet to happen on the same level of certainty as the present and the past. Whereas present-day prognostication is largely limited to weather forecasts, the Anglo-Saxons had a large range of prognostic techniques at their disposal, which first reached continental monasteries in the late eighth century, and Anglo-Saxon foundations in the ninth. These prognostications they inherited from the same Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures that provided the basis for religion and learning. Prognostication offers tools with which to interpret the future in all areas of life, from human concerns such as war and peace, life and death, health and illness, wealth and poverty, happiness and adversity, to noteworthy events in the natural world, including meteorology, agriculture and animal husbandry. This chapter examines the kinds of beasts that feature in prognostications from Anglo-Saxon England. Depending on the technique employed, prognostications may reveal the fate of animals as part of the output of a prediction, or their symbolic value as part of the input of a prediction. The former tend to be closer to the Anglo-Saxon natural world than the latter, though some Anglo-Saxon scribes interfered with the homely animal world displayed in prognostications to make the predictions seem more exotic.
- Matèries
- Màgia - Endevinació
Història natural - Animals
- URL
- https://www.academia.edu/14734825/L_S_Chardonnens_D ...
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