Sea monsters in the works of Thomas of Cantimpré and
Bartholomeus of Solencia,
known as Claretus
In his encyclopedia De natura rerum Thomas of Cantimpré (1201-1272) intended to realize the program
formulated by Augustine in De doctrina christiana, viz. to
collect and classify all information about animals, plants, trees, stones and
all species mentioned in the Scriptures. In comparison to the scientific work
of his great contemporary Albertus Magnus, Thomas
aims at a wider public. Apart from instructing his audience about the elements
of human anatomy, zoology, botanics, mineralogy and
cosmology, he wants to entertain them by a variety of curiosities. This aim is
especially evident in the 6th book which deals with strange sea
monsters. While he found most of his information on fish in Aristotle’s Historia animalium or
Pliny’s Naturalis historia, he
followed other Greek and Roman authors in selecting the animals with an
unusual, marvellous or frightening appearance and
behavior, and classified them as monsters. In this he was followed by the
Bohemian encyclopedian Bartholomeus
of Solencia, known as Claretus,
in his Glossary (ca. 1360)
Comparison of passages dealing with sea creatures in Thomas‘ work with
those of his sources that have been preserved to us shows that the author
quotes many descriptions of the animals – esp. those found in Pliny, Solinus and the Latin translation of Aristotle – almost
verbatim. There are several examples of minor or major inaccuracies that
affected the way the medieval reader imagined a particular animal, however.
Fish and other sea animals that were for the most part well known to the
ancient inhabitants of the
Both works employ names not unknown
to the medieval reader (balaena,
cetus, delphinus, hippopotamus, orcha, polipus, testudo and others), as well as
less common terms that are linguistically transparent but whose meaning is
somewhat obscure. Greek mythological names (Nereides, Sirenae, Scalla), and names properly
belonging to a terrestial animal and transferred to a
sea animal on the basis of a similarity in body or in character (draco maris, cervus marinus, canis marinus, equus marinus, monoceros, vacca maris and
others) belong to this category.
Apart from these, both works employ names that are extremely difficult
to interpret either semantically or linguistically and whose Greek or Latin origin
is not immediately clear (abydes, ahune, barchora, caab, celethi,
chylon, cricos, exposita, fastaleon, galalca, glamanez, koki, kylion, ludolacra, scinnoci, zedrosi, zydrach and zytiron). Most of
them are attached to animals the description of which Thomas claims to be
derived from Aristotle. Therefore, the first step to identify their meaning is
to compare the descriptions of these animals with Aristotle, and then look for
the origin of the strange names in the Latin translation of Aristotle’s zoological
treatises. Thomas used the Latin translation from Arabic made by Michael Scotus in