Medieval dragon manuscript full#
Medieval dragon manuscript series#

Thrown in jail and tortured by a Roman official who wanted to sexually violate her, Marina encountered a demon in the form of a dragon. Similarly, the Byzantine historian Michael Psellos wrote in the 11th century of a dragon that tormented Saint Marina. The bishop bonked the dragon on the head three times, led it through Paris on a leash, then banished it back to the forest so it would never trouble the city again. In the sixth century, for example, French bishop and poet Venantius Fortunatus wrote about a bishop of Paris named Marcellus, who, in front of the gathered citizens of the city, drove off a dragon that had devoured a sinful noblewoman’s corpse.

Though they sometimes appeared as foes to be overcome in valiant single combat, dragons in the European Middle Ages more often figured in accounts about the lives of saints and religious figures than stories of heists and adventures. Illuminated manuscript featuring Saint Marina and the dragon

Medieval dragon manuscript series#

According to Bruce, one of the reasons he collaborated with Penguin on the series is that he wanted to make “these fascinating themes … accessible to general readers,” demonstrating that monsters of the past are not the same as modern ones. Collections of texts from the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds, these books allow readers to see for themselves how people from the past thought about things that went bump in the night. In 2016, he published The Penguin Book of the Undead, and in 2018, The Penguin Book of Hell. Over the past few years, Bruce, a historian at Fordham University, has developed wide-ranging expertise in how medieval people talked about monsters. Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to 'Game of Thrones' Buy The Penguin Book of Dragons (Penguin Classics)

As historian Scott Bruce, editor of the newly released Penguin Book of Dragons, explains, dragons in the medieval mindset stood “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of our heroes.” As such, they were neatly and easily folded into Christian tradition, “often cast … as agents of the devil or demons in disguise.” But dragons held a special place in both the modern imagination and the medieval one.

Medieval people told tales about all kinds of monsters, including ghosts, werewolves and women who turned into serpents on Saturdays. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another. Though horror today is most often about entertainment-the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller-it hasn’t always been that way.

Medieval dragon manuscript full#

Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories-tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.Īs Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast.