Overview

What kind of being did a sailor see, when he was confronted with a mermaid? A demon, a fairy, a monster, or only an extraordinary marine mammal? Transmitted by the tradition of ancient natural history the European universities faced many creatures belonging to natural science as well as to mythology, which still could be observed throughout the world. While medieval sholarship treated those beings as subjects for demonology, early modern scholars started to rationalize the sirens and satyrs and developed new models of explanation. Throughout hundreds of academical disputations the debate on hybrid creatures can be followed up to the time of Linné and Buffon and the zoological classifications of the 18th century. This study reconstructs the discussions of hybrid creatures as part of the Early Modern change of paradigms and the longue durée of ancient and medieval natural history with the help of five examples, sirens, satyrs, giants, pygmies, and dragons.

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9789004185203

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Bernd Roling, Ph.D. (2002) in Medieval and Neo-Latin, University of Münster, Lecturer for Medieval Philosophy at the Thomas-Institute, University of Cologne. He has published on Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, history of early modern universities, the philosophy of the Renaissance, and medieval philosophy of language (Locutio angelica. Die Diskussion der Engelsprache in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit als Antizipation einer Sprechakttheorie [Brill, 2008]).

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