- Feb 2024
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Only the largepelican, squatting in the trees, can break the connection, a symbol ofbad audience, staring insolently, resolutely offstage. But she is beinggradually struck out, her colours fading as the original red and giltborders reassert themselves reprimandingly from beneath, themanuscript exacting a slow punishment for the sin of inattention.
Dennis Duncan completely misreads this image of Grosseteste and the Pelican which appears in the Lambeth Palace Library's MS 522 of The Castle of love. (for image see: https://hypothes.is/a/RzHLjsz8Ee6dZLOTV5h65Q)
Duncan identifies Grosseteste's pose with his hand raised and his index finger extended as "the classic gesture of the storyteller." In fact, the bishop is pointing directly up at the pelican which sits just on top of the frame of the illuminated scene. This pelican is elevated above and just beyond the scene of the image because it represents, as was common in the time period, the suffering of Christ.
Bestiaries of the age commonly depicted the "pelican in her piety" which was noted by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies (Book 12, 7:26) from the 7th century, a text which heavily influenced many of these bestiaries. It was also thought at the time that the insatiable and rapacious pelican ate lizards and crocodiles (or lived off of them); as these were associated with snakes and by way of the story of the Garden of Eden the devil, they were also further associated with Christ and driving sin out of the world.
Thus the image is more appropriately read in its original context as Grosseteste giving a sermon about the suffering of Christ who is represented by a pelican floating above the scene being depicted.
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Isidore of Seville [7th century CE] (Etymologies, Book 12, 7:26): The pelican [pelicanus] is an Egyptian bird inhabiting the solitary places of the river Nile, whence it takes its name, for Egypt is called canopos. It is reported, if it may be true, that this bird kills its offspring, mourns them for three days, and finally wounds itself and revives its children by sprinkling them with its own blood. - [Barney, Lewis, et. al. translation]
Despite the now commonly accepted etymology of pelican stemming from the Greek pelekys or pelekus meaning "ax", a referent to the bird's large beak, in Etymologies (book 12, 7:26) Isidore of Seville says it "takes its name for Egypt which is called canopos."
question: There is a thing called a canoptic jar (from Egypt), is it possible that trade via these jars caused the ancients to associate Egypt with them, or is there a separate etymology at play?
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Pliny the Elder [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 10, 66): Pelicans have a resemblance to swans, and would be thought not to differ from them at all were it not that they have a kind of second stomach in their actual throats. Into this the insatiable creature stows everything, so that its rapacity is marvelous. Afterwards when it has done plundering it gradually returns the things from this pouch into its mouth and passes them into the true stomach like a ruminant animal. These birds come to us from the extreme north of Gaul. - [Rackham translation]
In his Natural History (Book 10, 66), Pliny the Elder indicates that pelicans resemble swans, but have a second stomach in their throats into which they insatiably and rapaciously stow everything only later passing them into their true stomachs like ruminant animals.
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