SUMMARY

■ In 1270 the Flemish author Jacob van Maerlant wrote Der naturen bloeme. This first vernacular nature encyclopedia in European literature is a translation of the influential Liber de natura rerum, which was completed by its author, Thomas van Cantimpré, around 1240. Maerlant’s nature encyclopedia, of which eleven more or less complete manuscripts as well as a considerable number of fragments have been preserved, comprises over 16,000 verses. They have been spread disproportionately over thirteen so-called ‘books’. These books contain pieces of information about people, quadrupeds, birds, sea monsters, fish, snakes, insects, common trees, spice-trees, herbs, sources, stones and metals.

■ The two editions of Der naturen bloeme that are currently available contrast sharply with the numerous manuscripts that must have circulated in earlier times. The edition that Verwijs published between 1872 and 1878 is based on the beautifully embellished Leiden manuscript. However, this is the manuscript that turned out to be the worst - in any case as far as the snake book is concerned. The second edition is the one published by Gysseling in 1981. It is based on the Detmold manuscript, which is supposed to have been produced around 1287. In the snake book this oldest manuscript has been affected seriously in many places and a great number of verses is lacking. Besides, both available editions are open to the objection that they do not pay any attention to the biological and cultural-historical components of Maerlant’s bestiary.

■ Because of this, the subject matter remains badly neglected and possibly uncomprehended Therefore, it is desirable to make Der naturen bloeme also more accessible as far as its contents are concerned. A comparison of the seste boec van serpenten of all the manuscripts with their Latin source revealed it is the extraordinary London codex that can be regarded as the best manuscript. Not only does it appear to be the most complete of all the texts preserved, but it also turns out to represent the best translation of the Latin example. Consequently, it is this manuscript that has laid the foundation for this separate edition of Der naturen bloeme. A probably West-Flemish transcriber completed the manuscript in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Perhaps with the help of others, he turned it into a specimen that may well be considered one of the most attractive of the codices that have been preserved.

■ Because of a clever lay-out it became a particularly user-friendly book: booktitles, subtitles, initials, lombards, section marks, the typical namesigns and the numerous illustrations, all this will have made sure that information in demand was quickly made available. Moreover, the manuscript shows that its contents were examined carefully. Maerlant’s objective with Der naturen bloeme was different from Thomas van Cantimpré’s with Liber de natura rerum. Thomas wrote for congenial religious people, Maerlant for laymen. Thomas wrote Latin prose, Maerlant delivered its expert translation in vernacular in rhyming couplets. Thomas aimed at completeness - which, once in a while, makes him verbose, inconsistent and repetitive. Maerlant, on the contrary, drew from his source just that piece of information he considered relevant for his patron.

■ In doing so, he skipped individual serpents in the snake book, but as regards the animals that he did include, he paid special attention to practical matters such as their appearance, their venomousness, their significance as a therapeutic ingredient, how they behave, how they can be caught and where they occur. In the snake book Maerlant turned out to be much less of a moralist than people normally take him for. Neither did he pay much attention to the etymologies of the snake names Thomas so often takes notice of or to the literary references with which the latter likes to embellish his narrative. Furthermore, symbolic interpretations are hard to find in Maerlant’s translation, just like detailed anatomical and physiological descriptions of the serpents. All the manuscripts of Liber de natura rerum that have been preserved - people argue about 44 to 158 pieces - show such big differences among them, that they are divided in so-called Thomas-I-, Thomas-II- and Thomas-III-versions.

■ The assumption, gaining more and more ground nowadays, that Maerlant had an example at his disposal that was part of the Thomas-II-version, has been strengthened a lot by the investigation of the snake book carried out in this study: in Der naturen bloeme certain snakes occur and in the separate lemmata data were included that are lacking in both the Thomas-I- and the Thomas-III-version, but do occur in the second. Snakes not only played a vital part in ofiolatric structures in Antiquity, but they were also the object of observation and study. Researchers interested in nature, like Aristotle, already observed snakes centuries before our era and they sometimes recorded their experiences. However, due to the fact that researchers transcribed and translated their information repeatedly, their work ended up showing all kinds of inaccuracies. As a result, fact and fiction were eventually interchangeable. Nevertheless, all that was written about nature gained an almost inviolable status, which prevented the contents of the treatises from being judged on their merits.  Due to the emergence of Christianity the status of the snake changed fundamentally. Initially looked upon as an animal with positive connotations, it gradually came to be seen as a pre-eminent symbol of evil. As a matter of fact, in the days of early Christianity the role of nature as a whole underwent a drastic change as a result of the impact of Physiologus and the bestiaries that followed: flora and fauna turned into metaphors, carriers of symbolic qualities and causes for moralistic reflections. Being an exponent of the principle of authority, Maerlant provides us with data about nature similar to those that writers, sharing these views, passed on to each other for centuries. Only in the seventeenth century will people carefully start an empirical investigation into the correctness of views, held true for centuries, about, for example, snakes.

■ A lot of data about snakes that Maerlant included in Der naturen bloeme at the instigation of his Latin source will make many a reader frown. It appears that, by submitting exceptional, incomprehensible or implausible behaviour to a closer investigation, a large number of these ways of conduct can be accounted for from a herpetological point of view in a fully plausible way. While reading, one gets acquainted with the incredibly rich cultural history of the snake and thus becomes aware of the herpetological and cultural-historical dimension that is lacking in the editions by Verwijs and Gysseling.

(Translated from the Dutch by Yvonne van Dorp).

For a review of my thesis, click Hans Westgeest pag. web 98.