Trish Stewart

Contact Details


Email: ps273@st-andrews.ac.uk

B.Sc. Cellular, Molecular, and Microbial Biology, Minor in History. University of Calgary (Canada), 2003. M.Phil. History and Philosophy of Science. University of Cambridge, 2005. M.A. Medieval Studies. University College London, 2006.

I started life as a scientist but after four years spent researching the genetics of limb development in fruit flies, realised that I prefer studying the history of science to doing science. I first encountered bestiaries in an undergraduate history class on the High and Late Middle Ages, and have continued to study them because I am still fascinated by the combination of science, magic, and religion. I also really love manuscripts and palaeography.

Thesis Title: The Medieval Bestiary and its Textual Tradition. My thesis deals with the textual development of the medieval Latin prose bestiary – a text describing the religious and symbolic natures of a variety of wild, domestic, and fantastic animals, birds, insects, and sea creatures. The bestiary was one of the most popular medieval texts apart from the Bible and Psalter, yet much of its scholarship to date focuses on the art-historical aspects and later English manuscripts. The earliest developments of the text from its immediate ancestor the Physiologus, the place of unillustrated bestiary manuscripts, and the spread of the text throughout Europe have been relatively ignored. To address these issues, I am carrying out a critical analysis and comparison of the first bestiary versions to investigate how the text was initially created, altered, and disseminated in both England and the Continent.

Having been able to examine most of the bestiaries in Europe, I am also focusing on bestiary manuscripts as objects in themselves and using their physical characteristics to propose new audiences. It is hoped that my research will provide a more complete understanding of the medieval bestiary, and its importance in medieval intellectual thought. Publications: Stewart, Patricia and Elselijn Kingma. 'The virginal body: an instrument of seduction?' The Body as Instrument. The Cambridge Latin Therapy Group, 2006.

 

---