Evidence of the Use of the Physiologus as a Source in Aldhelm's Enigmata

Abstract

Abstract Among the 100 riddles of Aldhelm’s Enigmata, 36 deal with animals. Apart from Pliny’s Historia naturalis and Solinus’s Polyhistor, Aldhelm made use of the medieval encyclopaedic source par excellence, Isidore’s Book XII (De animalibus) from the Etymologiae, which has universally been acknowledged as the author’s major source for these riddles. However, the Physiologus was a further traditional zoological treatise from which Aldhelm could have drawn some information. Of the 36 zoological topics of Aldhelm’s Enigmata at least 13 of them are also treated in the Physiologus and so the portrayals of the animals offered in these riddles could have been inspired by this work. It has usually been assumed that most of these descriptions derive from Isidore’s Book XII but not much has been said about the possible connection of some of them to the Physiologus. The main aim of this essay is therefore to study the contents of a selected group of zoological riddles from Aldhelm’s collection and demonstrate that some of the clues observed in them suggest that, apart from Isidore’s Book XII, this author had a version of the Physiologus at his disposal for the composition of his Enigmata.