80A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONThe epistemic uniqueness of the Middle Ages lies in the pervasiveness
of the logos of God.^24 Then, the authoritative optic on nature shifted in
the hands of monks who found to be discursively congenial an anony-
mous text on the subject of animals and nature titled the Physiologus
(probably originating in Egypt and written in Greek), which became
“one of the most popular and widely read books of the Middle Ages.”^25 In
the Physiologus, pagan tales of animals were infused with Christian morals
by subsequent anonymous revisers. The book thus became a widely ad-
opted reference for iconographical sourcing at the time.^26 Its authorial
anonymity and its many translations in different languages, including
Greek, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, and Latin, situated its author-
ship in a nebulous dispersion through different times and geographical
sites.^27 But most importantly, as a didactic text, the Physiologus constituted
a new epistemic spatialization in which animals and fantastic creatures
were essentially represented through the enmeshing of animal semantics.
Animal semantics are the words interwoven in the very fabric of “repre-
sented animal”: they are intrinsic to their materialization in discourses
and essentially constitute the archive of symbolic representations, prac-
tices, and discourses produced by human/animal relations.^28
The impact of the Physiologus on human knowledge of animals was
defining and long-lasting. It provided the visual and literary arts with
many allegorical images of phoenixes and unicorns. Of great relevance
to this argument is that the Physiologus became instrumental to the
emergence of another important book on animals, the Bestiarium, a
zoological-epistemological site that profoundly marked medieval and
Renaissance culture in Europe. The Latin text of the surviving early bes-
tiaries effectively is a translation of the Physiologus.^29 It is this connection
that makes them both similar to archives: collections of propositions
repeated and dispersed, functioning as thresholds to the emergence of
discursive formations in early natural theology. But most importantly,
moving beyond the Physiologus’s unorganized assemblages, the Bestiarium
provided visual representations of animals, first unclassified (before the
twelfth century) and thereafter classified in loose orders.^30
In the Bestiarium, animal semantics encompassed the legendary, the
mythical, the anecdotal, and the phenomenological (fig. 2.2). They con-
structed a realism of nature that was substantially different from that
which followed in Renaissance representation. The text constituted a