Physiologus Cotogninianus (cotognini's Bestiarium)
liber rarissimus
Anglican Apostolic Bibliotheca. Section forbidden books.
After a very long forgetfulness they see the light of the non-existent pages Physiologus Cotogninianus, and the light increases the hiss that seem to come from the paper.
The work goes well beyond the Liber de diversis monstrorum generibus: an unwillingness to moralizing bestiary that is in late-ancient or medieval, but it is a book of wonders, that knows how to scare, surprise, surprise, a book in the odor of magic that transcends reality restandone always attentive witness.
The message is didactic, allegorical and religious at the same time, it is a grammar of nature that classifies and creates creatures. In Medieval times this book pursues the semantic polyvalence and multifunctionality, in spite of all the enlightenments; as in Isidore of Seville Etymologiae each page begins with "bestiarum vocabulum own convenit ..." (the word animal, wild animal, suits ...).
Who can benefit of the beast word? This is the didactic purpose of Physiologus Cotogninianus: follow with amazement and horror, in a horse magical land of cultural anthropology, actuality and fantasy, boundless completeness of nature, even in its teratological aspects. the free encyclopedia rarissimus houses a procession of animals and hybridizations. There are real creatures in the Middle Ages had some strange behavior (the Ibis that if you are wrong you do an enema with their beaks, to the beaver tearing the balls to pull the enemy chasing it ...) Now the strange creatures that are not : double popes, leading media, sung bearded, so small dictators in hindsight, employees at pornofood and the eugenic experiments. There are also fantastic animals that exist only because someone, centuries ago, he imagined them as lumerpa, the monoceronte, the mandricora, the parandro, Sirenia and the great Leviathan ..) and those that exist and do not talk because they fear: that no body that lives in the dark corners, what they breathe just a moment after us and we do not rest easy because we were convinced of being alone.
The book is a book of pages in which, with the reverse movement, the words frame the images, the images are geometry and movement, proceeding from the archaic to the present, from the educated to the popular and come back to the origin.
The medieval bestiary glorify the omnipotence of God, who has created a large variety of animals, this bestiary tries to explain to God what he has created.