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#.illuminations
illuminatedvisage · 10 months
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these hands in tightly hidden fists.
Pairing: Jing Yuan x (GN) Reader Summary: It is a late night, and the General's mind wanders. Warnings: Ineffectual Pining, Smut (sort of) Notes: 1.6k words of Jing Yuan being cockblocked by his own sense of morality. Title and quote taken from "So We Must Meet Apart" by Gabrielle Bates & Jennifer S. Cheng
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jing yuan notices the earrings first—small, bright gems set on a thin chain, hanging like stars from your delicate earlobes. then your hair, styled with more care than usual, and the new perfume that stains your wrist with a faint scent that he strains himself to catch, to catalogue into the breadth of information he has carefully collected about you. your clothes are as usual, neat and formal, as is your manner, except for the way you sometimes fiddle with the hem of your sleeve and cast longing looks out the window while he reads your report.
that is to say, jing yuan notices you quite a bit and today, there is something different about you.
“you look lovely today,” he says after some time has passed. the seat of divine foresight has emptied out for the day, save for the few guards that stand at attention by the door; he would have gone by now too and released them from duty, if he hadn’t been expecting you. it is rare enough that your work brings the two of you together, and since your promotion at the divination commission, the master diviner has kept you busy adjusting and readjusting the nodes on the matrix of prescience to keep up with her constant calculations. you have a talent for it, attuned to the fine details of your surroundings, so he wonders why you always seem to miss the glaring fact of his love for you.
“oh, thank you, general,” you say, suddenly going shy. your gaze travels around the room, from walls to window and even to the guards, landing on anything but him. it’s adorable, the way you avoid his eyes even though you want, eagerly, to share something—another of your mannerisms that jing yuan has filed away in his heart.
would it be too much to hope that you had dressed up just to see him? that you had made yourself prettier than you already are for his eyes alone? it is presumptuous to think that he is in your thoughts as often as you are on his, but he does it anyway. he allows his eyes to linger on your mouth, the way it curves into the trace of a smile at his next question.
“is there a particular occasion?”
“i have dinner with someone later,” you let out like a confession, in one breathless, rushed whisper. the answer is so incomprehensible that he doesn’t register it at first. not until you start fiddling with the earring that caught his eye, twisting the chain around your finger. he wonders if it’s a gift from the person you are seeing tonight. he wonders how it would feel to tug it off your earlobe with his teeth. “general?”
there is a waxy feeling in his throat, so thick that you could scrape it off with a fingernail, at the thought of you with someone else. someone you might be directing that secretive smile toward. someone whose arm you might be touching as you lean in close, close enough to let them catch a brief taste of your perfume—
“general?”
“i see.” jing yuan clears his throat, looking for his words, which have all suddenly fled him. “where will you be dining?”
“we have reservations at the sleepless earl. i know, i know,” you laugh a little, “not that exciting, but i hear the storyteller is starting a tale about the high-cloud quintet tonight and i don’t want to miss the opening. it’ll be decades before he tells it again.” the smile you give him then makes the muscle in his jaw jump. “and afterwards, we might take a starskiff to the exalting sanctum. the luofu is passing close to a binary star system tonight…”
his hands tighten around the scroll containing your report—the detection of cosmological time dilation patterns in three-body starquake ruptures—your voice gone soft and muddled in his head as he tries to get his jaw to unclench, so that he might beg you—and if we’re lucky, they might set off an aurora that we can see from the pavilion—if he could only say something that would keep you by his side, instead of, of—owing to the expansion of space in ten to the third dimensions upon point of impact, we can predict that the best course of action for the alliance—he doesn’t want to lose you, doesn’t want to give you up to this person who has done what he has failed to—it’s quite a romantic spot, actually—has caught the tail of your bright comet—
with a wash of sick, nervous heat, jing yuan realizes that he could. he could keep you from going out tonight under the guise of work, have you explain to him in charts and calculations and the graceful arc of your hands those elegant predictions which were your life’s work. he could always count on you to put your duty to the xianzhou luofu first, even if it meant making others unhappy.
one night might unfold into another into another as he lures you into his trap. he could start now. dismiss the guards. demand your time. steal a touch or two, first at your wrist, then your elbow, narrowing the distance between you by degrees as he bids you to lean over the desk and explain to him some prediction he pretends not to understand—all the while he looks not at the report, as you might have believed, but at the column of your unmarked throat that he longs to sink his teeth into like a claim. a night like that repeated a dozen times over. how long would it take you to sense him prowling at the edges of your comfort? to realize how close you have already allowed him?
how long would you be able to hold out against him?
jing yuan cares for you, cares what you think of him, and so your seduction would be as patient and meticulous as any strategy he’s executed. perhaps, after so many nights like that, alone together, he might ask you for a drink. tea or wine, whatever your preference, he’d offer to pour you a cup if you returned the favor. one drink becoming two becoming more, just like the hours he’d steal away from you, your tired head dipping into your chest as you struggle to stay awake in his company.
he’d have moved to your side of the table by then, offered you his shoulder to lean on; polite and trusting as you are, he doubts you would have questioned it as you drift into a haze of half-sleep. he’d stroke your shoulder, then your cheek, the crown of your lovely hair. he’d take the teacup from your slackening grasp and marvel at the sensation of your hand in his, at the delicate points of your fingertips, the soft cup of your palm that he cannot help but kiss. perhaps you would have woken, and if not, he’d take the time to memorize your hands, to slip his tongue between your fingers and nip at the sensitive skin between pointer and thumb.
you’d wake with a gasp, and he would turn his head to swallow the sound.
your lips—they’d be divine, he knows it, stained with the flavor of your drink, bitter and sweet as he coaxes you open on his tongue. he’d like it if you kissed him back, hand tangling in his long hair. he’d like it if you sighed, meltingly, into his embrace; if your supple body arched beneath his wandering hands. there, he’d show the first and only sign of his impatience, working them into your clothes so he could feel the heat rising beneath your skin and know for certain that you felt it too—that you were filled with a need as powerful as his own.
he’d take you on whatever surface was available, on the floor, on his desk. he would lay you out and fit himself between the spread of your legs, fingers probing inside you—at first one, then two, then three if you could take it. he thinks you could. he would do it slow, a precise calculation of what would bring you the most pleasure; if you whined, he’d only go slower. with just his fingers he could make you fall apart. he imagines you gnawing at your lips, slick with spit as you moan into the tabletop, your body slick around his fingers as he fucks them into you.
how would you feel on his cock? squirming as he splits you open or holding yourself breathlessly still? his hands on your hips as he presses himself into the heat of you, hoping to leave bruises that you’ll remember tomorrow and tomorrow after that. he’d fuck you however you’d like—slow, hard, fast, soft. he’d fuck you until you saw stars sparking beneath the cover of your closed eyes, no need to look outside, to look away from him at all. he’d make you come again and again, slack jawed, clawing at the his shoulders, addicted to the push and pull of him inside you. you’d ask him for more and he would give it to you gladly.
bent over like this, you wouldn’t be able to see him at all. he is grateful for that. what would you think if you saw that hunger so naked on his face, which he has only ever shown you so indolently calm? he is not known as a man of large appetites, but for you he is a wild, starving thing. for you— for you—
“general?”
jing yuan smiles at you, locking those thoughts of you behind the placid expression on his face. you haven’t noticed anything at all, and why should you? it is a mask that has not slipped for hundreds of years, unlike his next words, which slip loose without him meaning to.
“i hate to keep you longer than i should, but if you wouldn’t mind…”
A/N: i want him so bad i look stupid i know. i feel like jing yuan is just a little bit of an asshole but he tries hard not to be because he is also very aware of the power he has over people and knows that he could exploit them all too easily. but i really, really want him to (: anyway i like my jing yuans literally sick with longing. will i ever let him fuck for real???? stay tuned for more.
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roach-works · 2 months
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the 50$ sword i got from a shady flea market was diagnosed to be a wall-hanger rather than a prop so i spent today making it the prettiest wall-hanger in the land
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fox-teeth · 5 months
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Everyone liked the color charts I test printed for Basilisk so much, I felt compelled made a nice version! Great for anyone that has an interest in Risograph printing, historical pigments, or weird medieval marginalia.
(buy it here)
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fairycosmos · 1 year
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it is what it is *throws up blood*
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cy-lindric · 8 months
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An angel. Alchemy treaty Aurora Consurgens, 1420-1450
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Charlie Day Luigi: HERES A-MY BROTHER MARIO NOW TO TELL YOU A WHOLE-A HEAPING SPAGHETTI PILE OF INFORMATIONI!!! Chris Pratt Mario: Hello Luigi.
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gonna put the progress of this thing in its own post
so we start with references
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then i figure out my layouts and start sketchin, putting the text down first after initial drafting
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then i gotta fully flesh out all of the illustrative bits with pencil sketching. we got the holy gritty with his holy hockey staff and flyers pendant, little bits of orange dashed onto there, designing the flyers logo wherever i can
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then we get black inking on there, bit more orange as well. normally i get kinda heartbroken when I smear a bit of ink here or there by mistake, even patch to fix mistakes sometimes.
But I'm gonna be real. The small blots match too well with the overall energy of the piece
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the next image will be the fully completed piece!
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lucybellwood · 9 months
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hi sorry s'cuse me but were NONE OF YOU GOING TO TELL ME ABOUT BLACK BOOKS OF HOURS???
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LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT GOTH-ASS SHIT
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EGADDDDDDD
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THE IRON-COPPER SOLUTION USED TO DYE THE PAGES WAS SO CORROSIVE THAT THERE ARE VERY FEW SURVIVING EXAMPLES
THESE BOOKS WERE LITERALLY TOO METAL TO LIVE
i can't
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krossan · 4 months
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the adorkable Gwen from the movie Migration gave SO MANY VIBES of how I portrait Danielle. I had to.
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illuminatedvisage · 10 months
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waiting for this story to end before i begin another.
Pairing: Jing Yuan x (GN) Trailblazer!Reader Summary: The General attempts to write you a letter. Warnings: Angst, Pining Notes: Title and quote taken from the poem, "Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin Another" by Jan Heller Levi
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it’s been a long time since jing yuan has needed to grind his own ink, but he has not forgotten the ritual of it. dropping water onto the inkstone, unwrapping the cake, dragging water from well to plain and grinding, slowly, in measured circles until the soot dissolves into the proper color. these days, his hands are more accustomed to handling paper over steel, to signing off laws over swinging his blade, but there is little art in the way he must handle his work—fastidiously, meticulously, planning for every eventuality. water defies such control, and ink makes such defiances permanent, which is perhaps why he’s chosen to write a letter to you in this way.
how else to express a heart honestly than to relinquish control of it?
i wonder—
i wish—
i want—
but how to begin? he tries a dozen different times, crossing off each false start, trying to put together his thoughts into some sort of coherency. it is easier said than done, and jing yuan, for all the merits he has earned and the battles he has won, does not consider himself brave enough to speak these things out loud. if he should stumble over his words, unrefined, unbecoming of his age— if those clumsy words should somehow fly to you like birds and reach your ears—
jing yuan laughs at himself. perhaps he hasn’t yet let go of the illusion of control.
he crumples the paper and begins again, setting out a new page, grinding more of that glossy ink. he finds it difficult to explain himself to you, even more so to do it without expectation, without trying to predict your response to the confession that pours from the tip of his brush—
i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you
he wonders when he fell in love with you, wishes he could pinpoint the precise moment when you began, unintentionally, to take up space in his heart. could he have stopped it? would he have, given the chance? or would he, having seen the pattern of your conquest, have simply let you advance piece by piece until he had no choice but to surrender—and look forward to that surrender if it meant you kept rewarding him with your careless smiles and unadorned camaraderie, if you kept treating him with a casual intimacy that makes a curl of pleasure and affection settle in his stomach.
the door clicks open, letting in a cool breeze and you, standing cocksure in the entryway of his office. your smile is warm as your hip checks the door closed. “looking awfully lonely in here, general,” you say, giving the room a slow once-over before resting your eyes on him. “have you come in here to take a nap?”
jing yuan sets his brush down, returns your smile with one of his own. “it’s not often that the seat of divine foresight is empty like this,” he tells you. “i thought it might give me a moment to finish a letter i had to write.”
for a moment, you look worried, as though you’ve interrupted some important business of his. but the glimmer in your eyes returns when he beckons you over, eyeing the paper that he covers up with the flat of his hand.
“top-secret luofu business?” you ask, tilting your head this way and that to try and catch a glimpse of what he’s hiding.
“something like that.”
“should i really be here, then?” you ask, before your smile slips into a grin, fingers already twitching for the piece of paper. “or are my information-sharing privileges still active? is it stellaron related? is it stellaron hunter related?”
“actually,” jing yuan admits, without really knowing why, “it’s a love letter.”
you pause, blinking rapidly, nose scrunching in confusion before a startled laugh bubbles out of you. “fine, fine,” you say, holding your hands up in surrender, “keep your secrets. i didn’t come here for that, anyway.”
“and what did you come for, illustrious trailblazer?”
“did you seriously forget?” you set your hands on the table, leaning in close until you are all he sees in his field of view. “the farewell party? to celebrate the successful containment of the stellaron? and the once-in-a-lifetime partnership between the express and the luofu?”
“it’s a long lifetime.” he hopes you don’t notice the way the words stick in his throat.
“not for all of us. so that’s why i’m here, to drag you back with me,” you say. your hand is already wrapped around his wrist, tugging him up, away from his desk. “by force if i have to.” he likes this about you, your easy manner, the way you treat him like an old friend; he likes it less that, like his old friends, you too will leave him on his own.
he doesn’t budge, gently releasing your grip on his wrist. but he doesn’t let you go either, not yet, fingers lingering in your own. it is the first time he’s held your hand, and it might be the last. “no force necessary. i’ll join you just as soon as i’m finished with my business here, so wait for me by the door.”
you huff but relent, pulling away too soon. “you work too hard,” you scold good-naturedly, “even though it always seems like you’re slacking off. are you sure i can’t convince you to jump ship for a while? the express has an extra cabin with your name on it.” your lips twitch as you fight off a laugh. “maybe you can even convince pompom to give you a whole car, oh great arbiter-general of the xianzhou luofu.”
a pang of some unnamed emotion goes through him. could it be as easy as that? to take your hand in his and say yes, say please, say i’ll follow wherever you go. he wants it to be but instead he retracts his hand, laying them over each other on his desk to stop himself from reaching for you again. “my place is here,” he says, and not beside you.
something in your gaze wavers, with sympathy or perhaps pity, he doesn't care to know which, and your voice goes soft as you step back, away from him. “right, then. i’ll wait for you outside, until you’re ready.”
his eyes follow you long after the door has closed. he looks at his letter, the ink smeared by his hand, and crumples it in his fist.
A/N: i can't stop writing for this sad, sad old man. and prob blade when more of his lore comes out.
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cuties-in-codices · 7 months
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st. catherine of siena drinking from christ's side wound
in a hagiography of st. catherine of siena, alsace, early 15th c.
source: Paris, BnF, ms. allem. 34, fol. 43v
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feleven · 9 months
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🐟
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yeoldenews · 6 months
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The title of a short story about a French girl who sprays a man with a garden hose.
(source: The Philadelphia Times, April 12, 1891)
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maniculum · 7 months
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Medieval Scorpions Effortpost
So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:
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The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".
Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.
As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".
Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.
See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:
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That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?
So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.
And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.
*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.
Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.
And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.
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11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)
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12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)
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12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)
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12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)
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13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)
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13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)
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13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)
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13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))
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13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)
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13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it — it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)
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13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)
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13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)
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13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)
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13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)
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13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)
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13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)
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14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)
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14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)
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14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)
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15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)
I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.
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upennmanuscripts · 4 months
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I'd like to introduce you to LJS 57, a compendium of Astronomical text in Hebrew, written in Spain around 1391. It's an interesting combination of astronomy and astrology, and illustrates how the division between "science" and "not science" was not nearly so clear in the past as it is today. It has some fantastic illustrations of constellations!
🔗:
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pastasilly · 1 year
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the bowuigi tag rn
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