Hrabanus Maurus and the mystical meaning of creatures
In his De rerum naturis Hrabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda, reworked Isidore and gave every animal a spiritual meaning, for good and for ill.
In Carolingian Europe, two centuries after Isidore, a German monk decided to reread the whole encyclopedia of the bishop of Seville with new eyes. Hrabanus Maurus, born in Mainz around 780, a pupil of Alcuin at Tours, abbot of Fulda and finally archbishop of Mainz from 847 until his death in 856, composed a work known as De rerum naturis or De universo. His aim was not only to describe the world, but to explain its spiritual meaning, entry by entry.
The teacher of Germany
Hrabanus was one of the most influential intellectual figures of the ninth century. Under his guidance the abbey of Fulda became a leading centre of learning, and his work as a teacher later earned him the title ‘praeceptor Germaniae’, teacher of Germany. The nickname Maurus had been given to him by Alcuin, in memory of Saint Maurus, the favourite disciple of Saint Benedict.
His works include biblical commentaries, treatises on the education of the clergy and the famous De laudibus sanctae crucis, a collection of figured poems in which the letters form crosses and figures. The encyclopedia belongs to the years of his maturity, around the middle of the century. These works show the same taste for the relation between figure and meaning that drives the encyclopedia, and they were long copied and studied in the monasteries of the Carolingian empire and beyond.
A new order and a double sense
The De rerum naturis, in twenty-two books, largely takes over Isidore’s text but rearranges it. It no longer begins with the liberal arts, but with God, the angels and man, and then descends to animals, stones, places and objects. Animals fill the eighth book, where beasts, small animals, serpents, worms, fish and birds follow one another.
The decisive novelty is the systematic addition of a mystical interpretation. After reporting Isidore’s information, Hrabanus explains what the animal can signify in Scripture. And he often gives two opposite readings: in a good sense and in a bad sense. The lion may be Christ, the lion of the tribe of Judah, but also the devil, who according to the First Letter of Peter prowls like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.
This ambivalence is precious for understanding the medieval mind. An animal did not have a single, fixed meaning: the sense depended on the biblical passage, on the context and on the intention of whoever was preaching or carving. The same serpent could stand for the prudence commended by the Gospel or for the tempter of Eden, and the dove for the simplicity of the righteous or, in some passages, for culpable naivety. Readers always had to ask in which sense the animal was being named.
The Montecassino manuscript
Hrabanus’s work circulated widely, but one copy in particular has remained famous. The abbey of Montecassino holds an illustrated manuscript of the De rerum naturis dated to around 1023, codex 132, which accompanies the text with hundreds of images. It is one of the oldest illustrated encyclopedias of the West and a fundamental tool for the study of early medieval iconography.
Hrabanus Maurus thus forms an essential link between Isidore and the bestiaries of the twelfth century. From him later compilers learned that every natural fact could open a door onto Scripture, and that the same creature could teach virtue or warn against sin. His rigorous and systematic method set the pattern for centuries.