Friendly Anemones

Actinologia Britannica

This enigmatic fellow would definitely make my short-list for dinner party guests from throughout history...

"Philip Henry Gosse (1810 – 1888) was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology. Gosse is perhaps best known today as the author of Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile the immense geological ages presupposed by Charles Lyell with the biblical account of creation.

After his death, Gosse was portrayed as a despotic and fanatically religious father in Father and Son (1907), the literary masterpiece of his son, poet and critic Edmund Gosse." [W]

Gosse's 1860 book, 'Actinologia Britannica - a History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals' was a very popular follow-up to a series of works he published that described how to stock and maintain a home aquarium. But as an early conservationist, Gosse was said to have been somewhat disturbed by the public's clamouring for all manner of tidal plant and animal to fill their home collections on the back of his sea anemone book.

The book's success was due, in no small part, to the vibrant set of a dozen chromolithographs prepared by W Dickes from Gosse's own designs and drawings.

"Among Dickes finest color plates. the softness, subtlety, and richness of the coloring far exceeds in quality the best achieved by the four-colour processes of today" [(McLean, Victorian Book Design, p.199)]

The illustrations were described as having "something of the mystery and opulence of those in 'The Temple of Flora'" (Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790-1914, p. 106) [source]

• 'Actinologia Britannica - a History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals' is available from the University of Strasbourg Digital Library.
• The book is also available from (at least): Internet Archive & the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• An OCR reprint was issued last year but appears to have no illustrations, which is more than a little odd.
  
• Philip Henry Gosse at Strange Science. [W]
  
• Linda Hall Library juxtaposes Grosse's sea anemones with Thornton's amazing flower illustrations.
• 'anemone' must be close to the stupidest word ever conceived
  

The Brabant Chronicle

Brabantsche Yeesten
by
Jan Van Boendale (c.1280-1351)

"His first work, the Brabantsche yeesten (Brabantine Deeds), is a chronicle in coupled rhyme, dealing with the history of the Brabantine ducal house in the period from ca. 600 to ca. 1350. This chronicle is divided in five parts (“books”), of which the first four describe the history of Brabant before Boendale’s own lifetime, and the fifth is devoted to the three dukes contemporaneous with him: Jan I (d. 1294), Jan II (d. 1312), and Jan III (d. 1355). This voluminous work of some 16,000 lines was not written in one effort; the first version dates from ca. 1316, the fifth from 1347, and a sixth version may have been written around 1351, each one providing an updated version of the history of the duchy." [source]

[all images above were spliced together from screencaps]

From rather opaque translations (the usual for Dutch-to-English), it appears that Jan Van Boendale's 14th century 'Brabant Chronicle' manuscript was "discovered" in the 19th century in a tobacconist shop where it was to be torn up and used as wrapping paper.

There is little mention of the illustrations or why they were excised and re-mounted in a secondary volume. Supposedly two volumes have been digitised and uploaded and it may be that the both are contained in the one "book". The array of images above is a fair sampling of the sorts of events recorded through the available manuscript of medieval life in the Brabant region of Belgium. They are essentially universal themes - of love, marriage, war, clergy, noblemen and soldiers - one might expect to be depicted in any medieval town's chronicle, so it's hard to guess when the events took place.

The scene showing the killing of the Duchess above *might* be Marie of Brabant, who was beheaded by her husband for adultery (the customary punishment of the time). That took place in the middle of the 13th century. But any apparent visual narrative in the selection of images above is coincidental: they are doubtless showing scenes from varying periods and are almost certainly out of order.

• 'The Chronicle of Brabant' (Brabantsche Yeesten) is owned and hosted by the Royal Library of Belgium --> "Feuilleter le document (ms. IV 684)" : click to open a fairly friendly flash viewing window.
• Jan van Boendale biography said to be from 'Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia'. [W]