Exploring Visual Monstrosity in the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript: A Digital Edition of ‘The Wonders of the East’

‘The Wonders of the East’ is the Old English translation of a Latin text known as ‘De rebus in Oriente mirabilibus’. It is a teratological text, a liber monstrorum, also inscribed in the tradition of travel literature, containing descriptions of strange and unknown creatures found in Eastern regions, such as Babilonia and Egypt. The text had a wide circulation in early medieval England, and it survives in two witnesses – London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the so-called ‘Beowulf’ manuscript) and London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.v, with the latter presenting the Latin version side by side with the English translation; another witness, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 614, only contains the Latin text. Interestingly, all three manuscripts are accompanied by illustrations of the creatures and monsters described in the text. Although Rypins (1924) and Orchard (1995) decided not to include the illustrations in their editions of the ‘Wonders’, there is a growing body of literature that recognises that the illustrations not only can provide a better understanding of the written text, but they also seem to interact with it, often reinforcing its meaning, or even telling something the written text does not, resulting in a double narrative layer (Hassig, 1995; Mittman & Kim, 2010). This is particularly true in the case of the ‘Beowulf’ manuscript, which, as agreed by scholars (Sisam, 1953; Orchard, 1995), finds in the monstrous element the fil rouge connecting all the texts preserved therein. Therefore, the present thesis discusses the usefulness of a scholarly digital edition of the ‘Wonders’ preserved in that manuscript, with the purpose of offering a tool that allows the user to fully appreciate the communicative interplay established by the written text and the illustrations that characterises this witness. An overview of the textual tradition of the ‘Wonders’ will be followed by a presentation of the editorial procedures, the encoding workflow, and a sample of the digital output.