Scholarly Texts

All of the motivations thus far have been strictly to convince someone of something because of a personal conviction. Whether the monk wants his ideologies spread, his religion adopted, or his tradition upheld, each use of illuminated manuscript is unique but justifiable based on conviction. However, there is a more relaxed reason many monks produced manuscripts. Some monks produced manuscripts that were strictly in scholarly efforts. Monks created manuscripts in which they discussed the information about the world around them. One of the manuscripts I have on my exhibit is one of these -- The Aberdeen Bestiary. "... [the bestiary] might have been seized, along with the majority of the collection, from a recently dissolved monastic library." [12]  I chose this bestiary to put in this collection because it has the potential of coming from a monastic library and is one of the most well known bestiaries. 

Two monastic orders stand out when talking about scholarly manuscripts. These are the Franciscans and the Dominicans. At the time, there were a lot of different viewpoints starting to pop up, and the monastic orders needed a way to defend themselves and their beliefs. "At that moment the universities were growing and the translation of Aristotle into Latin was challenging Christian scholars. The mendicants took up the challenge with gusto, and by the end of the thirteenth century most of the lead the scholars in the major universities were either Dominicans or Franciscans." [13] These monks turned scholars were the leaders in both culture as well as discourse. They needed to be if they wanted to maintain power. This was something that was exemplified in their manuscript production.