“This miniature painting, along with fifty-five others, illustrates the Secretz de l’histoire naturelle (Secrets of natural history), a Middle French translation of the Benedictine scholar Pierre Bersuire’s encyclopedic Reductium morale (ca. 1340). […]

Fantasy and fact swirl together […]. Out in the world grow the things that cost money here in France: the jewels that must be extracted from dragons’ stomachs in Ethiopia; the cinnamon trees of Arabia; the mountains of gold on Ophir and pearls on Trapo. And from Egypt, ‘celle confiture que on appelle momia, cest a dire char domme confite dont usent les medicins et les apoticayres’ (the preserved material that we call mummy, that is to say, that preserved flesh that doctors and apothecaries use).

As the products of these far-flung lands make their way to Europe, so too does information: there is the usual palaver about Blemmyes and centaurs, but the manuscript’s reader also discovers Hindu vegetarianism, Irish bog bodies, and Chinese footbinding. Bersuire is a proto-anthropologist, reporting back about the supposed mores and lifeworlds of faraway lands — in Ethiopia, we learn, the women of the Auriges have group sex on their wedding nights. (He is also a proto-geologist, reporting that the presence of seashells in mountain caves in Macedonia proves that it was once a seashore.)”

— Mathilde Montpetit, The Public Domain Review