Kamel – C. – III.2 Tierepos

The camel has little to do in Latin beast epics, though it does appear in the Ecbasis cuiusdam captivi (l. 641), in which the → leopard gives the camel the task of providing the cloths for the celebratory breakfast (a veiled allusion to Matthew 19, 24? – Ziolkowski, p. 183). Meanwhile Leo of Vercelli’s mid-eleventh-century Metrum Leonis presents the camel as a scribe who records the proceedings of the → wolf’s trial (see Ziolkowski, pp. 124 and 254, who postulates a possible connection between this role and the camel’s association with the scribes and Pharisees in Mt 23).

Lit.: K. GRUBMÜLLER/ G. DICKE: Die Fabeln des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1987; J. M. ZIOLKOWSKI: Talking Animals, 1993.

Nigel Harris

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