Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake, Songs of Experience (1794)

Knight on horseback and a tiger with a mirror.  The knight throws down a mirror so that the tigress will stop to look at its own reflection, thinking it is her cub, from Bestiary, with extracts from Giraldus Cambrensis on Irish birds (Salisbury, England, 2nd quarter of the 13th century), shelfmark Harley 4751 f.3v.

Hunter distracting a tiger from the capture of its cub by casting a mirror onto the ground in front of it from The Queen Mary Psalter (England (London/Westminster or East Anglia?), between 1310 and 1320), Royal 2 B VII f.123.

Hunter capturing a tiger’s cub by distracting its mother with a mirror from Bestiary (England, 1st quarter of the 13th century), shelfmark Royal 12 C XIX f.28.

Man capturing a tiger cub by leaving a mirror to distract its mother from Bestiary (England, 2nd quarter of the 13th century), shelfmark Royal 12 F XIII f.6v.

Slaying of the tame tiger from Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Naples, Italy, 2nd quarter of the 14th century), shelfmark Royal 20 D I f.17v.

Tiger from Bestiary (England, 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 13th century), shelfmark Sloane 3544 f.2.

Tiger of Thebes from Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Paris, France, 1st quarter of the 15th century), shelfmark Stowe 54 f.20v.

Man riding away on a horse with a tiger cub from Theological miscellany, including the Summa de vitiis (England, 2nd or 3rd quarter of the 13th century, after c. 1236), shelfmark Harley 3244 f.36v.

Note on the British Library’s copyright
Nearly a year ago, I first started to use on my blog digital images from the British Library’s catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.  As all the images were in copyright, I (quite rightly) had to request permission to use these images.  This permission the British Library very willingly and quickly granted me, as my blog is a non-profit hobby blog. However, just recently the British Library has marked all their images from their catalogue of illuminated manuscripts as being Public Domain Images and therefore free of all copyright restrictions.  This is fantastic news for both professional and amateur historians alike.  I have gained much pleasure from sharing my ‘finds’ from their catalogue with you.  The decision to remove their copyright will hopefully encourage more people to use some of the most exquisite images in existence, thereby giving us modern sophisticated(?) digital-age folk a fleeting glimpse into the medieval world.

You may also be interested in the following posts with images from the British Library’s Medieval Manuscript collections:
– Images of Tudor people
– Wild Animals and Early modern England
– Images of the Devil in the Medieval/early-modern period
– Images of medieval cats
– Images of medieval cats – part 2
– Images of medieval dogs
– The Medieval Spinsters
– The sinful hermit
– The Snail and the Knight
– Jousting snails
– Medieval Marriages