In the Ambrosian Tanakh (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MSS. B 30-32 inf), the Book of Genesis opens with an illuminated word panel framed by Adam, Eve, and a menagerie of animals, both real and fantastic. The couple’s nakedness links them to the neighboring fauna and to marvelous peoples recounted in texts like the Alexander Romance . This article examines these connections, discussing the multiplicity of interpretations that the miniature may have prompted for its viewers. It shows how the image conveys an unsettling elision between animal and human natures, which contributed to viewers’ constructions of normative and non-normative – and gendered – bodies in medieval Ashkenaz.
Reed O’Mara (Sat,) studied this question.