Today, January 15, is the feast of Paul the Hermit, who is also known as Paul of Thebes. According to tradition, he died in the year 341, and was the first Christian hermit. The earliest known account of Paul's legend was composed by the church father Jerome, and functions in essence like a prequel to the very popular biography of Anthony of Egypt written by Athanasius of Alexandria and later translated into Latin by Evagrius. Athanasius' biography of the historical hermit Anthony had a long-reaching impact on the development of Christian mythology - both chronologically and geographically speaking. It is, therefore, tempting to suggest that by penning a story about an even older hermit whom Anthony meets, Jerome sought to capitalise on this popularity and expand the emerging Latin Christian historical vision that was being solidified in the course of the fourth century.
The narrative of Jerome's story tells about how the hermit Anthony learns about an older and even more austere colleague living in the Egyptian wastes. He sets out to meet him, and after the two hermits have shared a meal brought by ravens - a typological connection to Elijah - Paul eventually breathes his last, and is interred by Anthony in a grave dug by two lions who miraculously appear. The burial of Paul became a well-known motif in later medieval art, presumably - at least in part - because it is the most iconographically interesting episode in the narrative. One of the more curious renditions is found in a Flemish manuscript from around 1300, which is now known both as the Rotschild Canticle, and by its shelfmark Beinecke MS 404. The manuscript is a collection of various Christian texts, assembled as a kind of florilegium or anthology, and also left unfinished. The pages are filled with a rich array of medieval illuminations which showcase the magnificent world of the medieval imagination. One of these illuminations is a full-page depiction of the burial of Paul the Hermit (f.31r), and it is a curious rendition of the motif. As can be seen in the picture below, the artist has illustrated the lions' assistance in a peculiarly anthropomorphic twist, by having one of them actually carrying the body of Paul together with Anthony. The anthropomorphic lion is not uncommon in medieval art, but is perhaps most often seen in illuminations showing episodes of Reynard the Fox or other animal tales typical of the Latin medieval literary world. Consequently, this illumination stands out as rather unusual, at least to the modern mind. To the medieval beholder, on the other hand, this scene might simply be understood as a very effective rendition of the well-known topos from Latin Christian hagiography, namely that nature and all its denizens were subordinate to, and came to the aid of, the saints of God.
In Beinecke MS 404, this scene is one of several full-page illuminations by the same artist found in the manuscript, and these are all depictions of a single scene from the life of a saint or from a particular story. Unfortunately, the page following each illumination is left blank, and the extracts from the various legends that were likely intended to be included, were never copied into the manuscript. For this reason, it can sometimes be difficult to assess to which story a particular illumination refers. In the case of the one on folio 31r, however, every detail of the scene provides a clear pointer to the legend of Saint Paul the first hermit, one of the earliest and most successful prequels of the Latin Christian traditions, at least outside the biblical apocrypha.
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