Von Dichtern und Bienen: Die Bienenwelt in poetologischen Gleichnissen

Since Antiquity and through the Middle Ages, the world of bees appears in metaphors and allegories with different meanings and connotations. Regarding poetry and poetic reflection, the bees – which fly to different flowers, drink their nectar and concoct it into honey – were often used to represent the process of reading the great models, learning from them through imitation and, finally, creating something new on the basis of the old. This metaphor was famously used by Seneca and Macrobius, it frequently recurs in medieval literature and has been often considered as an instance of the medieval understanding of Latin poetry as the result of learning. However, it has been largely overlooked that bees also can represent in Medieval Latin literature divine inspiration, attributed to the prophet, the preacher, and even in some instances to the poet. In this paper, different instances of bees metaphors in Latin texts from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the 12th century are examined, showing in which ways they can convey a complex meaning, often combining poetic work and poetic gift