Bestiary

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This article is about a literary genre. For a gaming book, see bestiary (RPG).

A bestiary, or Bestiarum vocabulum is a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries were made popular in the Middle ages in illustrated volumes that described various real or imaginary animals, birds and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast were usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was literally the Word of God, and that every living thing had its own special meaning. For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. The bestiary, then, is also a reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.

Bestiaries were particularly popular in England and France around the 12th century and were mainly compilations of earlier texts. The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists.

Following the Physiologus, Saint Isidore of Seville (Book XII of the Etymologiae) and Saint Ambrose expanded the religious message with reference to passages from the Bible and the Septuagint. They and other authors freely expanded or modified pre-existing models, constantly refining the moral content without interest or access to much more detail regarding the factual content. Nevertheless, the often fanciful accounts of these beasts were widely read and generally believed to be true. A few observations found in bestiaries, such as the migration of birds, were discounted by the natural philosophers of later centuries, only to be rediscovered in the modern scientific era.

The most well-known bestiary of that time is the Aberdeen Bestiary. There are many others and over 50 manuscripts survive today.

In modern times, artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Saul Steinberg have produced their own bestiaries. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a contemporary bestiary of sorts, the Book of Imaginary Beings, which collects imaginary beasts from bestiaries and fiction. Writers of Fantasy fiction draw heavily from the fanciful beasts described in mythology, fairy tales, and bestiaries. The "worlds" created in Fantasy fiction can be said to have their own bestiaries. Similarly, authors of fantasy role-playing games sometimes compile bestiaries as references, such as the Monster Manual for Dungeons & Dragons.

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References

"The Medieval Bestiary", by James Grout, part of the Encyclopædia Romana.
Payne, Ann. (1990) "Mediaval Beasts.
Hassig, Debra (1995) Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology.
Hassig, Debra, ed. (1999) The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature.
Benton, Janetta Rebold. (1992) The Medieval Menagerie: Animals in the Art of the Middle Ages.
George, Wilma and Brunsdon Yapp. (1991) The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary.
Clark, Willene B. and Meradith T. McMunn. (1989) The Bestiary and its Legacy.