bestiary

bestiary (bĕs`chēĕr'ē), a type of medieval book that was widely popular, particularly from the 12th to 14th cent. The bestiary presumed to describe the animals of the world and to show what human traits they severally exemplify. The bestiaries are the source of a bewildering array of fabulous beasts and of many misconceptions of real ones. They were the artist's guide to animal symbolism in religious building, painting, and sculpture. Physiologus (the naturalist), an ancient work of the type, was probably the chief source of the bestiaries. A Middle English version is translated in J. L. Weston, The Chief Middle English Poets (1914). Variations of the genre remain popular. Modern authors who have written bestiaries include Lewis Carroll, James Thurber, T. H. White, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Bibliography

See W. Clark and M. McMunn, Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages (1989).

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bestiary

Medieval European work in verse or prose, often illustrated, consisting of a collection of stories, each based on a description of certain qualities of the subject, usually an animal or a plant. The stories were allegories, used for moral and religious instruction and admonition. They ultimately were derived from the Greek Physiologus, a text compiled by an unknown author before the mid 2nd century AD. Many traditional attributes of real or mythical creatures derive from bestiaries, such as the phoenix's burning itself to be born again and the parental love of the pelican, which, believed to feed its young by gashing its own breast, became a symbol of Christ.