menagerie

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menagerie

1. a collection of wild animals kept for exhibition
2. the place where such animals are housed

Menagerie

 

a collection of wild animals kept in cages and intended for exhibition. Menageries go back to the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings, the Egyptian pharaohs, and the ancient Persian rulers. In Europe, menageries were associated with the ancient Roman circuses; their animals were used to persecute people.

In the late 18th century and early 19th, traveling menageries owned by private entrepreneurs began to appear in various European countries, including Russia. They exhibited for purely commercial purposes what were considered the “wonders” of the animal world—for example, elephants, lions, tigers, monkeys, bears, crocodiles, peacocks, boa constrictors, and parrots. These menageries were essentially amusement enterprises, and they have been eliminated in the USSR. Menageries were the precursors of zoological gardens.

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References in periodicals archive ?
But in the 19th century, when travelling menageries and circuses traversed Britain and the US, such break-outs were far more common.
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Jim lives in a real world of technological progress while Laura lives in the illusory world of inanimate menageries.
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Director Whit Wales has wedded his experience in film with live theater in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," performed at the First Parish Church, Fitchburg, this month.
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The animals are thought to have been housed in the Tower's Royal Menagerie, established by King John in the 13th century.
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The journeys of the inmates of the Royal Menagerie are well documented; Robbins quotes letters tracing the futile attempts of the hapless French Consul at the Cape of Good Hope to fulfill his orders to find and transport to Paris a mate for the king's zebra.
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The black sheep of the zoo family, these attractions are disowned by accredited zoos, but that hasn't stopped these menageries from cashing in on the marketing and education efforts of their larger or more sincere counterparts in the AZA community.
Reinventing the zoo: it's no longer enough to put endangered species on display and call it conservation
Medieval menageries did not substantially alter the perception of contemporary society about the probable and improbable fauna of this world, but they did at least provide an opportunity to see exotic and unusual animals that came from distant lands, allowing individuals to begin to understand the behaviour and characteristics of animals previously known only by their fabled attributes Both Villard de Honnecourt and Matthew Paris, in the thirteenth century, drew from life and in so-doing challenged false assumptions about the physical characteristics of previously mythologised beasts.
The Tower of London's royal menagerie
Though a cursory glance will reveal the crowded design, often vibrant hues, and imaginative use of found materials that mark self-taught art from Switzerland to Haiti, it is the evangelical slogans, church picnics, reminiscences of slavery, and barnyard menageries that serve to underline the influence of landscape and religion.
"Passionate Visions of the American South." (New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana)
They were sent to the Birmingham Mail by Geoffrey Younger whose great grandfather, Arthur Feeley, was a lion tamer with Bostock and Wombwell's Menagerie.
THE LION TAMER OF BIRMINGHAM
FITCHBURG - Director Whit Wales has wedded his experience in film with live theater in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," performed at First Parish Church this month.
Live theater, film share stage in `Glass Menagerie'

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