Bestiaries

Bestiaries are books that were produced during the Middle Ages that described both real and fictitious animals and accompanie d by imaginativ e drawings. The bestiaries dealt with the natural world but were never meant to be scientific texts. Rather each creature with its unique characteri stics was used as a metaphor for Christian virtues or vices.

Images and descriptions of animals and monsters from medieval bestiaries at the BNF.

Stories and proverbs from Latin bestiaries, along with Aesopic fables in verse and prose, plus other animal stories taken from various medieval Latin sources.

An index to the newsletter of the Slavic Interest Group, organized by article topics.

The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24) is considered to be one of the best examples of its type. The manuscript, written and illuminated in England around 1200, is of added interest since it contains notes, sketches and other evidence of the way it was designed and executed.

The process of medieval education is still very obscure to us, and indeed very little is known about how texts were used in schools. This is particular ly true of the role and function of the influentia l genre of medieval bestiaries in the process of educating novices and pupils in cathedral schools and monasterie s. The Royal collection contains one peculiar manuscript , namely Royal 2 C. XII, a bestiary of the so-called BIs Family, made in the first quarter of the 13th century, probably at the abbey of St Peter at Gloucester . The text of this bestiary was published at the end of nineteenth century, and thus Royal 2 C. XII is one of the first bestiaries published by modern scholars.

A visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art.

The goal is to gather all available information about the Medieval Bestiary and its antecendants, as well as related information on the medieval view of animals in general, both fabulous and real. Aspects of the general topic of animals in the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on the manuscript tradition, particularly of the bestiaries, and mostly in western Europe.