Everything about Bestiary totally explained
A
bestiary, or
Bestiarum vocabulum is a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries were made popular in the
Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks. The
natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was 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.
Two illuminated
Psalters, the
Queen Mary Psalter (
British Library Ms. Royal 2B, vii) and the
Isabelle Psalter (State Library,
Munich), contain full Bestiary cycles. That in the Queen Mary Psalter is in the "marginal" decorations that occupy about the bottom quarter of the page, and are unusually extensive and coherent in this work. In fact the bestiary has been expanded beyond the source in the Norman bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc to ninety animals. Some are placed in the text to make correspondences with the
psalm they're illustrating.
The Italian artist
Leonardo da Vinci also made his own bestiary.
The
Aberdeen Bestiary is one of the best known of over 50 manuscript bestiaries surviving today.
Mediaeval bestiaries are remarkably similar in sequence of the animals of which they treat.
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. Nicholas Christopher wrote a literary novel called "The Bestiary" (Dial, 2007) that describes a lonely young man's efforts to track down the world's most complete bestiary. 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. It isn't uncommon for video games with a large variety of enemies (especially
RPGs) to include a bestiary of sorts. This usually takes the form of a list of enemies and a short description (for example the
Metroid Prime and
Castlevania games, as well as
Dark Cloud and
Final Fantasy).
Further Information
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