“A bestiary is a collection of short descriptions about all sorts of animals, real and imaginary, birds and even rocks, accompanied by a moralising explanation. Although it deals with the natural world it was never meant to be a scientific text and should not be read as such. Some observations may be quite accurate but they are given the same weight as totally fabulous accounts. The bestiary appeared in its present form in England in the twelfth century, as a compilation of many earlier sources, principally Physiologus. A great deal of its charm comes from the humour and imagination of the illustrations, painted partly for pleasure but justified as a didactic tool ‘to improve the minds of ordinary people, in such a way that the soul will at least perceive physically things which it has difficulty grasping mentally: that what they have difficulty comprehending with their ears, they will perceive with their eyes’ (Aberdeen MS 24, f25v).” (1)
A bestiary is a collection of beasts (both mythical and real) that have been given some kind of moral lesson or religious connotation. The roots of these stories and creatures date back to before we started recording things in writing, to Indian, Jewish and Egyptian legends. The Bestiary as we know it appeared around the 12th Century in England, based on a greek text called Physiologus. This was a collection of beasts, birds and fish with elaborate illustrations. Nearly all of the animals in this original text were North African in origin, European animals didn’t appear till much later.
Part of the reason a bestiary has such a moral message is because when it was written it was believed that God had put animals on this planet to learn from them, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.” (Job 12:7-10) (2). From the Physiologus greek version came Etymologia in the 7th Century by Isidore of Seville. These two books combined to create a version of the Bestiary we would recognise today. It is not a zoological or religious text, but rather a reflection of our world and how we interpret it.
Many of the illustrations were not accurate, as often the artist had never seen the animal they were depicting. They were a combination of writing, description, and other drawings of the animal. For example, ‘medieval European illustrators often drew the crocodile as a dog-like beast , the whale as a large, scaled fish, the ostrich with hooves and many serpents with feet and/or wings.’
Maddy Caulfield Animation 