Penned, tinted, and fully painted images are prominent in the group of bestiary manuscripts that combine passages from Physiologus with passages from other medieval and Classical sources, to treat some hundred or more different beasts. 1 These images-often lively and memorable, sometimes elegant and lavish beyond price-expand the manuscripts' written texts with further conceptions and interpretations of how nonhuman animals differ from humans, how they respond to circumstances, and how their behaviors interface with various cultural enterprises such as hunting, farming, and war-making. 2 We oversimplify these late medieval bestiaries when we value only their moral and theological lessons for humankind. Bestiary scholars have tended to focus exclusively on the bestiaries' didactic passages, in which Creation is understood as a vast system of material signs that convey spiritual meanings. For example, the bestiaries teach that the unicorn's capture by a virgin girl represents the Virgin Birth of Christ (see plate 3); the fox's trick for killing birds is a warning that the Devil preys on heedless sinners (see plate 9); and the crocodile's double habitat, aquatic and terrestrial, shows how hypocrites behave. Some scholars even argue that, given the bestiaries' Christian milieu, we should see moral and theological meanings everywhere implicit, even when not explicit in texts or images. - [Abstract]

Language: English