Why does the bestiary carry such fascination to the modern mind? How has it changed as a form over the years? What lesson does it deliver about the textual nature of animals, and the nature of texts themselves? These questions require new insights and new methods of inquiry. For the past several years I have been working on a semiotic method of inquiry which I call "juxtapositional analysis". The fundamental assumption of juxtapositional analysis is that any two objects of inquiry can be juxtaposed, thereby leading the inquirer to draw meaningful conclusions about the said juxtaposition. In particular, one way to advance the understanding of the juxtaposition is to describe the first component by using the language of the second component. By shifting both the language and the context of the first component, new insights about that component should be uncovered. The purpose of this paper is to do such an analysis, so as to shed new light on the nature and history of the bestiary, and its place in the modern world. The idea of the bestiary, then, is the "text" of this particular semiotic methodology. In this way, we should be able to trace the textual thread of the bestiary from the medieval world to see its modern counterpart. - [Author]

Language: English