Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages

Book excerpt: Bestiaries are among the most interesting and varied books of the Middle Ages. Collections of illustrations depicting real and mythical animals and plants accompanied a text which can be traced back to the earliest centuries of the Christian era. Dr. Baxter, employing a completely fresh and comprehensive approach, has undertaken extensive new research into a large corpus of Bestiaries, applying modern narrative theory to their texts and images to reveal the messages encoded in themmessages which were systematically altered as Bestiaries were expanded and restructured. By applying the results of this analysis to medieval library records, he has been able to identify important centres of Bestiary use, and to present a radically different picture of what Bestiaries were to their medieval users.