The Medieval Bestiary

In today’s globalized age, the internet grants access to a near infinite level of information. Yet in that vast wealth of knowledge, many people find themselves accessing it solely to look at cute animal pictures. This seemingly innate fascination with animals extends far back to the Middle Ages, wherein bestiaries were a popular genre.

Simply put, a bestiary is a compendium of animals. In medieval bestiaries (many of which draw from the Physiologus , each animal’s entry included things like etymological information, natural history, observations, habitats, and an often wildly inaccurate illuminations. While somewhat analogous to a zoological encyclopedia, bestiaries were hardly scientific. Each description was usually a Christian allegory or comparison to guide the reader’s morality; nor was any of the information itself guaranteed to be true to reality. For example, as a puppy’s tongue can supposedly cure internal wounds, someone’s sins can be cleansed by a priest in confession. (Folio 19v, Aberdeen Bestiary. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f19v). On top of this, there are many entries for mythological creatures, such as dragons, phoenixes, and jaculi, which are listed alongside real animals as if to make their existence more credible. As for whether bestiaries were taken seriously by medieval people, there seems to be no consensus among scholars.

This article will describe some digital humanities resources concerning the medieval bestiary.

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages is the most robust resource for bestiaries on the web. An independent project from Canadian scholar David Badke, this website collates information regarding “any and all aspects” of the topic “animals in the Middle Ages” with a focus on Western European manuscript tradition. The website contains a myriad of features and catalogues, which can be ordered in a variety of different ways. Most notably, a user can access an index of all beasts that appear in bestiaries and other related works, which can be sorted alphabetically by the beasts’ common names or by cross referencing name variations (such as alternate names, spellings, and Latin names). Next to each beast on the list, the type of beast is shown, plus a short descriptor. Each entry contains a short summary of the beast’s general attributes, translated entries from the medieval texts in which the beast appears, a gallery of its artistic renderings, as well as a bibliography.