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<\/a>Bestiaries themselves don\u2019t appear to distinguish between \u201creal\u201d and \u201cimaginary\u201d animals, in terms of the arrangement of entries or the way that creatures from these two categories are verbally described or artistically depicted;[1]<\/sup><\/a> the distinction is a modern and anachronistic one. Furthermore, bestiaries\u2019 inclusion of hard-to-believe anecdotes about well-known creatures who actually do exist (e.g., the stag\u2019s alleged habit of drowning snakes) renders the boundary between \u201creal\u201d and \u201cimaginary\u201d animals, as we might consider it, less firm in these texts. At stake in the discourse of the \u201creal\u201d versus the \u201cimaginary\u201d in bestiaries is our view of medieval thinkers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One approach to the \u201cimaginary\u201d animals in bestiaries\u2014a very old approach to interpreting mythical creatures, in fact\u2014is rationalistic: positing that even the legends have some basis in reality, and that real animals were, through a combination of misunderstanding and literary transmission, rendered (almost) unrecognizable. Notable proponents of this view in modern times have included T. H. White (1954), and more recently, zoologists Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp (1991).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bestiaries, for these scholars, can be read as works of natural history, albeit flawed ones, and we should perhaps extend some generosity to their creators, in light of the limitations of their knowledge. George and Yapp characterize the bestiary as \u201can attempt, not wholly unsuccessful or discreditable for the time at which it was produced, to give some account of some of the more conspicuous creatures that could be seen by the reader or that occurred in legends.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a> They suggest, for instance, that the manticore\u2014described in bestiaries as a creature with a man\u2019s face, a lion\u2019s body, three rows of teeth, and a tail like a scorpion stinger\u2014was based on the cheetah; that the unicorn could actually be an oryx; and that the half-human, half-fish siren could be a Mediterranean monk seal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reading bestiaries as genuine, sometimes highly faulty attempts at something comparable to modern natural history is not a popular position amongst medievalist scholars of bestiaries. However, the idea of bestiaries as failed pre-modern zoology lingers in some sources aimed at popular audiences. The entry on bestiaries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica<\/a>, for example, claims that the \u201cfrequently abstruse stories\u201d in these works \u201cwere often based on misconceptions about the facts of natural history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for the ontological status of \u201cimaginary\u201d bestiary creatures to medieval readers, i.e., whether they believed unicorns, etc. actually existed, this is hard to ascertain, and perhaps of less interest to many scholars than the prospect of examining the messages these rich works articulate on their own terms. Still, the unsupported assertion that bestiary stories were \u201cgenerally believed to be true\u201d in the Middle Ages, as the Wikipedia<\/a> page for bestiaries claims, is very much in line with widespread perceptions<\/em> of the period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an appealing contemporary fantasy, not so much to believe in dragons or unicorns, but to believe that people really believed in them<\/em>, once\u2014a sort of vicarious experience of enchantment, accomplished not simply by imaginatively engaging with medieval works that depict fantastic animals, but by imagining more credulous medieval readers, and perhaps even by imagining oneself in their place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To take both \u201creal\u201d and \u201cimaginary\u201d bestiary creatures as the texts present them\u2014not seeking to sieve the factual from the fabulous, not seeking an ordinary, well-known animal behind the remarkable verbal and visual depictions that bestiaries offer\u2014allows for, amongst other things, a certain defamiliarization of the natural world we inhabit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Playing on the fertile ambiguities of bestiary accounts is a project by The Maniculum (a podcast series<\/a> which brings together medieval texts and modern gaming, co-hosted by E. C. McGregor Boyle, a PhD Candidate at Purdue University, and Zoe Franznick, an award-winning writer for Pentiment<\/a>). On the Maniculum Tumblr<\/a>, readers are offered \u201canonymized\u201d selections from the Aberdeen Bestiary<\/a> (i.e., the name of the animal being described is replaced with a nonsense-word to disguise its identity). Contributors are invited to create artwork inspired by the bestiary description itself, rather than their knowledge of what the animal is \u201csupposed\u201d to look like. The results are diverse; the \u201chyena\u201d entry, for instance, yielded representations of creatures resembling everything from pigs to predatory snails, in a wide range of styles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bestiaries continue to fascinate and inspire, centuries after their creation. Below are some medieval bestiary facsimiles and related resources to explore:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Linnet Heald [1]<\/a> Pamela Gravestock, \u201cDid Imaginary Animals Exist?\u201d in The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature<\/em>, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Garland, 1999), 120.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>\n
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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