Joanna Bagniewska - The Modern Bestiary: A Curated Collection of Wondrous Wildlife

Before we start, let me warn you that this is not really a book for childrenso if you bought it for your baby sister, kid nephew, or little cousin (because its about animals and it has pictures), you need to be prepared for a, perhaps awkward, conversation about traumatic insemination, Animals are gross. And gory. And obscene. And I suspect that it could be difficult to address issues such as siblicide with children who are going through the phase of hating their brother or sister.

Now that thats out of the way, welcome! Welcome to The Modern Bestiary!

First of all, what is a bestiaryand why write a modern version of it?

Medieval bestiaries were books of beasts: collections of creatures containing natural history information (factual or otherwise), doused in didactic sauce with a strongly Christian flavor. While animal stories have been popular for centuries, across all cultures, bestiaries of the Christian West were written with a very particular goal in mind. Early Church Fathers, such as the third-century scholar Origen of Alexandria, believed that God speaks to people through creation. If we pay close enough attention to the natural world, he claimed, we will be able to grasp a deeper understanding of the Creatorand of human nature. Animals and their behavior therefore presented a perfect opportunity for a moral and theological lesson. Some of these lessons were plausiblefor example, ants working together for a common good show us how humans should work in unity. Others, however, were completely off. Famously, the pelican was said to kill its young and then pierce its own breast to revive them by feeding them blood; in doing so, the bird symbolized the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Mundane facts (that pelicans feed on fish and not the blood of their parents) did not get in the way of a good allegory. To further blur the line between fact and fiction, the bestiaries contained fantastical beasts, such as unicorns, phoenixes, or mermaids, alongside the real animals.

The first of these moralizing collections of beasts was written sometime between the second and fourth centuries ad , probably in Alexandria. This book, known as the Physiologus, sourced animal stories from Egyptian, Hebrew, and Indian lore, as well as the works of natural philosophers such as Aristotle (De animalibus) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia), and used them to explain the Christian doctrine. The Physiologus, originally written in Greek, was translated into many European and Middle Eastern languages and became hugely popular across Europe. The original contained fifty-odd chapters describing animals (actual and fantastical), plants and rocks, covering everything from ants to lions to antlions. Over the next centuries, more entries were addedand eventually the Middle Ages saw a real bestiary boom.

The illustrations complementing each entry were an important part of the bestiaries. The stories themselves (with their associated moral lessons) were not new or unknown, having been told and retold in many circumstances; therefore, the purpose of the artwork was predominantly to jog the memory of those who couldnt read. As such, the illustrations were meant to be evocative, expressive, and didactic. Unfortunately, they were not always accurate or even realistic, mainly because the artists did not have much of a chance to see the more exotic species (or none at all when it came to the manticores, griffins, or centaurs). Instead, they based their drawings on previous illustrations, descriptions from earlier books, or other peoples accounts, forming a sort of composite image created via Chinese whispers, with any gaps filled by their own poetic license. Consequently, many animals didnt look quite rightwith lions having very human-like faces, pelicans sporting sharp, eagle-like beaks, whales and dolphins covered in scales, and so on. And the imagery prevailed in other forms: every time I walk through the center of Oxford and peek into Corpus Christi College, I am greeted by a statue of a stubby-beaked, breast-piercing pelican standing atop a sundial in the main quad.