'The Bestiary' is a book of animals. The 'Second-family' bestiary is the most important version. This study addresses the work's purpose and audience. It includes a critical edition and new English translation, and a catalogue raisonne of the manuscripts.

This is an English translation of the short version of the French Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais. The original text, the Physiologus was probably written during the 2nd century, in Greek, then translated to Latin, and then translated into Old French by de Beauvais. These are stories of animals given as symbols of Man's eternal fears and hopes. This bestiary can be used as a means of understanding the thought processes of people in the Middle Ages.

A celebration of the visual contributions of the bestiary--one of the most popular types of illuminated books during the Middle Ages--and an exploration of its lasting legacy. Brimming with lively animals both real and fantastic, the bestiary was one of the great illuminated manuscript traditions of the Middle Ages. Encompassing imaginary creatures such as the unicorn, siren, and griffin; exotic beasts including the tiger, elephant, and ape; as well as animals native to Europe like the beaver, dog, and hedgehog, the bestiary is a vibrant testimony to the medieval understanding of animals and their role in the world. So iconic were the stories and images of the bestiary that its beasts essentially escaped from the pages, appearing in a wide variety of manuscripts and other objects, including tapestries, ivories, metalwork, and sculpture. With over 270 color illustrations and contributions by twenty-five leading scholars, this gorgeous volume explores the bestiary and its widespread influence on medieval art and culture as well as on modern and contemporary artists like Pablo Picasso and Damien Hirst. Published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center May 14 to August 18, 2019.

This book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

Fresh and provocative approaches to the literature of the middle ages, offering close readings of texts from Chaucer to Henryson, and beast fable to devotional works. Jill Mann's writing, teaching, and scholarship have transformed our understanding of two distinct fields, medieval Latin and Middle English literature, as well as their intersection. Essays in this volume seek to honour this achievement by looking at entirely new aspects of these fields (the relationship of song to affect, the political valence of classical allusion, the Latin background of Middle English devotional texts). Others look again at the literary kinds and ideas most important in Mann's own work (beast fable, the nature of allegory, the nature of "nature", the relationship of economic thought and literature, satire, language as a subject for poetry) in the poets she hasbeen most drawn to (Chaucer, Langland, Henryson). All of the essays involve close readings of the most careful kind, taking as their primary method Professor Mann's repeated injunction to attend, above all, to the"words on the page". Christopher Cannon is Professor of English, New York University; Maura Nolan is Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. Contributors: Siobhain Bly Calkin, Christopher Cannon, Rebecca Davis, Peter Dronke, A.S.G. Edwards, Elizabeth B. Edwards, Maura Nolan, Paul J. Patterson, Derek Pearsall, Ad Putter, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, James Simpson, Barry Windeatt, Nicolette Zeeman

This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.

6 Mixed Feelings in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances: Emotional Reconfiguration and the Failures of Crusading Practices in the Otuel Texts -- 7 Circularity and Linearity: The Idea of the Lyric and the Idea of the Book in the Cent Ballades of Jean le Seneschal -- 8 'What shal I calle thee? What is thy name?': Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of 'Chaucer'

An “insightful cultural history of the mythical, self-immolating bird” from Ancient Egypt to contemporary pop culture by the author of The Book of Gryphons (Library Journal). The phoenix, which rises again and again from its own ashes, has been a symbol of resilience and renewal for thousands of years. But how did this mythical bird come to play a part in cultures around the world and throughout human history? Here, mythologist Joseph Nigg presents a comprehensive biography of this legendary creature. Beginning in ancient Egypt, Nigg’s sweeping narrative discusses the many myths and representations of the phoenix, including legends of the Chinese, where it was considered a sacred creature that presided over China’s destiny; classical Greece and Rome, where it appears in the writings of Herodotus and Ovid; medieval Christianity, in which it came to embody the resurrection; and in Europe during the Renaissance, when it was a popular emblem of royals. Nigg examines the various phoenix traditions, the beliefs and tales associated with them, their symbolic and metaphoric use, and their appearance in religion, bestiaries, and even contemporary popular culture, in which the ageless bird of renewal is employed as a mascot and logo. “An exceptional work of scholarship.”—Publishers Weekly

Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.