Goodreads Rating: 3 stars
NetGalley Rating: 4 stars
An indispensable volume for the study of bestiaries and their role in the medieval world. While I personally didn’t find it to be riveting casual reading, it still had immense amount of information that, had I been writing a paper on the topic, this would have been a great source.
The book contains essays covering the variations in bestaries throughout the medieval era, as well as covering how creatures from the bestaries ended up in other works of art, like architecture, sculpture, and maps. An epilogue about the bestiary in the modern world shows that our interest in illustrating animals in a unique way or to make an allegorical point is still as strong as it was in the middle ages.
While I did end up skimming many of the essays in the first section, since I simply found them a bit too specific and academically focused for a casual read, I still gleaned some interesting info (e.g. many bestaries were not illustrated, some were supplemental inserts to religious works, lions always start off bestaries). The essays in the “Beyond the Bestary” section were the most interesting to me and correlated more with my interests (e.g. beasties on maps!!).
The catalogue of the exhibition is interspersed throughout the essays, rather than being fully contained in its own section. However, the sectioning of the catalog does correlate with the essays and is helpful for showing how bestaries evolved and how they built off of prior versions. I did find some that I was always wanting more visual references to the works referenced, so the few pictures from each work featured just didn’t give me the full picture I was hoping for. Again, for a scholarly purpose, the info likely would be enough, but for an introduction to bestaries, I think an abundance of visuals are more helpful.
Had I been more interested in the text of bestiaries, rather than the illustrations/art and natural history aspect of the, this would have likely been an amazing read for me. However, if I lived closer to the museum, I would definitely visit to see these works in person! The catalog of the exhibition included in the book looks highly diverse in illustration styles and types of beasts, so I think it’s something that just needs to be seen and analyzed independently.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a free copy to review!
Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World will be available June 4, 2019 from Getty Publications.
Editor: Elizabeth Morrison, with Larisa Grollemond.
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