Beasts Factual and Fantastic
Manuscripts of the middle ages teem with pictures of animals, ranging from fierce hunting hawks tied to their owners wrists, to proud lions added to the coasts of arms of noblemen, to terrify monsters of the Apocalypse. The images in this volume provide a window onto a time when animals both factual and fantastic played a leading role in the medieval imagination.
Beasts Factual and Fantastic is the first in the Medieval Imagination series of books that will draw on manuscript illuminations from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Each volume will focus on a particular theme or subject as represented by medieval artists. Often, as in the case of the imaginary beasts that readers will encounter in this volume, artists depicted that which they did not see or know, but which was nonetheless shaped by the prevailing beliefs, fears, and rudimentary science of the time. In other cases, manuscript illuminators recorded what they indeed did see - which, centuries later, reveals much about the world in which they lived.
Elizabeth Morrison is Associate Curator of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Table of Contents
Foreword - Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick
Introduction
ANIMALS IN DAILY LIFE
Creating the Animals
Work and Play
Warfare
Animals and the Law
Studying Animals
Beasts in Focus: The Hunting Manual
SYMBOLIC CREATURES
Christian Symbols
Saintly Companions
Astrological Animals
Heraldic Creatures
Tales, Parables, and Fables
Beasts in Focus: The Bestiary
FANTASTIC BEASTS
Marginal Hybrids
Mythological Animals
Beasts in Human Guise
Dragons and Demons
Beasts in Focus: The Apocalypse
