bestiary

A didactic literary form popular in classical and mediaeval times which presents human characteristics in the guise of animal behaviour: the Greek Physiologus is the model. Many animals such as the lion, the eagle, and the fox owe their symbolic associations to these works, of which the 13th-c Middle English Bestiary is a late example. Stories such as George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and Richard Adam's Watership Down (1972) are sometimes seen as modern developments of the bestiary.

Bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals, birds and even rocks. The bestiary, then, is also a reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.

Bestiaries were particularly popular in England and France around the 12th century and were mainly compilations of earlier texts. The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists. A few observations found in bestiaries, such as the migration of birds, were discounted by the natural philosophers of later centuries, only to be rediscovered in the modern scientific era.

The Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci also made his own bestiary.

The most well-known bestiary of that time is the Aberdeen Bestiary.

In modern times, artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Saul Steinberg have produced their own bestiaries. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a contemporary bestiary of sorts, the Book of Imaginary Beings, which collects imaginary beasts from bestiaries and fiction. Writers of Fantasy fiction draw heavily from the fanciful beasts described in mythology, fairy tales, and bestiaries. The "worlds" created in Fantasy fiction can be said to have their own bestiaries. Similarly, authors of fantasy role-playing games sometimes compile bestiaries as references, such as the Monster Manual for Dungeons & It is not uncommon for video games with a large variety of enemies (especially RPGs) to include a bestiary of sorts.