Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries [Book Review]

Abstract

A genre devoted to taxonomising animal life, the medieval bestiary has proven deeply resistant to its own neat scholarly classification. Nearly a century ago, M.R. James, in The Bestiary (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1928), proposed the nomenclature of the ‘family’ to describe the loosely affiliated manuscript traditions that developed from the earliest example of the bestiary form, the Physiologus, translated from Greek into Latin as early as the fourth century CE. These family trees have grown new branches on the decades since, with recent scholarship largely following the foundational work of Florence McCulloch’s Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962). Sarah Kay’s Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries marks the first major challenge to the genealogy of the bestiary families since McCulloch, highlighting a continental bestiary tradition too often side-lined in English-language scholarship.