Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages

Challenging the prevailing view that they are keys to the iconography of contemporary sculpture or early attempts at zoology, art historian Baxter takes a completely fresh approach to the collections of illustrations depicting and texts describing real and mythical animals and plants. He applies modern narrative theory to the texts and images to find messages encoded in them, and argues that those messages were systematically altered as the Bestiaries were expanded and restructured. Distributed in the US by Books International. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.