During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, numerous manuscripts of the bestiaries, richly illuminated, emerged from the English scriptoria, which represent the particular genre of the Bestiary par excellence, constitute its most complete and perfect examples, and at the same time rank among the highest achievements of English, Romanesque and Gothic illumination, as well as of all medieval illumination. ... Indeed, among some 500 medieval manuscripts, Western and Eastern, of the Bestiary and the Physiologus which have been preserved, no two manuscripts are absolutely identical as to their text, their illustration and the sequence of their chapters. The history of the Bestiary>, also widely distributed outside England, illustrates well the typical destiny of the popular encyclopedic work in the Middle Ages: it is a history of increases and accumulations of information drawn from older sources, of the expansion of the text and the cycle of illustrations, of the constant reorganization of the work over time, corresponding to the internal modifications of the conception of the medieval world and to the new tendencies of knowledge of the world and of nature. - [Author]

Language: French