Medieval Latin bestiaries are a mystery: their genealogy, their images, their short and carefully circumscribed period of production, their very premise. That mystery was recently on display in the spectacular Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum (May 14–August 18, 2019), where visitors had the singular opportunity to peruse, examine, and irrepressibly marvel at the largest gathering of bestiaries ever assembled—more than one-third of their total extant number. The Getty owns three of these precious manuscripts: The Northumberland Bestiary, MS 100, produced in England between 1250 and 1260; the Franco-Flemish Bestiary, MS Ludwig XV 3, dated to about 1270; and MS Ludwig XV 4, a Franco-Flemish aviary, from 1277 or after. Besides bestiary manuscripts, the exhibition also included accompanying objects that invoke bestiary texts and images, such as maps, delicate ivories, gilt textiles, and richly embroidered tapestries. It is hard to imagine a better complement to that splendid exhibition than this catalog. Like the exhibition, the catalog is a grand assemblage: hundreds of dazzling illustrations accompany articles by scholars of art, medieval studies, and history to illumine the medieval bestiary and its reception. With creation as its overall defining lens, the bestiary contains an encyclopedic polyphony of clever, engaging, compelling, fantastic, moralizing, or sinful animal stories. And the individual stories are themselves compilations of various and, at times, conflicting animal traits and their interpretations, traditionally understood as allegories for Christian virtues and vices. But unlike the more traditional bestiary studies, as found in the book's appendix 4, “Textual Editions, Translations, and Facsimiles” (314), and in the references section (315–29), the catalog organizes bestiaries in a novel way—according to their image programs: rather than the texts of animal stories with their Christian allegories, the catalog privileges illustrations. As Elizabeth Morrison writes in the introduction, “[c]onsidering the correlations among bestiaries for their pictorial programs enables a different examination of the bestiary tradition, elucidating new relationships and insights” (6).

Organized into three parts, the catalog's chapters are object-oriented and for the most part discuss aspects of the more than one hundred bestiaries and other pieces that were gathered from institutions across the United States and Europe for display in the exhibition. Part one, “Introducing the Bestiary,” includes Morrison's Introduction and fifteen deluxe images of some of the most well-known animals in the tradition, in sumptuous color. Beginning, as do most bestiaries, with the lion, these images follow the usual order of animals to include fantastic and domestic beasts, birds, reptiles, and fish. (This sampling of images is expanded in appendix 3 [311–13], which compares the order of illuminated animals in five bestiaries, representing different recensions.) Twelve of these lavishly executed images are culled from the exhibition bestiaries, the full list of which appears in appendix 1, “A List of Bestiaries in the Catalog” (308). Three are from other bestiaries: the beaver, depicted biting off his medicinally valuable testicles to escape hunters in pursuit; the half-human half-bird sirens that lure sailors with their melodious voices to viciously devour them; and the monstrous dragon who can crush even an elephant with his tail. The sources of these three images may be found in appendix 2, Ilya Dines's indispensable compilation of “List of All Extant Illuminated Latin Bestiaries” (309–10).

Part two, “Exploring the Bestiary,” and part three, “Beyond the Bestiary,” form the core of the catalog. The fifteen articles in these sections are punctuated by detailed scholarly descriptions of the exhibition's pieces; a bibliography of select works concludes each description. Corresponding to Catalog Nos. 1–34, Sarah Kay provides an overview of the “kaleidoscopic” variety of bestiaries (31); Xenia Muratova explores their “principal, mystical and symbolic aim” (39), which she considers to be devotional; Elizabeth Morrison finds a dynamic relationship between bestiary scribes and illuminators in page design, or how to explain those “deer antlers, dragon tails, and camel hooves” (52) that extend into margins; Ilya Dines reveals possible uses of the bestiary using clues gleaned from the miscellanies in which they were bound; and Susan Crane illuminates the night life of medieval cats and the activities of hawks to argue that bestiaries deviate from the tradition of spiritual allegory in presenting creatures in social rather than exclusively religious roles. To close part two, Emma Campbell and Larissa Grollemond consider the vernacular redactions of the bestiary, particularly French prose and verse adaptations and their readership (which included noble women as well as men), and the stability of animal iconography despite the expanding secularity of the audience. In part three, Catalog Nos. 35–98, Meredith Cohen examines the ubiquitous migrations of bestiary animals, often in apotropaic contexts, as they expand into other forms of sacred and secular art, such as church exteriors, misericords, or tapestries; Christine Sciacca discusses aquamanilia, metalwork water vessels in the shape of lions, which reflect attributes widely familiar from bestiary texts and images; Elizabeth Eisenberg and Melanie Holcomb analyze the use of three biblical, mythic (and large!) animals—a ziz (bird), behemoth (ox), and leviathan (sea creature)—in a North French Hebrew miscellany; and Emily Steiner treats the taxonomy of bestiaries and their relationship to medieval encyclopedias. In the three remaining chapters, Rebecca Hill, Deborah Higgs Strickland, and Chet van Duzer address beast lore in Islamic traditions and texts, bestiary creatures in careful spatial designs on medieval world maps (mappae mundi), and images of animals and monsters on maps and other media, respectively. In the epilogue, “The Legacy of the Bestiary,” Larisa Grollemond finds the bestiary in modern fine art books that link text and image in similar ways. The catalog closes with illustration credits (330) and a thorough Index (331–39).

In their expansive theriophilism, bestiaries anticipate the growing number of modern scholarly publications whose titles suggest a deepening of human/animal studies. Among these is the Book of Beasts catalog. Beautifully illustrated, meticulously edited, thought-provoking for scholars and animal enthusiasts alike, the catalog reminds us that, like the opulent bestiaries, our fellow creatures are fragile, irreplaceable, and endlessly enchanting.