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About the Collection
White's The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts was the first and, for a time, the only English translation of a medieval bestiary.
Bestiaries were second only to the Bible in their popularity and wide distribution during the Middle Ages. They were catalogs of animal stories,
combining zoological information, myths, and legends. Great attention was given to bizarre, exotic, and monstrous creatures. Much of the content
of bestiaries was drawn from much older sources including Aristotle, early English literature, and oral traditions. White provides an excellent
appendix that explains how the creatures of the bestiary influenced the development of allegory and symbolism in art and literature.
Technical Note
Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):
- Hand-written texts;
- Texts that contain diacritics;
- Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
- Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
- Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.
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