Book Review

摘要

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 (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 , translated from Greek into Latin as early as the fourth century . These family trees have grown new branches in the decades since, with recent scholarship largely following the foundational work of Florence McCulloch’s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962). Sarah Kay’s 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.