Living with animals in the Middle Ages.

Unicorns, dragons, griffins: the lives of men in the Middle Ages, from the year 1000 to the Renaissance, were populated by a multitude of fabulous creatures, but also real and feared ones. The holy Fathers of the desert, monks, and credible preachers asserted that ferocious beasts and monstrous hybrid creatures were invading the earth. And since these chimeras were considered in the light of Creation, they raised fundamental questions. Was a cynocephalus truly a man with a dog's head? Could it be that God had created such horrible creatures? In the Middle Ages, humanity lived, in all conscience, in a lost paradise. Just as the marvelous relationship of subordination that animals, created to serve Adam, had maintained with men was lost forever after the transgression of Adam and Eve. They lacked effective weapons to confront wolves, bears, and wild boars, let alone lions, tigers, and panthers, should they encounter them. This did not prevent their fertile imagination from coming to their aid to overcome their fears.

In this lavishly illustrated essay, the great Italian medievalist Chiara Frugoni meticulously observes and analyzes tapestries, miniatures, mosaics, sculptures, paintings, and illustrated encyclopedias to show us the myriad facets of the centuries-old tradition, as symbolic as it is real, that linked men and animals. So many annotated images that bring this distant era, inherited by our culture, to life and excitement.