Afterword

The connections that were being made with animals in the bestiary tradition, as this collection shows, were wide-ranging. Whether thinking about the relationship between text and image in manuscripts; between monolingualism, multilingualism, and translanguaging; tracing the relationship between the nature of the natural and the divinity of the divine; or looking at the use and understanding of animals in works from different religious traditions; what emerges from these studies is the variety and complexity of the ideas contained within the bestiaries, which in turn allows the period that produced them to be looked at in new ways.