Medieval bestiaries (Latin: liber beastiarium) are compendiums of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and fabulous and ferocious chimeric creatures. These texts, developed from the Physiologus of Late Antiquity, were particularly popular in England and France in the 12th century. Bestiaries characteristically ascribed moral virtues and vices to the beasts on their pages, illustrating a symbolic language of animals tied to Christian thought. These works were not necessarily intended to provide factual information about natural history, but rather to imbue the curious and compelling natural world with a religious moral grounding. Some animals in bestiaries evaded such moralizing, inviting medieval readers to draw their own wide-ranging social, political, and religious connections.

UCSC Special Collections and Archives is positively replete with critters large and small, winged and maned, familiar and exotic, actual and imaginary. This exhibition celebrates a broad range of (mostly) bibliographic materials that engage with the bestiary tradition, explicitly and implicitly. We invite you to explore and discover the many articulations of animalia that populate our collections, to trace the histories these creatures contain, carry, and transmit, and to consider the following questions:

- When bestiaries are divorced from their religious utility, what new uses emerge?
- How do modern and contemporary artists saturate animals with moral and symbolic meaning? How is that meaning expressed by artworks’ material qualities?
- What flattens animals, and what expands them?
- Can you identify different social, cultural, and religious ways of understanding the natural world in this exhibition? How are these differences represented?
- How do we signify the benign? The monstrous?