Throw your testicles Tom Shippey reviews ‘Book of Beasts’ edited by Elizabeth Morrison, with Larisa Grollemond

• Published in: The London Review of Books Vol. 41; no. 24; p. 35
• Main Author: Shippey, Tom
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London London Review Of Books 19-12-2019
• ISSN: 0260-9592

Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World edited by Elizabeth Morrison, with Larisa Grollemond Getty, 354 pp, £45.00, June, ISBN 978 1 60606 590 7 Medieval people lived in much closer proximity to animals than most of us do today, but had less sense of their variety. Who in 12th-century England would have seen an elephant or a crocodile? Tales filtered back from Crusaders and distant travellers of a giant herbivore with a nose so long and pliable that it could pick up men and seat them on its back, and of an armour-plated carnivore that lurked in water and could be mistaken by the unwary for a log of wood. These were as improbable – and therefore as possible – as a white horse with a long horn in the middle of its forehead (not least because such horns were sometimes found, and might even be transformed into bishops’ staffs).