Plural of bestiary; illustrated medieval books or manuscripts describing real and mythical animals, often with moral or religious meanings assigned to each creature.
From bestiary, from Latin bestia (beast) + -arium (place where things are kept) + -es (plural). Bestiaries flourished in medieval Europe as a major literary and artistic form.
Medieval bestiaries like the Physiologus are absolutely wild—they describe unicorns, dragons, and phoenixes alongside real animals, and each gets a spiritual lesson, so a weasel teaching regeneration because supposedly it's the only animal that dies and comes back to life (totally false, but so creative!)
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