Product Description

A glimpse at bestiaries. The author applies modern narrative theory to their texts and images to reveal the messages encoded in them. This book should be of interest to students of art history, mediaeval history, or mediaeval studies and to anyone fascinated by the mysteries of mediaeval art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #787472 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-23
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 242 pages

Customer Reviews

Marginal discourse
Ron Baxter is an academic art historian and this is a book intended for his peers. He evidently had the time and resource to outpace the many earlier commentaries on the bestiaries, and it would take a brave man to query his conclusions (...chief among them the argument that the Latin Bestiaries of the middle ages were in large part used to teach Christian virtues to novitiates). Baxter corals his texts with the side-stepping meticulousness of post-modern critical techniques (he's a fan of Foucault); but for a historian he seems oddly contemptuous of earlier critics who failed to transcend their own times. A decade after publication some of his analytical ideas already seem over-arch, and it's certain that the charm of more fanciful commentators (T.H.White, for instance) will live-on when this title is skulking around in footnotes. He's crabby, then; but the book remains both original and informed - albeit chiefly of interest to academics and amateur mediaevalists.