Acknowledgements
I owe this volume’s genesis to Julian Deahl of Brill Publishers, who invited me shortly before his retirement in 2015 to edit a collection of essays on bestiaries with the freedom to select its intellectual parameters. Back then, I was uncertain about the timing of such a volume, but this feeling changed dramatically the following year with the announcement of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, which in 2019 focused renewed attention on the richness of the bestiary and its enduring cultural relevance. I warmly thank Elizabeth Morrison, the exhibition’s executive curator and contributor to this volume, for inviting me to participate in the associated 2017 academic symposium, “The Ark After Noah: Beasts, Books, and Bodies of Knowledge,” which gave me the opportunity to exchange ideas about bestiaries and related topics with most of the scholars whose studies are presented here.
It was a pleasure to work with the editorial team at Brill. I thank Kate Hammond for her administrative support, and I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for their encouragement and helpful suggestions for improvements. I thank Abdurraouf Oueslati for copyediting assistance, and Dirk Bakker for guiding me through the production process humanely and efficiently. I owe special thanks to Marcella Mulder for her expert editorial guidance, and for her patience and support throughout the publication process. I would also like to extend thanks to the British Library for supplying digital images in difficult circumstances following the 2023 cyberattack on their online information systems, which disabled the URL links that we have nevertheless retained in footnotes on the assumption that they will be reactivated in the future.
As for any volume of this nature, the lion’s share of thanks must go to the authors, who in this case remained committed to the project through a global pandemic involving travel restrictions, delayed access to archives, and serious personal challenges. Their cooperation and professionalism, their enthusiasm and creativity, and their high scholarly standards have been an editor’s delight. It was a privilege to work with them.
This volume is dedicated to all the creatures—past and present, real and imaginary—who inspire us to look, think, and write.
– D.H.S.