Bestiary Bes Chee Er Ee Bees Noun Collection Moralized Fables Written

noun

A collection of moralized fables, especially as written in the Middle Ages, about actual or mythical animals.

[Bestiary is from the Latin bestiaries meaning "a fighter against beasts in the public entertainments." It entered English in the 1620s.]

It was pieced together into no named pattern native to this country, not star flower or flying bird of churn dasher or poplar leaf, but was some entirely made-up bestiary or zodiac of half-visionary creatures. - Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 1997

An inexperienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration. - Vladamir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1951