Blessed Beasts A Blessed Bestiary in Verse

A bestiary is a literary collection of animals, each one of which conveys a practical lesson or a moral virtue. Bestiaries belong to the various books of the art of rhetoric, one of the three liberal arts of the trivium, and combine reason (syllogism) and imagination (metaphor) into a persuasive form. The Christian bestiary is based on the rhetorical Summa of Venerable Luis de Granada, O.P., a contemporary of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Church. The Christian bestiary conveys moral lessons with theological accuracy, despite often containing fantastical descriptions of the beast themselves. Much of the information in Blessed Beasts is literal. The definitions of the virtues, for example, are accurate. The definitions of words and glossary of beasts are accurate but not absolute, and were written for the sake of discussion. The verses of the beasts are poetical, however, and were written for the sake of fancy.