A bestiary of hatred: A co-authored monograph

Abstract

The monograph consists of chapters devoted to various methods of expressing hatred using the imagery out of a bestiary. Despite the book’s diverse material, it strikes as a holistic piece of research that touches on such problems as reliability of sources, convergence of historical facts and literary topoi, the correlation between a tradition and an author’s intention, the mutual influence of literary and visual images, the ambivalence of the symbolism of beasts, creativity and the interplay between the animal world and humanity. The book considers material produced in different languages, which enables the authors to trace the stylistic evolution of animal metaphors and transformation of their meanings. The contributed studies prompt the conclusion that it is impossible to find a beast that would unequivocally symbolise hatred: any negative connotations are revised by a later tradition.