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Christopher de Hamel has been Donnelley Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 2000. For twenty-five years before that he was responsible for sales of illuminated manuscripts at Sotheby's.

In the Middle Ages, people believed that studying animals allowed them to read the Divine Order as written in the natural world. Medieval bestiaries illustrated beasts in stunning detail and explained their scientific nature as well as their allegorical significance.This bestiary, dating from the mid-13th century and preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford since the early 17th century, is one of the finest medieval English bestiaries. It is clearly the work of a master artist and was probably destined for an aristocratic home.This exquisite facsimile contains reproductions of all 137 folios and 135 miniatures: their original gold leaf is superbly rendered in high-quality foiling. The volume includes a detailed introduction by Christopher de Hamel which provides a context for bestiaries in general and "MS. Bodley 764" in particular, along with a discussion of the manuscript's provenance and style.