Physiologus

The Physiologus is an anonymous early Christian text, likely composed in Greek in Alexandria in the early centuries of the Christian era, describing real and legendary animals and assigning each a moral or allegorical Christian meaning, and this edition, published by University of Texas Press, presents it in English translation with scholarly apparatus. As a primary source it is the foundational text behind the medieval Christian bestiary tradition, so it is the strongest possible evidence for how early Christian allegorical natural history actually worked. Its limit is that its original author and precise date are unknown, and the text survives through a complicated history of later translation and expansion into different medieval bestiary traditions, so claims about any one specific later bestiary need that bestiary's own source rather than this earlier text alone.