Interpreting the Beasts of the Middle Ages

Related: there is a very interesting guy who interprets the modern popular phenomena (mostly movies) through this medieval Christian symbolic lens: https://thesymbolicworld.com

Although I understand the middle ages' worldview was entirely christian and thus tracing the evolution on the symbolic perception of animals would involve tracing it through christian authors I'd contest that to fully understand the origin of this symbolism one has to broaden the view a lot further than St. Augustine... 2nd 3rd century christian texts and thought emerge from a very very cosmopolitan world where pagan conceptions of the nature of reality (i.e. neoplatonism, orphism, chaldean theology) are mixing with the newly emergent jewish sect that we'll later call christianity, and even with new jewish apocalyptic and esoteric thought.

I'm not totally convinced by this. Some of the animal archetypes predate the medieval bestiary and appear in, say, Roman or Greek plays, or pre-medieval texts like the Talmud, or Aesop's Fables.

EG Crocodile tears goes back to Plutarch. Lions' association with Kingship is Biblical.

Interesting, I wonder why cartographers in the medievil and renaissence periods used to draw sea monsters on their maps. Was it for similar reasons as explained in the article?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/can-you-spot-all-the-s...