Supplies & Materials: The Bestiary
A class about creatures asks little of your shelves and much of your attention. Most lessons need nothing but the lesson, your bestiary journal, and a pencil.
Two lessons ask you to go and look at the real world: Lesson 13, where you observe a real animal and write its entry twice — once as a medieval bestiarist would, once corrected by fact — and the capstone, where you document a being of your own choosing to the class standard. Everything on this page serves those pages, and the thirty-four lessons between them.
A Note from Professor Rookmere
Keep your own bestiary from the first lesson. Every assignment in this class writes one entry in it, in your hand, on paper you will keep. A raven remembers where every acorn is buried; your journal is how you will.
Observe kindly. We study what people recorded, and we look at living animals from a respectful distance — we do not catch, keep, or collect.
The Bestiary
Bestiary Keeper
What You'll Need
Level Two: The Castle Road
- A leather-bound journal, kept as the fair copy of your bestiary
- Quill and ink for fair entries (Scrollwork scholars: your own hand and ink)
- A brass hand lens
- A field satchel or small bag for the observation walk — journal, pencils, lens, and nothing for collecting: we carry things away only as notes
- A book stand or lectern for reading the heavy references
- Printed entry-template pages from the lesson packets, for the Unfinished Pages at the back of your bestiary
Level One: The Household Road
- A notebook that will become your bestiary — one per scholar, kept for the whole class; every assignment adds an entry
- Pencils and a pen you like writing with
- A red pencil or red pen — for the correction pass in Lesson 13, where your medieval entry is corrected line by line, as the class teaches
- Index cards or slips of paper, for drafting entries before they are copied fair
- A ruler, for ruling your entry pages to the class standard
- A hand lens or magnifying glass, if your house has one (Lessons 13 and the capstone)
- A phone or camera, for the observation lesson only — a photograph of the animal you watched, taken from a respectful distance
- Access to a library, or to the sources listed at each lesson's end — this class studies creatures through the records they left behind, and the records are the supplies
The Keeper's Rules
Read before Lesson 13, and keep for the whole class:
- Observe, never collect. No living creature is caught, kept, handled, or harmed for this class, ever.
- Wild animals are watched from a distance that keeps them calm; a nest, burrow, or den is looked at, not into.
- Domestic animals are observed with their owner's permission.
- What you cannot observe honestly, you write as unobserved — the class's whole discipline, in one line.