A Cabra e o Bode nos Bestiários Medievais Ingleses

In the medieval bestiary, the symbolism of the animals taken as exempla is not always fixed or well determined. Most of the creatures present in the Bestiary are ambivalent in symbolic terms and can be read both in a positive way (“in bono”) or in a negative way (“in malo”). In this paper, I intend to reflect on this symbolic ambivalence, taking the goat as an example for two fundamental reasons: because the goat is one of the animals in which that ambivalence is extremely clear and because it is one of the animals to which a great number of chapters and illustrations are dedicated. In fact, the goat can have positive characteristics when it appears as a wild animal, but it assumes a negative connotation when it is presented as a domestic creature. It also establishes a network of symbolic meanings with other animals, such as the he-goat or the kid, and also the satyr, the deer or the monkey.