The naming of the beasts: natural history in the medieval bestiary

Along the way there is much interesting, and certainly deeply felt, material and comment, but, as history, the book is marred by its uncritical application of modernization theory, by its over-simple ascription to each time period of consensuses about aging, in place of the messily competing discourses which were closer to reality, indeed by a general tendency to smooth out the complexities of the past to a greater degree than can be justified even by the attempt to cover a lot of time in a short space.