Dragons, magical islands, gigantic snail shells, mysterious lakes, centaurs, and strange kinds of humanoids.

These are not scenes from a modern fantasy novel, but illuminations from an old manuscript created around 1485, Les secretz de l’histoire naturelle (The Secrets of Natural History), by the French illuminator Robert Testard.

The manuscript, now preserved in the French National Library under the designation Français 22971, represents a fascinating catalogue of what the medieval man recorded about the wonders of the natural world.

Although they appear to us today as fantasy, to the people of that time, these descriptions were part of their everyday reality.
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