In general, attitudes towards animals in the medieval Latin West were dominated by their use value. Animals served as food for the hungry, game for the huntsmen, and personal aids for the labourer or the traveler. Th omas of Chobham, a cleric from Salisbury, pointedly formulated this view in his handbook for preachers ( Summa de arte praedicandi ), written around 1220: "Th e Lord created diff erent creatures with diff erent natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful to us for the body, but also what may be useful for the soul." 1 Th is supremacy of man over beast found its theological substantiation in the words of the Jewish-Christian God in Genesis 1:26: "Th en God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fi sh of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground. ' " 2 As for animals in literature, the fable was arguably the only literary genre surviving from antiquity and dealing with animals that made a signifi cant impact on the medieval mind. In fables animal behavior was used as a simile for human virtues and vices. 3 It could thus be considered as "useful for the soul."Th e existence of at least three manuscripts dating from as early as the ninth century documents that Phaedrus' Latin fables in verse (fi rst century AD ) were available throughout the Middle Ages. Yet it seems that the bulk of medieval knowledge about the fables' contents derived not from the antique forerunner in the fi eld, but was gathered from later prose adaptations. A particularly popular version was the so-called Romulus , an anonymous reworking from the fourth or fi fth century AD based on earlier material -but many other variants circulated in Latin and in vernacular languages. 4 Th e genre did more than remain mere bookish wisdom, as some fables became part and parcel of the iconography of religious and secular