Animals in Medieval Literature
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0209
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0209
Introduction
Nonhuman animals have been born, lived, worked, played, eaten, bred, and died alongside people for millennia, and in the process they have been essential in the ongoing project of defining the “human.” The close proximity of domesticated and working animals has enabled different conceptions of a shared creaturely world, even as a strong tendency toward representation has meant that their work as symbols, allegories, and figures of human characteristics and ideals has consistently overshadowed their labor in fields and streets, as hunters or hunted, and as providers of materials and objects for human use. There is no genre of medieval literature that does not feature frequent and heavy use of animals: biblical exegesis, saints’ lives, laws, sermons, exempla, histories and chronicles, romances, encyclopedias, works on grammar and language, satires, mystic and devotional works, theological and philosophical treatises, medical texts, veterinary manuals, hunting manuals, and a plethora of poetic forms (lyric, narrative, elegy, riddle, the romance lai) often feature animals near the forefront and always have them in the background. Ongoing work in archaeology and material culture has brought new insights into the ways that human and animal worlds overlapped and coexisted. Classical and Christian writers participated in a long, ongoing conversation about the possession of minds, souls, and the faculty of reason, the origins of human and nonhuman identities, and the ethics of human treatment of animals that continues to the present day. In the last thirty years, scholarship that leaned heavily toward the representational function of animals has given way to new approaches that attempt to grapple with the “animal real” alongside, and in relation to, the work of animals as signs and symbols of human things. The field of critical animal studies has provided a fresh set of ideas and terminologies, in particular the blurring, problematizing, deconstruction, and even dismantling of the divide between human and nonhuman creatures, and the foregrounding of ethical considerations in the analysis of historical animal encounters. At the same time, posthumanism has provided a broad and flexible framework in which to explore shared characteristics and vulnerabilities across species lines, and to interrogate the construction and maintenance of the categories “human” and “animal.” The wide variety of disciplines and approaches across periods and genres makes medieval animal studies a complex, heterogeneous, rapidly changing, and continuously productive field of study.
Overviews and Histories
The recent development of medieval animal studies has meant that most overviews are from the last thirty years, and the heterogeneity of the field has generated a range of approaches. Salisbury 2022 is the first major literary/historical overview of medieval animals, and it influenced all those that followed. Yamamoto 2000 provides a theoretical analysis of boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. Voisenet 2000 and Voisenet 2019 are compendious studies with an emphasis on sources and transmissions. Salter 2001 and Holsinger 2009 anticipate the integration of critical animal studies into the field. Cohen 2008 surveys a range of emotional, cognitive, and representational frameworks. Crane 2013a and Steel 2022 provide ways to integrate concepts from critical animal studies into the study of medieval texts. Crane 2013b and Steel 2019 pursue a broadly posthumanist approach that is now central to most new work. McCracken 2017 confronts specific issues of exceptionalism and domination.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages.” In Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser, 39–62. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Outlines a range of imaginative functions for animals, from presenting alternate moralities to identifying with pain and suffering to figuring racial difference, and ultimately to testing the limits of human identities. Highly synthetic, ranging from the Physiologus to Chaucer, this is a perfect teaching text. The volume also contains a chapter by Susan Crane on the hunt à force.
Crane, Susan. “Animality.” In A Handbook of Middle English Studies. Edited by Marion Turner, 123–134. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2013a.
In a handbook organized around concepts and frameworks rather than genres, authors, and texts, Crane offers a useful overview informed by critical animal studies, especially the issues of the relationship between academic study and social concerns; environmentalism and its concern with ecosystems; and the ethics of animal use and welfare. Crane also keeps a close eye on ethology (the study of animal behavior), a salutary hedge against excessive abstraction.
Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013b.
Joins Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human as the two most significant contributions to the study of medieval literary animals. Fully responsive to currents in posthumanism and animal studies, the book carries through on its memorable promise to “redirect attention from the animal trope’s noisy human tenor back to its obscure furry vehicle.” With a close eye on genre and audience, Crane offers masterly readings of (mostly Irish) saints’ lives, bestiaries, Marie de France’s lais and fables, hunting treatises, Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, and the knight/horse assemblage in chivalric literature.
Holsinger, Bruce. “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal.” PMLA 124 (2009): 616–623.
A brief but broad-ranging overview of the complex introduction of critical animal studies into the medieval field, with an emphasis on periodization, continuity, and disruption in the history of mentalities across centuries. Highlights the increasing challenge of deciphering the logic of animal trials and the material, ethically challenging fact that most medieval texts are written on the skins of dead animals.
McCracken, Peggy. In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226459080.001.0001
Alongside Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human, this is the clearest and most powerful analysis of human mastery and sovereignty over animals, its role in defining political and social structures, and the challenges posed by literary works to the idea of human exceptionalism and superiority. Contains chapters on the wearing of animal skins as displays of human power and identity; domestication of nonhuman animals; the relationship of sovereignty to autonomous self-perception; and the abjection of animality in the romance genre.
Salisbury, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. 3d ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.
The first edition of this groundbreaking study (1994) anticipated the scholarship of future decades, broadening the range of source texts to include Christian doctrine, literature, dietary, and archaeological evidence. The first three chapters discuss real animals living in a human world (animals as property, food, and sexual beings), while the last three examine the blurring of human/nonhuman boundaries and the rise of the idea of the animal within the human. The third edition engages fully with current ideas in critical animal studies.
Salter, David. Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001.
An engaging study that asks of medieval animals “what they reveal about our perceptions of ourselves as human beings.” Though relatively untheorized, the book anticipates Karl Steel’s work by focusing on the ways human identities are inseparable from the depiction and use of animals. Contains sections on saints’ lives, four Middle English romances, and the Middle English Alexander tradition.
Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011.
Chief among the truly groundbreaking works on the topic, Steel’s book traces the process by which the concept of the “human” achieved a partial and uneasy coherence in the Middle Ages, through the mechanism of violence and domination over nonhuman animals. His tightly argued methodology, organized around unachievable limits of identity and the breakdown of the liberal humanist subject, informs a series of close readings of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known texts and traditions.
Steel, Karl. How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
DOI: 10.5749/j.ctvsn3ns7
Extends the argument of How to Make a Human (that delineating the human depended on domination and violence against animals) through well-known yet “unsystematic” sources that either ignore human/nonhuman boundaries or generate cultural forms that implicitly recognize “animal” characteristics across species lines. Includes penetrating and original readings of Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the Life of Christina Mirabilis, pets, the legend of St. Guinefort, Chaucer’s Prioress, experiments with feral children, an ecocritical look at “death art” (worms especially), sky burials, and a biopolitical look at the ontological status of oysters.
Steel, Karl. “Human/Animal.” In The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature. Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir, 436–444. New York: Routledge, 2022.
In a collection combining essays on individual authors and works with thematic syntheses, Steel offers a characteristically provocative look at the category “animal” and how it came, and continued, to be distinguished from the smaller category of “human.” The essay takes up the radical ideas (evinced by a few medieval writers, including Marguerite Porete) that reason, as a countervailing force to faith, could potentially be seen as bestial, and that an ethically shared animality can portend a wider faith community.
Voisenet, Jacques. Bestiaire Chrétien: L’Imagerie Animale des Auteurs du Haut Moyen Âge (V3-XIe Siècles). Toulouse, France: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2019.
A study of sources and influences that remains squarely within the framework of “literary” animals (those deployed for their moral, theological, or spiritual significance). Contains chapters on the Bible and desert fathers, the “pagan” heritage, early Christianity, Eurasian paths of influence, the development of types and subtypes, and a shift toward novelty in the adaptation and reassembly of sources in new texts.
Voisenet, Jacques. Bêtes et Hommes dans le monde médiévale: Le bestiaire des clercs du Ve aux XIIe siècle. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000.
DOI: 10.1484/M.STMH-EB.5.112326
A magisterial history of thinking about animals in early medieval Europe, from an exclusively and frankly clerical point of view. Draws on a wide array of sources—encyclopedias, saints’ lives, biblical commentaries, penitentials, poetry, visual art—to describe a spectrum of categorizations of animals, including moral example, natural resource, allegory, and Christian typology.
Yamamoto, Dorothy. The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186748.001.0001
The best available work on the role of the body in both defining and confounding boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. Makes extensive use of body theory, semiotics, and art-historical image study to frame a series of analyses of different texts (Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Valentine and Orson), the signifying power of particular animals (birds, foxes), and medieval motifs (heraldry, the hunt, the wild man).
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