The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality by Catharine Randall (review)

This is a book with an agenda. The agenda is, quite openly, the promotion of animal rights; and the paratexts all speak eloquently of that conviction. But it is also in most respects an engaging and lively piece of scholarly exposition. Four figures are central to Catharine Randall’s enquiry: Michel de Montaigne, Guillaume du Bartas, St François de Sales, and — almost certainly the least well known — the eighteenth-century Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant (with briefer treatments of several other early modern writers). And, at least from the seventeenth century onwards, the figure of René Descartes, with his reduction of the non-human animal to the status of a machine, looms in the background as an oppositional figure of dogmatic inflexibility. Randall’s rapid but perceptive opening section on Montaigne concludes approvingly with a quotation from the Essais (II. 12), in which the essayist ‘recognizes the value of the animal kingdom as part of creation along with man’ (p. 29). Du Bartas and François de Sales form a convincing central diptych: for the Protestant poet, animals are placed at the service of man in the divine scheme, and fulfil a primarily didactic function as ‘the animate and literalized form of the workings of God’s mind and will’ (p. 49); for François, by contrast, the popularizing format of the manual of spiritual direction (whose origins and development are helpfully sketched in by the author) allows him to erect what is perhaps ‘the first intentional theology of creatureliness’ (p. 77, emphasis original). But the most intriguing figure, whose thinking merits a justifiably extended exposition, is the Père Bougeant, whose Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes of 1739 met with predictable opposition from the ecclesiastical authorities. For Bougeant, it is rationally inconceivable that animals, especially such social animals as beavers and wolves, do not have a language, even if it falls outside humankind’s capacity to decipher it (although his hypothesis becomes more unappealing when a contorted eschatological justification, involving a kind of Christianized metempsychosis, is advanced in support). Randall’s writing is fluent, the theological background is accessibly incorporated into the argument, and the succinct conclusion is compelling, uniting as it does a range of ‘creatures […] who [open] up new, vibrant ways of experiencing both this world and that beyond it’ (p. 135). There are, unfortunately, a few presentational quibbles: the author seems on occasion to have an unduly loose sense of what makes one writer ‘contemporary’ with another; and the transcription of many French words in the endnotes is inaccurate (even with full account taken of the vagaries of archaic orthography). Above all, the bibliography is highly inconsistent, so that, for example, François’s Introduction à la vie dévote is cited in a scholarly French edition, whereas the Traité de l’amour de Dieu (largely absent from the body of the text) appears only in a rather creaky nineteenth-century English translation; and reference to the single (but seminal) poem cited by La Fontaine, the anti-Cartesian ‘Discours à Madame de la Sablière’ (Fables, IX), comes from a Lagarde et Michard anthology.