In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France by Peggy McCracken (review)

Peggy McCracken's newest book is about how "literary texts use human–animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others" (1). Over the course of In the Skin of a Beast, McCracken convincingly argues that medieval literature stages encounters between humans and animals to think about power dynamics among people. Yet, while animals provide a forum for thinking about relations of sovereignty among humans, this book is nonetheless careful not to overlook the specificity of the animal; indeed, it is particularly concerned with animal bodies. Furthermore, because she is concerned both with the reciprocity of encounters and with the process of asserting authority, which is never straightforward or even complete, McCracken shows a unique and valuable concern for recovering how animals have responded to humans' attempts to exercise power over them.

Thoroughly versed in poststructuralist theory, In the Skin of a Beast thus explores how medieval literary texts look through, at, with, and "against" animals; and while critics have been looking at animals for some while, this book's invaluable insight is that animals will also help us think through the intricacy of medieval representations of sovereignty. As McCracken acknowledges, the term "sovereignty" does risk anachronism: "We know that the notion of a 'sovereign nation-state' does not apply to the territorial governments of the Middle Ages" (4). Yet, similarly to how much may be gained from embracing the figurative functions that animals serve in medieval literature, so too is there much to be gained from bringing this concept tinged with modernity into dialogue with the medieval period, in order to think about "contractual rule and the consent to be governed" as well as the "[l]ayers of obligation and authority" that "define medieval political structures" (6) in all their complexity.

McCracken's corpus comprises a dazzling array of texts: vernacular Bibles and biblical commentaries, short didactic pieces, fables, lais, romances, and chansons de geste; this book also emphasizes manuscript illuminations. Its central exhibits date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Its geographical and linguistic scope is similarly ambitious, embracing Old and Middle French material, as well as texts originally written in Latin, Old Norse, and Middle High German. Each chapter brings together several works, and the argument advances almost more like a lyric than a narrative. Going from one chapter to the next is not simply a matter of going from "a" to "b"; rather, each new analysis returns, spiral-like, to fundamental problems addressed previously, further scrutinizing and deepening insight into them. The effect is kaleidoscopic, with increasingly intricate elements and connections brought into the mix.

The first chapter is about the flaying of animal skins, which, McCracken argues, functions as a complex "technology of human sovereignty" (12). This chapter moves from vernacular renderings of Genesis to the fifteenth-century Conte du papegau, which is, in turn, read alongside earlier romans antiques. As she proceeds through these sources, McCracken shows how flaying skins is both about survival and about relations of dominion; indeed, these skins, which were worn, exposed, written on, and so forth, are both the "material" and the "symbolic support for claims to sovereign power" (29). According to McCracken, in the Middle Ages, as in Foucault's concept of biopolitics, human sovereignty was "always already grounded on the capacity to regulate life" (30). This chapter concludes by turning to the little-known twelfth-century Romans des romans in order to imagine how animals might respond to the ethics of parading their corpses.

Animal responses are, though, perhaps more at stake in the following chapter, which focuses on human–animal encounters that are cast in more affective terms. This chapter traces the (rather surprising) trope of wolves that are domesticated in a variety of saints' lives, in Marie de France's Fables, and in her lai "Bisclavret." McCracken imagines submission both as the animal behavior par excellence and as...