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Conclusion In medieval writing the grip of a certain humanism was strong, as it is today: the humanism that conceives all other animals in opposition to humankind, and hierarchizes that binary opposition so that animals are distributed along a single axis of lack. But medieval works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that need recovering and reconsideration. My concluding example in Chapter 6, the Auchinleck Bevis of Hampton, well illustrates the complexity with which medieval writers apprehended relationships among the creatures. Bevis’s masterful self-extension in chivalric pursuit of his heritage veers off course as he surrenders that heritage to protect his horse Arondel. Knight and horse transform one another. Arondel is shaped by training into an instrument of chivalry but Bevis is shaped as well by his long partnership with Arondel. Bevis of Hampton depicts a knight who exchanges his subjection to sovereignty, in the person of King Edgar and the ideology of patrimony, for a productive alliance with his warhorse that sustains both of them until the day of their death. My six chapters began with the immediacy of cohabitation and copresence , then shifted upward to analyze systems that account for creation as a whole, and then returned in the final chapters to one-on-one relationships, this time to relationships that demand an ethical response. Uniting the diverse works in these chapters is a medieval fascination with animal mentalities —predatory concentration, obedience and disobedience, communication and devotion—that constructs animal encounters as two-way interactions. These constructions are sometimes anthropomorphic in that they ignore animal difference, but more often they are anthropomorphic in an exploratory mode that takes man and other beasts to be unsettled categories coming into definition through relationship. Some medieval works confound anthropomorphism altogether: Bisclavret’s central conundrum of man, wolf, and dog presents their overlapping co-presence as a natural wonder. Differently wonderful is the isopraxis of knight and horse. On a universal scale, the bestiary’s resonances and folds in nature affiliate all the species as well as positioning 170 Conclusion homo, from the day of his creation, in definitional contrast to the animals he names. A single line of argument unites these chapters as well, albeit paradoxically : the diversity of the animal record is irreducible to paradigm or paradigm shift. The immensely complex apprehension of animals in medieval culture does not derive, for example, entirely from learned thought of the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions. As he defines what it is to be Christian in contrast to his rejected Manichean faith, Augustine rejects the Manichean argument against eating meat. The crucial strategy in Augustine’s argument is to reserve the capacity for reason to the human alone, as had Aristotle before him: “We see and perceive from their cries that animals die with pain. But of course man disregards this in a beast with which, because it has no rational soul, man is not linked by any community of law.”1 This patristic and Classical viewpoint stretches well into and beyond medieval centuries. Nonetheless, the widely circulated wisdom book Sydrac le philosophe answers the question of whether one should take pity on animals by turning to a similarity rather than a distinction between human and beast. It is licit to eat animals and use them for human purposes, but “do not put them in pain or let them languish; let them alone and you will show your compassion. Think about yourself: if someone were to put you in pain or imprison you, it would seem terrible to you and you would suffer greatly. This is just how it seems to these helpless creatures.”2 Sydrac’s argument from analogy—how would you feel if someone hurt you—exactly inverts Augustine’s argument from difference—animal pain has nothing to do with you. Looking to animal sentience rather than rationality versus irrationality, Sydrac bypasses Augustine’s exclusively human “community of law” in favor of a creaturely relationship constituted in compassion: “Whoever delivers a creature that is in pain or in prison, know that he expresses great compassion. Whether it be a bird or a beast or a man that he delivers, he shows he has very great compassion.”3 Deriving a general principle of conduct from living creatures’ shared vulnerability, Sydrac articulates an ethical position that is implicit as well in Bevis’s protection of Arondel and Chaucer’s revisions to Boethius in the Squire’s Tale. My chapters have argued that ethical positions, as well as practical considerations, popular...

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