Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

Introduction

Introduction The people of medieval Britain lived in daily contact with domestic and wild animals. Forest and wasteland loomed over settlements, and even city streets teemed with all kinds of creatures. Scholars attempt to recapture this physical intimacy from its material traces. Archaeologists discuss paw prints on tile floors, zoologists use bones to estimate wolf populations, and historians reconstruct falcon keeping from household accounts. Medievalists who work primarily with imaginative writing have a role in this cross-disciplinary conversation . In recent decades the focus of literary studies has shifted from tracing intertextual relationships to mapping broadly material, social, textual, and embodied scenes of imaginative production. These scenes are inextricably lived and thought. Medieval writers (like writers today) had no animal experience, however physically immediate, that they did not apprehend cognitively as it unfolded. Conversely, there is no thinking—even in fabulation, in figuration, in the formal constraints of genre—that can entirely forget the living creature. But literary scholars sometimes seem to forget the animal, lured by how cogently the lion king and the preaching fox can comment on human behavior. Anthropomorphic roles have long been the star turns for literary animals. I seek instead to redirect attention from the animal trope’s noisy human tenor back to its obscure furry vehicle. Animal Encounters in Medieval Britain begins with a term that resists definition . Animal, synonymous with beast in Middle English, sometimes encompasses and other times contrasts with what is meant by human; the fate of each concept is bound to the other. Their tangled definitions have Classical and early Christian roots. Best known must be the concise version inherent in patristic exegesis and circulated as a maxim by the scholastics that “man is a rational animal”: what other animals are, the human both is (because a breathing, reproducing, mortal creature) and is not (because a rational creature ).1 John Trevisa’s fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus places the human within the animal category: “All that is compounded of flesh and spirit of life, and so of body and soul, is called animal, a beast, 2 Introduction whether it be of the air like birds, or of the water like fish that swim, or of the earth such as beasts that go on the ground and in fields, like men and wild and tame beasts.”2 But Trevisa incorporates also a distinction from other animals or beasts, crediting Isidore of Seville’s sixth-century Etymologies: “Isidore says that a man is a beast that resembles God.”3 Within and yet exceeding the category, this man is a beast who is enjoined not to be a beast: in a typically definitional move, the convert Tiburce in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale opines of Christian revelation, “anyone who does not believe this is a beast.”4 Even when taken as binary opposites, neither category is uniform. Both collapse pluralities into deceptive unities. Their failures to designate make them most effective when used not descriptively but polemically; both terms make excellent packaging for fictions of identity, myths of origin, and beliefs about natural hierarchy. And yet I have not been able to dispense with these paradoxically longstanding and ungrounded terms. In a few medieval contexts it is possible to resort to the genus and species of the Vulgate Bible’s Creation scene and the Middle English “kynde” for species difference.5 But most medieval conceiving happens on the troubled conceptual ground of human versus animal. It is hardly helpful to resort to scare quotes around “animal” or to new locutions such as the arrivant, the strange stranger, the animetaphor, and the animot: these locutions have made important points about one or another problem with the animal, but none can confront all its inadequacies.6 Likewise, I could acknowledge that the human fails persistently to be gender neutral by using man instead, reducing its potential field of reference by half, but man is hardly a stable designation that is never denied to male persons. I cannot find fine new terms that solve the referential problems posed in animal and human. Instead, I take the terms’ inadequacy as a persistent topic in my chapters, whether right up front in the argument or as components within related problems of cohabitation, classification, alliance, and ethics. This book’s encounters are poised between cross-species contacts and thoughts about contact. Some encounters attend to lived interactions and some are largely fantastic. Several cohere in their curiosity about cross-species relationship, on the one hand, and difference...