Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane (review)

In Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, Susan Crane makes an impressive contribution to the growing field of Medieval Animal Studies. Because she refers in her title to ‘Medieval Britain,’ one might at first imagine that she is attempting to discover the attitudes and practices that were characteristic of a particular cultural milieu within a single period of time. But rather than arguing a unifying thesis, as Joyce Salisbury did, for example, in The Beast Within, Crane has chosen to explore a variety of cultural settings and genres in a study that ‘spans traditions from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, but without any “teleology” of development’ (3). By examining a wide range of literary sources—including romances, encyclopedias, bestiaries, hunting literature, and hagiography—and analyzing selected texts through the various lenses of modern animal studies—including animal ethics, the sciences of cognition and evolution, and the history of domestication—Crane demonstrates how contemporary approaches can encourage new insights into familiar texts.

The book is unusual in the sense that Crane has not chosen a single methodology to apply consistently from one chapter to the next. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Cohabitation,’ for example, she argues mainly from a thorough grounding in social history and her own keen analytical skills, validating her interpretations with evidence from modern evolutionary science. Thus she makes a convincing case that the Irish and northern English monastic culture represented in the ninth-century Irish lyric ‘Pangur Bàn’ and the early eighth-century Life of Saint Cuthbert treated the natural world as ‘continuous with human society’ (p. 39), a view contrasting with the ‘authoritative patristic exegesis’ apparent in works of later centuries (p. 41). In analyzing Marie de France’s Bisclavret, on the other hand, she relies less on the scientific and more on the philosophical, citing thinkers from Augustine to Derrida to show how the lay explores the boundaries between—or commingling of—animal and human. Crane’s chapter on the second-family bestiary (unfortunately lacking any reference to the recent groundbreaking work of Ilya Dines) examines the bestiary tradition through the concept of taxonomies, while the chapter on the noble hunt builds on the framework of secular ritual and performance theory as they contribute to the reinforcement of hierarchy. The penultimate chapter, dealing with the falcons and horses of medieval romance, cites thinkers including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jeremy Bentham on the way to an examination of Orientalism and ‘cross-cultural difference’ (p. 128), while the final chapter delves into such concepts as ‘thingliness’ (p. 144), ‘isopraxis’ (p. 158), and ‘mechanization’ (p. 167) to argue a new understanding of the ethical relationship between knight and horse in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ and Bevis of Hampton.

As might be expected from a book with such a varied methodology, the advantages gained by presenting a wide array of approaches and texts may at times be offset by a lack of coherence; not all readers will be satisfied by Crane’s admittedly paradoxical conclusion that the disparate chapters are held together by showing how ‘the diversity of the animal record is irreducible to paradigm or paradigm shift’ (p. 170). Likewise, some readers may be put off by Crane’s untraditional use of the word ‘humanism’ to refer to what she, at one point, more accurately identifies as ‘human exceptionalism’ (4). Nonetheless, Crane’s erudition and her lively engagement with her texts make the volume well worth reading, and the book’s broad theoretical grounding provides plenty of resources for scholars who feel inspired to move in new directions.