Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (review)

Stories of saints’ encounters with animals hold a special place in medieval hagiography. The saint’s relationship with the natural world is often a sign of the sanctity of the holy man who is able to wield divine power over God’s creatures. Miracles involving animals can reflect the saint’s charity and compassion in the face of deprivation, damage, or need, or his faith and fortitude in the face of violence, evil, and sin. The tradition of tales concerning holy men and animals in western Christendom goes back to the fourth century in the Lives of the desert fathers and their heroic asceticism, and finds in its last major manifestation the representation of St. Francis as a “nature mystic” in the thirteenth century. From the fourth to the thirteenth centuries, the saint and animal story undergoes several changes in perspective and interpretation, reflecting the changes in church and society in western Europe. In this important and engaging book, Dominic Alexander sets out to examine the development of the Christian saint and animal story and the various influences upon this genre, as he identifies it, within hagiographical literature. He also looks at the purposes such stories had for medieval hagiographers and their audiences, and in so doing, offers several refreshing and stimulating insights into medieval culture. His reading of saints’ Lives points to changing societal attitudes in the Middle Ages and how popular imagination combined with Christian thought contributed to the growth and interpretation of this tradition of saints and animals in medieval hagiography.

Alexander does not provide a compendium of saint and animal stories; rather, he selects certain examples which are representative of the topoi which he identifies within the genre and discusses their possible origins, development, and interpretation. He begins, for example, with the story, as told by Eadmer, of St. Anselm and a hare that the saint protects from the hunters and dogs of the household of the king, William Rufus. Anselm, in defending the hare, likens it to the soul of man after death, in need of heavenly aid from the attack of demons. Alexander reads into the story an underlying political message as well. Anselm had just come from a dispute with the king; the story of the hare is followed immediately by another story in which the saint sees a captive bird being tormented by a boy and hopes for its freedom, which then occurs. Following this, the saint is exiled from England. In this context, Alexander sees an indication of the discontent leveled against William Rufus by ecclesiastical writers, who saw him as a harsh and oppressive king. St. Anselm, in the face of such a king, shows his concern for the misfortunes of the vulnerable and weak. This is but one illustration of a particular topos, which Alexander identifies as the “hermit and hunter” (the saint miraculously protecting a hunted animal), and one of its possible interpretations. He later devotes an entire chapter (6) to this topos and its implications in the promotion of the saint and his cult.

Alexander continues in his first chapter to lay out the principles of his reading of saints’ Lives, using examples of “saint versus dragon” stories and the often ambiguous symbolism of the dragon. But fabulous beasts are not the focus of his selection; he looks instead to saints’ dealings with real animals, like St. Anselm’s hare and bird, the metaphors which arise from miraculous events concerning animals, and the issues of the saints’ relationship to the natural world. Chapter 2, “The Formation of the Tradition,” explores its emergence in fourth-and fifth-century Egypt, where the hermits in the wilderness contended with and befriended wild animals, pointing out the influence of classical tradition as well as Biblical sources, and how a Christian moral and theological framework was applied. The hermit in the wilderness re-creates the conditions of the prelapsarian paradise, where man had dominion over animals, and so animals obey him; but also, the wilderness brings suffering...