How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (review)

Karl Steel’s study How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages examines the structural categories of the human and the animal in medieval thought. How to Make a Human’s engagement with critical animal theory yields an attentive approach to the construction of the human via the animal in various medieval literary, legal, and religious texts. In part, Steel’s specific focus on medieval literatures responds to assumptions that Cartesian philosophy “inaugurated modern attitudes of human distinctiveness from animals” (11). Steel’s work argues for an early and specifically medieval conception of the category of “human” that is contingent on the violent subjugation of animals; it is through this instrumental treatment of animals that “the human is an effect rather than a cause of its domination of animals” (19, my italics). As Steel elaborates, the human must continually engage in such acts of violence toward animals in order to abject its own animal nature, creating a fantasy of human essentialism and superiority.

The first chapter of Steel’s study, “How to Make a Human,” establishes the foundations of the work’s main arguments. Here, Steel first enlists readings of the catechetical verse encyclopedia Sidrack and Bokkus and various works of Augustine to show how “doctrinal Christianity defined and defended the human in the Middle Ages” (30). By describing the human in opposition to the animal, medieval Christendom presents a hierarchical binary that attempts a justification of human uniqueness through a corporeal tradition: upright posture, bipedalism, and the possession of hands had become the arbitrary markers of the human—and by extension, human reason, human language, and an immortal human soul. However, Steel exposes this fantasy of human distinctiveness as an instable conception directly challenged by monstrous bodies, “many of which are hybrids of human and animal form” (52). As Steel’s research shows, the only way to truly create and sustain the human as human is to jettison the animal—and “the animalized”—into the homogenous category of irrational, “ungrievable” lives subject to human domination. It is this orientation toward the animal that finds support in medieval Christian doctrine: a human being’s possession of hands does not signify rationality in itself; rather, human hands provide the means of expressing rationality via the taming, herding, and butchery of animals (53).

Steel’s second chapter, “Mastering Violence,” continues his discussion of the desire to create a specifically human identity through his examination of medieval hunting laws and prohibitions surrounding the consumption of carrion. Such prohibitions found in Christian penitentials and juridical writs articulate an anxiety over eating meat that has not been killed by humans. Further, in How to Make a Human’s third chapter, “In and Out of Mortal Flesh,” Steel analyzes the conceptual differences between human and animal flesh alongside medieval Christian resurrection doctrine. Christian doctrine’s exclusion of animals from the possibility of resurrection and an afterlife aroused questions concerning the consumption and digestion of animal meat. The concern surrounding the eating of animals and the possible incorporation and assimilation of animal flesh into the human body locates meat eating as an act capable of contaminating the body and soul. As Steel demonstrates through the explication of an anonymous twelfth-century Summa, medieval Christianity reconciled the hope for a pure resurrection with human carnivorousness through the conception of a human digestive system that allows “food to [disappear] from the body through defecation, urination, sweat, ‘sive alio modo’ (or some other ways)” (115). This erasure of animal substance from the human body allows human flesh to remain uncorrupted by animal material, but also elevates human flesh to a position of superiority—a position that inspired humans to imagine their own flesh as both delicious and desirable to others.

Steel’s earlier discussion of the monstrous body marks the beginning of his study’s concern for the “animalization” of the human as a justification for the subjugation of the peasantry and, to an...