From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe Edited by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

This fascinating, timely book brings together eight essays by medievalist scholars on a wide range of medieval texts, artefacts, and images depicting strange bodies which trouble categories of both species and gender. From werewolves to copulating gemstones, from a corpse addressing the worms who devour it to animals who suckle human infants: the bodies that are scrutinized in these pages are a testament to the way in which medieval figures and stories can question and subvert ideas of convention and category. The essay collection takes an angle that is broadly informed by the ‘posthuman’, an approach that is currently particularly vibrant in some sections of medieval scholarship. This approach questions the coherence of the human from the perspective of that which is non-human (the animal, the artificial, the non-organic); and it is also a way of envisaging an ethical dimension to that which normally lies beyond the purview of human (and humanist) ethics. The first piece, Jeffrey J. Cohen’s alluringly titled ‘The Sex-Life of Stone’, is most explicitly written from a post-human perspective: he outlines a thought experiment in which the non-biological (specifically, stone) is infused with a force that is necessarily non-human yet inevitably articulated within human terms and discourse. This intriguing proposition is not, however, fully illustrated by the examples Cohen cites: the diamonds allegedly encountered by John Mandeville possess gender and have sex, and therefore act in a recognizably human way. And although Cohen wonders what energy the stones of Stonehenge would have exerted to provoke humans to move them to Salisbury Plain, he does not mention the answer to this question given by Arthurian prose romance: Merlin brought them. Much more convincing are the essays by the volume’s editors: Peggy McCracken gives a wide-ranging, ingeniously argued account of a series of instances of animals who nurse humans, blurring categories of animality and maternity; and E. Jane Burns’s reading of the Mélusine tradition is innovative and persuasive. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner’s contribution is a scintillating, provocative reading of Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion; Noah D. Guynn’s essay on werewolves gives a clear and clever exploration of the questions this hybrid figure poses in two lais. Both Dyan Elliott and Elizabeth Robertson provide brilliant accounts of medieval understandings of the relation between the soul and the body, and the ways in which this relation is scrutinized and subverted in literary texts. Anne Marie Rasmussen’s piece is a dynamic and engaging examination of medieval badges that portray disembodied genitals. The typo in a footnote on p. 215 is particularly revealing: it gives the title of the important 1971 article by Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as ‘Mélusine maternelle et déchiffreuse’ rather than ‘défricheuse’. But this inversion points to the way in which these shifting, indeterminate bodies invite yet trouble our attempts to decipher them; this book offers a number of illuminating and enjoyable strategies to help us as we do so.