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  • From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken
  • Carole M. Cusack
Burns, E. Jane and Peggy McCracken, eds, From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013; paperback; pp. ix, 269; R.R.P. US$38.00; ISBN 9780268022327.

This edited collection follows the trend in medieval studies in which themes and methodological frameworks that have attained prominence in other areas of Humanities research are applied to medieval history and literature, with varying degrees of success. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken take up the issue of post-humanism, most ably championed by Jeffrey J. Cohen, author of Medieval Identity Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). This book divided the academic community, with some applauding his ‘posthuman’ stance and queer theory, and others opining that his contention was simply that the study of people of the Middle Ages has to be contextualised in relation to material culture and social interactions, which had been the case in Marxist-influenced and Annaliste circles for decades. Indeed the Annales school’s passion for the longue durée, climatic patterns, and geographical features such as the Mediterranean Sea, exhibit a positive disregard of the human individual. The editors of From Beasts to Souls are most interested in animality and gender, noting in the ‘Introduction’ that while carvings on Romanesque capitals often feature animal–human hybrids ‘yet, however fanciful and elaborate these cross-species hybrids become, binary gender assignment seems to remain unchallenged’ (p. 2). Their scholarly goal is to [End Page 189] look at medieval ‘representations of nonhuman or partially human creatures’ seeking insights into ‘gender and embodiment’ (p. 7).

Cohen’s provocatively titled ‘The Sex Life of Stone’, considers this ‘most inert, mute, intractable’ substance from the point of view of queer ecological studies that insist on the ‘aesthetic, affective and practical agencies’ that Jane Bennett has asserted all matter possesses. Cohen’s chapter does not argue a strong thesis, but rather is a series of vignettes in which (it could be interpreted that) humans project emotion and agency onto objects (not all of them stone). Chapter 2, McCracken’s ‘Nursing Animals and Cross Species Intimacy’ examines cases of animals suckling human infants and the story of the exiled Beritola, who suckled infant deer, but abandoned them when reintegrated into society. Chapter 3, ‘The Lady and the Dragon in Chretien’s Chevalier au lion’ by Matilda Tomalyn Bruckner, argues that where the lion is conjoined to Yvain, the lady Laudine’s cross-species partner is the dragon. The next essay, Dyan Elliott’s ‘Rubber Soul: Theology, Hagiography and the Spirit World of the Middle Ages’, shifts attention from literary fiction to theology, and what follows is a learned and stimulating tour of Western Christianity’s ‘strong impetus in favour of an embodied and sexed afterlife’ (p. 91). She notes Cathar anti-material and anti-female teachings, and the Beguine embodied and distinctly female spirituality that attempted to counter such attitudes. Her conclusion, that ‘God made the androgynous rational soul in his own image; the sexed body remade the soul in its own’ (p. 112) is an elegantly expressed conundrum that fittingly ends the chapter.

Elizabeth Robertson’s ‘Kissing the Worm’ continues the theme of the gendered afterlife with an analysis of a Middle English text, ‘A Disputacion betwyx the Body and Wormes’, and Chapter 6, Noah D. Guynn’s ‘Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender in Two Old French Werewolf Tales’ argues that ‘the theme of lycanthropy is seemingly inseparable from that of female betrayal’ (p. 157). His texts are Marie de France’s Bisclavret (c. 1160–78) and Melion, an anonymous text (c. 1190–1204). Chapter 7, Burns’s ‘A Snake-Tailed Woman’, is focused on Melusine, one of the more famous hybrids of medieval literature, and Chapter 8, Ann Marie Rasmussen’s ‘Moving Beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges’ opens with a dramatic description of a badge she describes as a ‘vulva on stilts’ which ‘belongs to a larger category of badges or pins known as sexual badges’ (p. 224), which usually depict female or male genitalia. This entertaining final chapter...

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