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

This collection is groundbreaking, not least for its intellectual generosity: in asking what happens to gender in narratives that challenge the boundaries of the human, essays in this volume connect the driving questions of posthumanism to feminist, queer, and postcolonial methodologies. In so doing, this anthology denudes posthumanism of some of its claims to novelty and singularity: investigating the limits of the human becomes less abstract and grandiose when these authors—from French, history, English, German, and women’s studies—pursue the myriad ways in which cross-species, shape-shifting, and in/organic bodies prompt us to think more precisely about gender’s connection to embodiment. This is the best kind of achievement for a critical anthology: across eight chapters considering bodies as diverse as desirous stones, winged penises, and nursing animals, From Beasts to Souls offers a welcome answer to all those conference panels that for the past decade have been asking “w(h)ither feminism, queer theory, or postcolonialism?” By tracking the specificities of gender in bodies that confound any categorical articulation of the human, articles in this essay collection establish posthumanism as a theoretical methodology deeply indebted to the medieval past, and vitally important to the future of medieval studies.

Posthumanism’s imbrication in medieval European sources is perhaps most evident in Chapter 1, “The Sex Life of Stone,” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Here Cohen investigates the motility and potential desire of stones to ask, “Could such a stone be gendered?” (17). In thinking about this question through the Pygmalion myth, medieval lapidaries, and Mandeville’s Travels, Cohen builds a case for seeing stone as part of a “queer ecological materialism” (23), which grants stone agency and desire, powers that remain independent of human obsessions and manipulations. To establish this possibility, Cohen investigates those human fantasies of gender and sexuality that render stone inert, passive, a reflection of human fantasies of stability and permanence. The contrast between these views and those of medieval lapidaries, which invest stones with an active, elementary form of vertu, allows Cohen to connect Mandeville’s discussion of diamonds to a vibrant, nonhuman world of desire, reproduction, and gender. And although Cohen does not fully acknowledge it (his essay is too focused on establishing the independence of lithic desire, in my view), the chapter is masterful at showing how misogyny and heteronormativity seek to shape bodies that cannot fully be known.

In Chapter 2, “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy,” Peggy McCracken considers the animality that mother’s milk potentially confers in the Old French Crusade Cycle, the Decameron, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, and a Krakow altarpiece entitled The Punishment of Unfaithful Wives. These diverse narratives share the belief that cross-species nursing should only be predicated by need. Because mother’s milk is understood to pass on maternal virtues or faults, stories of nursing deer, or of women who suckle animals, must be overcome with a return to humanity. In La naissance du Chevalier au cygne, like the Decameron and Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the animal intimacy of nursing must ultimately be abandoned. In the Krakow altarpiece, by contrast, the “unnatural” act of adultery is punished by forcing women to nurse puppies in public. Animal intimacy is a risk to humanity, but it also uncovers the misogynist assumption that women are more closely connected to animals. Through her deft readings, McCracken shows how women are distanced from humanity through the intimacies of maternity itself. While the stories are meant to provide limit cases, “These stories suggest a mixing—of person and animal, of the human and the bestial” that is persistently associated with women in the Middle Ages (43).

Chapter 3, “The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion,” by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, pursues a more figural interspecies mingling. By exploring the tale’s...