The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature by Dorothy Yamamoto (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER while the texts of productions like mummings that survive from the fifteenth century should suggest only that greater importance was attached to preserving them, not necessarily that drama, and the representation of the household to itself, became more sophisticated. But the scrupulous scholarship represented here, the 79 lavish plates, the clear prose, and an index that is such a work of art that it is virtually a guide to the household on its own, make this not only a necessary guide to understanding the importance of the household in the Middle Ages but a highly enjoyable way of encountering it. D. Vance Smith Princeton University Dorothy Yamamoto. The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 257. $74.00 The introduction and conclusion of this intentionally ‘‘eclectic’’ (p. 226) book promise to examine the ‘‘dynamic instability’’ between ‘‘high and low, centre and periphery’’ as ‘‘bodies of various kinds intermingle, trade features, or try to articulate their ascendency . . . at borders, margins, and edges, rather than at the accepted centre of the social body,’’ all of which reveals how ‘‘the membrane between humanness and otherness is frighteningly permeable’’ (pp. 8–10); or as the conclusion more plainly states, in medieval culture ‘‘the boundary between humans and animals ’’ was a ‘‘danger area . . . where human identity—construed as difference from animal kind—may slip from one’s grasp’’ (p. 225). The author grounds her own treatment of the potentially provocative theme of species slippage with a descriptive catalogue of relevant critical discourses and their practitioners: Laquer, Stallybrass and White, Kay and Rubin, Lomperis and Stanbury, and Bynum on ‘‘the body’’; Camille and Geremek on spatial and societal ‘‘margins’’; Flores, Hassig, Salisbury, and others on animals and beasts. These theoretical contexts, discourses, and critics are cited initially simply to set the stage for the ensuing chapters, in which they are rarely utilized again substantively. The chapters include an overview of the bestiary tradition in general and separate chapters on particular fauna such as birds and the fox, another on various beasts that inform the ‘‘Heraldic Image,’’ and an604 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:41 PS REVIEWS other that discusses both the animals that are hunted (deer, foxes, rabbits ) and animals that hunt (dogs) under the rubric ‘‘Bodies in the Hunt.’’ A subsequent chapter on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale emerges from the material covered in the chapters on heraldry and hunting. The final three chapters, devoted respectively to the Wild Man and ‘‘Women and the Wild,’’ seemed to me to fulfill the expectations raised by the book’s title more than did earlier chapters on beast fables, heraldry, and hunting . Although these early chapters are supported by the most recent scholarship on their subjects and present good introductions to or overviews of their genres and discourses, the animal/human interface examined in this part of the book seems to be less about actual slippage between the human and the bestial than about the equally legitimate (if more prosaic) category of animal imagery, in which human characters are described rhetorically in terms of characteristics of animals and vice versa. In its search for suitable textual and visual supporting evidence to illustrate its arguments or themes, the book ranges very widely, both chronologically and geographically, and often crosses over its own promised content boundaries of medieval English literature. The authors cited or texts analyzed include the Greek Physiologus, Ovid, Anglo-Saxon texts, the writings of the Church Fathers, various Middle English texts, Caxton printed editions, and even Spenser. Supporting examples are culled not only from the expected, familiar authors such as Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, or beast fables like the Roman de Renart, but also from texts that are usually not considered ‘‘literary’’ (treatises on heraldry and hunting manuals). Many are drawn from Old French texts (i.e., the Vulgate Lancelot, Aucassin and Nicolette, Marie de France’s Guigemar ) even when there is a Middle English equivalent. In one of the Wild Man chapters, for example, at least six pages (relying heavily on Le Goff’s analysis invoking Lévi-Strauss) are devoted to Chrétien’s Wild Herdsman in Yvain while about...