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

The co-editors of From Beasts to Souls locate their project at the intersection of work on sexuality and gender, on the one hand, and critical animal studies on the other (4–6). They are right to observe that few medievalists have addressed those fields together, at least until the past few years. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken also note a lacuna in the cultural materials that might interest scholars in both fields: in medieval art and literature, hybrids and shape-shifters maintain “binary gender assignments,” while ambiguous or camouflaged gender appears only in human characters (2–4). In contrast, write the editors, “the current volume seeks to raise the issues of species and gender in tandem” (3). Its limited success in that enterprise—the only shortcoming of this fine collection—may result in part from the archival gap. The eight contributors focus steadily on one of the terms, “gender,” taking “embodiment” to mean human embodiment; only two, McCracken and Elizabeth Robertson, give sustained attention also to the “beasts” of the main title. The editors themselves seem to struggle to bring beasts, souls, gender, and embodiment into mutually illuminating relationships, as evidenced by the unwieldy concatenation that ends the introduction: “In fact, these medieval models suggest that it is by moving beyond the human and beyond predictable configurations of human bodies that we can begin to imagine new configurations of gender, whether in the form of gendered bodies, desires, and intimate practices, as gendered souls, or in terms of gendered spaces, institutions, and the social behaviors within them” (11). Perhaps an afterword could have synthesized those incipient imaginings.

But coherence is hardly the only desideratum for edited collections, and contributors to From Beasts to Souls shed new light on many topics within its capacious statement of purpose. Indeed, one of the most provocative chapters, the first, enlarges the book’s scope even further, beyond organic gender and embodiment. In “The Sex Life of Stone,” Jeffrey J. Cohen observes that “classical and medieval stone lore . . . teem[s] with unexpected narratives in which stone plays an agential role” (28)—even a desiring role, since gems need organic matter on which to exercise their vertu, just as humanity needs metabolic minerals and memorializing stone. Cohen suggests that this “impulse toward assemblage making and intensification is already erotic,” though hardly heteronormative (31). Acknowledging our mutual desire can permit communication with our lithic partners despite our vastly different timescales, Cohen concludes. So, too, his essay unsettles petrified assumptions while providing few perceptible links with its successors.

Many such links appear in Peggy McCracken’s “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy.” In revelatory readings of texts from three linguistic traditions, McCracken argues that cross-species nursing is a distinctly somatic form of “becoming-animal,” a term that she borrows from Deleuze and Guattari and defines as “not metamorphosis but relationality” (46). No less important, the Old French Crusade Cycle and a tale from the Decameron resist that relation even while disclosing it. The third text, an excerpt from a twelfth-century “philosophical tale composed in Arabic in twelfth-century Andalusia” (55), suggests another form of becoming-animal: the young protagonist is not only suckled by a doe but also instructed by animals, eventually learning through grief that his foster mother’s soul survived her body. Thus cross-species nursing initiates an interchange that enlarges a human child’s nature rather than distorting it.

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner’s “The Lady and the Dragon in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion” completes the book’s first section, “Intimate Relations.” Here the intimate relation is principally human and heterosexual, but Bruckner sees other connections “hid[den] away . . . in the obscurities of romance” (83). In particular, the “signature image” of Chrétien’s narrative (64), in which Yvain rescues a lion entrapped by a dragon, adumbrates Laudine’s hold...