The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages by Joyce E. Salisbury (review)

REVIEWS spection" (p. 147). And for me the most unsatisfactory reading was of the Haukyn episode in passus 13-14 (chapter 12), which leads to a final comment. One might ask if an investigation of the "problem of language" in the poem should not focus less on "knowing" and more on "choosing." Though the book several times acknowledges that Piers concerns the will, choice, and action, it nevertheless focuses on "insight and knowledge" (p. 199). Thus, for example, Will "misunderstands" Holy Church in passus 1 be­ cause pupil and teacher employ different modes ofdiscourse (p. 13). Such a reading externalizes Will's moral failing as a problem of language badly managed. Rudd's discussion ofthe Friars' exemplum in passus 8 (p. 130) or of Haukyn do not, it seems to me, address what for Langland was the crucial problem: the failure ofthe will to choose what the mind knew to be "right" and the devastating consequence that one had continually to rise from sin and, through penance and "satisfaction," strive to reorient the dispositions (the a/foetus) to choose the "good," in imitation ofDowel, idest Christus. JOSEPH S. WITTIG University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill JOYCE E. SALISBURY. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Pp. ix, 238. $55.00. The fact that modern science and philosophy have still no clear "test of humanity" testifies to modern man's uncertainty as to what makes us "hu­ man."1 Joyce E. Salisbury takes this profound insecurity as the starting point for her fascinating historical study of how people saw animals and themselves in the Middle Ages. As the main representatives of the two differing views of the human­ animal relationship covered by her study she chooses the fourth-century Church father St. Augustine and the early-thirteenth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales-two figures who, at the same time, also approximately mark the temporal limits of her project. Thus, for St. Augustine in the 1 See, for example, Andrew N. Rowan's "The Human-Animal Interface," in M. H. Robinson and L. Tiger, eds., Man andBeast Revisited (Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991), pp. 279-89. 283 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER fourth century, the gulf between human beings and animals was obvious and unbridgeable, whereas the tales of "shape shifters" reported by Gerald of Wales are taken by Salisbury to illustrate the increasing "blurring of borders" between the two originally distinct categories of "human" and "animal." In the main part of her study, Salisbury underpins her initial thesis by analyzing the relationship between animals and human beings in terms of animals as property, food, and sexual objects. She bases the first part of her analysis (chapters 1 to 3) on a wide range of medieval legal texts (both secular and clerical) and convincingly illustrates how human attitudes to­ wards animals changed over the centuries from the assertion of an unques­ tioned (qualitative) difference in nature to a position that sees human beings and animals as being different only by degree. Thus, for example, increasingly severe punishments for bestiality are seen as becoming neces­ sary in order to maintain the formerly unquestioned separation of humans and animals by means of legal prescriptions. Salisbury's attempt, from chapter 4 onwards, to prove that the same development took place in the area of literature and manuscript-illustra­ tions, however, is more problematic. Not only do we find considerable variation in the number of texts that have been handed down, but the selection of representative texts is also far from straightforward. St. Au­ gustine, for example, may very well illustrate the prevailing early-medieval theological opinion. However, Gerald of Wales's Thejourney through Wales/ The Description of Wales, which Salisbury uses to illustrate the thirteenth­ century attitude and to contrast it with St. Augustine's point of view, belongs to an entirely different category of texts, with an orientation to­ ward relating the "curiosa" rather than clarifying the relationship between human beings and animals from a philosophical-theological vantage point-as St. Augustine did. Consequently, we find a somewhat motley selection of texts, which are all rather one-sidedly examined for further evidence to support Salisbury's initial...