Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries by Sarah Kay (review)

Reviews 225 à un moment ou à l’autre, mises à l’honneur” (99). Far from being a haven of peace, the author reveals that the “typical” family structure fosters power struggles that often reach a dangerous boiling point throughout life. According to the philosopher, traditional family paradigms predicated upon the world’s three most dominant monotheistic religions continue to justify deplorable acts of violence against women and to reinforce exploitative and abusive patriarchal institutions. In short, Violences des hommes is an indispensable resource that stimulates critical reflection about the essence of violence in a human-centered world in which we have the technological prowess to obliterate each other and the entire biosphere.In the present era of hominization , the stakes of this much-needed conversation cannot be overstated. Mississippi State University Keith Moser Kay, Sarah. Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 2017. ISBN 978-0-226-43673-9. Pp. 203. Focusing on medieval Latin and French bestiaries, Sarah Kay undertakes an examination of medieval attitudes toward animals and their significance to humans. In this first study in English since Florence McCulloch’s 1962 Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, Kay diverges from McCulloch by highlighting the “Continental roots” of the bestiary and by identifying France as an important point of contact and exchange between the various bestiary traditions. Kay pays special attention to six vernacular translations of Latin bestiaries into French from the twelfth to mid-thirteenth centuries: Philippe de Thaon’s Anglo-Normand bestiary, Gervaise’s verse bestiary, Pierre de Beauvais’s Short Version and his Long Version, Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie’s verse bestiary, and Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Kay draws from a wide range of medieval and modern critical perspectives, including posthumanist perspectives and lines of inquiry from the history of the book, critical animal studies, and the field of skin studies, to examine both the content of bestiaries and their material form as parchment books. She juxtaposes textual analysis of bestiaries, looking at the “natures”or behaviors of extraordinary bestiary animals, their Christian allegoresis (if any), and frequent textual references to skin, along with analysis of the parchment page—itself made of animal skin. The six chapters of Kay’s work (“Book,Word, Page,” “Garments of Skin,”“Orifices and the Library,”“Cutting the Skin: Sacrifice, Sovereignty, and the Space of Exception,”“The Riddle of Recognition,”and“Skin, the Inner Senses, and the Soul as ‘Inner Life’”) are each organized around an aspect of the bestiary writers’treatment of skin. Throughout, Kay returns to an interrogation of the manner in which these texts written about animals, on animal skins, influence the reader’s selfreflection and understanding of human animality and human identity. Although bestiaries were composed from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, production of the genre was greatest during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when bestiaries would likely have reached a diverse readership, according to Kay. Bestiary readers could have included lay brothers or schoolboys learning Latin, as well as university students, and highly literate readers. Whereas Kay states that there is “no direct evidence” that bestiaries were read by women (15), she notes the likelihood of medieval aristocratic women having access to the vernacular bestiaries and therefore refers in her work to the readers of Latin bestiaries as “he” and to the readers of vernacular bestiaries as “she.” Exceedingly well researched and organized, and richly illustrated with twentyeight color plates and numerous black-and-white reproductions from illuminated bestiary manuscripts, Kay’s close readings of bestiary texts, images, and parchment will be of tremendous interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including medieval studies, manuscript studies, animal studies, and skin studies. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Mack, Mehammed Amadeus. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture. NewYork: Fordham UP, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8232-7461-1. Pp. 318. The title suggests that the boundaries of Frenchness are increasingly defined by attitudes to LGBT issues and feminism. Mack contends that French Muslims, who can no longer be excluded on the grounds of linguistic non-assimilation, are now subjected to a “sexual” citizenship test. Immigrants and their descendants are...