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  • Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West by Jamie Kreiner
  • Mariechristine Garcia
Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), xxiv + 340 pp.

Pigs are curious, omnivorous creatures, who are known to thrive in varied ecosystems. Placed in new environments, they learn different behaviors to better acclimate to their surroundings, often to the point of being unruly. The versatility and curiosity of pigs did not go unnoticed by late antique and early medieval farmers, lawmakers, theologians, and natural philosophers. As a result, the pig's curious nature influenced the early medieval understanding of the natural world, from agricultural practices to pre-Newtonian cosmology. Jamie Kreiner explores the many lives of pigs in her captivating new monograph, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West. Pooling evidence from bioarcheology and osteology, visual and material culture, and theological and legal text, among many other sources, Kreiner demonstrates the importance of pigs to the cultural and agricultural workings of the period. As early medieval communities engaged with the intelligence and creativity of pigs, new approaches to environment, economics, and culture emerged that can be understood through modern ecological frameworks.

In the first chapter, Kreiner discusses the early medieval understanding of the pig. By identifying pigs as both "singular" and "plural," Kreiner argues that in the late antique and early medieval periods, people were capable of holding multiple (even conflicting) views of pigs at once. For example, boars and their associations with the male gender and elite class were characterized differently from the social and adaptable domestic pig. With these complexities in mind, late antique and early medieval theologians attempted to identify different "categories" of pig, taking into account their willfulness and variation. Humans were not the only creatures on earth with "uniquely willful behavior" (34), and pigs' abilities to care for themselves, teach themselves and other pigs to leave their enclosures, and uproot fields of crops made them dynamic players in medieval communities. Pigs provided these communities with a reliable source of meat that could be raised in a variety of environments but required accommodations for their rowdy behavior. Thus, the duality of pigs shaped the construction of early medieval agricultural communities.

In the second chapter, Kreiner steps away from centering pigs to discuss the pre-Newtonian cosmology of late antiquity. Kreiner takes the time to explain this [End Page 271] cosmology to her audience as an earnest attempt by late antique natural philosophers and theologians at understanding the natural world. For these authors, "science and religion were mutual inspirations. Christianity was not only an 'answer' to the universe but also an imperative to learn more about it" (45). But such explorations, as exegetes were keen to suggest, did not illuminate the entire universe in its complexity. Humanity was limited by its own perspectives, and animals, such as the pig, were apt reminders of that. These perspectives carry on through Kreiner's analysis of Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine's hexameral commentaries, as they linked the physical and the divine through the creation myth. Kreiner then discusses later medieval authors and their explorations of the complexities of causation in the physical world. Their world was "kinetic and contingent" (61), but authors debated over what the catalyst of the universe's tumultuousness might be. Although these exegetes could provide no definitive answers, they looked to the revolutions of the sun or the native animals around them for clues to the source of the cosmic force that continued to keep the complex world in motion. In the medieval world, "the farm and its physics were fused in divine order" (77).

In the third chapter, Kreiner discusses how pigs and pig husbandry functioned within the early medieval landscape from the archaeological perspective. Pigs were able to "salvage" their landscape by eating whatever food it provided (often foods humans were uninterested in eating) and humans then "salvaged" pork products for themselves. Although the behaviors of pigs were changeable across the early medieval West, the practice of salvage is a viable means of understanding both the micro-ecologies and variable economies of the period. Kreiner uses pigs as a lens onto the micro-ecologies of the medieval West...

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