Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei (review)

The contemporary interest in the inner life of animals and animal rights is an indication of a growing awareness that the line of demarcation between human and animal is not as clear as once thought. A Cartesian view of animals as nonsentient automata that, in the words of Malebranche, "eat without pleasure, cry without pain … desire nothing, fear nothing, [and] know nothing" (Nicholas Malebranche, The Search after the Truth 6.2.7, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 494-95) seems unsustainable the more we learn of animal behavior. Experiments in animal psychology increasingly challenge the early modern notion that higher animals lack self-consciousness and awareness of their own mortality, thereby depriving them of the imperative to live purposively. Instead, the line between human and animal (or at least between the human and those we call higher animals) seems drawn on ever-shifting sand.

Much the same may be said for medieval Scholastic views of animals. Despite attempts to establish a "hard boundary" between human and animal, a fixed boundary remained elusive. Human and animal bodies and behaviors offered too many similarities. It is abundantly clear that medieval Latin exempla and sermons treat animal behavior as instructive for humans. Positively, animals will display naturally some of the most noble human qualities: chastity, monogamy, a self-sacrificing defense of progeny, and even a natural solicitude for elderly parents. Negatively, animals provide examples of the very worst in humanity: predatory behavior, violence, carnality, promiscuity, and gluttony. While medieval bestiaries and medieval fabliaux reveal animals and animal societies to be very nearly human, medieval polemics invoke animal stereotypes to dehumanize and stigmatize religious "others" (i.e., Jews, Muslims, and heretics).

Controversy remains over the extent to which animals were valued beyond their contributions to the medieval European domestic economy as food sources (pigs, sheep, dairy cows), as beasts of burden (donkeys, oxen), as hunting aides (dogs, cats, falcons, hawks), as support for warfare (horses), or as sources of entertainment (dancing bears and the organ grinder's monkey). Modern research has proposed, moreover, that in the Middle Ages service animals (e.g., seeing-eye dogs) even assisted individuals with disabilities, and there is also a growing awareness—promoted, for example, by Kathleen Walker-Meikle's Medieval Pets—that in later medieval culture some animals achieved the special status reserved for our pets today as quasi family members.

On the one hand, even though medieval philosophers and theologians generally denied that animals have free will or can be held morally responsible, by the fourteenth century legal proceedings were convened to convict and punish animals for criminal assault against humans or their property. On the other hand, although animals were seen as cognitively inferior to humans, some animals were invested with almost prophetic insight: after Aubry de Montdidier's murder in 1371, his dog Dragon reacted with such violence toward his murderer, Richard Macaire, that King Charles V ordered a trial by combat in which Dragon was victorious and Macaire was condemned for homicide. Furthermore, although these same medieval thinkers denied that animals can sin or possess moral virtue, in popular culture some animals even achieved sainthood (see Jean-Claude Schmitt's The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century).

Ian P. Wei's Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris is not a cultural history of animals devoted to an investigation of their roles in the medieval domestic economy, in homiletic literature, or in vernacular fabliaux. Instead Wei provides a focused discussion of what several thirteenth-century theology masters at the University of Paris said about humans and animals. He traces Scholastic theological discussions that explore the similarities and differences between "us" and "them." In three chapters Wei provides a "close reading" and detailed paraphrase of a...