Animal Encounters - (Middle Ages) by Susan Crane (Hardcover)

About the Book

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

Book Synopsis

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.

The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.

Review Quotes

"Critical orthodoxy finds in medieval Britain clear-cut distinctions between human beings and all other forms of life, but Susan Crane finds instead a tangle of cohabitation. An immensely important contribution to the burgeoning conversation between animal studies scholars in the earlier and more recent periods, Animal Encounters gives us a picture of medieval Britain as a dynamic and often surprising contact zone, where human beings are enriched, both spiritually and intellectually, by the fact that they live and work, and play and die, alongside their fellow creatures."-- "Cary Wolfe, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame"

"Writing such a book as this requires hard-won mastery of human sciences, but also attentiveness to where such sciences stumble in encountering fellow, nonhuman creatures. Covering eight centuries, and giving us en passant a newly expanded understanding of British culture, this marvelous book shows poetry intuiting complexly lived relationships between humans and animals, where humanist philosophy cannot speak."-- "David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania"

About the Author

Susan Crane is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is author of The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.