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The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The chapters point to the wealth of non-human communicative and discursive forms through which animals function both as vehicles for human meaning and as agents of their own, demonstrating the significance of human and non-human interaction in medieval texts, particularly for engaging with the Other. The book ultimately considers the ramifications of deconstructing the medieval anthropocentric view of language for the broader question of human singularity.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- Part I Communicating Through Animals.- 2 Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse.- 3 As faucon comen out of muwe": Female Agency and the Language of Falconry.- 4 Saints and Holy Beasts: Pious Animals in Early-Medieval Insular Saints' Vitae.- 5 The Speech of Strangers: The Tale of the Andalusi Phoenix.- Part II Recovering Animal Languages.- 6 Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity, and Boundary in Old English Animal Voice Catalogues.- 7 In Briddes Wise: Chaucer's Avian Poetics.- 8 Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric.- 9 "Dites le mei, si ferez bien": Fallen Language and Animal Communication in Marie de France's Bisclavret.- Part III Embodied Language and Interspecies Dependence.- 10 On Equine Language: Jordanus Rufus and Thirteenth-Century Communicative Horsemanship.- 11 No Hoof, No Horse: Hoof Care, Veterinary Medicine and Cross-Species Communication in Late Medieval England.- 12 Medieval Dog Whisperers: The Poetics of Rehabilitation.- 13 Embodied Emotion as Animal Language in Le Chevalier au Lion.
About the author
Alison Langdon is Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University, USA. She is the editor of Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (2009) and has published articles on the women troubadours, Chaucer and his contemporaries, and canines in medieval literature. Her current projects center on the liminality of human/animal identity in the medieval imagination.
Summary
The essays in this interdisciplinary volume explore language, broadly construed, as part of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. Uniting a diverse set of emerging and established scholars, Animal Languages questions the assumed medieval distinction between humans and other animals. The chapters point to the wealth of non-human communicative and discursive forms through which animals function both as vehicles for human meaning and as agents of their own, demonstrating the significance of human and non-human interaction in medieval texts, particularly for engaging with the Other. The book ultimately considers the ramifications of deconstructing the medieval anthropocentric view of language for the broader question of human singularity.
Additional text
“Both books are solid contributions to the field, both models of the interdisciplinarity of animal studies, its happy capacity for interpretative surprise, and its laudable commitment to thinking ecologically and to decentering human primacy.” (Karl Steel, Speculum, Vol. 95 (3), 2020)
“The twelve essays collected in this volume comprise a varied and stimulating contribution to the thriving field of scholarly discourse on medieval ‘animalities’ … . Their general focus is on medieval representations of animal utterances and other non-verbal modes of communication in order to interrogate medieval attitudes to the supposed dichotomy between human and non-human animals.” (David Scott-Macnab, Modern Language Review, Vol. 114 (3), July, 2019)
Report
"Both books are solid contributions to the field, both models of the interdisciplinarity of animal studies, its happy capacity for interpretative surprise, and its laudable commitment to thinking ecologically and to decentering human primacy." (Karl Steel, Speculum, Vol. 95 (3), 2020)
"The twelve essays collected in this volume comprise a varied and stimulating contribution to the thriving field of scholarly discourse on medieval 'animalities' ... . Their general focus is on medieval representations of animal utterances and other non-verbal modes of communication in order to interrogate medieval attitudes to the supposed dichotomy between human and non-human animals." (David Scott-Macnab, Modern Language Review, Vol. 114 (3), July, 2019)
