Overview
- Challenges rather than reinforces the human-animal divide, setting itself apart from previous full-length studies on this topic
- Acknowledges the various modes of meaning through which human and nonhuman animals communicated between and among themselves in the Middle Ages
- Includes a breadth of discussions that range from falconry and horsemanship, as well as imaginative literature and medieval anthropocentrism
Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
- Critical Animal Studies
- Medieval Texts
- Interspecies Communication
- Hybridity
- medieval falconry
- medieval veterinary medicine
- Marie de France's Bisclavret
- birds in Chaucer
- Andalusi Phoenix
- falconry and gender
- performative gender and animals
- Le Chevalier au Lion
- animals as metaphor in medieval text
- medieval anthropocentrism
- Ancrene Wisse
- "becoming-animal"
- Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès
- Guillaume au faucon
- Troilus and Criseyde
- Vitae
Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Communicating Through Animals
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Front Matter
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Recovering Animal Languages
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Front Matter
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Embodied Language and Interspecies Dependence
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“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)
“This diverse and useful collection of essays takes us deeper into the critical animal turn of medieval literature by addressing compelling cases of verbal and bodily languages in nonhumans. Most imperatively, the book at points bravely pursues a broader acknowledgment of animal utterance as it contests the now outmoded human ownership of language.” (Lesley Kordecki, Professor of English at DePaul University, USA)
“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)
“This diverse and useful collection of essays takes us deeper into the critical animal turn of medieval literature by addressing compelling cases of verbal and bodily languages in nonhumans. Most imperatively, the book at points bravely pursues a broader acknowledgment of animal utterance as it contests the now outmoded human ownership of language.” (Lesley Kordecki, Professor of English at DePaul University, USA)
“Animal Languages in the Middle Ages now arrives in timely fashion to remind us that…the Middle Ages already witnessed a similar outpouring of interest in animal semiotics. Surveying saints’ lives and hawking manuals, verse romances and veterinary treatises, this volume demonstrates that medieval attitudes toward animal consciousness were more complex, more nuanced, and in some ways more accurate than the modern animal science that has supplanted them.” (Bruce Boehrer, Bertram H. Davis Professor of English, Florida State University, USA)
“Animal Languages in the Middle Ages attends to gesture, to avian Latins, to the attentiveness required to train falcons and horses, and even to lions as emotional therapists. With cases that span the Middle Ages, ranging from Persia to Iberia, in a host of languages, human and otherwise, this collection’s on-the-ground picture of the shared worlds of humans and nonhumans utterly demolishes the false belief that medieval people, as a whole, thought of animals only as nonlinguistic, passive tools.” (Karl Steel, Associate Professor, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)
“Assembling established and emergent voices in the field of medieval literary and cultural studies, Animal Languages offers a vivid exploration of interspecies codependence across a range of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than approaching nonhuman animals as mere topics of discourse or tropes in medieval thought, this textured collection richly explores modes of communication beyond human speech or writing—including the body language of horse hooves, otter breath, canine faces, and modalities of touch, smell, gesture, and motion. Animal Languages is paradigm-shifting in its linguistic, cultural, and textual range, addressing Latin, Old English, Anglo-Norman, early and late Middle English, Old French, and Arabic and Persian literary traditions.” (Jonathan Hsy, Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, author of Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Animal Languages in the Middle Ages
Book Subtitle: Representations of Interspecies Communication
Editors: Alison Langdon
Series Title: The New Middle Ages
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71897-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-71896-5Published: 23 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-89117-0Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-71897-2Published: 13 February 2018
Series ISSN: 2945-5936
Series E-ISSN: 2945-5944
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 272
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Topics: Medieval Literature, Comparative Literature, History of Medieval Europe