Download PDF | (The Middle Ages Series) Susan Crane - Animal Encounters. Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain-University of Pennsylvania Press (2012).
280 Pages
Introduction
The people of medieval Britain lived in daily contact with domestic and wild animals. Forest and wasteland loomed over settlements, and even city streets teemed with all kinds of creatures. Scholars attempt to recapture this physical intimacy from its material traces. Archaeologists discuss paw prints on tile floors, zoologists use bones to estimate wolf populations, and historians reconstruct falcon keeping from household accounts. Medievalists who work primarily with imaginative writing have a role in this cross-disciplinary conversation. In recent decades the focus of literary studies has shifted from tracing intertextual relationships to mapping broadly material, social, textual, and embodied scenes of imaginative production.
These scenes are inextricably lived and thought. Medieval writers (like writers today) had no animal experience, however physically immediate, that they did not apprehend cognitively as it unfolded. Conversely, there is no thinking—even in fabulation, in figuration, in the formal constraints of genre—that can entirely forget the living creature. But literary scholars sometimes seem to forget the animal, lured by how cogently the lion king and the preaching fox can comment on human behavior. Anthropomorphic roles have long been the star turns for literary animals. I seek instead to redirect attention from the animal trope’s noisy human tenor back to its obscure furry vehicle. Animal Encounters in Medieval Britain begins with a term that resists definition. Animal, synonymous with beast in Middle English, sometimes encompasses and other times contrasts with what is meant by human; the fate of each concept is bound to the other.
Their tangled definitions have Classical and early Christian roots. Best known must be the concise version inherent in patristic exegesis and circulated as a maxim by the scholastics that “man is a rational animal”: what other animals are, the human both is (because a breathing, reproducing, mortal creature) and is not (because a rational creature).1 John Trevisa’s fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus places the human within the animal category: “All that is compounded of flesh and spirit of life, and so of body and soul, is called animal, a beast, whether it be of the air like birds, or of the water like fish that swim, or of the earth such as beasts that go on the ground and in fields, like men and wild and tame beasts.”2 But Trevisa incorporates also a distinction from other animals or beasts, crediting Isidore of Seville’s sixth-century Etymologies: “Isidore says that a man is a beast that resembles God.”3 Within and yet exceeding the category, this man is a beast who is enjoined not to be a beast: in a typically definitional move, the convert Tiburce in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale opines of Christian revelation, “anyone who does not believe this is a beast.”4 Even when taken as binary opposites, neither category is uniform. Both collapse pluralities into deceptive unities.
Their failures to designate make them most effective when used not descriptively but polemically; both terms make excellent packaging for fictions of identity, myths of origin, and beliefs about natural hierarchy. And yet I have not been able to dispense with these paradoxically longstanding and ungrounded terms. In a few medieval contexts it is possible to resort to the genus and species of the Vulgate Bible’s Creation scene and the Middle English “kynde” for species difference.5 But most medieval conceiving happens on the troubled conceptual ground of human versus animal. It is hardly helpful to resort to scare quotes around “animal” or to new locutions such as the arrivant, the strange stranger, the animetaphor, and the animot: these locutions have made important points about one or another problem with the animal, but none can confront all its inadequacies.6 Likewise, I could acknowledge that the human fails persistently to be gender neutral by using man instead, reducing its potential field of reference by half, but man is hardly a stable designation that is never denied to male persons. I cannot find fine new terms that solve the referential problems posed in animal and human. Instead, I take the terms’ inadequacy as a persistent topic in my chapters, whether right up front in the argument or as components within related problems of cohabitation, classification, alliance, and ethics.
This book’s encounters are poised between cross-species contacts and thoughts about contact. Some encounters attend to lived interactions and some are largely fantastic. Several cohere in their curiosity about cross-species relationship, on the one hand, and difference on the other. What kind of mindfulness does a housecat have? Can a horse be said to know things about a rider? Even such familiar domestic animals pose mysteries of cognition and sensation. In other encounters, animals’ proximate strangeness raises ethical questions. When animals define the human by contrast, they are configured as humanity’s formative others—both unlike and importunately like the human. Can a dog know right from wrong? Does creaturely suffering enjoin humans to compassion? In still other cases, animal encounters are commodified, ritualized, totemic, gustatory, and instructive in often conflicting ways. A swan can be a dish at dinner, an ancestor represented in a crest and seal, or a sign of good luck for sailors.7 In all these cases, encounter refers not only to animalhuman relationship but to the relationship of text and living practice.
The medieval works I discuss present their encounters sometimes as metaphoric or symbolic, sometimes as intimate and substantial. To leave figuration out of my discussion would be to falsify my texts, but I aim to move beyond figuration in conjoining the hunting treatise to the capacities of hunting hounds and the cat of lyric to the deep history of domestication. Medieval Britain, as I search out its richest veins of animal thought, spans traditions from the eighth to fifteenth centuries, but without any teleology of “development” in perceptions of animals. Instead, differing milieus and genres engage animality in a heterogeneous convergence of analytical, intuitive, metaphorizing, didactic, and ethical modes that resists reduction to paradigms and teleologies. My Britain extends outward beyond its shores, first to recognize the vital role of early Irish evangelism in bringing Christianity to northern Britain, as I draw the earliest life of St. Cuthbert together with Irish hagiography and an Old Irish lyric of the monastic diaspora. Moving to Angevin England of the twelfth century, the Anglo-French fables and lays of Marie de France and an insular bestiary that may have been among Marie’s sources offer three arenas of overlapping and contrasting thought about human likeness to animals.
The Hundred Years War presents a differently expanded Britain in my later chapters. Powerful currents of cross-Channel ambition, rivalry, and desire flow through English lineages and literary consumption in this period, conjoining English and continental French hunting treatises, romances, and chivalric works in a capacious frame of reference for high-status animals. These creatures bear marks of nobility; their presence enhances prestige and their death confers honor. By sampling Celtic, Roman, British, and AngloFrench cross-currents, I begin to chart the fascinating contours of medieval Britain’s animal encounters and to suggest how richly their subtleties would reward further study. My chapters bring literary approaches to genre, language, gender, and culture together with perspectives from evolutionary biology, taxonomy, language acquisition, ethology, and environmental studies.
Discussing a saint’s relationship with a raven as an environmental experiment, a bestiary in terms of Linnaean classification, and chivalric romances with reference to phenomenology may seem disorienting conjunctions, but in each case the medieval works reveal new meanings as they are pressed into relationship with quite different kinds of work. In drawing on these several perspectives, Animal Encounters contributes to the emerging field of critical animal studies, a decentered set of endeavors that is just now coming into wide academic and public visibility. If the term animal studies has an oxymoronic valence, that valence reflects the field’s core claim: throughout their long history, the humanist traditions have tended to render nonhuman animals invisible to contemplation, unworthy of serious attention. Doubly rooted in antique philosophy and Biblical exegesis, humanism values the human by making a categorical and hierarchical distinction between humankind and all other kinds. The central question posed by animal studies is how to disrupt this deeply impacted hierarchy. From many directions in and beyond the academy, attempts are being made to envision a neo-humanism or post-humanism that would no longer conceive all life to be distributed in devalued contrast to humanity—a dichotomous premise that is as falsifiable as it is foundational.
The radical cut of human exceptionalism, whatever it was, now appears inaccurate to the polymorphous multiplicity of the living, shot all through with differences but also with affinities and connections.8 In the long wake of Darwin and Freud, every trait that humanism has posited as our special mark of difference has been discredited, from tool making to deductive thought, laughter to culture making to selfawareness. Human can no longer designate a discrete and specifiable entity. This lost clarity opens humanism to new conceptions. The stakes are high for animals, whose treatment derives in part from humanism’s anthropocentric measures of value and moral standing. The stakes are high as well for humankind: the founding human/animal dichotomy is so unstable that it has migrated all too easily within the human, to define as bestial certain slaves, women, colonials, criminals, and foreigners.9 Humanism’s organizing principle, powerful as it has been for the good of many, has set aside vital questions of interspecies relationship, environmental practice, and ethical responsibility. Animal studies often seek to reconfigure thinking about animals by turning interdisciplinary to skew and stretch each field’s range of vision. And the problem of animality can interrogate any field’s own material, asking anew what it can say.
In a characteristic call to new work, Jonathan Burt urges scholars not to overemphasize the metaphoric and iconic status of textual animals; instead, we should “achieve a more integrated view of the effects of the presence of the animal and the power of its imagery in human history.”10 For scholars of medieval texts, an early turn toward animal studies was Jeffrey J. Cohen’s Identity Machines: reading animals as “insubstantial allegories in which we discover ourselves,” he argued, “ignores what might occur between animals and humans, what processes, desires, identities might circulate in the interspace where animal and human differences come together or come apart.”11 Cary Wolfe, like Burt and Cohen, identifies in animal studies a turn from figurative toward living animals: “scholars in animal studies, whatever their home disciplines, now appear to be challenged not only by the discourses and conceptual schemata that have shaped our understanding of and relations to animals but also by the specificity of nonhuman animals, their nongeneric nature . . . linked complexly to the problem of animals’ ethical standing as direct or indirect subjects of justice.”12 Beyond ethics as well, animal studies have a persistent preoccupation with searching out traces of animal presence, moving back through figuration toward the living creature. My chapters emphasize the living animal by connecting written representations to perspectives from natural science, animal training, husbandry, and historical studies.
Entirely literary approaches can also recover traces of animal presence, not by treating language as if it were a transparent window on the real, but by concentrating on the peculiar obscurities and revelations inherent in turns of phrase, narrative strategies, and formal conventions. I look for moments when textual representation is porous to experience—when the somatic texture of embodied animal encounters leaves an imprint on artful language. My chapters begin with cohabitation. A raven provides lard for waterproofing the boots of Saint Cuthbert’s visitors; a wolf guards cattle so that Saint Fintán can slip away to take reading lessons. Such scenes are often said to show the saint recovering the harmonies of the Garden of Eden, but in the full context of their vitae, the saints’ encounters make better sense as interactions with a fallen world. When saints speak with wild animals and change their behavior, they are experimenting with their environments.
Nature comes into configuration around the saint, interpenetrating with monastic culture and facilitating its projects. Hagiography’s fascination with cohabitation in the present moment is even stronger in the ninth-century Irish lyric about a scholar and his cat named White Fuller. Here, as in hagiography, cohabitation is imagined as a kind of reciprocity that enhances not just a household’s comfort but the conditions for spiritual fulfillment. In hagiography, reciprocity involves a claim that saints can be understood by all creatures human and nonhuman, while in the Irish lyric, the claim is that the scholar and his cat share a particular kind of mental alertness when they are doing their most challenging work.
Mentality continues as a focus in Chapter 2, which puts Marie’s Fables and the Lay of Bisclavret in dialogue with philosophical writing on the human/animal distinction. In Classical, Christian, and modern philosophy, the human/ animal distinction has persistently been located in mentality. So fundamentally flawed is this distinction, Jacques Derrida argued in a lecture foundational for animal studies, that “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of.”13 Marie stages the tension between these modes of thought as her Fables shift from poetic narrative to what she calls the “philosophie” of the fable’s apologue. Marie’s Bisclavret draws more deeply on poetic resources to reflect on aspects of being that are shared among humans and other animals. She presents becoming a werewolf as a wonder and an adventure, rendering the werewolf’s indeterminate nature in positive terms. Her celebration of indeterminacy resonates with Derrida’s critique of philosophy’s dichotomy between human and animal. Both authors evoke the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis; both authors deploy Genesis to imagine creaturely relations differently from the Augustinian tradition of biblical exegesis. Creaturely relations in the broadest possible sense are the concern of one of Marie’s possible sources for Bisclavret, the “second-family” bestiary.
The bestiary tackles the question of creaturely relations by turning to taxonomy. For many readers, the bestiary has seemed either an early and flawed attempt at natural science, or a collection of spiritual exempla without serious interest in the natural world. My third chapter proposes that the bestiary classifies animate creatures in order to reveal the material and spiritual unity of creation. Moving beyond the physical bodies of the animalia, the bestiary encompasses behavioral, social, moral, and spiritual meanings within its classificatory project. The result is a multidimensional scheme in which fins or feathers can ground distinctions, but so can wildness or tameness, crafty or innocent behavior, and medicinal or poisonous flesh. Connections can be found in adjacency and metaphor as well as in morphology. A taxonomic impulse to find relationships as well as to differentiate presses the bestiary to situate humans among the other animals, not only as their master but also as their similar. The category confusion latent in the scholastic premise that homo est animal enriches the depictions of other animals. Deer, fox, ape, dog, and many more acquire capacities conventionally reserved to humans, such as capacities for sin, virtue, speech, and even rational thought.
In contrast to the religious systematizing of the bestiaries, the medieval hunting treatises of Chapter 4 systematize the aristocratic hunt in order to model the world cohering around secular lordship. The most praised and prestigious form of hunting, the all-day pursuit of a single hart or boar, deploys an orchestrated company of retainers, hounds, and noble huntsmen. This hunt à force, “with strength of hounds,” is puzzling in its inefficiency. Neither harvesting meat nor taking exercise can account for its elaborate structure. Instead, the hunt à force is a ritual process: it structures contact with the hunted animal and the pack of hounds in order to perform and reinforce the rightness of aristocratic superiority. Animal death, ritualized to evoke the powers of sacrifice, is only a final expression of this superiority. The hunt à force subordinates its animal to its human participants in several ways, but more intriguingly, it makes intimate knowledge of animal bodies and minds the highest expression of aristocratic authority. For example, I argue that many hunting cries recorded in treatises are deliberately contracted utterances designed for communicating with hounds—utterances analogous to the linguistic categories of baby talk and foreigner talk. Aristocratic mastery, this ritual asserts, is most compellingly displayed in practical engagement with animal capacities and behaviors. Ethical engagement with animals, suppressed in the hunting treatises, is taken up in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale.
This tale’s pivotal term “kynde” probes the relationship between kinds (types, species) and kindness (compassion, empathy). What kindnesses are due across differences of kind? A Mongol princess and a peregrine falcon talk together thanks to a magical ring that renders birdsong intelligible to humans. Or do they understand one another, as the falcon suggests, thanks to their shared femininity, nobility, and sensitivity to love? These registers of empathy unite them across the species barrier and set them apart from the tale’s opening scene of masculine diplomacy and chivalry. The opening scene displays a relatively straightforward Orientalism, in which the Eastern kingdom of Cambyuskan is both richly exotic and smoothly appropriated to express the Squire’s effort at international sophistication. In the tale’s second part, the species difference of princess and falcon raises the stakes on ethnic difference, interrogating the limits that ethics might set on hospitality and compassion.
My final chapter stresses the interpenetration of ethical, instrumental, and conceptual relationships by turning to the most thoroughly depicted animal encounter in medieval literature—that of knight and horse. Romances and treatises on chivalry sometimes understand the assemblage of knight, arms, and horse as a powerful mechanism manipulated by the knight, and sometimes instead as a partnership that attributes nobility, loyalty, courage, and initiative to both horse and rider. Chapter 6 draws first on the limit case of the brass horse in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale to show that, far from being contradictory or mutually exclusive, the technical model and the inter-subjective model of the mounted knight are necessary complements to one another. The Auchinleck romance Bevis of Hampton works out this double valuing of warhorses in the hero’s evolving relationship to his horse Arondel. Bevis begins the romance bent on recovering his heritage at all costs, conceiving Arondel as a means to this end, but later he surrenders his heritage in order to save his horse from the gallows. In its remarkably subtle analysis of mounted shock combat, Bevis of Hampton attempts to sort out what it is to be a great knight by sorting out how a knight is related to his warhorse as well as his wife, king, and family. Animal relationships have perhaps been peripheral to medieval scholarship not because they are so simple, but because they are so complex. No single perspective can carry scholarship very far toward exploring them. Early work in the emerging field of animal studies was especially invested in a human/ animal boundary, casting relationships in terms of crossing, reinforcing, or blurring the boundary.
Helpful as a starting point, this binary conception must now melt into a multiplicity of intersecting and competing distinctions that better reflect medieval ways of thinking. Just as fragments from scientific, imaginative, and religious traditions agglomerate with lived experience in our apprehensions of other animals today, so too in medieval Britain fragments from Classical science, pagan belief, popular tradition, and Christian teaching informed complex and even self-contradictory apprehensions. Alongside the paradigm of the boundary, another persistent way of treating medieval thinking on animality has been to declare it more uniform and simplistic than post-medieval thinking. In Keith Thomas’s groundbreaking Man and the Natural World, this developmental model is implicit in a scathing first chapter on beliefs about human ascendancy inherited from medieval religious writing; early modern thought, however, “was much more complicated” because those old hierarchical views were “gradually eroded by a combination of developments.”14
The medieval is cast, in a move all too familiar to medievalists, as the time before complexity, the time when a predominant strand of religious thought was thought tout court. I stress the plurality and density of medieval thought about animals rather than seeking out a dominant cultural paradigm for each chapter, much less for the book as a whole. Literary scholarship is well placed to examine the subtle mechanisms of imagination through which medieval encounters shaped and defined animals. Conversely, these encounters shaped and defined medieval hunters, clerics, and knights; their apprehensions of nonhuman consciousness and embodiment invited them to reconceive themselves. The synchrony of scholar and cat in their house and of knight and warhorse in combat bring the cat and the horse into revelatory roles; they offer scholar and knight an opportunity to explore how bodies, minds, and affects interpenetrate within and across species.
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