MACMILLAN Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication

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. Review “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) Review “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