Susan Crane

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing. They 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.

Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity precedes social performance and, indeed, that performance falsifies the true, inner self. Susan Crane resists the longstanding convictions that medieval rituals were trivial affairs, and that personal identity remained unarticulated until a later period.

Focusing on England and France during the Hundred Years War, Crane draws on wardrobe accounts, manuscript illuminations, chronicles, archaeological evidence, and literature to recover the material as well as the verbal constructions of identity. She seeks intersections between theories of practice and performance that explain how appearances and language connect when courtiers dress as wild men to interrupt a wedding feast, when knights choose crests and badges to supplement their coats of arms, and when Joan of Arc cross-dresses for the court of inquisition after her capture.

This study argues that Geoffrey Chaucer’s depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the English and French romances of his era. For Chaucer, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the cultural elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity.  In depicting the maturation of young women and men, romances stage an ideology of identity that is based in gender difference. Less obviously gendered concerns of romance—social hierarchy, magic, and adventure—are also involved in expressing femininity and masculinity. The genders prove to be not simply binary opposites but overlapping and shifting co-referents. Precarious social standing can carry a feminine taint; women’s adventures recall but also contradict those of men. Chaucer’s redeployments of romance are particularly sensitive to the crucial place gender holds in the genre.

Chapters on Masculinity, Feminine Mimicry and Masquerade, Gender and Social Hierarchy, Subtle Clerks and Canny Women, and Adventure draw on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer’s profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance.

This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D80C4W4W.

Many of Britain’s best known romances, such as the stories of Tristan, King Horn, Havelok, Guy of Warwick, and Bevis of Hampton, were first recorded in Anglo-Norman verse and later revised into Middle English versions.  Setting these English and French texts in conversation with one another illuminates the impact of the Norman Conquest on Britain's linguistic, literary, and social history. These romances form a distinctively "insular" body of works, closely related to one another and to their situation in England.

Chapters 1 and 2: Romances of English heroes assess the political ideas sustaining the shift from feudal toward national organization. Chapter 3: Pious romances counter the church's vision of irreconcilable opposition between worldly ambitions and devotion to God. Chapters 4 and 5: Romances concerned with courtliness question the hermetic elevation and spiritual refinement of conventional “courtoisie.”

This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8QZ2B94.

Francis of Assisi is well known for his devotion to all God’s “creatures,” from worms and fish to moon and stars. Francis’s devotion also has some little known dimensions that are unprecedented in his own time but that anticipate central tenets of post-humanist animal theory and ecotheology. In the earliest Franciscan documents, suppressed soon after his death, Francis asserted that he obeyed non-human animals as an expression of faith. He worshiped with them, protected their lives, and conflated their material welfare with their symbolic meanings. These aberrant features of Francis’s piety were suppressed soon after his death, but they merit close attention for the ways in which they anticipate contemporary theorists’ efforts to de-center the human, recognize animal participation in human cultures, and envision a coherently material and spiritual theology.

Philosophical anthropology has taken an ‘ontological turn’ to focus on humankind’s basic intuitions about the organization of the living world. For example, a perception that links creatures up in material networks of sympathies and antipathies (ontological analogism) differs from a perception that creatures are linked together by cognition and cross-species communication (ontological animism). These incompatible ontologies make many appearances in medieval books of beasts, alongside a more familiar ontological dualism that divides humankind fundamentally from other creatures. A thirteenth-century Bestiary manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764, illustrates how medieval books of beasts articulate their ontological heterogeneity, and how this heterogeneity can illuminate contemporary environmental theory.

Of the early works in this volume, Chaucer's Parliament of Foules is the most wide-ranging in its sources and interests and the most accomplished in its prosody. The Book of the Duchess offers a more consistent tone, the House of Fame more biting social commentary, and Anelida and Arcite more touching introspection. But the Parliament's confidence and brio carry the reader along a fast-paced journey through source citations, heavenly and earthly scenes, interpretive puzzles, and differing visions of how to live and love. Several of Chaucer's later works redeploy the Parliament's awkward and limited narrator, its incorporation of varied source texts, and its rhyme royal stanza.

Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls traces his rejection of Neoplatonist and moral allegories, with their emphasis on transcendent truths and teachings. Instead, the Parliament’s dreamer observes and absorbs a richly sensual earthly environment, replacing mainstream allegory’s guiding question  “How shall I save myself?” with the more mundane question “What’s happening here?” In exploring this latter question, the Parliament stages three contrasting ontologies—three models of how living things are interrelated—that continue to inform anthropological and environmental thought today. As dualism, animism, and totemism collide and intersect, Chaucer develops a productive uncertainty about the order of things. His ontological experiment offers a prehistory and a way forward for contemporary environmental theory.

Literary animal studies investigate relationships among humans and other animals while drawing on further disciplines including biology, anthropology, fine arts, cognitive science, philosophy, and environmental studies. In emphasizing that human cultures are interspecies systems, animal studies contribute to the posthumanist critique of “the human” as an autonomous, privileged, and securely defined category. When the species components of medieval culture are appreciated in their daily, material, andcognitive dimensions, literary scholarship can move beyond the oversimplifications of the past. In the Middle English Gesta Romanorum and Seven Sages of Rome, moral tales of remorse for the death of a working dog revise the patristic and scholastic premise that nonhuman animals have no ethical standing. The hunting treatise of Gaston Phébus complicates medieval scientific distinctions between human cognition and animal instinct. Legends of Saint Modwenna and other British saints that narrate the conversion of a wolf into a livestock guardian ponder how domestication happens and how it participates in culture making.

Joan of Arc wore men’s clothing almost continuously for the last two years of her life. Joan’s lengthy testimony at her trial for heresy clarifies how cross-dressing shaped her self-presentation and why she was unwilling to give it up despite months of pressure to do so. Joan’s supporters tended to justify her cross-dressing by citing its abnegation of feminine inferiority and its practicality for military campaigning. Neither of these conventional justifications is sustained in Joan’s verbal testimony. She never hides or renounces her womanhood, yet she refuses to give up cross-dressing when no longer on campaign. Men’s clothing emerges in Joan’s testimony as one of several aspects of masculinity in her uniquely gendered practice. Of all her contemporaries, Christine de Pisan in her "Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc" comes closest to articulating Joan’s own sense of how masculinity and femininity interrelate in her identity.