Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane Robert Mills Susan Crane. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 271. $59.95. Susan Crane has been at the forefront of developments in the field of medieval animal studies. At the New Chaucer Society’s Congress in 2010 she organized a lively strand of sessions devoted to “Animal Discourses,” select papers from which were collated into a symposium in New Medieval Literatures in 2011. In the same year, postmedieval dedicated a special issue to “The Animal Turn,” to which Crane contributed an essay that now features, in revised form, in the book currently under review. The following year saw the publication of a virtual colloquium on “Animalia” within the pages of this journal, in which the author again participated. Crane’s latest study, Animal Encounters, represents an exceptionally rich and insightful intervention in these ongoing debates, one that will be a point of reference for years to come. Animal Encounters responds to a number of key concerns in critical animal studies. First, Crane hopes to rectify what she sees as a tendency to “forget” the animal in literary analysis, by striving, as she puts it in her opening paragraph, “to redirect attention from the animal trope’s noisy human tenor back to its obscure furry vehicle” (1). Even a genre such as beast fable, which has generally been viewed as inhospitable to an animal-centered perspective, gets reconfigured in Crane’s analysis as a space where animals matter. Additionally, Crane is motivated to reconsider human specificity in relation to (other) animals. What happens when traditional markers of human distinctiveness, such as language or reason, can be shown also to exist among nonhuman animals? [End Page 295] What are the implications, ethical or otherwise, of these encounters with animality beyond the confines of the human? Furthermore, Crane resists the notion of a univocal medieval “paradigm,” or the idea that, between the earlier and later Middle Ages, there was a “paradigm shift” in attitudes to animals. Readers are invited instead to envisage a complex and contradictory terrain, crisscrossed by multiple sites of animal encounter—spaces in which animals never simply operate as figures. This plurality derives not only from Crane’s engagement with a multiplicity of genres, milieus, and timeframes, but also from her application of approaches developed outside literary studies. These include, as outlined in the introduction, “evolutionary biology, taxonomy, language acquisition, ethology, and environmental studies” (3). For instance, in the chapter on second-family bestiaries, information derived from scientific DNA analysis, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s work on taxonomy, and Jorge Luis Borges’s imaginary “Chinese” encyclopedia are cited in support of the view that the bestiary can be interpreted as an exercise in taxonomic thinking. Crane also conveys with admirable clarity possible resonances between medieval texts and modern critical theories, notably Jacques Derrida’s influential critique of philosophy’s dichotomy between human and animal. Each chapter incorporates sensitive analyses of visual material (mainly manuscript illuminations), which, like the texts that are the book’s main focus, call into question the idea of a single human/animal “boundary” in medieval culture. Crane calls the materializations of animal presence she collates “fragments” (8), and concludes by describing the project as one of “recovering and reconsideration” (169); this is reflected in the book’s eschewal of a central methodology in favor of a more eclectic range of approaches. The opening chapter, which centers on Irish and Northumbrian hagiography, resists the assumption that saintly encounters with animals in these early medieval vitae are ultimately only human in significance. Animals have not simply been enlisted as participants in a “divine puppet show” (38), Crane submits. Rather, figures such as Saint Cuthbert are also envisaged coming into contact with animals whose species-specific behavior is enlisted as a site of wonder. Chapter 2, focusing on relations between humans and wolves, takes as its point of departure the contrast between the fable of “The Priest and the Wolf” by Marie de France, and a courtly lai, Bisclavret, possibly also authored by the same Marie, about a werewolf whose body shifts...