Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts. By Liam Lewis

Abstract

Professional medieval thinkers habitually characterized humans as the only truly linguistic animal. Liam Lewis’s book joins recent work on medieval animals by describing cases that elude the strictures of such hierarchical binaries. Lewis’s examples, drawn from Anglo-Norman encyclopaedias, conduct manuals, fables, and hagiography, show that animal noise was not simply the opposite of rational sound but rather something bon à penser. In Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire, the earliest vernacular bestiary, Lewis finds some anxiety about sound in the representation of sirens. While illustrations show them with their mouths closed, as if refusing to imagine their threatening song, Philippe’s text itself focuses exclusively on their physical attractiveness, which medieval misogynist moralizing knew better how to handle. With the bestiary’s mandrake, we have a creature whose deadly cry muddles easy distinctions between sentient and non-sentient life. Next, Lewis considers the list of animal noises in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Le Tretiz: humans lead off the list (‘home parle’), followed immediately by the roaring of bears (‘ourse braie’) with the noun glossed in Middle English. As he traces further entanglement of animal sounds and human languages, Lewis also imagines the young readers of Le Tretiz learning their roles as aristocrats and men both by imitating animal sounds, and by gathering geese and women together into the same collective noun, a ‘compaignie’: the category in Le Tretiz of ‘home’, the human or more simply man, allies with (certain) animals while reducing most humans to servitude. The third chapter, on an anonymous Vye de Seynt Fraunceys, relies on Angelo Clareno’s division of zoē, mere life, from bios, holy life, practised by the saints: drawing from Giorgio Agamben, but eschewing Agamben’s gloominess, Lewis studies how St Francis of Assisi allies with animal sounds — crickets’ chirps, sheep’s bleating, and birdsong — to worship with them, or to help human and animal both rise from zoē to bios. His last full chapter considers the fables attributed to Marie de France. Though famously a genre featuring animals that talk, their animal sound matters too: Marie’s goats bleat to summon rescuing dogs, while elsewhere a dog’s reasoning with a thief ends with a bark, as if it’s raising the hue and cry, a human legal mechanism enacted not through language but through noise. Mouth and muzzle, as Lewis observes, are not so obviously different in their effects. Lewis writes well, creatively attends to poetics, and generates new readings without distorting his sources. Overall, I am more pessimistic than Lewis about the positive benefits of ‘reassessing human exceptionalism’ (p. 161). The landed aristocrats who learned to be men by imitating animals asserted their dominance in part by imagining themselves bestial. St Francis is one model; these rapacious men another. Lewis’s book, to its credit, urges us to be more like the former than the latter.