From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe ed. by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken Karl Steel e. jane burns and peggy mccracken eds. From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. 280. isbn: 978–0–268–02232–7. $38. This superb, well-illustrated anthology well represents medieval cultural studies’ recent focus on animals and other nonhuman subjects. It attends chiefly to Middle English and French literature, with a welcome aside into medieval Christian doctrine. Its topics range from stones to mother’s milk, werewolves and lions, gendered souls, free-floating genitalia, and monstrous founding mothers, demonstrating the range of materials that become available to scholars once we cease to presume that humans are the only proper subject of our attention, or that the category of ‘the human’ is an already answered question. Summaries of the essays follow: in the first, Jeffrey J. Cohen immediately turns away from the title’s beastly purview by considering rocks. Cohen clears away anthropocentrism to understand a stone as ‘a protagonist rather than an ancillary object’ (26), and finds his heroes in the gendered, mobile, and desiring diamonds of lapidaries. Cohen calls for a reimagining of the old divisions between human and nonhuman and organic and inorganic, and for an opening up of our parochial chronologies to the unfathomable expanses of lithic time. Next, Peggy McCracken studies the importance given to nursing in the story of the swan knight, Decameron 6.2, and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, in which a child isolated from birth is nursed and educated by a doe, more or less deliberately, in the ways of God and nature. In all these stories, a child’s first nurse has lasting effects, rendering the child noble or servile, and more or less human. As McCracken observes, the act of nursing troubles who might count as a child’s ‘mother,’ and also aligns women and animals through their shared edibility. Then, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner’s investigation of the Chevalier au Lyon tracks the thematic links between Laudine and the dragon to study the permeability of borders between animals and humans; it usefully points out that the romance’s frequent animal metaphors diminish after Yvain encounters the lion. However, Bruckner’s use of terms like ‘natural force’ (82), ‘human nature’ (73), or ‘subhuman’ (80) could have been avoided had she applied more critical pressure to the uncertain, differential, and contingent construction of the categories of human and animal, and culture and nature. Dyan Elliot’s fascinating, deeply learned essay treats the doctrinal problem of the identity of souls: if the self comprised both body and soul, does soul also have gender? Did women have the image of God or only his likeness, and would ‘natural’ [End Page 127] gender hierarchies persist eternally? Elliot describes how these debates played out in the patristic period and especially the High Middle Ages, whose response to dualist heresies ultimately led the Church to argue for a kind of ‘shadow corporeality of the soul’ (112), with all this implied about the permanence of gender hierarchy. Like Elliot, Elizabeth Robertson considers the gendering of souls in medieval theology and art: she treats the Middle English ‘Disputacion betwyx the Body and Wormes,’ in which a pack of consuming worms scolds a body for neglecting its spiritual health during its life. Robertson’s wide-ranging argument considers the Old and Middle English context of body/soul debates, late medieval transi tombs, the poem’s bizarre program of illustrations, and the way that poetry itself gives voice to the dead. Robertson identifies the poem’s bodily voice as that of a soul, gendered female, which emphasizes the poem’s association between bodies and women; the worms as masculine, inflicting sexualized violence and a moral accusation simultaneously; and the male dreamer who witnesses the debate as himself ravished by the vision. In Robertson’s reading, the poem imagines acceding to the will of God as accepting one’s own rape. Noah D. Guynn’s study of the werewolf lais Bisclavret and Melion is not specifically about animals, gender, or human hybrids. Rather, he focuses on narrative...