The animal turn: Into the sea with the fish-knights of Perceforest

Abstract

In his contribution to this volume, Cary Wolfe points out the ‘terrestrialist bias that still obtains in [an] animal studies’ that concentrates on ‘dogs, cats, horses, and farm animals,’ and perhaps less frequently, on birds and hideous fabulists. The world, on land and on sea, comprises many far less familiar ‘critters’ than these: anemones symbiotically reliant on ‘little marshes of algae, ocean plantlets of a species that has come to live only in them’ (Lingis, 2003, 165), deep-sea tube worms, cetaceans, or, legendarily, the whale-like aspidochelone, whose rocky and verdant back, resembling an island, lured unwary sailors to their deaths (Guillaume le Clerc, 1852, ll. 2095–2120; Coulter, 1926; Szabo, 2008, 47–50). Few medieval critters so confused distinctions between land and sea, animal and land, and life and nonlife, but we do find other examples of beings that inhabit both land and sea in medieval texts. We turn, then, to the curious figure of the fish-knight in an epilogue that aims to extend the inquiries and conclusions of the preceding essays and to further unsettle the terrestrial and vitalist biases underlying many critical perspectives on nonhumans. In what is surely one of the stranger episodes in medieval literature, found in the fourteenth-century Roman de Perceforest, the knight Bethides has been