The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals

Abstract

Most philosophers today know the thirteenth century as the age of Thomas Aquinas and debates about human nature and the rational soul; fewer are aware of the thirteenth century as an important turning point in western European attitudes toward non-human animals. The two themes are intimately connected, however—the same Aristotelian texts that, newly translated into Latin, were generating controversy about the ifs and hows of the immortality of rational animals were also packed with speculation about the nature of other animals. It was clear that some animals (such as pigs, horses, and monkeys) were extremely clever, for instance, and that any number of others had powers that exceeded those of human beings (such as dogs’ ability to track and falcons’ ability to perceive and retrieve prey). Tales of ravens who spoke even challenged the linguistic line thought to separate human beings from their fellow creatures. As two recent books—Nigel Harris’s The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn and Ian Wei’s Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals—make clear, this new interest in animals as subjects of inquiry in their own right (and for what those inquiries might tell us about human nature) manifests itself in a variety of forms, secular and religious, and challenges the notion of a sharp, clear division between human beings and ‘brutes’ (as non-rational animals were often called).Taken separately, Harris’s and Wei’s books present relatively narrow windows into their chosen topics. Both authors address only sources from within the Rome-centered Christian tradition, for instance, with Wei focusing on texts written by five theologians at the University of Paris and Harris drawing insights primarily from texts written outside the Scholastic tradition (such as sermons, chivalric tales and poetry, and legal proceedings). Taken together, however, the two books provide complementary glimpses into a rich world of understudied primary sources and model different methods for approaching those sources. The general picture that emerges of shifting Western Christian attitudes toward animals—expanded from viewing animals primarily as sources of food and/or labor to valuable sources of information about the world and/or the relation of God to creation—should prove valuable to anyone interested in those attitudes either on their own or in relation to attitudes toward animals in other religions and time periods.It is a testament to the breadth of thirteenth-century interest in animals that two books on such similar topics contain almost no overlap in material. In fact, the only medieval figure whose work is addressed in any detail in both volumes is Albert Magnus, indisputably “the” major author on animals in this period. There is also almost no overlap in how Harris and Wei approach their subject matter. Concerned not to go beyond what an author explicitly states about a topic to speculate about “what [the scholar] must actually have thought” (3), Wei provides close readings—indeed, often virtual paraphrases—of texts from the secular cleric William of Auvergne, who establishes the first Franciscan and Dominican chairs at the University of Paris, two Franciscans (Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure), and two Dominicans (Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas). Rather than focusing on any one philosophical or theological issue (e.g., arguments against animal immortality or parallels between human and animal cognition), Wei also attempts to capture what his subjects had to say about animals “wherever it cropped up in their more wide-ranging works” (4). By contrast, Harris is explicitly concerned to evoke what he calls the animal ‘moment’ or ‘turn’—“a cultural change in which scholars become increasingly aware of and interested in animals” and during which those scholars “develop new ways of looking at [animals] and writing about them which have implications also for sectors of society situated outside the academic world” (109). To capture this moment, The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn employs illustrative stories and overviews of social-cultural moves, with quotes from specific texts presented as crystallizations of general points.This stark difference in approach is one reason the books complement each other so well. (I might even go so far as to suggest they are better read together than independently.) While the close commentary in Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris provides a valuable extended window into how animals are discussed in particular texts, Wei is so careful to avoid speculating about authorial intentions that he largely avoids summarizing the results of his careful readings, much less comparing texts from different authors to each other. As a result, the reader is often left to puzzle out both how the views in these texts differ from each other and the potential significance of those differences. (In what seems like an extreme effort not to put words into the mouths of his subjects, for instance, Wei never directly addresses the question of why the work of theologians in thirteenth-century Paris is generally an interesting or important place to search for insight into these questions, or why the work of these theologians in particular is more worthy of attention than that of any number of others. One assumes the explanation is that the University of Paris was the epicenter of the controversy over Aristotle’s freshly translated works and accompanying Islamic commentaries in this period, and thus works from the faculty of theology in this period represent the cutting edge on changing attitudes toward animals and their relation to human beings, with the chosen authors being both influential and representative of a range of views on the topic, but Wei never comes out and says this.)Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris opens with a short but extremely helpful overview—in some ways, the most satisfying part of the book. As Wei notes, “There has been a tendency amongst both literary specialists and historians to suppose … that medieval theologians and philosophers, writing in Latin, all shared a very straightforward view of animals as simply lacking reason, with all other differences from the human arising from this deficiency” (2). Wei rightly responds to this supposition by noting that, given the wide range of sophisticated positions medieval theologians and philosophers take on virtually every other topic, it would be absurd to suppose that there would be wholehearted agreement on the nature and role of animals. The remaining three chapters then provide close readings of particular texts: chapter 1 looks at the De legibus and De universe of William of Auvergne, a secular master instrumental in establishing the theology department at Paris; chapter 2 examines two Franciscan sources—the Summa Halensis (so called because it was attributed to Alexander of Hales) and selections from Bonaventure; chapter 3 turns to selections from two Dominican sources—Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Each chapter involves painstaking exposition and provides corresponding Latin in extensive footnotes, which is a boon to scholars interested in the works being discussed. The upshot of this exposition is, as mentioned above, left primarily to the reader to figure out. Yet what becomes clear is that, although all the authors in question agree that what separates human beings from other animals is that human beings possess rational capacities which non-human animals lack, this agreement leaves room for a variety of understandings of the nature and use of animal corollaries to those rational capacities—including whether some animals with sufficiently developed estimative abilities could be held morally responsible for their actions.In contrast to Wei’s cautious approach, Harris makes bold claims throughout The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn about changes in attitudes about animals, supporting those claims with extensive citations from secular as well as religious sources (primarily in Latin and German). Harris’s central thesis is that this period marks a shift in western Europe from characterizing animals as sources of food and labor to considering animals as possessing inner lives and experiences—lives and experiences that indicate that the line dividing animal and human might be both porous and permeable; at the same time, Harris maintains that animals in this period were seen of interest primarily for what they could teach us about human nature. What’s particularly significant about Harris’s claim is that he argues it holds true in secular as well as religious contexts. In chapter 1, Harris focuses on the influence of Aristotle’s newly translated into Latin texts for thirteenth-century animal studies (particularly Albert Magnus’s De animalibus and Emperor Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus); in chapter 2, he examines how Innocent III’s injunction to parish priests to focus more on their preaching led to the widespread use of animals as examples in sermons (mother pelicans become models of self-sacrificing behavior, spiders become models of industrious wisdom, etc.), bringing increased attention to actual animal behavior and experience. Chapter 3 turns to the role animals play in chivalric identity, particularly the vital relation between the knight and his horse (a companion as well as battle-mate); chapter 4 identifies a tension between violence and affection toward animals “common to both thirteenth and twentieth-first centuries” (87)—most significantly, the regular killing of animals and consumption of their flesh while at the same time household pets are common and well treated. The book concludes with a short discussion of what Harris believes these discussions can teach us today, focused on the hope that attention to the inner lives and experiences of animals will bring home to us our interdependence.Harris and Wei both address the “how” of the thirteenth-century ‘animal turn’ much more extensively than the “why,” centering the influence of Aristotle’s newly translated texts on shifting attitudes toward animals. While this is understandable given their focus, Aristotle’s texts did not appear in Latin ex nihilo. The history of their transmission involved a complicated network and exchange of ideas (the full range of which we’re still rediscovering) that included Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian communities, and that also reached into Africa and Asia. Although substantive discussion of the impact of this history on western European Christian attitudes toward animals falls outside the scope of the two books being reviewed here, it would have been helpful for the authors to at least acknowledge the rich multiculturalism of the later Middle Ages and perhaps provide some places to interested readers to go (e.g., Housni Alkhateeb Shedada’s Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam, which begins its coverage in the mid-thirteenth century; Mark Podwal’s eminently accessible A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend and Lore, recently reprinted in color; or David Shyovitz’s work on the equation of Jews with animals in medieval Christian literature). What Harris and Wei’s books do, however, and do well is establish the complexity of thirteenth-century attitudes toward animals in northwestern Christian Europe; I expect their work will inspire others to explore these topics in even greater depth and breadth.