The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives by Nigel Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives by Nigel Harris Karl Steel nigel harris, The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pp. ix, 131. isbn: 978–3–030–50661–2. $44.99. After the last decades’ ground-clearing, medieval animal studies has been getting more precise, often attending closely to the varied, often ambiguous functions of animals in medieval philosophy and theology. Books from German academia or at least familiar with its scholarship have been in the movement’s forefront: these [End Page 108] include works by Tobias Davids, Udo Friedrich, Theodor Köhler, Anselm Oelze, Ian P. Wei, and now, Nigel Harris. Harris’s study thus furnishes two chief advantages: its engagement with what has become the scholarly center of medieval animal studies, and its provision of literary examples perhaps less familiar to Anglo-American scholars than what is usually on offer. To illustrate the increasing importance of animals in thirteenth- over twelfth- century chivalric narrative—consider the difference between La chanson de Roland, c. 1100, and Yvain, c. 1180s—Harris relies not on Middle English and Old French but rather on German translations like Partonopier und Meliur and Iwein as well as the many animals of German originals like Wolfdietrich, the Münchner Oswald (with its ornery talking raven), Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm, the elaborate animal heraldry of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois, Konrad von Stoffeln’s Gauriel von Muntabel (a knight whose goat kills Iwein’s lion!), and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône (in which a heraldic device, a lion, briefly animates and roars during battle), as well as shorter works like Walther von der Vogelweide’s lyric ‘Dô Friderîch ûz Osterrîch alsô gewarp’ (which Harris uses to explain the shifting reputation of peacocks). Sadly, neither the technologically advanced, crane-headed warriors of Herzog Ernst nor Ortnit’s hero-killing baby dragons make any appearance, but all such omissions, I assume, are due to the book’s brevity. Harris identifies the key driver of the ‘turn’ as the translation of Aristotle’s animal writing into Latin, and the massive commentarial efforts that ensued, particularly by Albert the Great. Another driver was the Fourth Lateran Council and its affiliated cultural movements, which encouraged a new proliferation and professionalization of preaching for the laity: in sermon and exempla collections, animals abounded. Drawing on Elisabeth Schinagl’s research into the uses of natural history in late medieval sermons, Harris looks at preachers like Martinus of Opava, Pierre Bersuire, Marcus of Orvieto, and John of San Gimignano to demonstrate how the corpus of culturally important animals expanded far beyond that of the Physiologus tradition. Meanwhile, natural history writing attended newly to local conditions, like Albert the Great’s remarks on how Bohemians capture dormice by building them deceptive little houses, or reevaluated old claims skeptically. Fredrick the Great (whose avian treatise receives significant attention) discovers no evidence for the peculiar natality of barnacle geese, while Thomas of Cantimpré softens the traditional motivations ascribed to pelicans for killing their own chicks, albeit less because of any observation on his part than for allegorical elegance, as pelicans typically functioned as symbols of Christ. Some changes were ‘scientific’ then, while others were a product of increasingly professionalized religious thinking. My objections principally have to do with the book’s length: I presume the series at least encourages the absence of notes and a minimal index, and offers little space to linger in its analysis. So the treatment of pets, which Harris pegs unconvincingly to a ‘rise in affection for animals’ (pp. 99, 100) could have dealt with the strange and sometimes skeptical attention to human/animal relationships in the scholarship of Donna Haraway, Dominic Pettman, and Kathy Rudy in a longer book. His discussion of the links Berthold von Regensburg creates between Katze (cat) and Ketzer (heretic) [End Page 109] misses Rainer Kampling’s work on medieval cats, and his observations about the rise of paper might have considered Nancy K. Turner’s skeptical account of animal ethics and parchment. I wonder, too, if Harris undersells the richness of natural history produced...