The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality by Randall, Catharine

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality by Randall, Catharine Susan Broomhall Randall, Catharine, The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014; paperback; pp. 192; R.R.P. US$28.00; ISBN 9780268040352. Although it acknowledges the arguments of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Erica Fudge, and Diana Donald in favour of a radical re-centring on animals within a new conceptual framework, Catharine Randall’s thought-provoking study is fundamentally concerned to analyse how specific early modern authors, predominantly Catholic, understood the relationship of animals to, primarily theological, authority. Each chapter focuses on a particular author, or set of debates about animals in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France. Randall first explores the views of Michel de Montaigne, who drew upon proto-scientific observations to suggest that animals were, on some occasions, morally superior to humans. In a more literary reading, Randall argues that this positive appreciation of animals’ wisdom and creativity extended to their constructions, most notably the nesting behaviours of swallows, that in many ways paired with Montaigne’s own knowledge and textual structuring. By contrast, Calvinist Guillaume du Bartas considered animals within the framework of a kind of early modern conceptualization of ‘dominion theory,’ in which the loss of the wonder and beauty of fallen nature only served to echo the paucity of post-lapsarian human experience. As the lone Protestant author in the text, it might have been productive to compare Du Bartas’s thought in more depth with that of contemporaries such as fellow Protestant Bernard Palissy, for example, for all his idiosyncrasies. For both Montaigne and du Bartas, Randall contends, animals were ‘vehicles for knowing’ (p. 11), principally for knowing where and how humans fit in God’s hierarchy for the natural world. With the seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation came the development of new genres such as the devotional manual in which the nature and places of animals could be considered in relation to humans. François de Sales interpreted animals as intimate others whose alterity provided human readers with valuable lessons. Animals were instrumentalized to help humans on their path towards God. Randall thus suggests that this para-ecclesiastical genre opened up key possibilities for exploration of new ideas within Catholicism about animals as ‘vehicles for our knowing’ (p. 12). Two authors who attempted to skirt condemnation for their provocative contributions were Jean de La Fontaine, who addressed his ideas as musings to Madame de la Sablière, and Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant putatively to a young lady. However, Bougeant’s Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes (1730), which considered whether animals had not only language but even souls (specifically, those of devils), was less successful in this strategy; he was condemned for heresy, exiled and forced to publish a retraction. In that sense, Randall’s suggestion in the conclusion that had Bougeant composed his [End Page 189] thoughts in the devotional genre he might have been protected (p. 134) seems to run counter to her argument in this chapter about the shocking theological novelty of his thought. This short work raises many questions and is at times a little uneven in its analysis. Was there something specific about the French intellectual or religious traditions that made animals a particular source of interest? Indeed, how widespread was an interest in animals in the terms analysed here? Certainly, others in France, women and men, were thinking through the value of animals as exemplars and tools for thinking. Were the authors studied representative or unique in their conceptualizations? Randall argues that many of these authors’ ideas were framed using ‘sensory, often synesthetic referents’ (p. 9) in a world spiritualizing the senses after Trent and the Wars of Religion. The ways in which the corpus ‘synesthetically evokes animal existence’ (p. 13) are at times a little hard to grasp; in practice, it seems to mostly entail the senses of sight and sound. One might also add that emotions appear present for some authors as a conduit to understanding animal-human relations. Both de Sales and Bougeant appear to explicitly foreground comprehension through the emotions for their intended female...