Lit review in process: Medieval Animal Studies

For my English 7011 lit review I will, broadly speaking, focus on animal studies in medieval-literary scholarship. Due to the fact that animal studies is relatively new and is a subcategory of ecocriticism, I have not yet identified a subtopic within animal studies—say, by restricting my review to a specific genre or type of medieval writing such as romance—or to a specific language or time period. As Anna Taylor writes in her 2018 History Compass article “Where Are the Wild Things? Animals in Western Medieval European History,” “Despite the humanities’ ‘animal turn,’ the historiography of western European medieval animals is limited. Social historians have examined specific (usually economically important) species, and cultural historians have analyzed the symbolism of animals in the Middle Ages, but few are interested in the animals themselves.” As I research, I will narrow down my topic, understanding that I might not be able to locate patterns by which to sharpen my focus. I might consider focusing on animal studies as applied to literature from, rather than the typical 500-1500, to written records in English in anything non-Latin from the year 800 and later. I learned that many scholars are working in the 15th to 16th century, straddling late-medieval to early early-modern (the early Tudor period) in order to think about continuities in English social and political landscape—what carries over, which could be useful for me. Alternatively, as my preliminary bibliography below shows, I could focus on animals in court records, sermons (I will definitely not focus on animal execution as I need to avoid depression), bestiaries, or romances (see: Lewis and MacGregor). I had initially thought I would most definitely not be restricting my review to a specific text; however, again as my preliminary bibliography shows, it might be possible to focus on animal studies on the Book of Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or similar (see: Kaiser and Ralph). Still, I have not read these primary sources so I will most likely not restrict my research to them unless the articles about them prove extra-fascinating. 

Due to my interest in the evolving formulation of the western self, animal studies is crucial to that understanding. Animals are historically, and still, held up as an example of what humans are “better” than. Further, by “dehumanizing” groups of humans, such as the president-who-will-not-be-named-by-me has done to individuals of Mexican descent by likening them to rats and dogs, and such as 18th- and 19th-century slavery advocates, Nazis and other perpetrators of genocide, it is clear that animals are often used to justify violence. As Heide Estesargues in “Blogging and Academic Identity,” it is not only possible but is advisable for me to align my passion and advocacy for animals and for the environment with my scholarly work. 

Below I identify 18 sources, some of which with brief preliminary annotations, which I will add to, subtract from and modify for the annotated bibliography then for the review itself. The most influential (most oft-cited) texts appear to be Stanton’s, which appears in a chapter in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication. 

Preliminary Bibliography

Standalone books

Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon. Cham, Springer Nature, 2018. 

The Bioarchaeology of Ritual and Religion, eds. Alexandra Livarda, Richard Madgwick, and Santiago Rivera Mora. Barnsley, Oxbow Books, 2018. 

Estes, Heide. Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes: Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2017. This is an ecocritical source, which I will scan for animal studies chapters. This is a recent book on ecocriticism in medieval studies recommended by you, as she is the most prolific, and one of the earlier scholars, to work on ecocriticism.

Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. New York City, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. I heard of this book on the New York Times Book Review podcast. Divided up by body parts, the book contains a chapter on the head/brain, which parts of the human anatomy scholastic and school-of-hard-knocks medics in the medieval period believed set humans “above” (other) animals, according to the author. 

Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic. New York City, Columbia University Press, 2003. I will be reading this book regardless of whether it applies, and will scan it for relevant points on animal studies. 

Nardizzi, Vin and Tiffany Jo Werth. Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2019. This is an ecocritical source, which I will scan for animal studies chapters. 

Rudd, Gillian. Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007. This is an ecocritical source, which I will scan for animal studies chapters. 

Spears, Matthew. “Identifying with the Beast: Animality, Subjectivity, and Society in Anglo-Saxon England: A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of English Language and Literature.” Cornell University (2017). While I realize that it is not advisable to cite dissertations especially in a literature review, I will mine this dissertation for interesting/applicable sources. 

Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman. New York City, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 

Journal articles

Hsy, Jonathan. “Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts.” TMT 14, 

Kiser, Lisa. “Margery Kempe and the Animalization of Christ: Animal Cruelty in Late Medieval England.” Studies in Philology 106 (2009): 299-315. 

Koyuncu, Emre. “Animals as Criminals: Towards a Foucauldian Analysis of Animal Trials.” Parergon 35 (2018): 79-96. 

Lewis, Liam. “Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries by Sarah Kay (review).” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 72 (2018): 100-101. I will be reading this book review to determine the relevancy of this text for my lit review. 

MacGregor, Lesley. “Criminalising Animals in Medieval France: Insights from Records of Executions.” Open Library of the Humanities 5 (2019). 

Medieval Animal Data-Network. “Animal Sessions in Kalamazoo 2014.” Medieval Animal Data-Network (2015). This will help me gain a general idea of the scope, depth and breadth of animal studies in the field, and I can mine it for scholars’ names to see if their articles on animal studies have been published. 

McCracken, Peggy. “Human Being and Animal Becoming in the Ovide moralise.” Essays in Medieval Studies 34 (2018): 1-15. 

Ralph, Iris. “An Animal Studies and Ecocritical Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Neohelicon 44 (2017): 431-444.

Taylor, Anna. “Where Are the Wild Things? Animals in Western Medieval European History.” History Compass 16 (2018).