On Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

For Crane, recovering the living animal’s place within the written animal is crucial for understanding animal encounters’ impact in medieval literature. Though animals are seen today as opposed to humans, medieval texts do not always make this distinction clear; Crane explores how bodies and minds commingle across species through the medieval figures of the saint, the scholar, and the knight in genres such as the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint’s life, and the bestiary. The six chapters (“Cohabitation,” “Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man,” “A Bestiary’s Taxonomy of Creatures,” “The Noble Hunt as a Ritual Practice,” “Falcon and Princess,” “Knight and Horse”) culminate in her claim “that ethical positions, as well as practical considerations, popular beliefs, and rhetorical practices, commingle with and diverge from high philosophy in shaping cross-species encounters. By taking stock of the abundance of medieval responses to animals we can eventually come to a better appreciation of just how animals mattered … in medieval thought and practice” (170). This book is presented as a substantial contribution to the animal studies field, in that it brings an earlier period into conversation with more recent periods. Animal Languages in the Middle Ages (above, 2018) cites it as key.