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

Ralph focuses on the anonymous 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its embedded insights about medieval attitudes toward hunting animals for sport: She argues the triple hunt scenes confront the problem of truth. She maps thematic/conceptual connections between Bertilak, Gawain, and the fox, which scholars have overlooked by focusing on connections between Gawain and the deer, boar, and fox. Ralph builds on studies by “such key figures in animal studies and medieval studies as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Susan Crane [both of whom Langdon, above, identifies as key figures also] and such key figures in ecocriticism and medieval studies as Gillian Rudd and Corinne J. Saunders” (431). Like Estes, Ralph blends an animal studies approach with its parent-field, ecocriticism, harnessing both to illuminate key aspects of the texts examined. Ralph uses Crane’s assertion that “animal representation ‘can both include humans and distinguish other animate beings,’ for it not only is capacious but also reflects that animals ‘are fully enmeshed … in human cultures’” (432-433) to show that such representation is exemplified in Sir Gawain.