Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

This book seeks to understand what masters of theology at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century had to say about similarities and differences between humans and animals. It explores the ways in which they related similarities and differences to each other, holding them in productive tension, so as to construct a boundary between humans and animals, or to query and blur such a boundary. In recent years some wonderful work has been published on the representation of animals in the vernacular literature of medieval Europe. Literary scholars have offered many insights into the ways in which animals and humans were understood in relation to each other. To give just three of the most outstanding and recent examples, Susan Crane, in her Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, has argued that the 'binary conception' of a boundary between animals and humans 'must now melt into a multiplicity of intersecting and competing distinctions that better reflect medieval ways of thinking', pointing to 'the plurality and density of medieval thought about animals'. 1 She identifies 'an exploratory mode that takes man and other beasts to be unsettled categories coming into definition through relationship'. 2 Peggy McCracken has argued that medieval 'literary texts use human-animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of authority and dominion over others', and that 'human dominion over animals is revealed as a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism even as they reinstate its claims', with the 'uncertain boundary

Everything but the Squeal: The Politics of Porcinity in the Livre des Propriétés des Choses

“…Though many thinkers did subscribe to the notion that nonhumans are incapable of reason, Oelze (2018) has demonstrated that the mediaeval debate about this topic was nuanced and complex as several thinkers did believe that nonhumans were capable of certain rational processes, such as reasoning, judging, or employing prudence. Likewise, Wei (2020) has recently argued that Parisian theologians enjoyed considerable freedom in exploring the boundary between humans and nonhumans as they saw fit, provided that they acknowledged humankind's unique capacity for reason. He observes that there was "tremendous diversity and creativity in the strategies that they adopted for making sense of similarities in relation to difference, for holding similarity and difference in productive tension" (pp.…”