Where are the wild things? Animals in western medieval European History

Abstract

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. Drawing on the highly interdisciplinary field of Critical Animal Studies and other fields of history, I suggest ways that medieval historians could embrace the animal turn to study the experiences of real animals and animal–human entanglements of the Middle Ages.

Agency as Interspecies, Collective and Embedded Endeavour: Ponies and People in Northern England 1916–1950

“…I have tried to keep the ponies at the centre of the analysis throughout, but this is surprisingly hard to do in practice (Coulter, 2018). Historians, in particular, come up against a lack of direct evidence from the point of view of animals themselves (Taylor, 2018). As suggested earlier, perhaps those ponies who were shipped overseas or found themselves pulling carts on busy city streets deserve their own separate stories.…”

“…The recording of pedigrees was disrupted during the Second World War, meaning Mrs. Fitzgerald’s book is regarded as a surrogate collective chronicle of both the breed as a whole and individual ponies and breeders. Nonetheless, historical records perhaps inevitably present the human point of view (Taylor, 2018). Human‐animal researchers are committed to decentring human actions, but we often struggle to do so in practice (Coulter, 2018; Dashper & Brymer, 2019).…”

Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re‐reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

“…45 Animal history is still a relative newcomer to the discipline of medieval studies, but interest is rapidly growing. 46 Thus far, little attention has been paid to the relationship between animals and enslaved people in early medieval Europe. 47 Historians of the early modern period have done more to explore the role of animals and animalistic rhetoric in systems of slavery.…”

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…Fostering an approach with a nuanced global applicability requires a two-fold intervention. First, it means adopting a wide definition of healthscaping that stresses contingency and power indeterminacy, including the role played by nonhuman animals and matter itself, as explored in Actor-Network Theory and in studies of animals in premodernity (Farías and Bender 2012;Müller 2015;Taylor 2018). This serves to create significant room for detecting preventative interventions beyond those privileged by a traditional approach and a Euro-American epistemology.…”