Zöopedagogies

Creatures as Teachers in Middle English Romance

Bonnie J. Erwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367077365
• eBook ISBN: 9780429632624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

The human protagonists of medieval romance are works in progress. They are learners, taught by an unexpected set of teachers: non-human animals including horses, hawks, lions, and the various quarry of the hunt. These "creature teachers" show humans how to be more perfectly human—how to love, fight, survive, and live according to medieval culture's highest ideals. Zöopedagogies explores the pedagogical role of animals in medieval romance, a genre whose fantastical elements enable animal characters to behave in ways inspired by, but not limited to their real-world actions.

Situated at the intersection of animal studies and medieval studies, Zöopedagogies claims medieval roots for posthumanism by telling a new story about the role of animals in constructing Western culture. Bonnie Erwin brings together a diverse array of texts, including chivalric romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and popular romances like Bevis of Hampton and Richard Coer de Lyon. She puts these into conversation with medieval texts on natural science, horsemanship, hawking, and hunting that inform the representation of creatures who teach. In so doing, she reveals a rich and nuanced sense of animals as participants in interspecies collaborative culture-making.

1 Beyond Mastery

Chivalry as Interspecies Apprenticeship

There is a perplexing moment in the romance of Bevis of Hampton when Bevis—down and out, just escaped from seven years in prison—hears that his beloved Josian has been married off against her will, and that his horse Arondel is in prison for violence against Josian’s new husband. “Wer Iosiane,” Bevis thinks, “ase lele, / Alse is me stede Arondel, / Ȝet sholde ich come out of wo!”¹ It is possible to read this declaration as simply a moment of medieval misogyny, a comment on women’s fickleness—yet, as some have argued, Bevis is a romance that more often eschews such antifeminist rhetoric. Corinne Saunders suggests that Josian “subvert[s] conventional medieval notions of women as naturally frail and passive.”² Moreover, Myra Seaman has convincingly shown that Josian “exhibits many of the qualities of a romance hero,” defying the traditional marking of these qualities as masculine.³ Thus, something more than antifeminist rhetoric may well be at work in this peculiar passage.

I propose that Bevis’ denigration of Josian and elevation of Arondel has a meaning beyond gender, and indeed, beyond species. Bevis deeply admires his horse, and believes Arondel’s conduct should be a model for human action. His comment gives us a glimpse into a chivalric culture where humans and horses existed in a profoundly intersubjective relationship. The collaboration between horse and human was integral to teaching knights the submissive, cooperative behaviors required alongside their combative, individualistic actions on the battleground and tournament field. Bevis hints that humans would be better off if more of them acted like horses; as I demonstrate in this chapter, other medieval romance writers agree. In their subtle characterization of horses teaching humans good conduct, these romances illuminate a medieval appreciation for animal agency. Far from a hierarchical conception of humans dominating other animals, these texts suggest that human culture can live up to its own best ideals only when people are willing to learn from creaturely guidance.

The horse is, in many ways, the quintessential zöopedagogue of romance, one uniquely suited to educating humans about the value of loyalty, submission, and teamwork. The horse is a near-constant companion throughout the knight’s training, contests, and battles, and he teaches lessons that only a horse can teach. Among other things, horses in romance teach their knights how to exercise discernment in choosing whether to obey or disobey an order—for who has more opportunity to practice this discernment than a warhorse, an impeccably trained animal-athlete who nevertheless realizes that the rider giving him orders is no match for his own physical strength? Indeed, romance horses even teach their knights intersubjectivity across species lines, to the degree that knights—like Bevis in the passage earlier—seem able to intuit their horses’ feelings and desires more accurately than those of their beloved ladies. This type of lesson, too, bears the marks of a horsely subjectivity at work, and the traces of authorial recognition that species difference makes zöopedagogy possible.

In other words, we can see equine zöopedagogy in romance as the residual trace of a medieval culture making its best “educated gues[s] about animals’ inner lives,” as Erica Fudge exhorts us to do.⁴ Drawing upon the work of philosopher Nancy Snow, Fudge explains the all-important link between compassion and imagination, a link which I argue is at play in romances that show humans learning from horses:

In compassion, as in anthropomorphism, I am central to my relationship to the rest of the world. But compassion, while it may make the world self-like, does not make the relationship to the rest of the world inherently selfish. It is by recognizing that I am simultaneously different from and yet similar to other beings in the world that compassion works.⁵

Horses in romance evince this process of recognition, as we glimpse writers’ attempts to guess what a horse would want or what a horse would teach based on its uniquely equine experience of the world: an experience that includes living closely with both other horses and humans, relying upon humans for food and shelter, and receiving from some humans commands that challenge the horse’s own instincts to flee danger, or to stay with the herd for protection. In these narratives, horses retain their difference from humans even as they lend their agency in the service of educating humans: for this reason, I would argue, representations of equine zöopedagogy are the most humbly anthropocentric of any considered within this study.

Moreover, the strong sense of equine agency in these texts defies, more than any other strain of zöopedagogy, the Deleuzian concept of “becoming animal.” In this, my reading of horses in romance diverges from some influential interpretations, including Jeffrey J. Cohen’s argument that “the horse, its rider, the bridle and saddle and armor together form the Deleuzian circuit or assemblage […] that decomposes human bodies and intercuts them with the animate, the inhuman.”⁶ Cohen goes on to explain that in such an assemblage, “no single body or object has meaning […] without reference to the other forces, intensities, affects, and directions to which it is conjoined and within which it is always in the process of becoming something other, something new.”⁷ Cohen’s reading is an important one, for it initiated the scholarly conversation about intersubjective relationships between knights and their horses. Yet I resist the notion that in chivalry, all subjectivities dissolve into “becoming” together, because such a reading too easily allows equine agency to recede back into invisibility. It is important that we notice the difference which remains, the agency that the horse claims because it is a horse, and the wisdom it offers from its unique set of species-specific experiences in the medieval world.

Romance offers unique insights into the intersubjective relationship between knights and horses. It might seem obvious that romances would be concerned with the horse’s active role in promoting knightly accomplishment. After all, the plotlines are typically chivalric: even as the social prominence of mounted knights declined in historical terms, in response to changing tactics on the real medieval battlefield, romances continued to valorize the role of mounted troops, whose successes or failures were linked to the cheval from which their class derived its name.⁸ Perhaps the frequency with which horses appear in medieval literature across genres has paradoxically led scholars to overlook them. As Paul H. Rogers notes of French literary studies: “[B]ecause readers of medieval texts take its presence for granted, one of the most fundamental defining features of the knightly hero of such works, namely his horse, does not receive much attention in literary analysis.”⁹ Rogers’ critique can be fruitfully applied to studies of Middle English romance: in this field, too, we should be wary of treating the warhorse as merely a vehicle or piece of equipment, the medieval analogue of the modern tank or stealth bomber. Still less should we assume that horses, when they are described at length in romance, are only quadrupedal metaphors for their riders’ prowess, wealth, or virtue.¹⁰ Because of their supernatural dimension, romances can present superlative horses acting in ways that other genres cannot offer; moreover, romance’s interests in tales of individual motivation and personal striving allow them to consider horses’ active collaboration alongside human heroes in chivalric endeavors.¹¹ This combination of factors makes romance an ideal medium for materializing equine agency, and in ways unavailable to many other medieval genres.

As a case in point, consider the infamous entry of the Green Knight and his horse into Arthur’s hall at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Both knight and horse are green, and wear matching green-and-gold gear. The striking visual correspondence between them is narrated at length as the writer describes these unusually colored but richly attired and physically impressive figures, singling out their size and muscularity, the rich abundance and careful styling of their hair, and the many costly ornaments each wears. In every way, this passage analogizes human and equine strength and masculinity by positioning the green horse as a gorgeous proxy for an uncannily handsome man. Yet this horse is more than a mere prop: if we see him as just a fashion accessory for the knight, we miss the role he plays in teaching Arthur’s court a lesson in humility. When Gawain beheads the Green Knight, the latter picks up his own head, remounts his horse as if nothing is wrong, and reminds Gawain to seek a return blow to his own neck in a year’s time. Then, in a key moment we might overlook if we see the green horse as only a set piece: “With a runisch rout ϸe raynez he tornez, / Halled out at ϸe hal dor, his hed in his hande, / Þat the fyr of ϸe flynt flaȝe fro fole house.”¹² Turning his horse abruptly, the Green Knight speeds out, leaving the court in awe; significantly, the spectacle concludes with a shower of sparks as hooves strike stone.¹³ The horse himself, through his eager response to his rider’s cues, creates the visual display of danger, making the assembled nobles feel the ultimate sense of humility before a superior. In other words, he stuns the observers with a performance of physical power that only a horse can offer: an unmounted man, perhaps turning hard on his heel and storming out of the hall, would not challenge the court’s sense of safety in quite the same way. Arthur’s court is unsure what to make of the green horse and rider: “For vch mon had meruayle quat hit mene myȝt / Þat a haϸel and a horse myȝt such a hwe lach” (233–34).¹⁴ I believe we should reopen their question, “what it might mean…?” with respect to the horses of romance. Romance narratives of equine agency have much to teach us if we attend to the subtle clues offered by such unresolved textual oddities as the Green Knight’s green steed.

Recent work in medieval studies has made some important initial moves in reopening the matter of “what animals might mean.” Susan Crane’s Animal Encounters critiques the tendency of some earlier scholarship to become bogged down in allegory and anthropocentrism, losing sight of the “daily contact with domestic and wild animals” that was typical in the Middle Ages.¹⁵ She writes that “the humanist traditions have tended to render nonhuman animals invisible to contemplation, unworthy of serious attention”; she asks critics to combat this blindness by taking a closer look at the literary traces of real human–animal interactions.¹⁶ In contrast to Crane’s generally positive or harmonious examples of humans living alongside other creatures, Karl Steel’s How to Make a Human focuses on the violent subjugation of medieval animals, as well as textual justifications for this treatment. Steel argues that violence against animals, and the medieval definition of animals as those against whom violence is entirely licit, works to shore up the idea of the human by contrast. Discussing the oft-idealized relationship between knights and horses, Steel objects that “though knights in chivalric narrative sometimes wish they were killed in place of their horses, humans remain the masters: the knight owns the horse and may separate himself from a chivalric circuit by killing and eating his possession.”¹⁷ Steel’s critique of what he calls “animal instrumentality” is brilliant, and offers important insights about the grounding of human identity in violence against other creatures.¹⁸ However, his project must by its very nature silence some animal voices from medieval literature that, as I see it, resist pure instrumentality. Romance horses are valorized first and foremost for their ability to advance human causes; yet, their role transcends instrumentalism because the writers of these romances celebrate them for claiming a degree of agency for themselves. These horses exert pressure on their riders and other humans, they thwart human desires which do not accord with their own, and they are even, at times, represented as deriving individual horsely satisfaction from their own triumphs. The extraordinary equine characters of romance use their own agency to powerfully shape the category of the human. Later, I examine romance horses in order to reclaim the traces of the real human–equine partnerships that may have inspired these textual characters, and in order to discover horses as zöopedagogues whose lessons shape a chivalric culture that is as much equine as it is human.

Interspecies Apprenticeship: Sharing Mastery

In Middle English romance, it is not unusual to find horses positioned as the enforcers of chivalry’s idealistic demand that the good knight balance strength with submission—what Cohen calls the formation of “a body at once deadly in its sanctioned violence and docile in its comportment at home.”¹⁹ The authors of texts like Bevis of Hampton, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and two Middle English versions of Fierabras show an understanding—born, I suggest, of lived experience—that the well-trained horse consents to human mastery, but that consent can be revoked at any time. Romances illuminate chivalry as an “interspecies apprenticeship,” a term which Gala Argent uses to describe the mutual construction of “social knowledge” by animals and humans working together. For Argent, interspecies apprenticeship helps to correct the myopic view of culture as “a human-only endeavor, enacted upon animals.”²⁰ The romance conception of equine agency reveals how dramatically human chivalric cultures were shaped by the daily lived experience of working in partnership with horses. Medieval knights knew—from long training and practice—that they must listen to their horses as much as these horses must heed their riders. The submission of the knight to cultural expectations, to his place in the social hierarchy, and even to the whims of fortune, is encouraged by his experience of sharing power with his horse.

Within the particular generic realm of romance, the idea of interspecies apprenticeship takes on a significance that cannot be dismissed. As Helen Cooper notes:

Medieval literature shares with earlier writing from the Hebrew Bible to Beowulf the function of recording the ideology of an entire c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond Mastery: Chivalry as Interspecies Apprenticeship
• 2 The Shame of “Manning”: Falcons and the Control of Love
• 3 The Wisdom of the Hunted: Critiques from Quarry
• 4 When Lions Paint: Alpha Predators and the Question of Legitimate Power
• Epilogue
• Index