Animal Acts

Configuring the Human in Western History

Jennifer Ham, Matthew Senior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415916103
• eBook ISBN: 9781136669187
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Animal Acts records the history of the fluctuating boundary between animals and humans as expressed in literary, philosophical and scientific texts, as well as visual arts and historical practices such as dissection, circus acts, the hunt and zoos. The essays document a persistent return of animality, a becoming animal that has always existed within and at the margins of Western Culture from the Middle Ages to the present.

1

Human Beasts and Bestial Humans in the Middle Ages

Joyce E. Salisbury

One of the major ways people define their identity is in relation to what they are not. Questions of the definition of humanity have frequently formed the basis for our reflections on animals. As Keith Thomas, in his study on man and the natural world, observed: “… it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves.”¹ This is certainly true; as we study people’s views of animals, we learn their perceptions of humanity. In this essay, I shall analyze medieval explorations of human identity that were shaped by people’s definition of animality. Medieval thinkers repeatedly defined humanity by trying to establish a clear boundary between humans and animals. By focusing our attention on this interspecies border, we can learn much about animals, people, and human identity.

Medieval ideas were significantly shaped by Christian thinkers in the early centuries after the birth of Jesus. Among other topics, Church Fathers considered the relationship between humans and animals and decided the two had nothing in common. Animals had no souls; they could look forward to no afterlife; they existed only to serve human needs. The boundaries between human and animal were wide, and theologians believed there was no possibility for transition between the species. St. Augustine can speak for the position of the early Church when he wrote: “And so I should not believe, on any consideration, that the body—to say nothing of the soul—can be converted into the limbs and features of animals. …”² Classical tales of metamorphosis were declared impossible, and the permeable boundary that seemed to exist between people and animals in Greco-Roman times was sealed.

In the twelfth century, this belief in the dramatic difference between humans and animals began to change. Due probably to the repopularization of some classical texts, people again began to be portrayed along a continuum with animals, sharing many bestial traits.³ In medieval literature from the twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages, we see a growing preoccupation with human/animal hybrids and a growing credulity with regard to such creatures. In striking contrast to Augustine, the early-thirteenth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales told the following tale:

One evening … he happened to meet a girl whom he had loved for a long time. … He was enjoying himself in her arms and tasting her delights, when suddenly, instead of the beautiful girl, he found in his embrace a hairy creature, rough and shaggy, and indeed, repulsive beyond words. As he stared at the monster his wits deserted him and he became quite mad.⁴

The transition from the confident articulation of separation of species to the bewildering blurring of boundaries described by Gerald may be seen in a number of sources, from scientific to literary. One way to study the edges of the human and animal worlds is to look at creatures that were believed to occupy a borderline region between the species. People defined their humanity as they thought about half-human creatures that increasingly populated art and literature after the twelfth century.

Literature and art increasingly portrayed borderline creatures like apes, centaurs, wild people, and even whole “races” that seemed to combine features of humans and animals. Descriptions of most of these creatures had been inherited from classical texts, but most of the early medieval texts either ignored or expressed skepticism about their existence. Augustine can again serve to represent the early Christian position:

This assumes, of course, the truth of their stories about the divergent features of those races, and their great difference from one another and from us. The definition is important; for if we did not know that monkeys, long-tailed apes and chimpanzees are not men but animals, those natural historians … might pass them off on us as races of men, and get away with such nonsense.⁵

After the twelfth century, skepticism seems to have been cast away, and exotic creatures from hybrids to monstrous races captured the medieval imagination.⁶ Many of the creatures were included in the thirteenth-century bestiaries, and the entries in these “scientific” works reveal the extent to which people could imagine the blurring of the species.

Figure 1. Manticore. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. MS. Bodl. 764, fol. 25r

One popular example in the bestiary is the manticore, shown here in Figure 1. The manticore was described as having the head of a man, the body of a lion, and a tail with the sting of a scorpion.⁷ This creature literally embodied the hybridization that people’s imaginations created on the border of the species. The question, for the scientific bestiary (and its readers), was whether this creature was human or animal. The face is visually a defining feature, marking a creature as human. The face was thought to reveal intellect (“reason” in medieval terminology) which was the sine qua non of humanity. So, with a human face, the manticore might rightfully be considered human in spite of the bestial body. However, the manticore’s behavior marked it as animal. The bestiary gave the manticore characteristics that would define it as vicious—an animal quality: it had a triple row of teeth and blood-red eyes. Descriptions of teeth and blood in the eyes revealed a vicious, passionate nature. By locating these characteristics in the humanlike face, the reader was cued to see the beast in the visage of the man. Finally, the bestiary tells us that the manticore had an insatiable taste for human flesh.⁸ The manticore in Figure 1 is shown indulging this taste. Perhaps more than any other behavior, the taste for human flesh defined creatures as bestial in the medieval mind. Humans eat animals; animals eat humans. Therefore, if something eats humans, it is an animal. In spite of his human face, the manticore happily chewing on a human leg was an animal.

The manticore might have been seen as purely an animal that only appeared to resemble a human. This would have followed the analysis of Augustine: they were animals which the uninformed saw as human. However, the texts show that people were not only concerned with surface characteristics that seemed to blend species. Sometimes their descriptions showed concern for a mixing of the actual essence of human and animal. For example, the bestiary says of centaurs that “… the nature of men and horses can be mixed.”⁹ If the actual nature of humans and animals could be mixed, then increasingly the only way to sort out the difference was by behavior, as we saw in the manticore. His eating habits definitively defined him as animal.

The concern for ambiguous species extended well beyond the scientific bestiaries. We can also trace the increasing popularity of borderline creatures in late medieval travel literature. The fourth-century Life of Alexander was translated into vernacular languages after the twelfth century and spread widely,¹⁰ no doubt fascinating readers with tales of Alexander’s encounter with Amazons, “dog-headed men and men without heads who had eyes and mouths in their chests.”¹¹ Another extremely popular travel story was Mandeville’s Travels, which was written in French in about 1360, then translated quickly into every major European language.¹² Mandeville’s work is rich in detail drawn from many earlier medieval sources and represents almost a compendium of exotic creatures that inhabited late medieval imaginations. All the monstrous races, from dog-headed cynocephali to giants, to sciopods (creatures with one giant foot) appear in the travelogue, and many of the creatures are described with the kind of detail designed to accent their bestiality. For example, the cynocephali, giants, and other monsters were described as cannibals, attributing to them, like the manticore, the quality that most defined animals, the desire to eat humans.¹³ The popularity of Mandeville’s Travels expresses the late medieval preoccupation with creatures on the border of humanity, and literature like this probably also served to increase the fascination.

The proliferation in literature and art of such creatures on the edges bet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Human Beasts and Bestial Humans in the Middle Ages
• 2. The Philosophical Beast: On Boccaccio’s Tale of Cimone
• 3. Pantagruel-Animal
• 4. “When the Beasts Spoke”: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine
• 5. Revolutionary Monsters
• 6. Audubon’s Ornithological Biography and the Question of “Other Minds”
• 7. What Is “Human”? Metaphysics and Zoontology in Flaubert and Kafka
• 8. Taming the Beast: Animality in Wedekind and Nietzsche
• 9. On Being “The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas
• 10. Animal Speech, Active Verbs, and Material Being in E. B. White
• 11. “Surely, God, These Are My Kin”: The Dynamics of Identity and Advocacy in the Life and Works of Dian Fossey
• 12. Humanimals and Anihumans in Gary Larson’s Gallery of the Absurd
• Index