Karl Steel is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages.

"In How Not to Make a Human, Karl Steel thinks with worm-eaten corpses, oysters, pets, feral children and other creatures in a wide range of literary and visual materials and through them traces a medieval sense of the shared embodiment of humans and animals that has too often been ignored. This fascinating book challenges assumptions about the human and the period and should be read by medievalists, posthumanists, and everyone in between."-Erica Fudge, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow"How Not to Make a Human welcomes fleas, nits, and worms among other bedfellows to eat away at human superiority. The book swarms and crawls with new life, composting so much dead matter. Karl Steel finds prospects for the future in a medieval corpus consumed by the low, noxious, and parasitic. He prepares earthy grounds for an estranging posthuman ethics emerging from our shared destitution, with implications that go far beyond any single historical period."-J. Allan Mitchell, author of Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child"The book as a whole is fascinating and Steel's choice of material very exciting."-CHOICE"How Not to Make a Human gives medievalists a stronger voice in conversations about ecocriticism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies. At the same time, it can inspire non-medievalists with its revised-and ultimately much more fruitful-set of medieval inheritances for ecocritical thought."-ISLE"A real strength in the book is Steel’s ability to trace narrative threads through temporal, linguistic, and manuscript sources and analogues."-Speculum "A compelling meditation on how humans are unmade, combining premodern notions of spontaneous generation with ecofeminist theories of compost."-Environmental History

Karl Steel is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages.

"In How Not to Make a Human, Karl Steel thinks with worm-eaten corpses, oysters, pets, feral children and other creatures in a wide range of literary and visual materials and through them traces a medieval sense of the shared embodiment of humans and animals that has too often been ignored. This fascinating book challenges assumptions about the human and the period and should be read by medievalists, posthumanists, and everyone in between."-Erica Fudge, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow"How Not to Make a Human welcomes fleas, nits, and worms among other bedfellows to eat away at human superiority. The book swarms and crawls with new life, composting so much dead matter. Karl Steel finds prospects for the future in a medieval corpus consumed by the low, noxious, and parasitic. He prepares earthy grounds for an estranging posthuman ethics emerging from our shared destitution, with implications that go far beyond any single historical period."-J. Allan Mitchell, author of Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child"The book as a whole is fascinating and Steel's choice of material very exciting."-CHOICE"How Not to Make a Human gives medievalists a stronger voice in conversations about ecocriticism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies. At the same time, it can inspire non-medievalists with its revised-and ultimately much more fruitful-set of medieval inheritances for ecocritical thought."-ISLE"A real strength in the book is Steel’s ability to trace narrative threads through temporal, linguistic, and manuscript sources and analogues."-Speculum "A compelling meditation on how humans are unmade, combining premodern notions of spontaneous generation with ecofeminist theories of compost."-Environmental History