Animal Languages in the Middle Ages

Alison Langdon is Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University, USA. She is the editor of Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (2009) and has published articles on the women troubadours, Chaucer and his contemporaries, and canines in medieval literature. Her current projects center on the liminality of human/animal identity in the medieval imagination.

“Both books are solid contributions to the field, both models of the interdisciplinarity of animal studies, its happy capacity for interpretative surprise, and its laudable commitment to thinking ecologically and to decentering human primacy.” (Karl Steel, Speculum, Vol. 95 (3), 2020)“The twelve essays collected in this volume comprise a varied and stimulating contribution to the thriving field of scholarly discourse on medieval ‘animalities’ … . Their general focus is on medieval representations of animal utterances and other non-verbal modes of communication in order to interrogate medieval attitudes to the supposed dichotomy between human and non-human animals.” (David Scott-Macnab, Modern Language Review, Vol. 114 (3), July, 2019)

• 1 Introduction.- Part I Communicating Through Animals.- 2 Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse.- 3 As faucon comen out of muwe”: Female Agency and the Language of Falconry.- 4 Saints and Holy Beasts: Pious Animals in Early-Medieval Insular Saints’ Vitae.- 5 The Speech of Strangers: The Tale of the Andalusi Phoenix.- Part II Recovering Animal Languages.- 6 Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity, and Boundary in Old English Animal  Voice Catalogues.- 7 In Briddes Wise: Chaucer’s Avian Poetics.- 8 Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric.- 9 "Dites le mei, si ferez bien": Fallen Language and Animal Communication in Marie de France's Bisclavret.- Part III Embodied Language and Interspecies Dependence.- 10 On Equine Language: Jordanus Rufus and Thirteenth-Century Communicative Horsemanship.- 11 No Hoof, No Horse: Hoof Care, Veterinary Medicine and Cross-Species Communication in Late Medieval England.- 12 Medieval Dog Whisperers: The Poetics of Rehabilitation.- 13 Embodied Emotion as Animal Language in Le Chevalier au Lion.