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Our relation with animals is mostly lived and thought today in terms of economy (products), environment (species), or affects (friends). We have the power to extinguish any animal species on earth, including our own. We so completely dominate our environment that we have forgotten that our relation with animals is fundamentally one of power. Peggy McCracken reminds us that medieval animal literature is still “good to think” (8), for it consistently relates animals with sovereignty. In fact, there is no medieval literature that is not about or of animals, insofar as it owes its preservation and transmission to animal skins. Medieval thinkers, writers, and readers created a corpus of texts and images that documents a turning point in the relationship between humans and animals, an era when domination was not yet total and was still thinkable as reciprocal, albeit most often in a violent mode. Animals could respond, even if it was in incomprehensible gestures. Animals do not respond to us anymore because we cannot admit our responsibility in their reduction to dispensable materials. I am not looking at the Middle Ages with nostalgia, though. McCracken provides a narrative neither of decadence nor of progress. She describes a past state of human imagination, one that used imagined encounters between human and nonhuman animals to question dominion and sovereignty (2–3). She has selected some of the most famous stories of animals (e.g., Marie de France’s Bisclavret and Chrétien de Troyes’s Knight with the Lion) and some much less known (e.g., Lutwin’s Eva und Adam and La vie de Sainte Modwenne). The corpus is mostly French, with the addition of Latin, German, and Old Norse texts. To explore aspects of the reception history and add nuances to her textual analyses, McCracken presents a set of well-chosen manuscript illustrations.In chapter 1, “Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival and Sovereignty,” McCracken envisions medieval biopolitics as a matter of skin. The book of Genesis establishes human sovereignty over animals as willed by God, but it remains unclear whether it is a prelapsarian prerogative or “a diabolical consequence of the fall” (14). In any case, only after the fall does sovereignty become a matter of survival, when animals become food and their skins clothing. Through her reading of medieval commentaries on Genesis and of romances concerning skins, leather, and women, McCracken unfolds the twists and turns of plots that entangle skins with skins (“Adam and Eve in Furs” [15]) or that use skins to establish dominion on lands. She ends with a moralizing Anglo-Norman poem, Le roman des Romans, in which animals complain about the way people use their skins: “Human dominion is contested in terms of animals’ claims to wear their own skins” (36).Having established that the mainstream theological basis for medieval thinking about animals is from the start deeply conflicted and political, McCracken picks the wolf to exemplify animals that resist socialization. In chapter 2, “The Social Wolf: Domestication, Affect, and Social Contract,” saints’ lives, fables, and lais are queried to throw light on the affective aspects of social life in feudal times and on the possibility of imagining a wild animal as a social experiment. I only regret that the Latin Ysengrimus was not used in this chapter to add a clerical perspective on issues of social bounds and affects.Chapter 3, “Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Sovereign: Skin, Heraldry, and the Beast,” pivots from structures and concepts toward moves, metamorphoses, and transgressions. Using two romances of exclusion or inclusion of the knight hero, Yvain or the Knight of the Lion and Guillaume de Palerne, McCracken shows that any form of “becoming” in courtly culture had to go through some form of animalization, emblematized by heraldry and played out in narratives of access to power. Yvain needs to pass “through leonine identity” to become lord and protector of his wife’s lands (78). On their way to sovereignty, the two heroes in Guillaume live and love disguised in deerskins, reveling in their bestiality—for a while (84). Could we say, pushing one notch farther, that medieval aristocratic warriors imagined themselves as wild animals to distinguish themselves from those humans who lived under their dominion like domesticized animals?Going back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, chapter 4, “Snakes and Women: Recognition, Knowledge, and Sovereignty,” addresses the gendered animal, the woman, and her personal relationship with snakes. Through Le jeu d’Adam, Mélusine, Le bel inconnu, and manuscript illustrations of the fall, McCracken establishes that the snake plays the role of a dangerous mirror, tempting woman or man with the lure of knowledge and self-sovereignty. The “fantasy of recognition” (124) works differently for the man and the woman confronting the snake: he may lose the woman and the snake, but he will keep power over himself and his lands, while she loses both self-power and her lands and properties.Chapter 5, “Becoming-Human, Becoming-Sovereign: Gender, Genealogy, and the Wild Man,” uses the ubiquitous figure of the wild man in late medieval Europe to gather several of the threads followed in the preceding chapters. From “La ballade d’un homme sauvage,” an anonymous fifteenth-century moralizing poem buried in one manuscript, McCracken establishes the hypothesis that “becoming-human . . . involves enduring kinships with animals” (131). As in the other chapters, the wild fantasies of courtly epic and romance reveal what we would much prefer not to know about ourselves. La naissance du chevalier au cygne roots the epic cycle centered on the historical crusader Godefroy de Bouillon in a mythical genealogy involving the genetic intervention of a bird in the lineage. What have angels, swans, children, and puppies in common? An animal attitude toward sexuality, which we call innocence. In this story, a passage through “innocence” is a necessary detour toward the “becoming-human” that culminated in the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem. A lot of innocence and white plumage was necessary to dress up that bloody affair. Tristan de Nanteuil is also part of an epic cycle. Tristan, too, passes through wildness and animality on his way to sovereignty, but, with occultation and revelation delayed until his adolescence, there is no innocent stage in this story. McCracken offers a marvelous reading of scabrous episodes centered on “splendid penis[es].” She underscores the obvious reduction human sexuality suffers to serve the goals of “dynastic procreation” (153). More important, she shows how the tale describes alternative sexual and social models that need to be abandoned by the heroes but that still succeed in “troubling the security of dynasties grounded in part on the violent subjugation of animals to the needs, both material and symbolic, of humans” (156).In the epilogue McCracken comments on the historical episode named “Bal des Ardents” (Dance of the Burning Men) as told by Jean Froissart in his Chroniques. On January 28, 1393, Charles VI and five courtiers disguised as wild men in a court festivity caught fire accidentally. Four of them burned to death. The king survived thanks to a lady who took him under her skirt. This weird episode in French monarchical history provides McCracken with a striking way to show how fantasies and fictions are involved in the performance of power, underscoring “the artifice of all sovereign claims that depend on human exceptionalism” (161). It also casts doubt on human exceptionalism, as do all the “strange, hybrid, and fantastic figures” (161), from fish knights to bestial kings, encountered in the book.
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