A paper for the Northwestern Medieval Colloquium, Feb 4 2022. This paper is about animalization. I’m going to lay out some typical points on this…
Pico della Mirandola’s late fifteenth-century oration On the Dignity of Man is still sometimes awarded laurels for bounding up past the Middle Ages into modernity’s…
It is, generally speaking, now a faux pas among medieval scholars to diagnose Margery Kempe as being a psychotic, a hysteric, an epileptic, and so…
By 1666, the year Margaret Cavendish published her Blazing World and its companion volume, her Observations on Experimental Philosophy, the population of Barbados had risen,…
Gerald of Wales’s story of the werewolves of Ossory from his History and Topography of Ireland has been the subject of frequent scholarly attention.[1] What distinguishes…
Stories of children raised by animals or isolated in the wilderness changed radically in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What had once been stories of…
Some of us, at any rate, have been told for millennia that we are the rational, mortal animal. Rational things are able to reason; mortal…
Marcy Norton‘s “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal relationships and the Columbian Exchange” (The American Historical Review 120.1 (2015): 28-60) begins with an anecdote about…
Some form of the word “reason” appears more than 100 times in The Consolation of Philosophy.[1]Thank you to The University of Oslo’s Bibliotheca Polyglota website, whose…
The Consolation of Philosophy culminates by proving that God’s omniscience does not prevent humans from exercising “free will.”[1]Trans. P. G. Walsh for Oxford World’s Classics,…
