In 2012, my article pairing Alexander and Dindimus and Chaucer’s lament “The Former Age” appeared in the anthology Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. My beast was “the…
I don’t want to presume that everyone here came in understanding that the first several chapters of Genesis comprise two separate creation stories. The first…
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…
