Paper for Sewanee 2026: Is it enough to “Humanize”? Some Reflections on Medieval Cruelty

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My paper for the Sewanee 2026 conference. For the session on “Dialects of Resistance and Refuge” (or is that Dialectics?).

I’m concerned today with “dehumanization.” The word’s seen a lot of use in our time of seemingly ceaseless catastrophe. Because I’ve made my career questioning what we mean when we talk about humans, “dehumanization” naturally makes me skeptical. While I don’t think any word or concept is enough to stop all this, whatever this may be, and I’m sure you don’t either, I’m still letting myself be put off enough to aim to leave you too a little less certain about what dehumanization means, how to use it, or what good it does in preventing or undoing the ongoing horrors of so uncountably much.

To speak of “dehumanization” requires us first to talk about what we might mean when we speak of “recognizing humanity.” It would be obtuse, I know, to suggest that this just means recognizing another person as a fellow member of a species of mostly hairless generally bipedal primates: to be hailed as homo sapiens, and no more, utterly fails to “humanize.” Even in just a biological sense, to “humanize,” as we typically understand the word, means recognizing the other as biological insofar as we recognize them as exposed to the same corporeal vulnerabilities, limits, and needs that constrain and enable us, a “nonpower at the heart of power” as Derrida put it so memorably in his animal lectures.[1] More than that though: to humanize requires recognizing this other as a fellow person, not just as a vulnerable being, but as a feeling and thinking one, with their own family and lineage and au fond their own inherent dignity, which crucially cannot be grasped or ever fully described. For what we recognize in their “humanity” is some quality that cannot be calculated, a something that always evades our capacity for conceptual capture. If the relationship to the other, as Emmanuel Levinas observed some 75 years ago, “overflows comprehension,”[2] then the “human” in such recognition is therefore almost precisely what cannot be recognized. So understood, a proper engagement with our fellow human as a human is necessarily apophatic. Hence, I suppose, Levinas’s career-long invocations of the “infinite.”

This being the conference that it is, you can expect some philology. To behave “humanely” or “mankindly” or in a “mannish” way in Old French or Middle English is primary to show hospitality: “Free was daun John and manly of dispence” (43) we’re told in the Shipman’s Tale about a monk who could hardly be praised more for his generosity, at least with another man’s goods. Another common definition was to behave with a soft touch, as when the Old French Life of Saint Audrey lauds the east Anglian King Anna for treating his relations and subjects “doz et humeins,” gently and humanely.[3] To be treated hospitably or compassionately is to be treated with more than one deserves, for precisely calibrated mercy or largesse is no mercy or largesse at all. My philological detour, then, just gets us back to where we were already: the human as the uncountable, unclassifiable extra.

With all that in mind, we should be expected to “recognize humanity.” Doing so, presumptively, means treating people well. It means sparing people from whatever harm might be done to them. When people are not recognized as human, not treated, as the phrase goes, as “fully human,” then the presumption is that they’ve been reduced to bare life, to mere utility, to an end, an object, something less than themselves. A human, recognized as they should be, deserves the world or, better, to share the world with us. It should be no surprise, given all this windup, and what I’ve already told you, that I’m here to push back against all this.

My test case is surely overdetermined. It’s the late fourteenth-century, nearly 1400-line Middle English alliterative poem known as The Siege of Jerusalem. The poem restages the Roman assault on Jerusalem in 70 CE as an anticipation of the Crusaders’ bloody sacking of the city a millennium later. Barring Nero, the poem’s leading Romans all convert to Christianity, and their assault avenges Christ’s crucifixion, figured here, as it was so often, as the fault of the Jews. Christ’s death gets only small attention though. The poem devotes itself mostly to the assembly and splendor of armies, the healing of bizarre ailments — Vespasian is so called because he has wasps in his nose, which only Christianity can drive out — and especially to spectacular scenes of violence. My regrets for what follows: we have heads smashed by siege engines, heaps of bodies immolated, their dust flung as a chemical weapon into the city, high priests flayed alive and hanged with biting animals, prisoners disemboweled to loot them of swallowed coins, and a mother driven by starvation to cook and eat her own child. It’s horrific, overwhelming, but also undeniably highly wrought, unforgettably called by Ralph Hanna, who co-edited it for EETS, “the chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement.”[4]

Criticism is ample, and from what I can determine, often concerned with what seems to it a strange combination of delight in Roman triumph and sympathy at Jewish suffering, or in the ways the poem’s delight in Jewish suffering short-circuits identification, or, as we might say, “shared humanity.” [[A sampling: at one point, Vanita Neelakanta’s Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England contrasts emotional “hardening” to “empathy” as two modes of Christian responses to “the suffering of Jerusalem,”[5] while Patricia A. DeMarco speaks of how the text impedes “compassionate identification” when it elicits “dis-identification, disgust, and horror” at the killing of Jews.[6] Identification and empathy is here set at odds with cruelty, and humanization, at least implicitly, with dehumanization.[7]]]

I’m not convinced. I’m going to show you why with just a few lines. My first comes from the point where Vespasian’s siege has cut off Jerusalem’s inhabitants from food and water. Starvation sets in. He recommends that they surrender, like so: “and more menske were hit ȝit mercy to byseche” (781):[8] that’s from Hanna and Lawton’s edition; in Michael Livingstone’s edition for TEAMS, “And more manschyp were hit mercy to byseche.” Livingstone glosses “manschyp” as “man-like,” Hanna and Lawton do “menske” as “humane action,” Adrianne Williams Boyarin’s translation for Broadview renders it as “valorous action:” that one’s acceptable too, but for my immediate purposes, I’m going to bracket it. If we translate this difficult line as “and it would be more human to ask for mercy,” I think we’re both left more uncertain about what the line says while better respecting its conceptual irreducibility: Vespasian is telling the Jews to behave like humans. A human behaves thoughtfully. A human reasons. Vespasian, that is, can be heard as telling the besieged Jews to “just be reasonable.”

As I’ve often observed, when someone is telling you to “just be reasonable” they are demanding not that you reason but that you agree with them. To accede to this demand to be reasonable means to stop thinking and to go along with things according to what the other wants. At the same time, Vespasian is at least presenting himself as wanting the Jews to behave “humanely” in the sense I’ve already described, that is, he wants them to behave mercifully, as if the power of mercy were theirs to exercise, against their own bodies and lives, and not his, as if he bore no responsibility for whatever violence his army is about to inflict. In this regard, he is extending them exactly as much humanity as is required to make them responsible for what he is about to do to them while correspondingly attenuating his own responsibility. When Vespasian produces the word “menske” or “manschyp,” when he orders the Jews to be human, when he orders them to choose mercy, this is not exactly a denial of humanity, nor is it exactly a refusal to recognize them as morally considerable rational agents, nor is it exactly a refusal to recognize his own rationality.[9] It’s all these things, but as if in a cloud. Some degree of humanization and dehumanization has occurred here, just enough to make things worse. So far as the human goes, we’re on shaky ground, but in no way does that improve matters for the besieged Jews.

To illustrate further, here’s the very next stanza:

Þan wroþ as a wode bore he wendeþ his bridul:

Ȝif ȝe as dogges wol dey, þe deuel haue þat recche!

And or I wende from þis walle ȝe schul words schewe

And efte spaklokere speke or Y ȝour speche owene (785-88)

Or in Livingstone’s translation:

Then, angry as a mad boar, he turns his bridle:

“If you would die like dogs, the devil take whoever cares!

But before I turn from this wall, you will [indeed] say something:

And [you must] speak more wisely in reply before I [will] acknowledge your speech![10]

At first glance the dynamics seem simple: the stanza contrasts human speaking to animal death. The reasoning animal can parley; it can be offered mercy, or at least a contract, as otherwise, it will die “like a dog.” Humans on one side, animals on the other. What Vespasian has done, in a way, is to offer the Jews a choice what they might be. They have the option to be dehumanized in the word’s familiar sense, that is, to be reduced to life that merits no respect. And that’s indeed how things often work in the poem. As the siege creaks to a close, the Jews turn on each other “as wolues” (1079); Domitian destroys a Jewish raiding party as if they were “bestes” (1132); earlier, the Jews fight like “griffouns” (556); Titus gears up to take Jerusalem from people he calls “warwolues” (1178).

But note how many ways there are to be human here, how many ways too of not being human. Almost invisibly, there’s Vespasian’s horse, present to us only in the general’s angry pulling on the bridle to lead the horse elsewhere. Simply instrumentalized, here at least the horse is nothing but a living tool, or nothing but an indication of the direction of Vespasian’s intention or concern: more on that later. A second animal: the Jews, threatened by Vespasian with a dog’s death. Now, even the dogs of the Middle Ages could be mourned. Chaucer’s Prioress would famously weep should anyone beat her little dog with a “yerde smerte” (1.149); the canis legend from the Seven Sages of Rome, known too from the story of Saint Guinefort, the Holy Greyhound, features a knight disconsolate, sometimes to the point of suicide, for having unjustly killed his own dog.[11] None of these are the dogs of Vespasian’s threat: these are necropolitcal animals, keep alive, as Achille Mbembe said about enslaved people, “in a state of injury,”[12] for to die like a dog is continuous with living “like a dog,” in a degraded way, and thus to be present to our attention as animals that are in some sense already dead, because they are life that’s for nothing, or, in a way, a life that’s a nothing that’s more than nothing, because its moral irrelevance sets off by contrast the life that’s lived for itself, which in this case, is that of Vespasian and the presumptively Christian reader so attached to their enjoyment of Vespasian’s contempt. Unfortunately, I suppose, I’m reminded of a recent response on Bluesky to Trump having claimed that he fired Anthropic – the AI startup – “like dogs”: in response, one poster wrote “once again I am asking for an explanation of what, exactly, Donald Trump thinks a dog is.”[13] I think I’ve answered the question.

And there’s of course one more animal: Vespasian, the boar that tropes his rage. The porcine analogy runs back to the historical Vespasian himself, who minted coins with sow and piglets to commemorate his sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and to the Tenth Legion, based in Jerusalem, whose banner featured a wild boar;[14] the statue of a pig, perhaps inspired by this very banner, was erected before the Southern Gate of the city, Aelia Capitolina, that Hadrian had built on Jerusalem’s ruins in 130 CE. Surely more proximate is the standard exegesis of Psalm 79:14, “The boar from the woods has banished her; and a singular wild beast hath devoured her.” Interpretations transmitted from Augustine and Cassiodorus understood the verse as referencing the destruction and dispersal of Palestinian Jews under Titus and Vespasian.[15] We can note, too, that in this poem, the Roman standard is a dragon, another animal. It would be a desperate stretch, I think, to claim that the text is somehow insulting Vespasian through the comparison, or the Romans through their banner. After all, medieval heraldry did this kind of thing often. England’s King Richard I was “lion-hearted”; Vespasian too the poem calls “liȝt as a lyoun” (766) freed from its chains. Questions of rationality or “bestialization” or “dehumanization” are here irrelevant, for what matters is not so much being better than animals but being better than other people.

What the stanza records is a double recognition, or, if you will, a double misrecognition: Vespasian recognizes his enemies as just human enough to make that humanity something worth taking from them. There’s no point in animalizing something that’s already known to be animal. The violence of the act requires that first recognition — what we must call a kind of “identification” or even “sympathy” — that must then be waylaid in a direction we generally don’t expect identification and sympathy to go. Humanization here is no salvation; it’s the prelude to further acts of violence, a recognition followed by the cruelty of deliberate misrecognition. The sadist gets off by maltreating a human, not a rock. The offense is both personalization and depersonalizing.[16] With the acknowledgement that close readings too often have the character of overreadings, of twisting the waxen noses of auctoritas, as Alan of Lille once wrote,[17] I find myself caught by the one verb the stanza repeats: wende, to go or to turn. Vespasian is turning his bridle even as he rides to the walls; he demands a response before he turns back from the wall. The threatened turn is already happening even as he threatens it. That turning, as I hear it, is that double recognition and misrecognition, that moment of humanization inherent to any dehumanization, which is at once a turning towards and a catastrophic turning away.

Some forms of violence and domination do indeed treat people as objects, as vermin, or as livestock; while some “ungrievable life,” to use Judith Butler’s formulation,[18] is treated as just human enough for others to be made to bear the responsibility for their own death, or for others to exult in their deaths, or indeed to exult precisely in the reduction of a human to an object. To have one’s suffering made visible is not necessarily to become “grievable.”[19] I have time at last only to tell you that I have in mind Saidiya Hartman’s observation in Scenes of Subjection on the condition of enslaved black females, where “life in this frame [of the law] was not an endowment, but the fine-tuning of managed depletion”;[20] among others, I have had in mind too the powerful demand in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World to rethink and transfer “the animal’ as symbol, as trope, as locus of possibility,”[21] to recognize the variable possibilities and dangers of being recognized as human or animal. With all this, we can challenge the use of “human” as a compliment, along with the cliché that “humane” behavior is necessarily kind, decent, and gentle. Something more is needed for victims than to “restore their humanity.” The categories of human and animal should be understood not as a binary but as political and rhetorical categories, whose only certain reference, if we could call this certain at all, is their immediate aims and the desires they encode.

Thank you.

  1. The Animal that therefore I am 28, David Wills trans., “Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish” ↑
  2. “Is Ontology Fundamental” (1951), in Basic Philosophical Writings: “Our relation with the other (autrui) certainly consists in wanting to comprehend him, but this relation overflows comprehension. Not only because knowledge of the other (autrui) requires, outside of all curiosity, also sympathy or love, ways of being distinct from impassible contemplation, but because in our relation with the other (autrui), he does not affect us in terms of a concept. He is a being (étant) and counts as such.” “A being” counters Heidegger and his concern with Being as such, Levinas’s target in this essay. Trans. Simon Critchley, with Peter Atterton and Graham Noctor. ↑
  3. The Life of Saint Audrey: A Text by Marie de France, ed. and trans. June Hall McCash and Judith Clark Barban (McFarland, 2006), l. 508, translation slightly modified. It doesn’t need to be said here. Nonetheless: I was unconvinced by McCash’s attribution of the Audrey life to Marie when I first encountered it in Speculum as a graduate student in 2002: as I remember, McCash compared the text not to the entire corpus of Old French writing but to Marie’s writing, a method that’s surely not unlikely to produce false positives. I’ve only glanced at Leena Löfstedt, “La Vie seinte Audree signée par Marie,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 116, no. 2 (2015): 285–328, but Löfstedt’s willingness to countenance the proposition that Marie de France may have been Thomas Beckett’s sister, and that Audrey may be the work of a young Marie, working with an incompetent team (“En fait, Aud. fait penser à une entreprise (mal) dirigée par quelqu’un ayant partagé son matériel successivement avec d’autres, et incapable de veiller à la qualité uniforme du résultat”), falls rather short of convincing me of the wrongness of my first impression. ↑
  4. “Contextualising The Siege of Jerusalem,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992), 109 [109-21]. I’m quoting the Hanna from its appearance at the opening of Michael Livingstone’s edition for TEAMS. ↑
  5. U of Delaware P, 2019, 9 ↑
  6. “Cultural Trauma and Christian Identity in the Late Medieval Heroic Epic: The Siege of Jerusalem,” Literature and Medicine 33.2 (2015): 288 [279-31]. ↑
  7. We are working to different ends, but it would be a disservice not to cite an important article by Mo Pareles, “Cannibal Maria in the Siege of Jerusalem: New Approaches,” Religion Compass 17.12 (2023): 1-10. ↑
  8. See their note at 133, “’Humane action’ probably is the durior reading. LD manschyp translates he word dialectically but loses much of the semantic force: manship usually means ‘dignity, worthiness, respect’, with strong connotations of manly valor.” More straightforwardly, their glossary prefers the “harder” manuscript reading, just offering “humane action” (s.v. menske). Livingstone provides the manuscript variants more succinctly: “manschyp. So L, D, followed by K. P, A: menske, followed by H.” ↑
  9. For “morally considerable,” Lori Gruen and Susana Monsó, “The Moral Status of Animals”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/moral-animal/: “To say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there is a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize such claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be wronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize moral claims, it is only humans who are morally considerable. However, when we ask why we think human animals are the only types of beings that can be morally wronged, we begin to see that the class of beings able to recognize moral claims and the class of beings who can suffer moral wrongs are not co-extensive.” ↑
  10. Here’s Williams Boyarin’s: “Then, like a wild boar enraged, he [Vespasian] yanks at his bridle: / “If you want to die like dogs, the Devil takes who cares! / But before I turn from this wall, you will speak words— / And reply wisely, or I won’t acknowledge your talk!’” I prefer the Livingstone here because he preserves the doubled “turns” of wendeþ and wende. ↑
  11. Jean-Claude Schmitt’s The Holy Greyhound: Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge UP 1983) remains the foundational treatment. ↑
  12. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2002): 21 [11-40]; see also 40, “I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” ↑
  13. Micah @rincewind.run, “once again I am asking for an explanation of what, exactly, Donald Trump thinks a dog is,” quote-posting Politico, “[Trump] stepped into the contentious dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic, telling us the AI startup “is in trouble because I fired [them] like dogs.” March 5, 2026, 1:08pm, Bluesky, https://bsky.app/profile/rincewind.run/post/3mgdfddfppk2o ↑
  14. Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (Yale UP, 2020), 133-34. “The imagery was a traditional homage to the white sow and thirty piglets that Aeneas had discovered in fulfillment of a prophecy about the founding of Rome.” ↑
  15. For example, here’s Peter Lombard, from his commentary on the Psalms: “Exterminavit eam, id est extra terminos patriae ejecit eam, aper veniens de silva, id est de gentibus. Aper est Vespasianus fortis et saevus eis, et contrarius illis, id est Judaeis, qui inter caetera hoc animal habent immundum, qui venit de silva . . . . Et singularis ferus depastus est eam, id est Titus qui reliquias Judaeorum terribili depastione consumpsit. Qui dicitur singularis, id est superbus. Dicit enim omnis superbus: Ego sum, ego sum, et nemo alius. Vel pro eodem accipitur, aper et ferus. Nam singularis ferus, ipse est aper, qui vastavit, scilicet Romanus exercitus. [He has banished her, that is, he has driven them beyond the boundaries of their country, “boar,” coming “from the wood,” that is from the gentiles. The boar is Vespasian, strong and savage against them, and contrary to them, that is, the Jews, who consider this animal unclean among the others that come from the wood. The gentiles were from the wood . . . . “And a singular beast has devoured her,” that is, Titus, who consumed the remainder of the Jews with a terrible grazing. It is said that he is singular,” that is, proud. For the proud say, “I am, I am, and no one else.” Or it might be read as meaning a wild boar. For a wild singular beast, this is a boar, who lays waste, namely, the Roman army.] ↑
  16. For one approach to this, Adam Etinson, “What’s So Special about Human Dignity,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 48.4 (2020): 353-81, especially 364. Etinson emphasizes the intention to humiliate underlying any assault on human dignity, in that that intention seeks to strip someone of social status and social protections,: this target of offense is what makes the affront one against their human dignity. I also have in mind a quotation from Gil Z. Hochberg’s “Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone” that I came across in Amin Parsa’s “The Politics of Vision, Targeting, and Palestine” on the website for Critical Legal Thinking (June 9, 2025): “the problem we are facing…consists less of making an otherwise invisible catastrophic reality visible and more so of challenging the dominant modes of representations through which the very visibility of others’ suffering remains nothing but a spectacle, providing at best a momentary source of ethical speculation and at worst a source of voyeuristic pleasure.” Also underlying what I’m doing: Susan Sontag’s critique of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2003, 11-12): “Photographs of mutilated bodies certainly can be used the way Woolf does, to vivify the condemnation of war, and may bring home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no experience of war at all. However, someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war—except to those for whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility.” ↑
  17. “Sed quia auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diversum potest flecti sensum, rationibus roborandum est” PL 210: 333a; in Peter Dronke’s translation, “but because authority has a waxen nose, that can be bent in different ways, she must be fortified by reasons,” from his History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 1992), 7 ↑
  18. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, 2004), ↑
  19. Contra the implication in Precarious Life here, “What is the relation between the violence by which these ungrievable lives were lost and the prohibition on their public grievability? Is the prohibition on grieving the continuation of the violence itself? And does the prohibition on grieving demand a tight control on the reproduction of images and words? How does the prohibition on grieving emerge as a circumscription of representability, so that our national melancholia becomes tightly fitted into the frame for what can be said, what can be shown?” (148) ↑
  20. I’m citing from the 2022 revised edition from Norton, for which, at present, I don’t have page numbers. The larger passage runs: “At first glance, it is tempting to say that black females were abandoned by the law, but the reality is far more complicated. The law determined the scope of existence by calibrating the vulnerability to violence and delimiting the kind of injury or offense that affected the life of the enslaved. Life in this frame was not an endowment, but the fine-tuning of managed depletion.” ↑
  21. NYU Press, 2020, 53. ↑
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