Speculations, a rejected proposal: The Medieval Literature of Animal Protest: A Brief Cross-Linguistic Survey

Also, so long as I’m posting about Speculum, I was approached about pitching them something for their Speculations special issue, which I did. My proposal didn’t make the cut. I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever have time to write this paper, so I’m sharing it here in case someone wants it, or wants me to try giving it as a plenary in, like, 2026 somewhere, which would, of course, force me to write it:

To illustrate the continued opportunities of cultural animal studies to our field, while addressing the “global turn” of the CFP, my contribution will concern the small set of medieval literary and philosophical works in which nonhuman animals complain of their maltreatment by humankind, and sometimes argue for their superiority. A handful of these texts are what have been called “Western”: the Greek Grunnius of Porphyry (unknown to the Middle Ages, adapted as La Circe in the early 16th century by Giovanni Baptista Gelli), the Testamentum Porcelli, and a couple poems in which hares complain of being hunted. The bulk of my attention, however, will be devoted to two works: Epistle 22 of the Brethren of Purity, commonly known as “The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn,” written about 1000 years ago, and translated in 1316 from Arabic into Hebrew in Provence by Qalonymos ben Qalonymos; the same work, likely in its Arabic version, would help inspire Anselm Turmeda’s Dispute of the Donkey, a Christian work written in Catalan before this Majorcan Franciscan converted to Islam: a French translation is the closest surviving version to the original. I will write for an audience like me: those trained as “Western” medievalists, whose knowledge of philosophical and literary traditions about what constitutes “humankind” is limited by their only glancing familiarity with material outside Latin Christendom and its vernaculars. While the Latin Church, Islam, and Judaism all share a commitment to human difference from, and superiority to, nonhumans, generally based on the human monopoly of “reason,” we find that literary and philosophical material outside, for example, the Latin Fathers and Scholasticism was more exploratory on the status of nonhuman animals in relation to humans. My survey will hypothesize about why that might be, while cautioning against reading these as “ecological” or “animal rights” texts. I will conclude by suggesting some routes for further teaching and study of medieval animal cultures.