This semester is my first time teaching the Canterbury Tales to doctoral students. To rise to their level, I decided manuscripts would be a big part of…
One of my (many!) procrastination habits is poking around in manuscripts online to see what might turn up. Recently, I’ve found the following– To start…
Sabbatical honesty, then – in the two weeks since the last post, I’ve given back revisions to articles for the Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History…
The 218-line “A Disputation Betwyx þe Body and Wormes” (hereafter Disputation) survives only in British Library, Additional 37049, a much studied mid-fifteenth-century miscellany likely produced for…
The King of Tars is story about proof. So is Guy de Cambrai’s Barlaam and Josephat. And likewise an account of a divining ape at the early 17th-century…
Today, my “Problems in Posthumanism” graduate seminar worked on Alexander and Dindimus, Montaigne on Cannibals, Petrarch on the Canary Islands (well, we at least read it),…
Nearly two years ago, I announced: For several years I’ve wanted to write an essay on the way that ‘mute beasts’ communicate through gesture in…
Thinking about animals and violence and the middle ages tends to follow one of two routes. The first holds that medieval people were more “brutal”…
by KARL STEEL As part of the process of assembling, expanding, and (re)writing the material for Book 2, I’ve returned to the problem of “feral…
by KARL STEEL Hi everyone! I’m trying to trick you into reading this whole thing with this jaunty opening. My interest in Sky Burial and…
