This seminar offers an introduction to basic readings in the field called critical animal studies or human-animal studies, with primary texts from medieval Britain and France, and secondary texts by familiar theorists including Derrida, Foucault, Agamben, Nussbaum, and Haraway together with field-specific founders including Ursula Heise, Vinciane Despret, and Cary Wolfe.
Medieval literature offers a rich archive of thought about nonhuman animals, ranging from the high philosophy of Augustine’s commentary on Genesis and Aquinas’s rediscovery of Aristotle, to the many animal miracles in the Life of Saint Cuthbert, the totemic use of animals in heraldry and family genealogies, and the instructions in treatises on how to hunt boar and deer. Many questions still current in animal studies today engaged medieval writers as well. Do humans have ethical responsibilities to animals? What kinds of consciousness do different species have? How did domestication come about? What kinds of working relationships are possible across species lines? What rhetorical resources (metaphoric? anthropomorphic? affective?) come forward when animals are represented, and what are the limitations of rhetoric for translating animal encounters into language?
