Table of Contents

Notes on Citations
Introduction
1. Cohabitation
2. Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man
3. A Bestiary's Taxonomy of Creatures
4. The Noble Hunt as a Ritual Practice
5. Falcon and Princess
6. Knight and Horse
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

About the Author

Susan Crane is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is author of The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews

"Writing such a book as this requires hard-won mastery of human sciences, but also attentiveness to where such sciences stumble in encountering fellow, nonhuman creatures. Covering eight centuries, and giving us en passant a newly expanded understanding of British culture, this marvelous book shows poetry intuiting complexly lived relationships between humans and animals, where humanist philosophy cannot speak." (David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania) "Critical orthodoxy finds in medieval Britain clear-cut distinctions between human beings and all other forms of life, but Susan Crane finds instead a tangle of cohabitation. An immensely important contribution to the burgeoning conversation between animal studies scholars in the earlier and more recent periods, Animal Encounters gives us a picture of medieval Britain as a dynamic and often surprising contact zone, where human beings are enriched, both spiritually and intellectually, by the fact that they live and work, and play and die, alongside their fellow creatures." (Cary Wolfe, author of Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame)