Medieval and Early Modern Animals

In medieval Europe and Early Modern Europe (roughly 700–1800 ce), human lives were entangled with those of non-human animals (which, for simplicity, I will henceforth call “animals”). Humans exploited other terrestrial animals for commodities (including meat, milk, eggs, honey, tallow, manure, leather, parchment, bone, and fur) and used them for agricultural labor, transport, war, entertainment, companionship, and status. Animals also featured as the objects of theological and scientific inquiry. This history is haunted by the often contested and unclear boundary between human and animal. Real and symbolic animals are conscripted into the work of maintaining the myth of human separateness, a myth which enables and requires the violent oppression and exploitation of individuals categorized as non-human. Until recently, the history of non-human animals has largely been a history of their representations. Scholars have focused on the depictions of animals, especially their allegorical and moral meanings. They have looked at how people used animals to talk about human uniqueness (in discussions of whether animals possessed souls, language, and reason) and how they used them to construct human social status, gender, and sanctity. A second strand of scholarship, informed by archaeology, has examined the practical uses humans made of animals. These works have largely treated animals as commodities and objects. Since the interdisciplinary activist-informed “Animal Turn” of the late twentieth century, scholars have centered animals, acknowledging their experiences and agency as political actors, as workers, and as collaborators who shaped history. Throughout the scholarship, historians locate the origins of modern preoccupations (notably the increasing sympathy with the natural world and the contestation of the animal-human boundary) in the specific era they study, whether it is the twelfth century or the eighteenth. The scholarship remains largely Anglophone and western-Eurocentric, and it focuses on birds and mammals, especially charismatic megafauna.