{"product_id":"animal-encounters-contacts-and-concepts-in-medieval-britain-hardback-9780812244588","title":"Animal Encounters; Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (Hardback) 9780812244588","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eAnimal Encounters\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eContacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eSusan Crane (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780812244588\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eHardback, published 12 December 2012\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e280 pages, 11 illus.\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.558 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003een passant\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eAnimal Encounters\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eBefore the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eTraces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.\u003cbr\u003e The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNotes on Citations\u003cbr\u003e Introduction\u003cbr\u003e 1. Cohabitation\u003cbr\u003e 2. Wolf, Man, and Wolf-Man\u003cbr\u003e 3. A Bestiary's Taxonomy of Creatures\u003cbr\u003e 4. The Noble Hunt as a Ritual Practice\u003cbr\u003e 5. Falcon and Princess\u003cbr\u003e 6. Knight and Horse\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography\u003cbr\u003e Index\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52745040462104,"sku":"9780812244588","price":50.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/animal-encounters-contacts-and-concepts-in-medieval-britain-hardback-9780812244588","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}