Talking animals abound in medieval texts . They speak to us in fables , ventriloquizing human morals and social norms; they trade insults and insights in debate poems; they offer miraculous testimony of divine power and grace in saintsâ lives. At the same time, medieval writers often insisted upon language as a singularly human attribute. Drawing on a tradition stretching back to antiquity, many identified language as evidence of the possession of reasonâthat faculty believed to separate humans from the rest of Godâs creation. Human beings were understood to exist at the apex of a divinely ordained hierarchy, a position justified because of the possession of a rational soul through which they bear a likeness to God. While nonhuman animals may be gifted with superior senses , the human animal was seen to surpass all others by virtue of its powers of intellect, made manifest through language. The capacity for language thus became one of the primary means for articulating the conceptual boundary between human and nonhuman animals.
In the Greco-Roman and Patristic traditions, as well as in the medieval traditions that grew out of them, language was intimately connected with reason and was deemed a necessary prerequisite for rational thought, a connection reflected in the use of the Greek word logos to refer to both concepts.1 Indeed, for the Roman writer Quintilian , language was essential to the exercise and discernment of reason: âReason itself would not help us so much, or be so evident in us, if we did not have the power to express the thoughts we have conceived in our minds.â2 Among the ancients Aristotleâs views on the natural world would prove to be the most influential among medieval thinkers, and it is he who makes the most explicit assertion of humanityâs singular claim to logos : âMan alone among animals has speech .â3 According to Aristotle , animals are capable of communicating pleasure and pain, but they lack the faculty of reason that would allow them to perceive abstract concepts such as justice and injustice, an argument that Albertus Magnus would later elaborate on extensively.4 Some writers granted that animals might produce sounds that are to some degree intentionalâthat is, a dogâs yelp may express a precise concept such as joy or fear not just as a symptom of physical sensation but also with the aim of eliciting a specific response in anotherâbut they do so through the sensitive rather than rational soul.5 For Augustine , the fact that animals share our bodily senses means that they can perceive the beauty of God in the created world, but lacking logos they cannot reflect upon its significance. Human beings, on the other hand, can question what they see and âobserve that the unseen things of God are understood through all that has been made.â6 Through such questioning the human soul ascends toward the divine; through logos humans alone can reach toward Logos.
Although such writers did not see animals as being capable of producing their own meaning, they nevertheless perceived animals to be meaningful as reflections of divine truth in nature. If, as Vincent of Beauvais wrote, âThis sensible world is like a book, written by the finger of God,â7 animals formed much of the text of that book. One way of thinking about representations of animals participating in language, then, is to emphasize their role in the creation of human meaning. Scholars have long noted the ways that medieval writers deployed animals as symbolic language for humans to talk to other humans about human concerns. This is perhaps most apparent in beast fables in which animals are made to ventriloquize moral truths. We may also see this in some of the more highly allegorized entries in the medieval bestiaries âcompendiums of animal lore that originally derive from the Physiologus , an immensely popular text throughout the Middle Ages that provided moralized lessons illustrated through descriptions of animal physiognomy and behavior.
The Augustinian emphasis on animals as signs of divine truth makes it tempting to conclude that the supposed characteristics of a given bestiary animal were significant only in the ways they could be used to illustrate Christian truth; for example, bestiaries seem far more interested in tracing parallels between wolves and the devil than in presenting empirical facts about wolf physiognomy and behavior. As Laura Hobgood-Oster observes, in such readings âthe literal animal is absent, replaced by the metaphorical or symbolic animal.â8 But the bestiariesâ treatment of animals becomes more complicated as they move away from their origins in the Physiologus , paying closer attention to the real animals themselves alongside their allegorized meanings.9 As Susan Crane argues, with their dual interest in spiritual truth and natural history, bestiaries offer âa vision of creation that is not purely concerned with moral and religious teaching.â10 In this way even the more allegorical textual traditions may evince an interest in animals themselves, in ways that sometimes inquire into the agency and interiority communicated through behavior .
Context matters too, of course. Medieval theologians were at pains to justify humanityâs claim to the highest rung on the ladder of creation and so focused their attention on establishing a clear boundary between humans and other animals. In other contexts, though, medieval writers were more willing to attribute to animals the powers of reasoning and language that theological texts claimed for humans . Crane points out a telling contrast between Thomas Aquinasâs stance that animals are unreasoning creatures driven solely by natural instinct and Gaston PhĂ©busâs confident assertion in his hunting manual Livre de Chasse that his dogs behave thoughtfully and communicativelyâif not in ways that exactly replicate logos , then at least in ways that reflect cognitive and communicative affinities between species.11 Animals in imaginative texts sometimes behave incongruouslyâYvainâs lion in ChrĂ©tien de Troyesâs Le Chevalier au lion seems far more canine than leonine in his behavior, for exampleâbut as Carolynn Van Dyke argues, even when âsculpted and literary beasts often act and speak in ways impossible for their species, their stares and whispers transmit an agency no less real than our own.â12 Such moments belie David Salterâs conclusion th...