Silencing the Lambs: Economics, Ethics, and Animal Life in Medieval Franciscan Hagiography

Domestic animals are especially useful foci for ethical consideration since it is hard to find a human economy, either medieval or modern, without them. But in the medieval period, sheep and lambs carried religious connotations in addition to having important roles in economic life. Unfortunately, the religious meanings attached to these animals have tended to dominate modern analyses of the medieval Franciscan literary canon, leaving little room for discussion of the relationships these actual animals had to the humans around them. Here, Kiser addresses a number of Franciscan narratives by resituating them once again in the sociocultural and environmental surroundings in which they were originally written, without denying that biblical and allegorical dimensions are also present within these narratives.