Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

In Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, Susan Crane makes an impressive contribution to the growing field of Medieval Animal Studies. Because she refers in her title to 'Medieval Britain,' one might at first imagine that she is attempting to discover the attitudes and practices that were characteristic of a particular cultural milieu within a single period of time. By examining a wide range of literary sources-including romances, encyclopedias, bestiaries, hunting literature, and hagiography-and analyzing selected texts through the various lenses of modern animal studies-including animal ethics, the sciences of cognition and evolution, and the history of domestication-Crane demonstrates how contemporary approaches can encourage new insights into familiar texts. In the first chapter, entitled 'Cohabitation,' for example, she argues mainly from a thorough grounding in social history and her own keen analytical skills, validating her interpretations with evidence from modern evolutionary science. [...]she makes a convincing case that the Irish and northern English monastic culture represented in the ninth-century Irish lyric 'Pangur Bàn' and the early eighth-century Life of Saint Cuthbert treated the natural world as 'continuous with human society' (p. 39), a view contrasting with the 'authoritative patristic exegesis' apparent in works of later centuries (p. 41).