Animals and Courts: Europe, c. 1200–1800. Mark Hengerer and Nadir Weber, eds. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2020. viii + 434 pp. $103.99

Many chapters are beautifully illustrated and a stimulating range of sources and evidence speak to each other: visual, material, literary (e.g., in Julia Weitbrecht's essay); archival, printed (e.g., in the chapter by John Villiers); archaeological, zoological, and genetic (e.g., in the study of the black francolin, a game bird whose fate in Western Europe was bound with courtly hunting, medical, and dietary practices [Giovanni Forcina et al.]). A skittish horse might spoil a parade, dogs or monkeys destroy precious interiors, a lion not fight on command, or conversely a leopard might kill a servant and escape its cage; besides, “on an everyday level, animals smelt unusual, ate things they should not, and left unwanted souvenirs” (280). The epilogue proposes that court studies take the opportunity to evaluate the growing body of scholarship on different times and places, to adopt a “longue durée approach to courtly animal practices,” one which “also takes the methods offered by human-animal studies seriously” (406).