About this book
Animalia: Animal and Human Interaction in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World is the fifth in a series of volumes exploring daily lives, material culture and environment in the early medieval English world. Like its fellow volumes, it explores the interactions and intersections between the peoples of early medieval England and their material surroundings, in this case, the relationship between people and other living creatures in their natural environment and the imagined creatures depicted in their literature and art. The collection is deeply interdisciplinary, using forensic archaeology, genetic testing, textual analysis of literary and documentary sources, and art historical study to assess the evidence for these relationships and interactions.
The volume is organised in three parts. The first section, Insights from Archaeology, looks carefully at recent, additional evidence for the existence and role of animals in early medieval England through evidence for animal husbandry and medieval falconry, to what surviving books and pages can tell us about animals through biocodicology, a new and important contribution to archaeology for the period.
The second section, Insights from Text, focuses attention on how textual sources portray human perception of animal reality and animal-human interaction and relationships, including the role of enslavement and violence between man and beast. From the Beasts of Battle to mundane animals, from poetry to documentary and homiletic text, the textual evidence evinces the highly symbolic role animals held in the early medieval English mind.
The third section, Insights from the Visual Arts, continues the volume's exploration of the perception of animals, but in the highly abstract and symbolic realm of early medieval English art. Abstract depictions of animals as iconographic motifs raise again the question of animal voice and agency in metals, ceramics, and stone, as well as animal symbolism in textiles and animals as monstrosities in illustrated "monster" collections.
Contents
Introduction / Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Animals: Insights from Archaeology
Chapter 1. Hidden in the Archives: How Biocodicology Can Reveal Biological Histories of Animals / Sarah Fiddyment and Matthew Teasdale
Chapter 2. Animal Husbandry in Anglo-Saxon England: Origins and Developments / Mauro Rizzetto
Chapter 3. 'The Hawk in Hand': Human-Raptor Sociality and Falconry in Early Medieval England / Robert J. Wallis
Animals: Insights from Text
Chapter 4. From Oxford to Gatwick via Swindon: Animals in English Place-names / Carole Hough
Chapter 5. Animals in Old English Poetry / Jill Frederick
Chapter 6. Unwitting Oxen: Visual Language and Verbal Play in Four Old English Riddles / Sarah M. Anderson
Chapter 7. Wandering Wolves and Wild Birds: Animals in Early Medieval English Hagiography / Maren Clegg Hyer
Chapter 8. Geese Behaving Like Geese: Accurate Renditions of Anserine Behaviour in the Lives of Three Anglo-Saxon Abbesses / Marian Hessink
Chapter 9. A Man between Two Beasts: Faces, Animals, and Epistemology in Old English Literature / E.J. Christie
Animals: Insights from the Visual Arts
Chapter 10. Revisiting the Animal Wonders of London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A. XV / John Friedman
Chapter 11. Cloth Creatures: Animals on Textiles from England and Wales, Seventh to Eleventh Centuries / Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Chapter 12. Animals in Stone / Lilla Kopar
Chapter 13. The Burden of Beasts in Anglo-Saxon Arts / Danielle Joyner
Customer Reviews
Biography
Maren Clegg Hyer is Assistant Professor of English, Snow College. Her many publications include Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World (co-edited with Gale Owen-Crocker, Liverpool University Press, 2020) and Old English Lexicology and Lexicography (co-edited with Haruko Momma and Samantha Zacher, Boydell, 2020).
Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor Emerita of the University of Manchester; she was formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. She was co-founder and, for 15 years, co-editor of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles. Her recent books include Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (with Elizabeth Coatsworth, Brill, 2018), Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World (co-edited with Maren Clegg Hyer, Liverpool University Press, 2020) and Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic (co-edited with Alexandra Lester-Makin, Boydell & Brewer, 2024).
