An important human trait is our inclination to develop complex relationships with numerous other species. In the great majority of cases however, these mutualistic relationships involve a pair of species, whose co-evolution has been achieved through behavioural adaptation driving positive selection pressures. Humans go a step further, opportunistically and, it sometimes seems, almost arbitrarily elaborating relationships with many other species, whether through domestication, pet-keeping, taming for menageries, deifying, pest-control, conserving iconic species, or recruiting as mascots. When we consider medieval attitudes to animals we are tackling a fundamentally human, and distinctly idiosyncratic, behavioural trait. The sixteen papers presented here investigate animals from zoological, anthropological, artistic and economic perspectives, within the context of the medieval world.
Contents:
Thinking about Beastly Bodies (Terry O'Connor); Medieval Bone Flutes in England (Helen Leaf); The Middle Ages on the Block: Animals, Guilds and Meat in the Medieval Period (Krish Seetah); Communicating through Skin and Bone: Appropriating Animal Bodies in Medieval Western European Seigneurial Culture (Aleksander Pluskowski); Taphonomy or Transfiguration: Do we need to Change the Subject? (Sue Stallibrass); Seeing is Believing: Animal Material Culture in Medieval England (Sarah Wells); The Beast, the Book and the Belt: an Introduction to the Study of Girdle or Belt Books from the Medieval Period (Jim Bloxam); The Shifting use of Animal Carcasses in Medieval and Post-medieval London (Lisa Yeomans); Hunting in the Byzantine Period in the Area between the Danube River and the Black Sea: Archaeozoological Data (Luminia Bejenaru and Carmen Tarcan); Chasing the Ideal? Ritualism, Pragmatism and the Later Medieval Hunt in England (Richard Thomas); Taking Sides: the Social Life of Venison in Medieval England (Naomi Sykes); Animals as Material Culture in Middle Saxon England: The Zooarchaeological Evidence for Wool Production at Brandon (Pam Crabtree); Animal Bones: Synchronous and Diachronic Distribution as Patterns of Socially Determined Meat Consumption in the Early and High Middle Ages in Central and Northern Italy (Marco Valenti and Frank Salvadori); People and Animals in Northern Apulia from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Some Considerations (Antonella Buglione); Animals and Economic Patterns of Medieval Apulia (South Italy): A Preliminary Report (Giovanni de Venuto); Concluding Remarks (Pam Crabtree).
Thinking about Beastly Bodies (Terry O'Connor); Medieval Bone Flutes in England (Helen Leaf); The Middle Ages on the Block: Animals, Guilds and Meat in the Medieval Period (Krish Seetah); Communicating through Skin and Bone: Appropriating Animal Bodies in Medieval Western European Seigneurial Culture (Aleksander Pluskowski); Taphonomy or Transfiguration: Do we need to Change the Subject? (Sue Stallibrass); Seeing is Believing: Animal Material Culture in Medieval England (Sarah Wells); The Beast, the Book and the Belt: an Introduction to the Study of Girdle or Belt Books from the Medieval Period (Jim Bloxam); The Shifting use of Animal Carcasses in Medieval and Post-medieval London (Lisa Yeomans); Hunting in the Byzantine Period in the Area between the Danube River and the Black Sea: Archaeozoological Data (Luminia Bejenaru and Carmen Tarcan); Chasing the Ideal? Ritualism, Pragmatism and the Later Medieval Hunt in England (Richard Thomas); Taking Sides: the Social Life of Venison in Medieval England (Naomi Sykes); Animals as Material Culture in Middle Saxon England: The Zooarchaeological Evidence for Wool Production at Brandon (Pam Crabtree); Animal Bones: Synchronous and Diachronic Distribution as Patterns of Socially Determined Meat Consumption in the Early and High Middle Ages in Central and Northern Italy (Marco Valenti and Frank Salvadori); People and Animals in Northern Apulia from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Some Considerations (Antonella Buglione); Animals and Economic Patterns of Medieval Apulia (South Italy): A Preliminary Report (Giovanni de Venuto); Concluding Remarks (Pam Crabtree).
edited by Aleksander Pluskowski