Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies

Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages

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.