Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries

Just like we do today, people in medieval times struggled with the concept of human exceptionalism and the significance of other creatures. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the medieval bestiary. Sarah Kay's exploration of French and Latin bestiaries offers fresh insight into how this prominent genre challenged the boundary between its human readers and other animals. Bestiaries present accounts of animals whose fantastic behaviors should be imitated or avoided, depending on the given trait. In a highly original argument, Kay suggests that the association of beasts with books is here both literal and material, as nearly all surviving bestiaries are copied on parchment made of animal skin, which also resembles human skin. Using a rich array of examples, she shows how the content and materiality of bestiaries are linked due to the continual references in the texts to the skins of other animals, as well as the ways in which the pages themselves repeatedly and at times, it would seem, deliberately intervene in the reading process.A vital contribution to animal studies and medieval manuscript studies, this book sheds new light on the European bestiary and its profound power to shape readers' own identities.

"Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries is an innovative analysis of how medieval bestiaries are apprehended by their readers--visually, intellectually, and emotively. Kay's focus on skin works brilliantly to link the bestiaries' literal and figurative content to its material expression on animal parchment. Kay intersects postmodern theory, animal studies, and manuscript studies in a rich array of close readings."--Susan Crane, Columbia University, "Whatever we thought about bestiaries before reading Sarah Kay's Animal Skins, her tour de force of philology and philosophy offers new insights into the genre... Thanks to skillful melding of material philology, philosophical anthropology, and ecological perception, Kay's mix of medieval and modern approaches breathes new life into bestiary studies."-- "Speculum", "I know of no book in animal studies, medieval studies, or manuscript studies that does what Kay's book does: no such text in recent years--and indeed, recent decades--has visited the archives with anything like her thoroughness. Through Kay's methods, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries calls on medievalists to do more with manuscripts and attests to the value of hands-on study in an era of mass digitization."--Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, "The aim of the book is to explore how bestiaries may have shaped their readers' sense of the relationship between themselves and other animals. This exploration is done by not only studying the texts but also the pages on which the texts are written, pages that are made of parchment, i.e. animal skin. Sarah Kay calls her method for this project 'close reading' (17) which is an apt description when one realises that she also 'reads' the page: i.e., she pays close attention to everything that can be seen, not only the written text, but also illustrations and remarkable aspects of the parchment itself. This combined attention to abstract and material aspects of bestiaries makes this study really remarkable."-- "The Medieval Review", "Extraordinary . . . . Not a word is wasted . . . . This is clearly a book that has set a new mark of excellence in a buoyant field and will be the obligatory reference on the topic for a very long time to come." -- "French History"

Sarah Kay is professor of French at New York University. Her many books include Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry and The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry.