| Paper 113-b | Warriors with Animal Faces: Negotiating an Anthropological Model
(Language: English)
Antonella Sciancalepore, Dipartimento di Ricerca linguistica, letteraria e filologica, Università di Macerata / School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Index terms: Anthropology, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - French or Occitan |
|---|
| Abstract | Paper -a:
Medieval unease with human animality manifests strongly in attitudes toward and proscriptions concerning food sharing. This is particularly true with dogs, the animals with whom humans most intimately share both the procurement and consumption of food and who are routinely figured as embodying the best and worst characteristics associated with humans. This paper will explore the role of dogs and food in hunting treatises, penitential manuals, and a range of literary texts to reveal the precarious boundary between human and nonhuman animals in the medieval imagination.
Paper -b:
European medieval literatures occasionally feature warriors who, during battle, take the appearances of wild animals. This transformation occurs on many levels: physical, total-body metamorphosis, a facial deformation, or symbolic, using animal masks. These three configurations are variations upon the same anthropological model: that of the animal-warrior.
Inside the socio-cultural process of shaping the image of the feudal knight, the universal model of the animal-warrior endured in both practice and literature, although negated, disguised and transformed.
My paper will illustrate patterns of negotiation of this model in Medieval literature. It will consider mainly literature in langue d'oil, both epic and romance, but I will occasionally draw examples from Germanic and Celtic literatures.
Paper -c:
Medieval sources have a tendency to conflate conditions such as mental illness, epilepsy, demonic possession, and cognitive impairments. Since in modern understanding 'mental disability' tends to mean specifically intellectual impairment, plus what used to be called mental retardation or learning difficulty, the paper will aim to uncover what medieval normative texts, especially natural-philosophical texts, state about mental disability. Philosophically, and subsequently judicially, medieval intellectual impairment was considered the absence of reason, the irrational, which contrasted the mentally disabled with the Aristotelian concept of man as the rational animal. Thus in medieval culture natural fools were contrasted with the artificial.
|
|---|
