The title of this introduction deliberately unsettles the distinction between two possible interpretations of the words “speaking species.” When “speaking” is read as an adjective modifying the noun “species,” the construction calls to mind the ancient philosophical concept, inherited by medieval audiences through works like William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics quoted in the epigraph, of humanity as the speaking species: the only animal endowed with a mind capable of reasoning discursively and using language to communicate its thoughts. When “speaking” is read as a gerund, on the other hand, “speaking species” suggests a set of concrete practices – individualized, local acts of “speaking [about] species” or “speaking [the nature of] species” – in lieu of an abstract cognitive power.

The aim of the present volume is to explore the relationship between animals, speech, and reason in medieval texts by drawing attention to the entangled dynamic of theory and practice that this punning formula expresses. From the ninth century onward – and particularly between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – the question of what it meant to be a rational, speaking animal became a central point of intellectual and artistic preoccupation in the Latin West. Across a wide range of cultural contexts, elaborate speculations emerged to probe at the limits of the logic that connects speech, the closely associated power of reason, and species identity: To what extent, if at all, were authors such as Aristotle correct in affirming that the rational-discursive faculty distinguishes the human being from the other animals? This question was complicated enough – and yet, to stop on the level of concepts would be to leave out half of the story. The argument I advance throughout this book is that the varied and prolific medieval discourse around humanity’s status as the (or a) speaking species cannot be divorced from the finer points of how authors, translators, and scribes “spoke species” on a local level in their texts. As if through a kind of conduit, questions left unresolved in accounts of humanity as an animal distinguished by the abilities to reason and speak could work themselves out in the minutiae of how relationships of species became expressed in words; conversely, the impasses, disruptions, and creative solutions that marked individual efforts to speak about species held the potential to put pressure on theories of human cognitive exceptionalism, suspending patterns of categorical thinking and enabling unforeseen interpretive possibilities to emerge.

This somewhat slippery topic can be introduced by examining a biblical narrative that medieval Jewish and Christian audiences would have understood as the first recorded example of human speech, and at the same time, the first recorded example of speech about species: Adam’s naming of the non-human animals brought before him by God in the Garden of Eden. In medieval translations of this passage from the Book of Genesis, a curious tension can be observed between the example purportedly set by Adam and the analogous naming work performed by the text’s various translators. The first human seems to have had no difficulty giving the other animals their names, his success implicitly communicating his dominance as a rational, speaking creature. However, the Latin and French translators who attempted to reproduce Adam’s feat in words of their own seemed notably less confident, their texts differing from one another in ways that suggest the discovery of uncertainty and confusion, rather than intuitive transparency, where speech and species intersect.

The second chapter of Genesis begins with a creation narrative that differs from the one presented in the preceding chapter, which had described how God created the Earth and populated it with plants, a litany of animals occupying the sea, sky, and land, and finally human beings (Gn 1:20–30). This time around, the tale takes a different shape:² Humans are the first of the animals to be created, and God promptly makes them aware of their rights and duties within their paradisiacal surroundings, prohibiting access to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (Gn 2:16–17). Up to and including the moment of this prohibition, there is nothing whatsoever in the biblical text that suggests that a human being has ever spoken, whether to God or for any other reason; humanity blends in as a silent species, just another mute animal (mutum animal) like the ones that would later be referenced by Peter in the New Testament (2 Pt 2:16).³ The mere fact that humans can hear and understand God’s words in these initial passages proves nothing to the contrary: In the first creation narrative, God speaks to non-human animals in exactly the same way with commands like “Increase, and multiply, and fill the waters of the sea” (Gn 1:22), and they, too, seem to understand his words well enough to comply.⁴

Immediately after issuing the prohibition against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, however, God offers the first human being the chance to speak – and, more precisely, to speak about the other animals that have been presented to him as potential companions:

The different shapes taken by this passage in medieval translations are considered later in this section; for now, I wish only to draw attention to the fundamental structure of the scene and its implications regarding the nature and function of human speech. The biblical narrative seems to suggest a kind of automatic, essential connection between the act of speaking and the concept of species difference: From its first explicitly noted use by a human being, the spoken word serves as a vehicle to express the natures of the other animals. Paradoxically, however, Adam’s inaugural words are covered in a textual silence; the passage does not enumerate the individual names chosen for the various non-human species. This omission has an obvious practical explanation, since the author of the original Hebrew text (בְּרֵאשִׁית) could hardly have stopped to list Adam’s chosen name for every different kind of duck, even if he believed that he still had access to the terms originally chosen for them in Paradise. Yet the textual lacuna that engulfs the very first words reported to have been spoken by a human being in Genesis could also be interpreted as a deliberate rhetorical strategy intended to direct the reader’s attention toward a more fundamental point: that what is really important here is not what Adam says, but the fact that he is speaking at all. By naming the other animals (who do not name him back), Adam constitutes himself as the first exemplar of a new kind of creature – one that has received a special mandate from God to talk about the others.⁵

In his fourth-century De Genesi contra Manichaeos (On Genesis Against the Manichees), Augustine of Hippo took this premise and ran with it, helping to establish the basic framework that later generations of medieval Christian audiences would employ in their own interpretations of this scene. For Augustine, the naming narrative offers a condensed lesson about how the rational faculty transforms humanity into a qualitatively superior kind of being:

Modern audiences may find it surprising that Augustine feels authorized to jump so confidently from Adam’s simple ability to name the creatures he sees to these sorts of sweeping conclusions about the presence or absence of reason itself in both human and non-human animals. However, Augustine’s view reflects an understanding of the rational faculty that he inherited from classical antiquity, and in turn helped transmit to medieval audiences: that the capacities to reason and to speak were entangled with one another on a fundamental level. The linguistic roots of this cognitive association stretch back to Ancient Greek, with the word logos (λόγος) embracing a range of potential meanings that extended from “word” and “speech” to the very faculty of reason or thought.⁷ This is the term employed in the original Greek version of the passage from Aristotle’s Politics excerpted as the epigraph to this introduction (“the human alone, above the animals, possesses speech”), with William of Moerbeke opting to render logos as “reason” (ratio) in his first medieval Latin translation, but “speech” (sermo) in his second – presumably because while either translation would be possible in principle, subsequent statements in the Politics make it clear that Aristotle’s contextual focus is on the particular question of vocal communication.⁸

In Latin, the word that came the closest to approximating the polysemy of logos as a term signifying both reason and speech was the one that William had selected in his first attempt, and which Augustine uses here in his discussion of Adam’s naming act: ratio, which could express the faculty of “reason,” but also the “descriptive account,” “reckoning,” or “explanation” by which the calculations of the rational mind are expressed in words.⁹ In his twelfth-century Metalogicon, for example, John of Salisbury draws on the authority of Cassiodorus to assert that ratio “is defined as both a power and the activity of a power” (“et potentia, et potentiae motus, ratio appellatur”), linking it to a specifically human “vim … disserendi” (“power of speaking/discoursing”).¹⁰ Because of its ability to refer both to reason and to the discursive form of its manifestation in this way, ratio could be imagined as marking a kind of middle point between words such as intellectus, focused primarily on thought, and sermo or loquela, focused primarily on language and speech.¹¹ In the medieval vernacular, terms descended from ratio maintained or even amplified the association between reason and speech: The Old French raison could be used to convey the ideas of “reason,” “speech,” and “language”; the Old Occitan razon embraced a similar range of meanings.¹² Throughout this book, I refer to the cognitive power imagined as existing (or not existing) in certain species by this multilingual vocabulary linking the concepts of reason and speech as the “rational-discursive faculty” – or, more concisely, “speech/reason.”

The rational-discursive faculty had its logical negative image in the polysemic notion of “muteness”: The inability to speak and understand words could be taken as evidence for irrationality (and vice versa), with constructions such as mutum animal and beste mue (“dumb animal/beast”) blending the two ideas together in an ambiguous manner.¹³ This principle of corresponding incapacities is what allows Augustine to read the biblical narrative of Adam’s naming act as a referendum on reason as it pertains not only to Adam but also to the unresponsive creatures that he names. God – so the thinking goes – has Adam use his first words to assign names to the other animals in order to help him perceive the naturally dominant position that the rational-discursive faculty has conferred upon his species; the named creatures’ incapacity to respond in words of their own discloses their fundamental irrationality, which in turn naturalizes their subjugation by humanity as announced in passages like Gn 1:26–30.

Augustine’s closing words in the passage under discussion illustrate the ease with which these first two conclusions that can be read into Adam’s naming of the animals – that speech and reason go together, and that humanity alone possesses the cognitive faculty at the root of both powers – can also lead to a third proposition: that members of the speaking species should identify wholly with the rational-discursive faculty, using it as the principle that rules over the other elements of their being. In his reading of the naming scene, Augustine proposes a dualistic account of the human person: On the one hand, there is the reasoning mind (the part of the human that Adam’s naming act supposedly highlights); on the other, there is the irrational, “animal” self, which corresponds to desires and appetites believed to arise from the level of the body rather than ratio.¹⁴ The Latin term that Augustine employs to characterize such appetites, animal, derives from the word anima: the “breath of life,” “soul,” or “vital principle” that renders a living creature different from that which is inanimus or inanimalis (lifeless/inanimate).¹⁵ Within the technical vocabulary of the Latin language, to be an animal is to have an anima of the sort that permits locomotion and sensation,¹⁶ with humans included in this category by definition, whereas plants were generally (but not always) excluded.¹⁷ This term allows Augustine to assert the supremacy of ratio while also acknowledging a potential difficulty: that human beings can never fully transcend the animal dimension of their natures, since their bodies, like those of other animals, are animated by a stubbornly species-agnostic breath of life. Augustine’s proposed solution is the subjugation of the inner animal by the government of ratio – a kind of continual, interspecies war that the rational-discursive faculty must wage from within the human person, understood as a composite of a body like those of the non-human animals present at the naming scene and a mind that, by being able to name them, emerges as distinct.

In contrast with the difficulty marking this process of self-recognition and internal governance, Augustine represents the act by which the human mind apprehends the external natures of non-human animals as significantly less problematic: He proposes that to “differentiate between” such creatures as Adam does, and ultimately come to a conclusion about the superiority of humanity, is a simple matter for the rational mind. While the broader assumptions behind this thesis could be challenged, the notion that humans can easily express relationships of species difference in words does, at least, fall in line with the evidence offered by the biblical narrative under discussion. When Adam names the other animals in Paradise, everything proceeds as if the relationship between his speech/reason and their species identities were one of straightforwardness and transparency. God seems to have had no doubt whatsoever that Adam would be capable of using his rational faculty to express concepts of species identity in words – and the text makes no suggestions to the contrary, briefly noting Adam’s successful naming act and moving on to the creation of Eve (Gn 2:20) within the span of a single biblical verse.

However, the effortlessness with which Adam names the non-human animals does not seem to have been shared by the subsequent generations of biblical translators who needed to follow in his footsteps, choosing words of their own in Latin and French to designate the categories of creature present for the scene of the naming. In what follows I reproduce the same excerpt of the naming narrative from the early modern Douay-Rheims English translation of the Vulgate version quoted earlier, but this time preceded by the equivalent passage as it appears in three different sources. The first is the Vetus Latina, a polymorphous Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint that served as the predominant Latin Bible until around the eighth or ninth century (and continued to be transmitted, in whole or in part, until the age of print). The second is the better-known Latin Vulgate translation spearheaded by Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, which leaned on the proto-Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible rather than the Greek Septuagint preferred by Augustine, and which eventually became the primary Latin Bible for medieval European audiences.¹⁸ The third is the late thirteenth-century vernacular Bible historiale, a partial Old French translation of the Vulgate version, paired with explanatory passages from Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, which was produced by the priest and canon Guyart des Moulins with the intention of edifying medieval lay audiences (and which would go on to become “the most widely disseminated and most influential French-language Bible translation for over two hundred years”).¹⁹ In the fundamentally postlapsarian textual logic that connects these different versions of Gn 2:19–20, the relationship between speech and species identity takes a less transparent shape than it does in the events of the narrative:

By isolating the eight different textual “positions” capable of being occupied by the human and non-human animals of this scene (set in bold and individually numbered in the excerpts) and mapping them out as in Table 1, we can see that two different categories of species terminology with incommensurate assumptions about the place of humanity compete to occupy the same positions across these different translations of the biblical text. First, there is a network of terms that etymologically express a given creature’s difference from humanity (albeit with varying degrees of precision): the terms volatilis (“flying,” used substantively to communicate “flying thing”) and avis/oiseau (“bird”) cover the creatures that traverse the skies; on land, the terms pecus (“cattle” or “beast”) and bestia/beste (“beast”) are employed, the latter of which originally referred to quadrupedal, predatory land animals.²¹ However, there is also a second category of terms to take into account: those like anima vivens (“living soul,” using the same Latin term anima discussed earlier in the context of Augustine’s idea of an inner “animal”) and animans (“living,” used substantively to communicate “living being”), the latter of which derives from anima via the verb animo.²² As previously noted, the logic of these terms is an inclusive one, since their strict etymological meanings express a distinction between living creatures and inanimate objects, not between human and non-human forms of life. Thus, whereas words like “beast” and especially “cattle” encourage readers to imagine a given being in terms of its difference from humanity, anima and the family of Latin terms to which it relates ought in theory to describe humans like Adam as well. To cite a formula used in the first chapter of Genesis, humans are, by definition, one of “all [the beings] that move upon the earth and wherein there is [a living soul]” (“universis quae moventur in terra et in quibus est anima vivens”).²³

On top of this oscillation between implicitly human-inclusive and human-exclusionary terms (both within and across versions), there is still another factor complicating the meaning of this passage: The list of animal categories, itself, subtly expands and contracts from translation to translation. At the beginning of the species litany (position 1), the Vetus Latina mentions a preliminary category of pecus (ambiguously “cattle,” “herbivorous/domesticated non-human animal,” or simply “non-human animal” in general)²⁴ that was not preserved in the either the Vulgate version or the Bible historiale. Then, at the end of the litany (position 7), the Bible historiale omits one category of creature, “beast of the land/field” (bestia terrae/agri) that is mentioned in both the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate. This was likely done to avoid needing to use the word “beast” twice (I discuss the possible reasons for this in the paragraphs that follow).

Although variations of diction across different translations of the Bible are not remarkable in themselves, the presence of a genuine ambiguity in the structure and articulation of this passage was noticed by early readers in the Christian tradition – among them, Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo would likely have accessed the narrative of Adam’s naming through one of the Vetus Latina translations based off the Greek Septuagint, a text he “held … to be divinely inspired” (even if his difficulty with Greek meant that he often needed to access this text through Latin versions, which he knew to be highly flawed and variable).²⁵ He may therefore have encountered a chain of animal species like the one from the Vetus Latina version, which mentions “cattle/beasts,” “beasts of the field,” “flying things,” “living souls,” “cattle/beasts” a second time, “birds of the skies,” and once again “beasts of the field” in sequence. The interpretation he proposes in his final literal commentary on Genesis is that only a subset of the world’s various animal species were actually named by Adam in this narrative: “What then is the meaning of this, that Adam put names to flying things and terrestrial living things, but not to fishes and all swimming things?” (“Quid est enim hoc ipsum quod volatilibus terrestribusque animantibus, non etiam piscibus atque omnibus natatilibus Adam nomina imposuit?”) This, in turn, raises the question of when the rest of the naming was done. Augustine speculates that “names were put to the different species of fish as little by little they came to be known” (“Sed credendum est, paulatim cognitis piscium generibus nomina imposita”) and that there is some mystical or prophetic explanation for this scene’s various enigmas.²⁶ However, a more skeptical reading of the same text could arrive at a different conclusion: that what we are witnessing here is a conspicuous failure on the part of rational speech to articulate relationships of species difference in a clear, consistent, and comprehensive way (and in the very scene that was thought to demonstrate the ease of such operations for the speaking species).

The inconsistencies become particularly noticeable around the contextual meaning of the Latin anima, “soul” or “breath of life,” and related terms. In at least one case, the word anima can be read in a way that includes human beings as well as non-human animals, in conformity with its strict etymological meaning: the statement that “whatsoever Adam called any living creature [literally, ‘living soul’: anima viva (Vetus Latina), anima vivens (Vulgate)], the same is its name” (position 4). This verse can be understood as referring to both human and non-human animals because immediately after this passage, Adam also begins to assign names – first “Woman,” then “Eve” in the next chapter²⁷ – to the first woman; the use of the neutral term anima prior to Eve’s creation situates her in a line of continuity with the non-human “living creatures” named by Adam (and her creation occurs as a direct consequence of other animals’ insufficiency as helpers, furthering this implicit logic of interspecies continuity, albeit one that is divided from within by a troubling gender hierarchy that promotes Adam as namer over Eve as named).²⁸ In the Bible historiale, the use of chose as a translation for anima here, and then again as a translation for “helper” (adiutor, position 8), suggests that Guyart des Moulins may have sensed this possibility. However, another anima-derived term, animans, seems to stray from its etymological meaning. The intent behind the Vulgate’s uses of this word appears to have been to exclude humans from consideration, since it appears twice (positions 2 and 5) to replace a term from the Vetus Latina that did not include humanity under its purview: First it replaces bestia (“beast”), then it replaces pecus (“cattle/beast”). When they subsequently translated the Vulgate text, both Guyart des Moulins and the translator of the seventeenth-century Douay-Rheims English version seem to have agreed that these deployments of animans were meant to be read in a human-excluding way, each one opting for “beast” in both positions of their translations.

The question of what anima and related terms signify in context has important implications for how this passage situates the namer, Adam, in relation to the animals being named. To employ words that etymologically designate a “living soul” or “living being” in a way that excludes humanity is to produce a much harsher boundary between human beings and other forms of life than would be possible through the use of words like “bird,” “cattle,” and “beast.” While they express degrees of difference from humanity, such terms continue to allow the human to be situated within the broader logic of what Laurie Shannon has termed the “litany of kinds”: Human beings, though distinct, can be imagined as one particular kind of animal among many.²⁹ This paradoxically inclusive logic of the litany of difference can be observed in Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Arthurian romance Erec et Enide when the narrator describes the beautifully fashioned scepter that the eponymous knight, Erec, receives at the conclusion of the romance: “in all the world there was no kind of fish, nor of proud beast, nor of human being, nor of flying bird, that was not worked and cut [into the scepter] according to its own image” (“La verité dire vos os / qu’an tot le monde n’a meniere / de poisson, ne de beste fiere, / ne d’ome, ne d’oisel volage, / que chascuns lonc sa propre ymage / n’i fust ovrez et antailliez”).³⁰ To cast Adam as something other than a “living being,” on the other hand, is implicitly to make a more radical assertion: that through the possession of the rational-discursive faculty, the first human has become so unique that his underlying relation to life itself differs from that of the creatures he names.

By the time of the Old French Bible historiale, the subtly unstable logic linking speech and species identity in the Latin versions of this narrative began to break down in even more pronounced ways. In producing his French translation in the late thirteenth century, Guyart des Moulins would have faced a distinctive lexical problem: The Latin language’s array of theoretically inclusive technical terms related to anima did not have ready equivalents in the vernacular. With certain rare exceptions in contexts that allowed for the direct borrowing of a Latin technical term, for example, the word animal does not appear in Old French.³¹ The Old French ame (“soul”), for its part, assumed a Christian, anthropocentric resonance; although it could sometimes be employed to refer to the soul of a non-human animal in contradistinction to its body, when it was used in the sense of “living soul,” it referred to human beings instead of the general category of animate life forms.³² The word that offered itself as the closest equivalent to broad Latin terms such as anima vivans and animans was beste (“beast”), which gradually evolved in the Middle Ages to encompass a much wider array of creatures than the original meaning of predatory quadrupeds. Only birds typically escaped capture under this heading, with the common formula “the beasts and the birds” conveying the approximate meaning of “any non-human animal.”³³

The Bible historiale’s version of Adam’s naming act reflects this transition: The word “beast” functions as a monolithic counterpoint to the birds, replacing animans on two occasions (positions 2 and 5). In the process of the flattening of the Latin text’s variety of terms (animans, bestia … ) into the single word “beast,” however, the potentially useful ability to include humanity as one of the species under discussion has been lost. As noted earlier, Guyart seems to have agreed that the biblical verse referring to Adam’s naming of the “living creatures” (position 4) could be interpreted as extending to Eve in the next scene, since he avoids using the term beste here, falling back instead on the extremely general concept of a chose (“thing” or “being”):³⁴ Adam named “all the things/beings/creatures” (“toutes les choses”). The same term appears in the statement that Adam found “no thing/being” (“nule chose”) like himself in the transition to Eve’s creation (position 8), bolstering the sense that the logics of the naming acts are linked. However, chose carries semantic baggage of its own. The term refers mainly to inanimate things, and although it could also be used in the sense of “creature,” it had potentially derogatory overtones when applied to human beings.³⁵

Because of all these factors, attentive readers of Guyart’s translation will encounter a cascade of interpretive questions that cut to the heart of how species becomes represented in speech, as well as to the dilemma of how their own identities relate to those of the beings Adam names in this scene. Is the word “beast” that appears in a given verse meant to be understood in the original sense of “quadrupedal predatory animal,” situating the human as just one example within a litany of many different kinds of animal species, or in the extended sense of “any non-human animal (usually, but not always, excepting birds),” suggesting the presence of something more like a binary divide between humanity and non-humanity? Or should we rather read the word “beast” in its status as an asymmetrical replacement of substantive uses of the Latin animans (for which no direct vernacular equivalent existed)? And if it is meant to be read as a translation of animans, was it the animans that was used to convey the idea of a “living being” in the broad etymological sense, or the animans that divided humanity off from the rest of the living, hinting at a uniquely human property that separates our species from all the others at once? Which animals (human and non-human) fall under the heading of the word chose, and when, if ever, were creatures such as fish named by Adam?

Once these sorts of questions need to be raised, the scene of the rational-discursive faculty’s theoretical supremacy becomes, at the very same time, the scene of its productive failure. Down one interpretive path through the biblical text, encouraged by the general structure of the narrative and affirmed by anthropocentric readings like that of Augustine, humanity becomes cast as the species whose speech/reason distinguishes it from the non-human animals being named in a decisive manner; for the human, the boundary between rational speech and species identity would be a transparent and unproblematic one, with relationships of species crossing over naturally into words invented by Adam under God’s supervision. But another interpretive path, which emerges as a local effect of the scene’s diction in medieval Latin and French translations, leads to the opposite network of conclusions: Human translators seem to struggle to assign words to the genera of non-human animals present at the scene, as well as to give clear discursive shape to the underlying relationship between the human namer and the non-human named. This path suggests a more porous boundary between the human exercise of speech/reason and the mute irrationality of the other creatures, with the point of contact between speech and species identity becoming marked by opacity, difficulty, and the need for active interpretation on the part of readers. And yet, as I argue throughout this book, it is precisely the need for continual (re)interpretation that makes this second, more frustrated interpretive path through texts like Adam’s naming of the non-human animals so paradoxically productive as a site of theorization into the relationship between reason, speech, and species identity. Within the tangled web of compromises, inconsistencies, and provisional solutions through which species was spoken at a local level in medieval texts, human identity through speech/reason held the potential to transform from a concept fabricated in advance into a dilemma sustained and reactivated from verse to verse, translation to translation, and animal to animal; visions of humanity as the speaking species could become eclipsed, challenged, and pushed toward unexpected developments by the very acts of “speaking species” on which they depended for their realization.

A Compromised Vocabulary

As the textual history of Adam’s naming of the non-human animals illustrates, medieval authors came up against two interlocking difficulties in their efforts to explore the relationship between speech, reason, and species identity in words of their own. The first was theoretical in character and corresponded to the species side of the equation. Because the human stands as one of the animal species while simultaneously appearing as unique with respect to the others – a problem memorably expressed by Pierre-Olivier Dittmar as “the human is an animal, the human is not an animal”³⁶ – every aspect of the human person, including speech/reason, can appear as either distinctive of humanity or shared by degrees with other animals depending on the angle by which it is considered. The second dilemma was practical in character and corresponded to the concrete use of speech (a term I use to refer to the expressive deployment of the rational-discursive faculty, whether in an oral or written form).³⁷ In texts that explored the concept of speech/reason, human speech became overburdened by the need to play the role of both the object under scrutiny and the concrete means of its own examination. The problem is that, to borrow a phrase from Jacques Lacan, “there is no metalanguage that can be spoken” (“il n’y a pas de métalangage qui puisse être parlé”)³⁸ – no way of speaking about speech without becoming caught up in the impasses and limitations that structure the field of speech itself. In medieval texts that activated both of these difficulties at once by investigating how speech/reason fits within classificatory schemes of species difference, the right conditions took shape for each side to put pressure on the other in a kind of circular motion: On the side of species, ideas about human identity came under pressure from the difficulty of finding the right conceptual place for the rational-discursive faculty; on the side of speech, discursive representations of species difference came under pressure from the need to give stable lexical shape to a human/animal identity that was both inherently elusive and informed by the theoretical place accorded to speech itself. The interplay between these theoretical and practical difficulties can be observed in the compromised resources of the medieval lexicon of species difference, which this section now explores.

Animals, Speech and Reason in the Middle Ages

This book’s investigation builds upon the contributions of many others that have come before.

Research on medieval animals from an animal studies perspective was arguably pioneered by Joyce Salisbury’s wide-ranging monograph The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (1994), which asserted that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “the paradigm of species was breaking down”; across a wide array of cultural contexts, a heightened attentiveness to the resemblance between human and non-human species, together with an increased openness to the idea that the category of humanity is contingent rather than immutable, can be observed.⁶⁸ Although my own focus on the rational-discursive faculty has led me to different conclusions on some of these points (see especially Chapter 2’s discussion of the conceptual hardening that took place within medieval Christian discourse), Salisbury’s project was truly groundbreaking in its adoption of an interdisciplinary, cross-genre approach to the question of non-human animals and their representation in the Middle Ages, and it continues to remain a valuable reference for work in this field.

Beginning in 2011, the topic has seen a resurgence of interest among scholars who have drawn attention to different particular aspects of the problem of the medieval non-human. Karl Steel has explored how “acts of violence” and the “differential allocation of care … are central to distinguishing humans from animals and indeed to creating the opposing categories of human and animal”;⁶⁹ his follow-up to this work rounds out the violence-centered approach by giving voice to “nonsystematic animal thinking.”⁷⁰ Susan Crane has directed her attention to “encounters”: “cross-species contacts and thoughts about contact,”⁷¹ as seen for example in hunting rituals, knighthood, and the practice of falconry. My approach in this book resembles Steel’s in that I take interest in how the theory of human dominion over the non-human comes to be constructed; like Crane, I study several forms of interspecies encounter (in particular, imagined scenes of dialogue between human and non-human animals).

Within the context of this renewal of interest in questions of medieval animality, skin and the voice have emerged as especially fruitful theoretical sites. Drawing on the psychoanalytic thought of Didier Anzieu, Sarah Kay has used manuscripts of the medieval bestiary tradition as a way to “sketch a speculative phenomenology of the parchment book,” founded on the provocative possibility of “suture between content, reader, and page.”⁷² Peggy McCracken has used skin as a way of unpacking how the representation of non-human animals becomes caught up in questions of sovereignty: “literary representations of encounters between animals and humans figure an interrogation of the forms of legitimate dominion and sovereignty over others, both human dominion over nonhuman animals and the power of some humans over others.”⁷³ Most recently, Eliza Zingesser and Liam Lewis have approached the question of non-human animal representation in medieval texts through the lens of sound and the voice. In articles published in 2017 and 2020, Zingesser explores the relationship between medieval poetic and rhetorical techniques, on the one hand, and avian vocalization, on the other.⁷⁴ Lewis, for his part, investigates how “[a]nimal soundscapes, and the meanings they generate, offer ways of navigating networks of relation that exist between human and non-human animals” in Anglo-Norman texts.⁷⁵ Despite their different areas of focus, what these treatments have in common is that they tackle questions of human and non-human animal identity in medieval texts by probing at aspects of anatomy and sensory experience – skin, sound, and voice – that trouble conceptions of human exceptionalism because they occupy a zone of overlap between human and non-human animals. Like Kay, I explore how “reading can be subject to contingent interference from the look and feel of the [manuscript] page itself,”⁷⁶ particularly in Part II; a separate article of Kay’s on the medieval vocabulary of species difference, produced in the years leading up to the publication of Animal Skins, has also significantly influenced my approach.⁷⁷ Like Zingesser and Lewis, I take interest in how acts of vocal expression can both produce and subvert relationships of species difference in medieval texts.

Building upon these studies, my own work examines how representations of species difference and identity in medieval thought and literature interfaced with one concept in particular: the rational-discursive faculty. In certain respects, the theoretical challenges raised by this concept resemble those of skin and voice. Like skin, rational thought and expression can be used to uncover a zone of indeterminacy along boundaries of species difference (many non-human animal behaviors and modes of expression seem to be rational in the human sense, or at least nearly so); also like skin, the concept of speech/reason raises self-reflexive questions in the context of literary production (just as medieval texts were written down on parchments of skin, they were composed within the field of speech). The rational-discursive faculty also requires one to grapple with questions that overlap with those of the voice, since in its particular manifestation as oral expression, speech quite literally emerges from the voice’s use. However, the faculty of speech/reason also diverges from that of the voice in that oral expression is only one possible manifestation of its functioning; the questions of written, and indeed internal, discourse must also be considered. Speech/reason differs from both skin and the voice, moreover, in that pre-modern authorities who take an interest in this faculty typically frame it as a point of differentiation, rather than overlap, between human and non-human animals. While it can raise thorny questions of species identity when considered in its finer points, the general concept of speech/reason makes regular appearances in discourses foregrounding human exceptionalism, as can be seen in the biblical tale of Adam’s naming act and Augustine’s commentary on its meaning.

Different facets of the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity in the Middle Ages have been compellingly analyzed in several of the interdisciplinary literary studies discussed thus far, as well as in recent work of Virginie Greene, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Liam Lewis, and Karl Steel.⁷⁸ Alison Langdon edited an important volume published in 2018 on the topic of interspecies communication in the Middle Ages, uniting essays on topics ranging from the romances of Chrétien de Troyes to late medieval veterinary manuals.⁷⁹ Critical analyses of Aesopian fables and fable-influenced texts like the Roman de Renart, too, have directed attention to the relationship between speech and species; since the depiction of non-human animal speech in these genres is clearly not to make an assertion about the actual cognitive capacity of non-human animals to speak in human words, however, scholarly treatments of these traditions typically prioritize the question of evolving genres and the fable form’s internal signifying structure over that of the rational-discursive faculty per se.⁸⁰ It is outside the field of literature altogether, in studies that focus on works of philosophy and theology, that the relationship between speech/reason and species identity has received its most thorough and in-depth treatments. An abundant bibliography exists at the murky intersection of non-human animals and the rational faculty in premodern philosophical discourse, with important contributions from scholars such as Umberto Eco, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Anselm Oelze, Richard Sorabji, and Ian P. Wei.⁸¹

The present study aims to contribute to the existing critical literature around reason, speech, and species identity in two principal ways, the first of which relates to focus and scope. No book-length treatment to date has isolated the question of the rational-discursive faculty’s relation to species identity in the Middle Ages and adopted a transversal, interdisciplinary approach to its examination. The benefit of approaching this question as a continually evolving discourse that extended beyond the confines of any single cultural context (philosophy/theology, fable, romance, allegory, naturalistic writing, etc.) is that doing so permits one to cut across the lines of different literary and non-literary genres, exploring how they each contributed to the collective thinking on the relationship between speech/reason and species identity in their own unique ways, and frequently in dialogue with one another. In this respect, my methodology resembles that of John Heath in The Talking Greeks, which tracks the representation of the rational-discursive faculty through the works of Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus, but with a focus on the literature and thought of the Middle Ages rather than those of Ancient Greece.⁸² The second principal contribution of the present volume lies in the assertion of a productive entanglement between theories of speech/reason, on the one hand, and the local speech of individual authors, translators, and scribes on the other. Taking my cue from the close association between reason and speech in the medieval imagination, my central contention in this book is that the conceptual relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity cannot be considered apart from the messy particulars of authorial and scribal speech, where such ideas were immediately put to the test as a practical exercise for the rational mind. To this end, I have sought to balance a global exploration of concepts and their development with fine-grained, local investigations into authors’ speech as the field within which the concept of speech/reason came together – and also came apart – in distinctive configurations from genre to genre, work to work, and handwritten text to handwritten text.

With important exceptions, my primary literary works of interest are those which were composed in French, Latin, and Occitan between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries in the approximate territory of modern France and, to a lesser extent, francophone England. This focus reflects a remarkable characteristic of the literary landscape that took shape within these cultural contexts, which is that they saw literary traditions in which non-human animals were imagined as having the power to speak rising to a level of popularity and cultural prestige never before seen.⁸³ In order to account for the various ways in which these works could simultaneously affirm and challenge theories of human exceptionalism through their theoretical and practical deployment of speech/reason, I put these texts into dialogue with a wide array of other, non-literary works, mostly composed in Latin, that influenced the intellectual zeitgeist of the relevant periods in a meaningful way: works of theology, Aristotelian logical treatises, encyclopedias, homilies, cosmological allegories, and more.

Part I, “Theories of Speech and Species,” approaches the relationship between speech/reason and species identity in medieval texts from the side of authorial speech, using the diction of popular literary sources as a way of thinking through the learned, Latin philosophical and theological discourse around similar questions (and vice versa). In Part II, “Speech and Species on the Page,” I shift the frame of my focus from authorial activity to scribal activity, examining fine-grained details about how the relationship between reason, speech, and species was actually written down in the medieval manuscripts through which the works under discussion have survived. These final chapters employ an experimental, interdisciplinary methodology to demonstrate that when scribes copied out literary texts that explored this relationship, their efforts to “speak species” were marked by the same sorts of productive breakdowns that authors encountered. Through ambiguous punctuation, the inking of letters that seem to hesitate between forms, and “slips of the pen,” the texts they transcribed brought the latent tensions that animated these literary works to the fore.

In Chapter 1 (“The Hellenic Inheritance”), I explore the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. I argue that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced the comparatively hardline position that humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures such as parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del Papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

Chapter 2 (“Talking Beasts, Theological Authorities”) examines ideas pertaining to the rational-discursive faculty and species difference that took shape within the discourses of medieval Judaism and Christianity. The chapter’s first part centers on two non-human animals described as speaking in the text of the Hebrew Bible: the serpent of the Garden of Eden and Balaam’s she-donkey. I argue that whereas works of serious exegesis by authors like Augustine and Maimonides downplayed the potentially radical significance of the talking done by these scriptural creatures, the medieval literary reimaginings of the same scenes indulged in drawing out the unorthodox implications of the non-human chatter. The chapter’s second section then considers Christian attitudes toward the naturalistic question of whether non-human animals outside the Bible actually do possess the rational-discursive faculty in some measure. Here, a clear progression can be observed over time: Despite the willingness of some early authors to humor this possibility, non-human animals gradually became barred from all conceptual access to rational thought.

Chapter 3 (“True Lies of the Medieval Fable”) investigates the growth of medieval literary traditions descended from Aesop’s fables, which differed from their late antique predecessors in that they increased the proportion of non-human characters featured in their collections and amplified the prominence of non-human speech in the texts themselves. I argue that these developments contributed to a shift in the relationship between truth and fable, which had traditionally been antithetical: A “fable” was a synonym for a lie, since fables imagined scenes of beastly speech that could not happen in reality; to arrive at useful knowledge, readers were enjoined to ignore all the non-human chattering and focus on the morals. In these new literary works, the source of knowledge shifted to a point within the very field of non-human speech, with the speaking beast becoming a detour by which the most convoluted paradoxes of species identity could be explored in words.

In Chapter 4 (“Human/Animal Speech”), I examine the ways in which speech could become entangled with non-human orders of identity in medieval texts, at once as a theoretical concept and as a concrete effect of scribal mise en texte. The first section considers encyclopedic and literary works that imagined human speech as something other than the natural possession of humanity, situating this power within a complex coordination between the human, the bestial, and the divine. In the second section, I use these ideas at the margins of the medieval discourse on the rational-discursive faculty as a lens to interpret the effects of punctuation in medieval manuscripts containing works of beast literature, arguing that the right conditions came together in these codices for an analogous entanglement of human and non-human meanings to arise as a literal effect in the course of reading. The identities and utterances of speakers of different species could blur together on the page, highlighting ambiguities in the relationship between speech and species identity that were encoded into the composition of the works themselves.

Chapter 5 (“Blottings on the Book of Nature”) explores the outer limits of the Book of Nature: the medieval concept that the world is meant to be read and interpreted by humans in the manner of a book. Authors who invoked the Book of Nature presented the act of metaphorically “reading” the natural world as a way of shoring up human identity against its conceptual outside, with non-human animals imagined as letters inked onto the world’s pages. Drawing on a corpus of allegorical, encyclopedic, and literary texts, I argue that this image was also haunted by a more subversive possibility: that species identity could become as confusing as a real medieval handwritten text, full of blottings and ill-formed letters that threaten to leave the relationship between speech and species in a state of irresolution. Like written letters, non-human animals could produce meanings in the human mind – but also like letters, they could just as easily descend back into their latent status as meaningless shapes.

In Chapter 6 (“Errors and Errancy”), I consider the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. I use this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. I argue that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?