Karl Steel

How to Make a Human

Abstract Derridas late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourses characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain.

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: “The Former Age” With Dindimus

“The Former Age” originates in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, Meter 5, which praises the first, peaceful humans, who shared what little they had communally. The traditional theme, and Chaucer’s use of this material to condemn mills, the wool-dying industry, overseas trade, tyranny, and sedition—all the disorder of a world that had lost its original perfection—warrant the source studies and historical criticism of the poem’s scholarship so far.1 But by praising a vegetarian people who injure nothing, not even the soil or sea, “The Former Age” critiques not only human institutions but also, more radically, the human itself. This chapter reads “The Former Age” as one of a set of late-medieval antihumanist works about people indifferent to the hierarchical distinction between humans and nonhuman animals and even between humans and the world more generally. These works not only advocate what might be recognized as ecological thinking, but also directly envision what humans would lose if they abandoned their supremacy. None of these works, then, are simply utopian imaginations of humans just “getting along with” nonhumans and the world as a whole, but rather are unflinching accounts of the misery humans would experience if they sought to harm nothing.

Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Worcester”) surveys Worcester’s three eleventh-century cartularies and examines in detail the fragment (so far neglected) of the “Nero-Middleton” cartulary, the one most closely associated with St. Wulfstan. In their various ways of recording the past, all three texts are important testimonies to what has long been regarded as distinctive of eleventhand twelfth-century Worcester; and it is most interesting that the vernacular, so crucial for Worcester’s preservation of the past, features prominently in St Wulfstan’s cartulary. Two essays concern themselves with Emma of Normandy. Lynn Jones (“Emma’s Greek Scrine” [sic]) writes about the physical appearance and contents of the Byzantine reliquary given by Queen Emma to the New Minster, Winchester, and suggests a date for her donation. Jones erroneously uses the form scrine as if it were nominative (it is in fact the dat. sg. of the neuter noun scrin), and once even creates a nonexistent (and erroneous) plural form scrines (p. 501). A look at the context of the two attestations for scrin quoted on p. 500 would have given useful information on the meaning of the term in these attestations; and a look at Simon Keynes’s introduction (pp. 105–6) to the facsimile edition of the Liber Vitae of the New Minster (EEMF 26; a work quoted in n. 2) would have provided a solid basis for dating Emma’s donation. Catherine Karkov (“Emma: Image and Ideology”) stresses the iconography of power and virginity, and an association with the Virgin Mary in the prefatory image of the Encomium Emmae Reginae in BL Add. 33241. There is some tendency to rash generalizations, as when it is maintained (p. 513) that for Ælfric a queen was “a type of the body of the congregation of all Christian peoples.” However, in the passage quoted, Ælfric—drawing on a homily originally by Eusebius Gallicanus—is referring exclusively to an allegorical interpretation of the Queen of Sheba in her relation to King Solomon. Elaine Treharne (“The Bishop’s Book: Leofric’s Homiliary and Eleventh-Century Exeter”) reconsiders the Exeter manuscripts Cleopatra B.xiii, fols. 1–58 and Lambeth Palace 489, and the Exeter additions to Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 421, and their assumed purpose to serve as a homiliary for the personal use of Bishop Leofric. The article should have been proofread more carefully. In the final essay, John Blair (“The Dangerous Dead in Early Medieval England”) concerns himself with the written and archaeological evidence for the notion of the “undead” and the various ways of safely disposing of them in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, and (providing a rich bibliography) with situating the English evidence in a global, but especially eastern European context. As a consequence of the exceptionally large number of contributions, the essays present varying scholarly standards, but in their entirety they are an impressive testimony to the impact of Patrick Wormald’s personality and scholarship on his field and well beyond. Mechthild Gretsch University of Göttingen