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Contact zones
Fur, minerals, milk,
and other things
Edited by
Elizabeth S. Leet
Contact Zones
Elizabeth S. Leet
Editor
Contact Zones
Fur, Minerals, Milk, and Other Things
Previously published in postmedieval

Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020
Editor
Elizabeth S. Leet
Washington and Jefferson College
Washington, PA, USA
Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020
ISBN 978-3-031-19851-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material
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or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence
of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Contents
Writing companions: Toward a critical entanglement with the more-than-human world ....................... 1
Elizabeth S. Leet: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:3–11 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00158-9
Human and insect bookworms ..................................................................................................................... 11
Emma Maggie Solberg: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:12–22 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00162-z
Francis’s animal brotherhood in Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima ............................................................ 23
Brandon Alakas and Day Bulger: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020,
2022: 11:23–32 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00153-0
Reading the medieval fur experience: Peire Vidal and the poverty of Pelletiers ..................................... 33
Sarah-Grace Heller: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:33–44 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00156-x
Becoming object/becoming queen: the marital contact zone in Chrétien
de Troyes’ Erec et Enide ................................................................................................................................ 45
Elizabeth S. Leet: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
‘Do not allow an empty goblet to face the moon’: lyrical materialities in the drinking
poems of Li Bai 李白(701–762) and Du Fu 杜甫(712–770) ........................................................................ 57
Elizabeth Harper: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:57–67 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00155-y
Jahāngīrī portrait shasts: Material-discursive practices and visuality at the Mughal court .................. 69
Krista Hall Gulbransen: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:68–79 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00154-z
The hungry monk: Bernard of Clairvaux in a trans-corporeal landscape ............................................... 81
Melanie Holcomb: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11:80–90 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00157-w
‘Skin black and wrinkled’: The toxic ecology of the Sibyl’s cave.............................................................. 93
Alan S. Montroso: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
‘De aymant en dyamant’: Lexical transmutations in the works of Philippe de Mézières ......................105
Julie Singer: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11: 102–111 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00161-0
Posthumanism and the claim to rational action .........................................................................................115
Karl Steel: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2020, 2022:
11: 137–148 (07, April 2022) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00163-y
v
Editor’s Introduction
Writing companions: Toward

a critical entanglement
with the more-than-human world
Elizabeth S. Leet
Assistant Professor of French, Department of Modern Languages,
Washington & Jefferson College, Washington, PA, USA.
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 3–11.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00158-9
Lors moy, Cristine, oyant les series voix de mes tres venerables maistresses,
remplie de joye en tressaillant tost me dreçay, & agenoillee devant elles
m’offry a l’obeissance de leurs dignes vouloirs ; et adonc je receuz d’elles
tel commandement: « Prens ta plume & escrips. »
[Then I, Christine, hearing the sweet voices of my honored mistresses,
joyful and trembling, got up and knelt down in front of them, offering
myself in obedience to their worthy wishes. Then I received the following
command from them: ‘Take your pen and write.’]
1 Edited by Willard
– Le livre des trois vertus, Christine de Pizan (Boston Public Library MS and Hicks (de
1528, fol. 4r [Paris, 1405])1 Pizan, 1989, 9);
translated by
Blumenfeld-
Kosinski (de Pizan,
1997, 157).
Chapter 1 was originally published as Leet, E. S. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11: 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1057/
s41280-020-00158-9.
Reprinted from the journal 1

Leet
Wr i t i n g w i t h d o g s
Take your pen and write. This directive of the three virtues – Raison, Droicture,
and Justice [Reason, Rectitude, Justice] – to Christine de Pizan suggests that
composition requires only a writer, a writing implement, and the will to create.
It recalls spartan medieval depictions of the Evangelists, for whom divine
inspiration – plus parchment and quill – seemed sufficient to translate their
Gospels to the page. Unlike these men, however, images of Christine show a
poetess surrounded not only with the accoutrements of late medieval scribal
work but also those of contemporary nobility, femininity, and fashion
(Figure 1).
Christine’s conventional evocation of poetic inspiration by the three virtues in
Book I of Le livre des trois vertus belies the numerous miniatures that embed her
literary life within its material environs. Codices, crisp white wimples, simple
Marian blue gowns, luscious garden views framed by Gothic arches, and a tiny
dog populate at least 29 distinct manuscript illuminations that depict Christine
2 For more on de Pizan in her study.2 The above illumination clearly establishes her embodied
depictions writing praxis, with all its material entanglements, as evidence of her authority,
of Christine at
but why must it? Why surround Christine de Pizan with so much stuff in stark
work, see Bell
(2008). contradistinction to depictions of the Evangelists? How does each item in her
material entourage imbue this work environment with authorial power? Does
this miniature point symbolically to her literary authority or stage her actual
embodied writing life? Considering Christine’s supervision of this manuscript’s
Figure 1: Christine de Pizan writes in her study, accompanied by a small white dog. The illumination
precedes the incipit of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria’s 1410–1414 copy of the Cent ballades. Ó British
Library MS. Harley 4431, fol. 4r.
2 Reprinted from the journal

Writing companions: Toward a critical entanglement with the more-than-human
production, should we understand this illustration as a realistic representation of

her creative process? If so, why write with a dog?
I have often asked myself why anyone writes with a dog over the nearly 12
years during which a rat terrier runt known to most as LuLu has been my
writing (and life) companion. However she may resemble Christine’s diminutive
partner, she does not sit demurely by my side while I channel inspiration into
text. No, she burrows furiously into the lap and blankets I provide her, kneading
textile and thighs alike into submission. When they submit, as they always do,
she flops all her eight pounds down and wiggles determinedly into her desired
position, emitting a muffled groan when she succeeds (Figure 2).
While I have often smiled at her reminders of my entanglement with
subjectivities outside my own, her constant interruptions have frustrated my
work. Rather than singlehandedly provide LuLu with all the social interaction
(and, frankly, emotional support) she might need, I decided she needed a
companion.
We adopted Spanky based solely on a blurry cell phone photo on the PAWS of
Southwest Virginia website. In the photo, he stands next to the woman – here, in
blush pink dressing gown and quilted house slippers – who had days earlier
found him sniffing around her trash in a holler off Route 23. Unfortunately,
when we brought him to meet LuLu at our home in The Pound, Virginia, she
answered his goodwill with total contempt. His smell – fresh cedar mixed with
Betadine scrub from his neuter just hours before – seemed to repulse her, and it
was weeks before she accepted his presence and, still later, his friendship.
I, on the other hand, became and remain totally devoted to Spanky. I fall
asleep each night with my nose buried in his scruff, inhaling deeply until I drift
to sleep. As I write this piece, he dreams beside me, paws paddling as he relives
Figure 2: LuLu keeps vigil; I write. Ó Matthew Lockaby.

Leet
Figure 3: Spanky rests comfortably at my side; I write. Ó Matthew Lockaby.
the Appalachian squirrel hunts of his youth. Even LuLu eventually warmed to
our new companion. Her erstwhile frenemy has become her brother, and
balance is restored both in my writing praxis and among the companions who
help enact it (Figure 3).
Now I write with two companions, in peaceful coexistence and material
entanglement. Whenever I must stop, close my laptop, and leave the house, I
carry bits of their fur along with me. I deposit this evidence of LuLu and Spanky
on my route, in library books, on the office chairs of colleagues, and in hotel
rooms at academic conferences hundreds of miles away from our home. They
could no more be disentangled from my writing than from my physical
environment or my emotional life.
So, what of the tiny companion beside Christine in the Cent ballades? Did this
tiny white dog merely exemplify the courtly fashion for companion animals, or
did Christine indeed have a series of canine writing companions over her literary
career? Would Christine allow their mirthful eruptions to interrupt her writing?
Or did they, like my slumbering boy, rest easily at her side while she toiled away
at her work? Might she have relished their little dog exuberance or laughed as
she picked bits of fur from her bodice before welcoming a visitor to her home?
Did Christine cherish her pet? Which ones? How? Why?
LuLu, Spanky, and Christine de Pizan’s canine writing companion(s) speak to
the imbrication of our lives and identities with those of animals. In the Cent
ballades illumination, the dog at Christine’s feet links her with her environment,
spurring the viewer’s curiosity about the many materials, structures, and things
in her midst. Though separated by 600 years, LuLu and Spanky enact a similar
connection: all three awaken us to our embeddedness within our more-than-
human environs. Each dog inspires, in their own way, our openness to

encounters not just with animals, but with the environments, materials, and
objects that populate our world. Eschewing the general in favor of the intimate
specificity of the particular, these nonhuman agents are not types – not merely
‘dog’ or ‘companion animal’ – but individuals in dynamic, iterative relation
within networks of agency, subjectivity, and performance. In this special issue,
each contributor seeks out elements of this world: the medieval animals,
environments, materials, and objects existing in – following Jane Bennett’s
idiom – ‘vibrant’ co-presence with people (Bennett, 2010). We ask what stories
medieval literature, art, artifacts, archives, and myths tell about the contact
zones between human beings and the nonhuman agencies that influence, affirm,
and challenge human embodiment, subjectivity, and identity.
Thinking things through
The studies of entanglement in this issue find their root in the material turn
dating to the mid-1990s. Motivated by a rejection of anthropocentric criticism,
new materialist fields of inquiry like posthumanism, human-animal studies,
object-oriented ontologies, and ecomaterialism have sought to unmake rigid
Cartesian distinctions erected between humanity, on one hand, and animals,
environments, and objects, on the other. Rather than elevate the human as a
monolithic figure with monumental impacts on its environs yet impenetrable by
their reciprocal influences, new materialists and posthumanists inscribe
humanity within a web of influences generated by forces to which humanists
have long refused to attribute agency. Instead, pluralities of influence unlimited
by category, species, or type define new materialist views of identity and
community.
Over the last decade, scholars of medieval studies have taken up the mantle of
the material turn by seeking the material-semiotic entanglements that define
human identity in the global Middle Ages. A 2010 issue of Exemplaria deploys
‘thing theory’ to read premodern culture (Ingham, 2010). For Karl Steel,
violence against animals is a manifestation of medieval human exceptionalism
(Steel, 2011). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues for the primal liveliness of stone,
whose geological unboundedness underscores human ephemerality (Cohen,
2015). Julian Yates constructs a multispecies mangle in which sheep, oranges,
and yeast support and subvert human objectives (Yates, 2017). Deborah
Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti lay bare the social, religious,
economic, political, and cultural impacts of everyday and extravagant objects
from the postclassical period (Deliyannis, et al., 2019). These texts explore how
people use animals, materials, and objects to serve their own objectives.
Building on this work, ‘Contact Zones: Fur, Minerals, Milk, and Other
Things’ explores the possibility of reciprocal entanglement and influence
between people and the more-than-human world. The essays in this issue

Leet
examine individual objects, animals, and environments that possess agency and
wield immense identitary capital. Here, the stuff so often considered peripheral
to human existence comes to influence and even converge with the bodies of
medieval people. This issue moves out from flesh and inward from environments
to interrogate how the items that accompany, enhance, protect, or hide human
bodies constitute human identity. Inspired by new materialist modes of critique,
these essays take up three of its critical touchstones to read the more-than-
human agents that become inextricably linked with notions of medieval human
identity: Donna Haraway’s contact zones, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and
Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality.
Haraway builds interspecies contact zones upon the intercultural contact
zones established by Mary Louise Pratt, for whom they signify the ‘social spaces
where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of
highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their
aftermaths’ (Pratt, 1991, 34). Haraway uncovers new meeting, clashing, and
grappling while training for canine agility competitions. Unlike Pratt’s socio-
economic power differentials, contact zones between humans and dogs in
training reside in their shared language and in the ‘flesh of [their] world making
entanglements’ (Haraway, 2007, 4). Trainer and pupil communicate across their
difference, not as ‘autopoietic wholes,’ but as subjects shaped by their co-
becoming, as ‘sticky dynamic openings and closures in finite, mortal, world-
making, ontological play’ (Haraway, 2007, 88). The iterative becoming inherent
in these material-semiotic partnerships expands the borders of subjectivity and
endows contact zones with an ethical engagement in which trust and respect
thrive.
Barad likewise tackles the perennial question of how matter comes to matter,
how the intra-action of bodies with disparate power comes to wield world-
making potential. ‘Agential realism’ is Barad’s answer. This onto-epistemolog-
ical framework establishes the performative web of forces and practices through
which our world comes into being and meaning in an intra-active flurry of
ontologically inseparable agents (Barad, 2007, 127). Her post-structuralist
performativity prioritizes not the simulacrum of the real (chased by represen-
tationalists) but the multifactorial, material-discursive practices (‘apparatuses’)
by which subjects and objects alike intra-act, come into being/meaning, and
iteratively produce representations of themselves. Indeed, matter’s dynamism
guides Barad to establish agency not as an attribute of matter but as the process
of open-ended becoming through which material-discursive exchanges bring
meaning into the world. Nor do Baradian agencies reproduce the anthropocen-
tric limitations of much technoscientific critique. On the contrary, the intra-
actions between human, nonhuman, technical, natural, cultural forces endow
each with the ethical responsibility to ‘[take] account of the entangled
phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and [be] responsive to the
possibilities that might help us and it flourish’ (Barad, 2007, 396).

By asserting the inseparability of human bodies from the infinite agencies of

the more-than-human world, Alaimo redirects new materialism toward the
question of human embodiment and identity. Yet rather than reprise the
anthropocentrism against which new materialists and posthumanists define their
work, her ‘trans-corporeality’ overthrows any notion of human determinacy.
Like Barad and Haraway, Alaimo uses ‘the often unpredictable and unwanted
actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical
agents, and other actors’ as inspiration for ‘more capacious epistemologies’
(Alaimo, 2010, 2). Indeed, if ‘‘‘the environment’’ is not located somewhere out
there, but is always the very substance of ourselves’ (Alaimo, 2010, 4), the
entwined fates of humanity and nature make our political engagement on behalf
of both an ethical imperative.
Consider LuLu, who fills our writerly contact zone with embodied semes,
whining at and nudging me for attention even as I type these lines. Recall the
PAWS of Southwest Virginia volunteer who, by photographing Spanky, co-
created an apparatus in which our desire to support animal welfare, the Silicon
Valley-produced smartphone, and Spanky’s stocky, opinionated namesake on
‘Our Gang’ and ‘The Little Rascals’ from 1931 to 1942 intra-act and produce
the phenomenon of his image and its meaning. Imagine the allergenic trespass I
facilitate when my clothing transports their dander to every public or private
space I enter.3 The tangled amity and enmity of such interconnectedness points 3 I nod here to
to what Timothy Morton calls the ‘strange strangers’ that proliferate in the Alaimo’s ‘chemical
trespass,’ which
enmeshed environments he names ‘dark ecologies’ (Morton, 2010, 15–8). When
points to the
Morton asks, ‘Is the strange stranger a person? What is a person? Are we porosity of human
people?’ (Morton, 2010, 60, italics mine), he challenges us to see the strangeness bodies to (toxic)
that surrounds us not as separate from us, but within us, for even ‘[p]ersonhood chemicals in our
environment
is strange strangeness’ (Morton, 2010, 70). In this special issue, entanglement
(2010, 83).
with strange strangers through contact zones, intra-active becomings, or trans-
corporeal relationships is part and parcel of humanity.
While each essay imagines its strange strangers in distinct relation to human
embodiment and identity, their intertextual references forge new resonances
between and across disparate objects, animals, and environments. Both Melanie
Holcomb and Julie Singer, for example, call upon the stella maris to imagine
material relationships. For Holcomb it is a hymn on the lips of Bernard of
Clairvaux, who exults in the intra-active maternal nourishment he receives from
a lactating statue of the Virgin Mother. For Singer, the stella maris recalls the
metal magnetism of a compass that ‘will revive past Christian comity.’ Others
find evidence of liminality in objects: the wine cups that deliver oblivion to
Chinese poets for Elizabeth Harper, furs whose workers bring the drowned back
from death for Sarah-Grace Heller, and Mughal shasts that convey imperial
power even to wearers of lower castes for Krista Gulbranson. These objects shift
human consciousness, foil death, and raise social capital by their presence on
bodies. Finally, subjectivity interjects throughout the issue – a fact befitting its

Leet
inspiration from Haraway’s interspecies contact zones – to remind us of the

semes produced by material enmeshments. Pastoral relationships between St
Francis and animals in Brandon Alakas and Day Bulger’s essay reject any
hagiographic thaumaturgy that associates his control over nature with divinely
vested authority, while the rumination of codicological material by bookworms
in Emma Maggie Solberg’s essay mirrors the reading praxis of the monks and
bibliophiles who likewise inhabit libraries. In Alan Montroso’s essay and my
own, women’s subjectivity transgresses material and social convention. For
Montroso, the toxic cave ecology of Sybil of Cumae brings her racialized
embodiment into conversation with her verbal authority. In my essay, a
husband’s increasing incapacity (objectness) obliges his wife to speak and act to
restore him to chivalric wholeness. Together, the essays offer disanthropocentric
readings of materiality that center the more-than-human agencies that impact
human identities and embodiments across the medieval world.
Most broadly, ‘Contact Zones: Fur, Minerals, Milk, and Other Things’ offers
strategies for writing the companions of our humanity. Just as the issue entails
contact zones between scholars working across languages, periods, regions, and
disciplines, we each envision contact zones between materials, bodies, and
identities as multidirectional agentic exchanges that define and enact material-
semiotic entanglements. Even as the Anthropocene grinds on, this issue rejects
the singular substantive of ‘the human,’ that unitary, universal individual, whole
in and of itself. Instead, these essays center human interconnectedness with the
companions that populate our environs, our stories, and our past. By thinking
things through, by understanding stuff in dynamic relations of dependency on,
challenge to, and care for human life, by imagining a humanity not just
embedded within but constituted by its more-than-human surroundings, we do
more than honor the companions upon whom our species relies: we become
companions ourselves.
About the Author
Elizabeth S. Leet is Assistant Professor of French at Washington & Jefferson

College. She has published on medieval horsemanship, Breton lays, ecocriticism,
and neomedievalisms. Her current book, Cavalières: Horsemanship, Speech,
and Gender in Medieval French and English Literature (in progress), examines
the intersection between gender identity and chivalric praxis (Email:
eleet@fandm.edu).

References
Alaimo, S. 2010. Bodily Matters: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Blooming-
ton, IN: Indiana University Press.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bell, S.G. 2008. Christine de Pizan in her study. Cahiers de recherches médiévales et
humanistes: Études christiniennes. http://journals.openedition.org/crm/3212.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Cohen, J.J. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
de Pizan, Christine. 1405. Le livre des trois vertus. Boston Public Library MS 1528. https://
archive.org/details/lelivredestroisv00chri/page/n13.
de Pizan, Christine. 1410–1414. Cent ballades. British Library MS Harley 4431. https://
www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8361&CollID=
8&NStart=4431.
de Pizan, Christine. 1989. Le livre des trois vertus: Édition critique, ed. C.C. Willard and E.
Hicks. Paris, France: Honoré Champion.
de Pizan, Christine. 1997. The Book of the Three Virtues. In The Selected Writings of
Christine de Pizan, ed. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and K. Brownlee, trans. R. Blumenfeld-
Kosinski. New York: W.W. Norton.
Deliyannis, D., H. Dey, and P. Squatriti. 2019. Fifty Early Medieval Things: Materials of
Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Haraway, D.J. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Ingham, P.C. 2010. Introductory Note: Premodern Things. Exemplaria 22(2): 97–98.
Morton, T. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pratt, M.L. 1991. Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession: 33–40.
Steel, K. 2011. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Yates, J. 2017. Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Article
Human and insect bookworms
Emma Maggie Solberg

Department of English, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA.
Abstract This article attempts to rethink what conservationists have seen as the
damage done to manuscripts by insects from the insects’ perspective. We have learned
so much in recent years about the agency of the ruminants whose skins make up the
leaves of medieval manuscripts, but we have yet to hear much from the bookworm.
Small wonder: the cow gives its skin for the conservation of texts, while the book-
worm, the natural enemy of the librarian, steals our words like a ‘þeof in þystro’ [‘a
thief in the dark’], in the words of the Exeter riddle. This article reconsiders this
ancient rivalry between human and insect bookworms as a mutually constitutive
partnership, and even as a co-authorship of the text or, in Barad’s words, an
entanglement.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00162-z
A riddle in the tenth-century Exeter Book quips that a bookworm (moððe,

wyrm) may swallow words, but cannot read. Unlike a good monk, who learns
from the text he digests, an insect learns nothing from what it (or rather ‘he,’ as
the riddle specifies) consumes; he is not a whit wiser [‘ne wæs / wihte þȳ
glēawra’] after his meal (Muir, 2000, 1.320). His body digests the letter of the
word, but his little bug-brain cannot comprehend its higher spiritual meaning.
This riddle reworks an aenigma attributed to Symphosius that makes similar
points and puns: literature feeds the illiterate tinea [moth, worm], and yet, like a
bad student, he never makes any intellectual progress (Symphosius, 2014, 41).
The moral seems clear: ‘The dumb bug,’ as Martin Foys puts it, ‘resides below
the human, in a darkness of ignorance’ (Foys, 2018, 115). We can read, write,
Chapter 2 was originally published as Solberg, E. M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11: 12–22. https://doi.org/
10.1057/s41280-020-00162-z.

and learn, and he cannot; books, therefore, belong to us, and not to him – he has
no rightful place in the library. He is a thief in the dark [‘þeof in þystro’], a
stealing-guest [‘stælgiest’] (Muir 2000, 1.320), or ‘thievish stranger’ (Clark-Hall,
1960, 317). Books are ours, not his. Or so we would like to believe. The long
history of the book tells another story – about cohabitation, companionship,
and professional rivalry between human and non-human bookworms.
In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces us to the
brittlestar, a brainless and eyeless cousin of the starfish that sees with its
skeleton – ingenious bioengineering that has inspired recent advances in the
design of the micro-patterned lenses used in telecommunications networks.
Biomimetics, Barad explains, is the ‘use of nature as inspiration’ for innovation,
not ‘merely’ as a ‘tool,’ but also as our ‘partner,’ and, most importantly for her
purposes, as ‘living testimony’ (Barad, 2007, 380–3). For Barad, these crawling
eyes embody her theory of entanglement: ‘Brittlestars literally enact my agential
realist ontoepistemological point about the entangled processes of knowing and
being’ (Barad, 2007, 379).
Although Barad hails biomimicry as the way of the future, it is also the way of
the past. We have, of course, always imitated animals. As Barad herself points
out, the Wright brothers learned about drag and lift from birds, as, we might
add, did Leonardo da Vinci (Vincent, 2006, 471). Just as the bristles of the
burdock plant schooled the inventor of Velcro in the art of adhesion and the
kingfisher tutored the engineer of the Shinkansen in aerodynamics, fish taught
Roman armorers how to overlap scales (Ehrlich, 2015, 238) and trees taught the
architects of the Gothic cathedral how to make vaults fan and buttresses fly
(Aziz and El sherif, 2016, 709–10). What can the concept of biomimicry teach
us about the history of the book?
Biomimicry materializes metaphors. First, the engineer constructs a concep-
tual analogy by comparing the non-human to the man-made and ascribing the
attributes of vehicle to tenor: the nanotechnician suddenly realizes that the
crystalline skeleton of the brittlestar (tenor) resembles a kind of fantastical
camera (vehicle). Then the engineer literally constructs that analogy (and
reverses tenor and vehicle) by building a camera that takes on the attributes of
the brittlestar. The biomimetic metaphor, as Barad puts it, ‘takes on a strikingly
material form’ (Barad, 2007, 371). Writers have long constructed biomimetic
metaphors about the craft of poetry. Horace, for instance, claimed to have
learned the art of imitatio from bees, sucking the nectar of poetry from groves of
thyme and regurgitating honeyed verses (Horace, 2004, 222–3). Bede claimed
that Cædmon, the first English poet, had learned how to compose verse by
watching cows chew cud (Colgrave and Mynors, 1969, 419). In Bede’s words,
‘quasi mundum animal ruminando, in carmen dulcissimum convertebat’
(Colgrave and Mynors, 1969, 418), or, in Old English, ‘swa swa clæne neten

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eodorcende in þæt sweteste leoð gehwerfde’ (Miller, 1891, 346) – ‘like some
1 Thanks to recent
advances in clean beast chewing the cud, he turned it into the most melodious verse’
proteomic and (Colgrave and Mynors, 1969, 419).
genomic analysis, Metaphors like these tick several biomimetic boxes: Horace and Cædmon
we now know how claim to use nature as tool, partner, and inspiration. While the bee could not
many and (to a
certain extent)
teach Horace how to excrete literal honey-poetry nor the cow teach Cædmon
which animals (in how to literally mind-chew idea-cuds, the bee inspired the poet to imitate and
terms of species, the monk to ruminate; the poet and the bee cohabitate in gardens, and the
breed, and gender) Christian shepherd has long shared figurative and literal pastures with flocks of
gave their hides to
which codices: for
both quadrupeds and bipeds; beekeepers and farmers use the bee and the cow as
example, we know tools in the production of honey, beeswax, dairy, beef, and rawhide. Further-
that 216 animals more, the cow not only fed and clothed his human companions, but also became
gave their hides to the vellum on which they wrote.1 As so much recent scholarship has
the fourteenth-
demonstrated, scribes did not write on but rather in partnership with their
century Messale
Rosselli, 41% skins (Kay, 2017, 58).
calves and 59% For all these many reasons, our fascination with the animal in the archive has
goats (Calà, 2019, focused on the ruminant. Small wonder. These animals have given us so much –
723–4).
their milk, meat, and skins. Their sacrifice resonates, now as in the Middle Ages,
2 Here, my take with the martyrdom of the Paschal Lamb (Holsinger, 2009, 621). But let us
differs from that of
leave the long-suffering cow, and return to our much less tractable companion:
Zeb Tortorici,
who emphasizes the bookworm.2 If the cow has been our victim, then the bookworm has been
the battles lost by our match, rival, and frenemy. Unlike the dead skin of a cow, a quick
insects in the bookworm makes its own active choices in the archive – not in service of our
archive, which needs, but rather for its own ends. We can try (and have tried, and still try) to
have indeed been
many: ‘Pests,’ he
stop them, but (as has been the case in our many campaigns against insects until
stresses, ‘are killed quite recently) we have found ourselves grossly outnumbered and outmaneu-
within the vered.3 We might imagine that our libraries and museums belong to us, but that
documents, for the is a matter of perspective. Recent advancements in ‘Integrated Pest Manage-
documents, and by
the documents’
ment’ have demonstrated that resident populations of insects quietly thrive in
(Tortorici, 2015, our archives, living on our hair and skin and in lint behind walls and under
84). floorboards, dead spaces from which, occasionally, they raid bookshelves and
display cases, only then becoming visible to us (Pinniger, 2010, 239). But they
3 On the recent,
alarming decline are always there. Bookworms live in the archive; we just visit. By all rights,
of insect books belong to them more than they do to us.
populations, see Before going any further, I should pause and clarify an important point: there
Hallmann, et al.
is no such thing as a bookworm, not technically speaking. ‘Bookworm’ is an
(2017).
umbrella term used to describe any insect that marks a book. The word ‘worm,’
in this sense, retains some of its medieval capacity to mean more than an annelid
of the genus Lumbricus (earthworms). Medieval texts use a broad set of terms to
refer to insects that mark books, including, in Latin, tinea (which can mean
moth, beetle, caterpillar, or tapeworm), and in Old and Middle English, wyrm
or worm (which can mean dragon, snake, mouse, or insect) (Barney, 1977, 69).
Inheriting this imprecision, the modern word ‘bookworm’ identifies by action,

not phenotype. If a cockroach nibbles on the corner of a book, then it becomes a

bookworm. Aristotle described the bookworm as a tailless scorpion with claws
(Aristotle, 1970, 56–7, 214–5); Robert Hooke (1635–1703) as a kind of
silverfish (Hooke, 1665, 208). The entomologist Harry Weiss (1883–1972)
identifies more than a dozen species as bookworms, including roaches, moths,
termites, and beetles.
These various bookworms make their various marks in books for various
reasons. Some crave the paste in binding, while others like the taste of cotton,
leather, or wood. Some eat the acid applied for the absorption of ink, others the
mold grown by damp. For scavengers, books function like spider-webs,
convenient stores of corpses. For mothers, books function as nests or burrows
– safe places to lay eggs and raise larvae. In the forest, these insects decompose
deadwood, let sunlight through the canopy, and clear ground for new growth. In
warehouses and archives, however, they turn artifacts into habitats and profits
into losses.
Allow me to introduce one bookworm in particular (Figure 1).
Classified by Linnaeus as Sitodrepa panacea (order: Coleoptera, subfamily:
Anobiidae, genus: Stegobium, species: S. paniceum), this bookworm goes by
many names: drugstore beetle, biscuit beetle, bread beetle, Vrillette du pain,
Brodkäfer. The medieval habit of referring to this beetle as both a worm and a
moth makes a kind of sense: Sitodrepa panacea begins as a larva and
metamorphoses into an insect with wings. As its many titles suggest, this bug
is our old companion: we call it by the names of the spaces and foodstuffs we
share. This omnivorous insect eats everything we store: flour, cereal, chocolate,
coffee, tobacco, pepper, poisons (wormwood, aconite, belladonna), cork, tin
foil, sheet lead – ‘anything,’ in short, ‘except cast iron’ (Howard and Marlatt,
Figure 1: Illustration of Sitodrepa panacea from Howard and Marlatt, Principal Household Insects of
the United States (1896), 124.

Solberg
4 In the past, 1896, 124–5).4 Sitodrepa panacea is also partial to books. Indeed, the
librarians entomologist Constant Houlbert (1857–1947) claims that this specific insect is
attempted to deter
‘the most dangerous of all’; he estimates that they have caused 80 percent of the
Sitodrepa panacea
with ‘a little fine damage done to the bindings of old codices. Despite himself, Houlbert cannot
pepper sprinkled help but admire this worthy opponent: ‘A tout seigneur, tout honneur!’ [‘Honor
on the shelves’ where honor is due!’] (Houlbert, 1903, 28).
(Iiams, 1932, 376).
Houlbert is far from alone in his admiration. Historically, men of letters
Inadvertently, they
were only spicing seemed to have had a habit of falling in love with the bookworms living in their
the bookworm’s libraries. Robert Hooke lovingly describes every scale and bristle of the ‘small,
meal. white, silver-shining’ bookworm under his microscope, admiring the lumines-
cence of its ‘perfect pearl-color’ (Hooke, 1665, 208–10). Nineteenth- and
twentieth-century bibliophiles took this admiration to the next level: men in the
book-trade traded in bookworms, collecting catalogs of live insects and feeding
them with bits of old books. They visited each other’s collections, commissioned
paintings from local artists of their beloved pets, and wrote each other letters
about the nutritional benefits of antique hog-skin binding as opposed to modern
paper (Bowden, 1885, 163). In these correspondences, they use truly remarkable
adjectives to describe their pet bookworms’ bodies: ‘fine,’ ‘soft,’ and ‘glistening’
(Osler, 1917, 356); ‘perfect,’ ‘creamy,’ and ‘plump’ (Bowden, 1885, 162). But I
digress.
We have all seen the tell-tale marks that Sitodrepa panacea leaves behind,
traces ranging from ‘a few circular holes in a few pages to numerous circular
holes and longitudinal channels throughout the covers and pages’ (Weiss, 1937,
9). The literature on Sitodrepa panacea tends to feature strangely beautiful
descriptions of the ‘ravages’ wrought by this bug. The entomologist William
Reinicke (1879–1929) describes books ‘so bored through with holes that the
page looks like a sieve’; leaves that ‘when held up to the light, resemble pieces of
rare lace’; a codex that, ‘as you grasp it, you are covered with a miniature snow
storm of paper flakes’ (Reinicke, 1924, 574–7). However, as any librarian will
tell you, these insects are more interested in the surfaces than the depths of
books – but not because they are shallow.
As Houlbert explains, female beetles crawl along the ridges of the bookshelf
looking for ‘the most favorable locations for the evolution of their posterity’
(Houlbert, 1903, 29). She tends to choose the front or back cover; the head, tail,
or spine; or the edges and gatherings. (Perhaps these ridges resemble the barky
tissues of the tree trunks where she would lay her eggs in the forest. After all,
codex, book, descends from caudex, tree-trunk, for a reason.) When her eggs
hatch, the larvae, seeking food and shelter, burrow deeper, making pinprick-thin
tunnels. As they chew and dig, they excrete granular castings, turning wood and
parchment into dust. When the larvae are ready to fly the nest, they head for the
surface and build themselves chrysalis chambers, those cavities that we see

threaded along their tunnels near the outermost edges of the book, ‘varying in
size from a pea to a walnut’ (Reinicke, 1924, 576). Finally, the metamorphosed
beetle emerges from its book-nest and takes wing, leaving behind tunnels, nests,
holes, and that excretory dust that helps give old books their distinct sweet and
musty smell (Houlbert, 1903, 30).5 5 A survey
Humans and bookworms have cohabitated in libraries as far back as the conducted by
researchers at
written record extends; Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts complain about insects
University College
eating old codices and scrolls (Carruthers and Weiss, 1937, 22–4). Not London’s Institute
unreasonably, ancient poets often expressed concern that their works, like their for Sustainable
bodies, would all too soon make food for worms, and turn to dust. And yet Heritage found
that subjects
despite these complaints, pre-modern texts seem rather resigned to sharing the
compared the
archive with its non-human residents. Lucian called libraries ‘lodgings for smell of old books
worms’ (Lucian, 1960, 195); Isidore of Pelusium agreed: ‘Books furnish a home to that of
and nourishment to the worms, and are vanquished’ (Carruthers and Weiss, chocolate, coffee,
1937, 23) [‘Nam libri quoque tinearum patres & nutritii fiunt, cum vinciuntur’ and burnt wood
(Bembibre and
(Isidore, 1860, 267)]. It was commonly held that worms ate only neglected Strlič, 2017).
books – a just punishment for collectors more interested in display than study
and a natural death for outdated volumes. This myth is repeated by bibliophiles
from Isidore to Erasmus and through to the end of the nineteenth century:
Francis Tebbs Havergal (1829–1890), the meticulous librarian of Hereford
Cathedral, believed that insects would not infest books that were kept in use,
and so made a point of picking up, dusting, and vigorously shaking the codices
under his care once each day (Bowden, 1885, 164). (Of course, this method did
not really work.) Before the twentieth century, most librarians shrugged, and
lived with the insect in the archive. When, in 1928, the new rare-books
collection of the Huntington Library faced its first infestation of Sitodrepa
panacea, the librarian Thomas Iiams reached out to his colleagues at older
archives in Europe and was appalled to find that these ancient institutions had
no interest in the eradication of bookworms. As Iiams put it, incredulously,
these librarians claimed that ‘they were not bothered with bookworms’ (Iiams,
1932, 376). Over the centuries, humans and insect bookworms had gotten used
to each other.
During this long cohabitation, human bookworms began to identify with their
insect companions. Or more precisely: at first, certain types of bibliophiles liked
to disparage other, rival species of bibliophiles by identifying them as
bookworms. For example, an epigram attributed to Antiphanes compares
grammarians (men of letters – commentators, philologists, bibliographers,
librarians) to ‘σῆτες’ [‘bookworms’], ‘the bane of poets’ (Antiphanes, 1916–18, 6 For another
4.219–21). This epigram distinguishes between poets who create literature and epigram that
scholarly pests who parasitically feed on their genius.6 On the one hand, this compares
grammarians to
distinction depends on an opposition between bookworms and writers, an bookworms, see
assumption that insects do not make but rather unmake text with the negative Philippus (1916–
scripts excised by their mouths. Yet on the other hand, this distinction between 18, 4.218–19).

Solberg
poets and grammarians, makers and destroyers, also acknowledges that some
humans write as badly as bugs – in other words, that poets, grammarians, and
insects are all creatures of the book, all writers, differing in quality but not in
kind. Likewise, Symphosius’ aenigma and the Exeter riddle identify the
bookworm as a type of reader, albeit a bad one, comparable to a student who
‘lives in books’ but never improves (Symphosius, 2014, 92), who takes in the
words [‘wordum swealg’] but never learns (Muir, 2000, 1.320). Over time, the
identification between bookworms and the bookish became more than an insult;
now, nostalgia for the physical book has endowed the term with a complimen-
tary quality. This insect, in short, has inspired a human identity.
As the nineteenth-century book-dealer Alfred Bowden put it, ‘Much has been
written about the bookworm’ (Bowden, 1885, 161). This insect certainly
constitutes a motif if not a sub-genre of literature. Within this corpus, you have
(as we have seen) your ancient and medieval epigrams and riddles – comic genres
with a twist that imitates the double quality of the bookworm, who is (like the
punchline to a joke) both expected and surprising, familiar and strange, right
there and yet unthought-of until revealed. Satirists have valued the bookworm
for its dual capacity both to puff up and puncture the myth of textual
disembodiment, to make the bookish feel superior to their lowly rivals (human
and insect) who use books incorrectly (whether by neglecting, hoarding,
fetishizing, criticizing, misunderstanding, or literally eating and excreting them),
while also reminding us that our love of books does not make us exceptional or
transcendent.
Perhaps this satirical sting helps to explain why scholars have not made as
much of the bookworm as we have of the ruminant, despite our current
fascination with the materiality of the book. Whereas every scratch on cow-skin
has been digitized, analyzed, and celebrated (witness not only the monographs
and articles, but also the blogs, tweets, and Pinterest boards), the marks made by
bookworms have as yet received less love and attention. As far as I can tell,
scholars use wormholes for two basic purposes, each of which I will address in
turn: First, as an indicator of authenticity, and second, as evidence of infestation
– the discovery of which necessitates intervention (fumigation, desiccation,
refrigeration – in short, eradication).
To the untrained eye, wormholes confer a certain authenticity on antique
chairs, picture-frames, and books. By contrast, professional authenticators seem
intensely suspicious of wormholes – suspiciously suspicious, in fact. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, authenticators armed with magnifying
lenses accused dealers of faking wormholes with white-hot awls and auger drills
7 See Owen (2004) (Craven, 2005, 71). (They knew whereof they spoke: traditionally, the
for an account of populations of authenticators and forgers have overlapped rather extensively.)7
the collaboration
between forgers,
In one relatively recent case, magnifying lenses discovered fractures in the paint
authenticators, around the apparent wormholes of a Madonna and Child attributed to
and dealers. Botticelli, proof of a forger’s drill rather than an insect’s mouth (Jones, 1990,

34). Ever since the controversial Vinland Map (which appears to be a medieval
map of the coast of Newfoundland, and therefore proof that the Vikings landed
in the New World before Columbus) first appeared in 1957 (when the book-
dealer and art-thief Enzo Ferrajoli brought it to the British Museum for
authentification), its wormholes have been magnified, measured, and scrutinized
(Baynes-Cope, 1974, 209–10). The historian Robert Lopez allowed that real
bookworms may well have made these wormholes, but intimated that he knew
from ‘reliable sources’ that forgers kept ‘stable[s] of live worms’ to do their dirty
work (Lopez, 1971, 32). Similar accusations from the nineteenth century refer to
farms of live worms kept by Parisian truqueurs (furniture-forgers) ‘to do the
work, and do it better and to order’ than man-made tools (Craven, 2005, 71).8 8 We have already
This is one of the two ways that the marks made by bookworms have been (and seen that
antiquarians kept
continue to be) interpreted: as suspicious indicators of authenticity legible only
collections of pet
to the scrutiny of trained professionals. bookworms, a
Second, wormholes have served as justifications for chemical warfare. We habit that, in light
have seen the bookworm represented as a bad reader, a bad writer, and a bad of these
accusations,
authenticator, disparagements that doubly figure the insect as the opposite and
begins to look
yet also the professional rival of its human counterparts. The bookworm is also, rather suspicious.
if not first and foremost, the bad librarian. Revealingly, the medieval book-
collector Bishop Richard of Bury (1287–1345) described wormed books as
rotting corpses, ‘corrupt and loathsome’ [‘corrupti et abominabiles’] (Thomas,
1970, 82–3). The bookworm decomposes deadwood; that is its nature. The
conservator, by contrast, wants to keep the mummified codex intact, untried by
worms. Library science must, therefore, evolve in response to insects.
Bookworms infest wooden shelves, so librarians tried steel (Iiams, 1932, 377).
Bookworms like the heat, so librarians invested in cold stores and climate-
control systems (Pinniger, 2001, 64–5, 72–4). Bookworms are (like most
organisms) vulnerable to poisons, so librarians collaborated with chemical
engineers to develop liquid and gaseous insecticides and gas-tight fumigation
chambers (Iiams, 1932, 381–2). But of course, libraries today prefer the gentler
methods of Integrated Pest Management; unsurprisingly, it turns out that the
poisons that hurt bookworms hurt books and librarians too.
Wormholes, in short, have been understood as damage, as that which gets in
the way of reading, not as something to be read. By contrast, the holes in
parchment made by the insects that bit the cow during its life and/or the 9 The term
parchment-makers who stretched its skin after its death are the subject of ‘wormhole’ is
often attributed to
enormous scholarly interest. Recent close readings have illuminated these the physicist John
imperfections’ ability to build suspense by revealing a glimpse of the next leaf A. Wheeler (1911–
(Kwakkel, 2018, 236) or illustrate the narrative by representing a hole in the 2008); see Kar,
story (Kay, 2017, 71). But not wormholes, despite their importance in the Lahiri, and
SenGupta (2015,
modern imagination as tunnels through space-time.9 Why not? Perhaps because 319) and Misner
the holes made by flies and/or parchment-makers precede the penning of the and Wheeler
text, while bookworms make their holes after the ink has dried. The makers of (1957, 532).

Solberg
the text (scribes, rubricators, illuminators) have the opportunity to collaborate

intentionally and purposefully with the holes that they find on their parchment,
but not with the wormholes that come after. Wormholes, like marginalia,
belong to readers. And, as Michelle Warren has written, ‘We are taught to think
of books as static: we do not leave any signs of our reading even as we delight in
discovering notes and doodles made by our predecessors’ (Howe and Warren,
2014, 179). The bookworm breaks this rule. When he reads, he leaves
permanent marks on the text, giving the lie to the notion that reading is an
10 Our bodies leave immaterial practice that leaves no trace.10 The bookworm enacts the practice of
both visible and reading, making its materiality and intra-activity impossible to ignore.
invisible marks
Despite all the tall tales told about bookworms (volume-sets turned to tatters,
on what we read,
such as yellowed entire shelves pulverized to dust), wormholes, as a rule, do not render texts
or darkened illegible. Conveniently for us, bookworms prefer the exteriors and the edges of
splotches left by books to the interior or the center. They tend to make their tunnels, holes, and
the oils in
burrows in the covers, gutters, and margins – the same blank spaces aptly filled
fingertips (or by
kisses: see by medieval illuminators with painted moths, spiders, and caterpillars. Book-
Amsler, 2001, worms’ little negative doodles and tiny punctuation marks rarely obscure
96–7), and meaning. It is as if human and insect bookworms were meant to read together.
microbial
analysis reveals a
teeming
‘biological Ac knowledgments
palimpsest’ of
microbes from My heartfelt thanks to Marieke Van Der Steenhoven at the Department of
human mouths, Special Collections at Bowdoin College and to Vanessa Wilkie at the Hunt-
stool, nose, and
skin imprinted on
ington Library for all their generous help with this project.
the leaves of
medieval
manuscripts About the Author
(Teasdale, 2017,
3–7).
Maggie Solberg is an Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College. Her
first book, Virgin Whore, was published by Cornell University Press in 2018
(Email: esolberg@bowdoin.edu).
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Publisher’s Note
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Article
Francis’s animal brotherhood

in Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima
Brandon Alakasa and Day Bulgerb

a
Department of English, University of Alberta – Augustana, Camrose, AB, Canada.
b
Independent Scholar, Annaka, Gunma Prefecture, Japan.
Abstract Francis of Assisi’s encounters with nonhuman animals in Thomas of

Celano’s Vita Prima open into ‘contact zones’ between human and nonhuman animals
that challenge traditional social hierarchies. Following Mary Louise Pratt’s and Donna
Haraway’s foregrounding of these spaces as sites of contention and transformation, we
explore the way that Francis’s behaviour with nonhuman animals draws attention to
them as victims of economic, social, and moral inequalities. Within the contact zones
found in Celano’s hagiography, Francis engages directly with orthodox ontologies
articulated by Augustine and Aquinas that separate human and nonhuman. Indeed,
Francis’s actions toward animals reimagine horizontal relationships between subjects
who span the human-nonhuman animal distinction. Lastly, in exploring Francis’s
encounters with nonhuman animals, we draw on Carol J. Adams’s notion of the absent
referent to discuss the saint’s efforts to restore subjecthood to nonhuman animals
whose subjectivity has been annihilated by medieval culture.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00153-0
Travelling with his companions through the Marches east of Assisi, St Francis
encountered a man carrying two lambs to sell at market. In the earliest
biography of the saint, Thomas of Celano relates that Francis, moved by their
bleating, drew near and ‘touched them as a mother does with a crying child’
(Celano, 1999, 249). Immediately after this physical contact, Francis interro-
gated the man, ‘Why are you torturing my brother lambs […] binding and
Chapter 3 was originally published as Alakas, B. & Bulger, D. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11: 23–32.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00153-0.

Alakas and Bulger
hanging them in this way?’ (Celano, 1999, 249). The farmer replied, ‘I am
carrying them to market to sell them, since I need the money […]. Those who
buy them will kill them and eat them’ (Celano, 1999, 249). Outraged by these
animals’ commodification – first as property offered in financial exchange and
then as food to be consumed – Francis immediately offers his cloak in return for
their lives. In other words, Francis reverses the process in which the animals’
subjectivity is extirpated and absorbed within a value system that is entirely
1 Francis’s anthropocentric.1 Although such narratives of Francis’s life have resulted in an
relationship with often-sentimentalised portrait of the saint, Celano’s Vita Prima yields important
non-human
insights about the role that creation plays within the saint’s own spirituality by
animals has
always been articulating an alternative vision of human identity delineated by its relationship
recognised as to the natural world.
distinctive, and it Francis’s contact with nonhuman animals offers rich opportunities for
is on account of
rereading Celano’s biography. Until recently, discussions of the saint’s encoun-
this atypical
affinity with ters with animals have viewed them as typical examples of hagiographic
creation that he thaumaturgy – a display of the saint’s control over the natural order that
has become the underwrites his or her authority as an agent of God.2 Yet Celano’s Vita Prima, a
patron saint for work commissioned by Pope Gregory IX, does more than promote an image of
those who work
in and study Francis rooted within a long tradition of ascetic monks seeking to renew the
ecology Church (Armstrong, 1999, 175). When the work was requested in 1228,
(Bergolio, 2015, disputes had already become frequent within the Franciscan order over the
10.9; see as well extent to which evangelical poverty had to be observed: Celano’s text had to
White, 1967,
1203–7).
steer a middle way in order to promote harmony among the brothers and to
2 See Short (1983, avoid solidifying factions that had already formed (Moorman, 1940, 63–4).
39–64); Sorrell Despite the layers of generic convention and competing agendas that mediate
(1988, 47–50); Celano’s biography, focusing on specific encounters reveals a Francis whose
Bogliani (1985); affinity with nonhuman animals in fact undermines hagiographers’ own efforts
Salisbury (1994,
167–74); and
to present a moderate vision of the saint. Lisa J. Kiser’s discussion of animal
Kiser (2004, stories in Franciscan literature does this work of exploring Francis’s animal
124). encounters extremely well. Kiser sees the saint’s relationship with nonhuman
animals as primarily economic and relates these encounters to a desire to
embrace radical poverty by seceding from the market economy that dominated
twelfth-century Italy (Kiser, 2004, 125). According to Kiser, animals provide
Francis and his companions with analogical models for living one’s life ‘entirely
outside […] the human and economic order’ largely by their manner of food
procurement, which eschews acquisition and relies instead on providence or
chance (Kiser, 2004, 126). Kiser’s discussion contributes a great deal to our
reading of animal stories in early Franciscan lives by pointing to the way in
which these episodes touch on wider political, social, and economic concerns
that operate just below the surface of the text.
Our own investigation of Francis’s relationship with nonhuman animals
moves beyond traditional readings of these episodes to view them instead as

Francis’s animal brotherhood in Thomas of Celano’s Vita Prima
encounters that valorise the animal body, thus exploring the radical nature of
the saint’s actions even further. Indeed, the episode in which Francis ransoms
two lambs is one of a handful in Celano’s hagiography that open into ‘contact
zones’ between human and nonhuman animals. Donna Haraway’s use of this
term to articulate the interaction between species ‘within radically asymmetrical
relations of power’ (Haraway, 2008, 216) is especially helpful for making sense
of Francis’s encounters with animals as sites in which traditional hierarchies are
challenged. Equally productive is Mary Louise Pratt’s foregrounding of the way
these spaces function as sites of contention and transformation: critique,
collaboration, mediation, denunciation, and imagined dialogue are all, in Pratt’s
view, ‘arts’ of the contact zone (Pratt, 1991, 37). Viewed through the lens of
Haraway and Pratt, Francis’s indignation is not simply a naı̈ve reaction to the
fate of two animals sold at market; rather, his behaviour draws attention to
nonhuman animals as victims of economic, social, and moral inequalities.
Within this and other contact zones in Celano’s Vita, the text engages directly
with orthodox ontologies articulated by Augustine and Aquinas that separate
human and nonhuman. Indeed, Francis’s actions toward nonhuman animals
reimagine horizontal relationships between subjects who span the human-
nonhuman animal distinction. Lastly, in exploring Francis’s behaviour, we also
draw on Carol J. Adams’s notion of the absent referent to discuss the saint’s
efforts to restore subjecthood to nonhuman animals whose subjectivity has been
annihilated: in this episode, Francis draws attention to the lamb’s being made
absent for medieval culture to exploit as food, commodity, and even metaphor
for the divine.
Francis’s treatment of nonhuman animals strikes readers, both medieval and
contemporary, largely because of its divergence from orthodox norms that
delineated humanity’s relationship with creation. Work by such doctors of the
Church as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, who was born the year before
Francis died, articulates medieval Catholicism’s separation of nonhuman
animals and humanity into discrete ontological categories. Augustine lays the
theological foundation for this division in De civitate Dei when reflecting on the
divine injunction against killing: this commandment does not apply, he writes,
to the ‘animantibus irrationalibus, volatilibus, natatilibus, ambulatilibus,
reptilibus, quia nulla nobis ratione sociantur’ [‘non-rational animals which fly,
swim, walk or crawl, for these do not share the use of reason with us’]
(Augustine, [1864] 2019, vol. 41, col. 35; 1998, 33). Moreover, in Contra
academicos he states that reason is the faculty that most characterises the human
being by constituting the best part of the soul and by leading one to self-
knowledge and the knowledge of God (Augustine, 1957, 2.1.31).3 A perceived 3 See also Hankey
lack of reason in nonhuman animals, Augustine continues, authorises human- (1999, 696).
ity’s subordination of creation: ‘non eis datum est nobiscum habere communem;
unde justissima ordinatione Creatoris et vita et mors eorum nostris usibus
subditur’ [‘It is not given to them to have it in common with us; and, for this

Alakas and Bulger
reason, by the most just ordinance of their Creator, both their life and death are
subject to our needs’] (Augustine, [1864] 2019, vol. 41, col. 35; 1998, 33).
Aquinas extends these notions when outlining the lawful treatment of
nonhuman animals. Citing these passages from Augustine, he insists as well on
the subordination of other species for the use of humanity: ‘animalia bruta et
plantae non habent vitam rationalem, per quam a seipsis agantur, sed semper
aguntur quasi ab alio, naturali quodam impulsu. Et hoc est signum quod sunt
naturaliter serva, et aliorum usibus accommodata’ [‘Dumb animals and plants
are devoid of the life of reason whereby to set themselves in motion; they are
moved, as it were by another, by a kind of natural impulse, a sign of which is
that they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others’]
(Aquinas, 1897; [1920] 2017, II-II, question 64, article 1). Reflecting further
on humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals and whether or not they
ought to be loved out of charity, Aquinas concludes that ‘creaturae autem
irrationales non possunt communicationem habere in vita humana, quae est
secundum rationem. Unde nulla amicitia potest haberi ad creaturas irra-
tionales, nisi forte secundum metaphoram’ [‘irrational creatures can have no
fellowship in human life which is regulated by reason. Hence, friendship with
irrational creatures is impossible, except metaphorically speaking’] (Aquinas,
1897; [1920] 2017, II-II, question 25, article 3, emphasis added). A curious
remark, Aquinas’s statement reflects the process through which humans deny
nonhumans individual subjectivity. Much more recently, John Berger’s
observation that ‘the first metaphor was animal’ acknowledges this fact and
further explains the separation of humanity from other species embedded
within orthodox Christianity (Berger, 1980, 5). For Berger, viewing the
nonhuman animal as a metaphor highlights an innate difference between the
species: humans differentiate themselves from the rest of creation not simply
because of an ability to reason but also because of a ‘capacity for symbolic
4 Bestiaries, as thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of
Hobgood-Oster language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something
claims, are a other than ourselves’ (Berger, 1980, 6–7). According to this approach, then,
prime example of animals – or, more specifically, the rapport we may have with them – can only
the ways in which
nonhuman
ever exist symbolically for humans because the ontological gap that separates
animals are us is simply too great to bridge.
viewed The effort by the institutional Church to subordinate nonhuman animals and
metaphorically to insist on relationships that are primarily metaphoric articulates and inadver-
disseminate
Christian morals;
tently anticipates the process by which the nonhuman animal body is
in these transformed into an absent referent. Viewed symbolically – whether it be as
situations, they instrument of moral instruction, messenger of the divine, or companion who
have ‘didactic distinguishes a human counterpart – the nonhuman animal is denied subjectiv-
value, but no
other real
ity. As Laura Hobgood-Oster notes, a ‘literal being’ is replaced with a
purpose’ (2008 metaphorical character that completely lacks its own agency (Hobgood-Oster,
64; 76–80). 2008 14–5).4 Carol J. Adams’s concept of the ‘absent referent’ is, thus, crucial to

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See also Downing, George.
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E.
Earl Delamere (in Ups and Downs), xi. 387.

—— Egbert (in Holcroft’s The Noble Peasant), ii. 110.
—— of Flanders (in Kinnaird’s Merchant of Bruges), viii. 264, 265.
—— of Glenallan (Scott’s Antiquary), iv. 248.
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—— London Theatre, The, viii. 404, 412; xi. 370.
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—— Polity (Hooker’s), x. 145.
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—— (in Kenney’s The World), viii. 229.
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—— des Maris (Molière’s), xi. 356.
—— Militaire, The, ix. 160.
—— des Vieillards, The (a French Play), xi. 366.
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Editors, A Chapter on, xii. 230.
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Edmonton, xi. 306.
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—— III., v. 19; vii. 193.
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—— Mrs Sarah, viii. 292.
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—— Travels in (Nicholas Savary’s), ii. 107.
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Eiconoclastes Satyrane, iii. 52.
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—— on the Death of Lord Byron, An, vii. 314.
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Elgin, Lord, ix. 327, 381, 490, 492; xi. 227.
—— Marbles, ix. 326;
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—— Mr, ii. 266.
—— (in Miss Burney’s The Wanderer or Female Difficulties), x. 43.
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—— (Rousseau’s), i. 133; vi. 425; ix. 146.
Eloquence of British Senate, iii. 387;
also referred to in i. 433; iii. 460; xi. 602.
Elphinstone, James, i. 96.
Elshie Elshender (Scott’s Black Dwarf), vii. 207; viii. 129; xi. 531.
Elspith (in The Antiquary, a play), viii. 413.
Elton (a town), x. 356.
Elwina (in Hannah More’s Percy), viii. 256.
Ely, Isle of, ii. 9, 10.
Elymas the Sorcerer (Raphael’s), i. 131; ii. 387; vi. 41; ix. 46, 272 n.
Elysium (Barry’s), ix. 415, 421.
Embassy to China (Gilray’s), vi. 455.
Emblems (Quarles’s), xii. 48 n.
Emery, John, ii. 195, 365; vi. 161, 453; viii. 10, 235, 236, 256, 283,
315, 333, 370, 391, 413, 426, 428, 442, 466; xi. 304–5, 378, 402;
xii. 24.
Emigrants, The (see Adelaide), viii. 308, 530.
Emile (Rousseau’s), ii. 379; vii. 224–5, 401 n., 456 n.; ix. 120; xi. 85,
135, 178 n., 259.
Emilia (in Shakespeare’s Othello), viii. 217.
—— Gauntlet (in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle), xii. 64.
Emily (G. Colman the younger’s The Poor Gentleman), viii. 319.
—— Tempest (in Cumberland’s Wheel of Fortune), xi. 207, 208.
—— Worthington (in The Poor Gentleman), xi. 376.
Emmaus, v. 184.
Empedocles, v. 122.
Emperor Alexander in his Droschi (Sauerweide’s), xi. 249.
Enchanted Castle (Claude’s), vi. 74; ix. 13; xi. 212.
—— Island (in Shakespeare’s Tempest), v. 187.
Encyclopædia Britannica, ix. 377, 483.
—— Metropolitana, viii. 480.
Endymion, vi. 201; vii. 23.
—— (Girodet’s), ix. 131.
—— (Guercino’s), ix. 224.
—— (Keats’), ii. 302; vi. 254; viii. 478; x. 270.
—— (Lyly’s), v. 197–9, 247.
Enfield, William, v. 90, 147; vi. 294.
Enghien, Duc d’. See D’Enghien.
England, Church of, xii. 386, 402.
—— in 1798 (by S. T. Coleridge), iii. 241.
—— History of—
(1) Mackintosh’s iv. 287;
(2) Oldmixon’s, x. 368 n.;
(3) Turner’s, v. 143.
Englefield, Captain, vii. 92.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Byron’s), iv. 258.
—— Comic Writers, Lectures on the, viii. 1;
also referred to in i. 417, 418, 419, 437; xi. 568.
—— Grammar, xii. 342.
—— Novelists, viii. 106;
also referred to in vii. 300; x. 405.
—— Opera House, New, viii. 314, 327, 463, 464, 474, 476.
—— Poets, Lectures on the, v. 1;
also referred to in i. 395, 419, 420, 421, 442, 458; x. 406.
—— Philosophy, History of (Hazlitt’s Prospectus), xi. 25.
—— Revolution, i. 430; iii. 100, 252; x. 153.
—— School, The, ix. 314.
—— Students at Rome, ix. 367.
—— Traveller, The (Heywood’s), v. 214.
Englishman, The (a newspaper), x. 212.
Enobarbus (in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra), i. 231–2; v.
253; viii. 191.
Enquiry concerning Political Justice, The (Godwin’s), ii. 163; iii. 126;
vii. 198; x. 385, 394–6, 398, 400; xii. 170.
—— concerning Population (Godwin’s), iv. 297.
Enraged Musician, The (Hogarth’s), viii. 142.
Ensign Hibbert (in Fielding’s Amelia) viii. 114; x. 33.
—— Beverley (in Sheridan’s The Rivals), viii. 508.
Ensor, George (on State of Europe in Jan. 1816), xi. p. vii.
Entombment of Christ (Bird’s), xi. 244.
Entombing of Christ, The, in the Louvre, ix. 112.
Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, The (Haydon’s), xii. 271.
Envy, xii. 386.
—— (in Spenser), v. 39.
—— On (a dialogue), vii. 97.
E. O. Tables, i. 145; iii. 77.
Epic Pictures, i. 28.
Epicene (in Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman), viii. 42.
Epicharmus, The Sicilian, x. 100.
Epictetus, x. 16.
Epicurus, iii. 101; iv. 293; ix. 161.
Epistles (Dryden’s), v. 79.
—— (Ben Jonson’s), v. 306.
—— (Pope’s), v. 69, 77.
Epistle to Abelard, The (Pope’s), xi. 505.
Epistles to Arbuthnot and Jervas (Pope’s), v. 78, 373.
Epistle to Lord Byron (Leigh Hunt’s), iv. 361.
—— to the Countess of Cumberland (Daniel), v. 309.
—— to Michael Drayton (Ben Jonson’s), v. 307.
—— (of St Paul), An, xii. 280.
—— to Selden (Ben Jonson’s), v. 307.
—— to Robert Southey, Esq. (Lamb’s), vii. 131.
Epitaph (by W. Gifford), i. 374.
Epithalamion on a Count Palatine of the Rhine (Donne’s), viii. 52.
Epps, Mr (a Strand shopkeeper), iii. 297.
Erasmus, vi. 245; ix. 218; xii. 214.
—— (Holbein’s portrait of), ix. 41.
Eresbourg, The Forest of, xi. 232.
Eriphile (Racine’s Aulis), x. 98.
Eros, i. 231.
Erskine, Lord, ii. 147, 154 n., 185, 214, 228; iii. 44, 425; iv. 319, 335;
vi. 51, 199, 406; vii. 161, 215; xi. 480; xii. 254.
Escapes, The (Holcroft), ii. 235.
Escurial, ix. 349; x. 278.
Espercieux, Jean Joseph, ix. 167.
Esplandian (early romance), x. 57.
Essays (Bacon’s), v. 328, 333.
—— (Hume’s), xi. 323.
—— (Montaigne’s), v. 165.
Essays (Southey’s), v. 165.
Essay Writing, A Farewell to, xii. 321.
Essex (the county), ii. 248; x. 357.
—— Lady, vi. 454.
Establishment of the Enfants Trouvés, ix. 125.
Estcourt, Will, i. 157; viii. 96, 160.
Este, Mr, ii. 205, 214, 225.
Estifania (in Fletcher’s Rule a Wife and Have a Wife), viii. 49, 234.
Estremadura (town), xi. 317.
Etherege, Sir George, i. 53, 155; viii. 68, 70, 82, 152; xi. 276–7.
—— etc., On, viii. 49.
Ethics (Grove’s), xi. 254.
Eton, iii. 421; iv. 199; v. 118; vi. 72; ix. 187 n., 480; xi. 334, 373.
—— College ... Ode on a Distant Prospect of (Gray’s), v. 118; vii. 74.
Etruscan cities, xii. 223.
Eubulides (Landor’s), x. 248.
Euclid, i. 46; vi. 433; vii. 257; viii. 19, 25; x. 179, 347; xi. 45, 273, 288,
491.
Eudemus (in Ben Jonson’s Fall of Sejanus), v. 265.
Eudocia (Godwin’s Cloudesley), x. 391.
Eugene de Biron (in Morton’s Henri Quatre), viii. 443.
Euler, Leonard, vii. 306.
Eumenides (in Lyly’s Endymion), v. 199.
—— (of Æschylus), x. 91.
Euphrasia (in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster), v. 262.
Euphues and his England (Lyly), v. 201.
Euripides, iv. 216; x. 97, 98, 99, 100, 271; xii. 326.
European Child, The (in Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming), v. 150.
—— Magazine, The, vii. 74; viii. 12; x. 221.
—— Repository, The, ii. 229.
Eurydice (Nantreuil’s), ix. 127.
Eustace de St Pierre (in Colman’s The Surrender of Calais), viii. 331;
xi. 307, 308.
Eustace, Mr (The story of, in The Tatler), i. 9; viii. 99.
Eutropius, ix. 17.
Evadne (in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy), v. 251–2.
—— The (by Richard Lalor Sheil), v. 345.
Evan Dhu (Scott’s Waverley), iv. 247.
Evangelists (Rubens’), ix. 52.
—— xii. 281.
Evans, Mr (actor), ii. 84.
—— Thomas, iii. 238, 299, 300.
Eve, vi. 397; xi. 517.
—— (Milton’s), i. 38; v. 60, 65–6, 371; vii. 36; viii. 561; xi. 452.
—— (Michael Angelo’s), ix. 363.
—— On the Character of Milton’s, i. 105.
—— (Raphael’s), ix. 240.
—— of St Agnes (Keats’), iv. 304; vii. 225.
Eve’s Apple, xii. 222.
Evelina (Miss Burney), vi. 160; vii. 72; viii. 123, 124; ix. 139 n.; x. 24,
25, 41, 42; xii. 65.
Evelyn, John, vii. 232; x. 287 n.
Evening Scene (in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode), i. 30; viii. 137; ix.
80.
—— Ode on (Collins), v. 116, 126, 147, 374.
Every Man in His Humour (Ben Jonson’s), viii. 310;
also referred to in viii. 44; vii. 313.
Evreux (town), ii. 268; ix. 102.
Examination before the Privy Council (Franklin’s), x. 314.
Examiner, The, i. pp. xxx., xxxi., 367 n., 374, 376, 385, 430, 445, 451,
456; iii. 103, 107, 109, 121, 152, 194, 201, 213, 281, 438 et seq.; iv.
302, 362, 401, 432; vi. 86, 286, 496; vii. 16, 123, 378, 379, 381,
507, 515; viii. 174, 224 n., 497, 500, 502, 512; ix. 462, 466; x. 220,
228, 418–21; xi. 253, 258, 269, 274, 277, 282, 284, 290, 297, 299,
301, 303, 305, 307, 309, 315, 317, 323, 328, 334, 343, 348, 352,
356, 358, 362, 366, 369, 373, 377, 381, 384, 389.
Exchange no Robbery, or Diamond Ring (Hook’s), viii. 475.
Exclusion Bill, The, x. 364.
Excursion, The (Wordsworth’s), i. 46 n.; v. 114, 156, 280; vi. 65 n.; xi.
311, 457, 512; xii. 276.
Exeter, ii. 143 n.; vi. 21, 161, 379, 390; ix. 68.
—— Change, iii. 121; iv. 223; vi. 349, 416; ix. 160; xi. 350, 364, 503;
xii. 49, 215.
Exile, Reflections on (Bolingbroke’s), vi. 100.
—— (in Lewis’s The Monk), viii. 127.
Exiles, The (Kotzebue’s), ii. 201.
Exit by Mistake (by Jameson), viii. 321;
also referred to in iii. 304.
Exmoor, x. 416.
Exmouth, Lord, vi. 429.
Expiring Taper, To an (by Peter Pindar), xii. 350.
Eyre, Lord Chief Justice, ii. 146; iii. 75 n.
Eyre’s Charge to the Jury, Remarks on Judge (Godwin’s), iv. 210, 211
n.
Ezekiel, iii. 144, 145; v. 183.
Ezra (Michael Angelo’s), ix. 362.
F.
F——, vi. 390.

F——, Mrs, viii. 406.
Fables (Æsop’s), i. 9, 46; viii. 25, 98; x. 107; xi. 273, 491.
—— (Dryden’s), iv. 102 n.; v. 372.
—— (Gay’s), v. 106, 107.
—— (Northcote’s), vi. 408, 415, 416.
Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), vii. 467; viii. 157 n.; xi. 254.
Fables for the Holy Alliance (Moore’s), ix. 283.
Fable of Salmacis (Albano’s), ix. 34.
Face (Ben Jonson’s Alchemyst), viii. 228.
Fadladeen (in Moore’s Lalla Rookh), v. 152.
Faërie Queene (Spenser), i. 71 n., 138; iii. 113; v. 12, 35, 43, 187, 299,
370; viii. 438; x. 74, 155; xi. 464; xii. 129.
—— (in Midsummer Night’s Dream), i. 63.
Fag (in Sheridan’s Rivals), viii. 510.
Failer (in Etherege’s Wild Gallant), viii. 68.
Fainall (in Congreve’s Way of the World), viii. 74.
Fair, The (Teniers), ix. 35.
—— Deserter, The (a farce), viii. 533.
—— Penitent (Rowe’s), viii. 287;
also in v. 268.
—— Quarrel (Rowley’s), v. 214.
Fairfax, General, iii. 398; vi. 177.
—— (Holcroft’s), ii. 204.
Fairhurst, Richard, ii. 167.
Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher’s), v. 254, 256; vi. 184; x. 118.
Fakreddin, The two pages of (Beckford’s Vathek), ix. 60.
Falcon, The (in Boccacio), i. 163; v. 82, 347; vii. 227; viii. 558; xi. 501;
xii. 30.
Falconbridge (in Shakespeare’s King John), v. 209; viii. 347; xi. 411.
Falconer, William, xi. 486, 495.
Falcoz, Madame, xi. 356.
—— Mademoiselle, xi. 358.
Faliero (Byron’s), iv. 258.
Falkland (in Godwin’s Caleb Williams), iv. 208; viii. 130, 131, 241,
420; x. 385, 398, 399; xii. 67.
Fall of Nineveh (Martin’s), xi. 381.
—— of Sejanus, The (Ben Jonson), v. 263.
Fallacies, Book of (Bentham’s), xii. 361.
Falling Tower, The, at Bologna, ix. 205.
Falls of the Grenfells, The, xi. 364.
False Duessa (Southey’s), iii. 217.
—— One, The (Beaumont and Fletcher’s), v. 253, 295.
Falsity of Human Virtues, Treatise on, xi. 254.
Falstaff’s Letters (by Jem White), vii. 37.
Fame, The (vessel), ii. 126.
—— On Different Sorts of, i. 93.
Familiar Style, On, vi. 242.
Family of Anglade, The (Payne’s), xi. 304; viii. 279.
—— Instructor, The (Defoe’s), x. 379.
—— Picture, The, etc. (Holcroft’s Tales), ii. 104.
—— Journal, vi. 505, 506.
—— Vandyke, The (a picture), ix. 57.
Fancy, The (by J. Hamilton Reynolds), viii. 480 n.
—— Poems of (Pope’s), v. 69.
Fanning, Mrs, xi. 546.
Fanny, Mademoiselle, ix. 174.
—— (Fielding’s), vi. 236; vii. 223; viii. 107.
Farce of Taste (Foote’s), vii. 216.
—— Writer, The (a play), viii. 523.
Farewell (Byron’s), vi. 210; x. 221.
—— to the Stage (Ben Jonson’s), v. 312.
—— to Tobacco (Lamb’s), v. 378.
Farington, Joseph, ii. 189, 198; vi. 359, 379, 380; x. 172, 173, 175,
180, 181, 189, 192, 195, 201, 202.
Farley, Charles, viii. 251, 253, 281, 416, 465, 468, 469, 535; xi. 207,
208, 305, 384.
Farmer’s Boy, The (Blomfield’s), v. 95, 97.
Farmer’s library (Richard Farmer), ii. 188.
Farnese family, The, vi. 385.
—— the Little, ix. 239, 365.
—— Theatre, The, ix. 204.
Farnham, vii. 126.
Farquhar, George, vi. 434; vii. 227; viii. 14, 163, 285, 552; x. 118; xii.
451.
—— On, viii. 70.
Farren, Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, ii. 160; viii. 165, 268, 291, 389;
ix. 147, 149; xii. 24.
—— William, viii. 154, 412, 426, 466, 480, 484.
—— —— Dr Cantwell (in The Hypocrite), xi. p. viii.
Farrier shoeing an Ass (Berchem’s), ix. 22.
Fashion, On, xi. 437.
—— in High Life (Hogarth’s), viii. 400.
—— (in The Relapse), vi. 414.
Fashionable Tales (Miss Edgeworth’s), ix. 490.
—— World (a newspaper), x. 220.
Fatal Cave. See Ellen.
—— Curiosity (Lillo’s), ii. 212; v. 359.
—— Dowry (Massinger and Field), v. 268; viii. 287.
—— Marriage (a play), viii. 391; xi. 383 n.; xii. 355.
Fate of Calas (a play), viii. 428, 439.
—— The Fiat of (song), ii. 190.
Fates, The (Michael Angelo’s), ix. 220, 363 n.
Father and Daughter, Tale of (Mrs Opie), viii. 268.
Father Paul (in Sheridan’s Duenna), iv. 159.
Fathers of the Church (Rubens’), ix. 52.
Faucit, Helena, Lady Martin, viii. 192, 231, 251, 266, 267, 276, 340;
xi. 316, 403.
Faulkener (not Ferdinand), a play (Godwin’s), iv. 210 n.
Faulkland (in Sheridan’s Rivals), viii. 509.
Faust (Goethe), vii. 313; x. 261, 271.
—— (Lessing), x. 274.
Faustina (a statue), ix. 221.

Contact Zones Fur Minerals Milk and Other Things Elizabeth S Leet Full Chapter

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Contact Zones: Fur, Minerals, Milk, and

Other Things Elizabeth S. Leet

Previously published in postmedieval

Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 11, issue 1, March 2020

Writing companions: Toward

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 3–11.

Reprinted from the journal 1

2 Reprinted from the journal

production, should we understand this illustration as a realistic representation of

Figure 2: LuLu keeps vigil; I write. Ó Matthew Lockaby.

Reprinted from the journal 3

Figure 3: Spanky rests comfortably at my side; I write. Ó Matthew Lockaby.

4 Reprinted from the journal

Thinking things through

Reprinted from the journal 5

6 Reprinted from the journal

By asserting the inseparability of human bodies from the infinite agencies of

Reprinted from the journal 7

inspiration from Haraway’s interspecies contact zones – to remind us of the

About the Author

Elizabeth S. Leet is Assistant Professor of French at Washington & Jefferson

8 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 9

Human and insect bookworms

Emma Maggie Solberg

A riddle in the tenth-century Exeter Book quips that a bookworm (moððe,

Reprinted from the journal 11

12 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 13

not phenotype. If a cockroach nibbles on the corner of a book, then it becomes a

14 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 15

16 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 17

18 Reprinted from the journal

the text (scribes, rubricators, illuminators) have the opportunity to collaborate

Reprinted from the journal 19

20 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 21

Francis’s animal brotherhood

Brandon Alakasa and Day Bulgerb

Abstract Francis of Assisi’s encounters with nonhuman animals in Thomas of

Reprinted from the journal 23

24 Reprinted from the journal

Reprinted from the journal 25

26 Reprinted from the journal

Earl Delamere (in Ups and Downs), xi. 387.

F——, vi. 390.

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