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The redundancy of language is also a source of comedy in The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English debate‐poem which draws on an eclectic range of traditions—lyric, bestiary, fable, lai, as well as debate. The shifting invocations of these various literary modes comically unsettle the reader's sense of how each animal is to be judged, and the introduction of details of avian appearance and habits, alongside appeals to ‘Nature’ as the amoral determinant of each bird's characteristics, carries this unsettling process even further. The birds also use beast literature (Marie's lai of Laüstic, and one of her fables) as ‘evidence’ against each other, moralizing animal behaviour in sublime disregard of the mechanisms by which it is usually given moral implication for humans, but not for the animals themselves. This reversal of direction reaches its climax with the surprisingly serious reinterpretation in terms of Nature, rather than in terms of religious dogma.

‘Thinking the body’ can give us privileged access to the ways in which a culture represents the world to itself, and handles its own, potentially conflicting, elements. This is certainly true of medieval culture, with its frequently articulated models of high and low, centre and periphery. However, the relationship between what is valued and what is not is inherently unstable because of its focus upon physical form — which can always change. Man is the high point of mortal creation, but he shows this through his upright stance, oriented towards God. If he goes down on all fours and crawls like a beast, does he lose whatever it is that makes him human? In the following chapters, such questions generate explorations of texts like the Bestiary and of social practices such as hunting. The discussion then moves to the ambiguous figure of the wild man, and to the role of women within this world view.

We still debate what it means to be ‘human’, often invoking markers such as language. Yet our search for articulacy in the animal world mirrors its salience in our own culture. Similarly, the dividing lines we draw between differently valued groups of creatures (e.g. ‘vermin’) are socially generated. The medieval Bestiary is often seen simply as a catalogue, but it is really a work that enacts the relationship between animals and humans. It is concerned with boundaries, with marginal creatures such as speckled frogs and hybrid leopards, and it also reflects man's inborn orientation with animals associated with the virtues gazing up into the sky while vicious beasts are condemned to live underground.

In the Bestiary, birds are treated as a self-contained and distinctive form of creation. Lévi-Strauss suggests that it is precisely because birds are so different from humans that they can be permitted to resemble them in cultural references. In medieval literature, birds often represent an ideal society, but many writers play with the fact that, although they are socially congruent, they are emphatically unlike us in their bodies — conducting their wooing not with lips but with ‘beckes’. Close readings of texts including Chaucer's Squire's Tale and Manciple's Tale; Gower's ‘Ceyx and Alcione’ and ‘Tereus’ in his Confessio Amantis; Lydgate's ‘The Churl and the Bird’, and Clanvowe's The Cuckoo and the Nightingale follow.

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.

This introduces the book’s focus on skin, presenting a series of key concepts including those of Skin Ego (Anzieu), suture (Zizek), caesura and anthropological machine (Agamben), and manuscript matrix (Nichols). It outlines the history of the bestiary tradition in Latin from the original Greek Physiologus through Latin Dicta Chrysostomi and B-Isidore bestiaries to the Second-family redaction and the so-called H bestiary, and the French-language vernacular versions from Philippe de Thaon to the Long Version of the bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais. In all, six bestiary texts in French are distinguished, and six in Latin are identified for discussion, plus the Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy. The relation of these various versions to learned or school culture is discussed, along with what can be inferred about their readerships. The Introduction ends with a close reading of a page of the B-Isidore bestiary in Bodleian Laud Misc. 247, which features the chapter on the Sirens and Onocentaur, in order to show how text, image, and parchment insinuate conflicting contours of identity as between human and nonhuman animal, between internal caesura and the outlines of the Skin Ego.

This chapter concerns bestiaries’ relationship to the book of nature and the book of scripture. In Confessions Augustine describes how the process of reading clothes readers in a second skin that can be identified simultaneously with the Bible and with the natural world; the same conjunctions are performed by medieval parchment. Drawing on Derrida’s commentary on Genesis and Agamben’s on Apocalypse, the chapter argues that although nonhuman animals are relegated to the edges of the Bible, they are central to bestiaries which anticipate the Last Judgment as the point from which humans can return to Eden. Language and the book depend on the exclusion of nonhuman animals as “dumb,” but the resulting imbrication of human with nonhuman produces what Agamben calls a “space of exception.” The chapter analyzes the relation to language and the book of different bestiary versions, examining their presentation of sacred history, their similarity to wordbooks and their use of etymology. It ends with a discussion of Adam naming the animals, in particular as depicted in the Northumberland and Sloane Bestiaries, concluding that bestiaries’ spiritual teachings do not prevent them being presented also as time-bound material objects.

Citing the same passage of Confessions as chapter 1, this chapter begins with the connection which Augustine draws between reading as second skin and the tunics of skin which Adam and Eve wore when they were driven from Eden. The tunics indicated that sin, in making them mortal, had also animalized them, a process that could only be reversed when Jesus assumed this same skin in the incarnation. Texts too are compared with garments or skins where one covering overlaid and could be stripped away from another, metaphors captured in the terms involucrum or integumentum. Bestiary allegories thematize these metaphors of skins as wrappings that can be unwrapped; and, because they are written on parchment, they also materialize them in their physical makeup. But they resist and twist them too, laicizing or eroticizing the themes of dressing and undressing, or using pages whose animal origins are so insistent that they give the lie to textual insistence on immortality. The chapter explores these ideas with reference to bestiary treatment of the Serpent and related creatures, and of the Hydrus and Crocodile, in a range of Latin and French bestiaries, particularly Second-family bestiaries and the bestiary of Philippe de Thaon.

Although bestiaries promote what can be learned from other creatures, increasingly their pages portray humans killing animals and animals killing them. This chapter analyzes the import of this violence relative to the concepts of sacrifice (Derrida), which tends to humanize animals, and bare life (Agamben’s homo sacer), which results from a sovereign decision demarcating human from nonhuman. The alternatives of sacrifice and sovereignty, humanization and dehumanization, affect the status of parchment which can seem more or less human; hesitation about the status of the human calls attention to the arbitrariness of the decision in either direction, the “state of exception” of sovereignty disclosing the “space of exception” that is the page (compare chapter 1). This chapter examines the development from a benign view of human-animal relations in Physiologus through to the interspecies violence depicted in Second-family manuscripts, and in French bestiaries that seem similarly designed to appeal to aristocratic appetites. It focuses mainly on pages depicting the Pelican (a benefactor beast), the Unicorn and Ape (examples respectively of a sacrificial quarry and a victim of sovereign decision), the Crocodile (a threat to man), and the Lion that can fulfil all three roles.

This chapter explores how two texts, Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarium and Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours, foster a sense of inner self or “soul” by situating the reader within an imaginary framework of sight and touch. Both texts have prologues appealing to their recipients’ imagination and both dwell on images of parenting though in Hugh’s case the reader is the cared-for infant whereas Richard, ever ironic, casts himself in that role so as to manipulate his lady into caring for him. Although very different in their convictions – Hugh’s views being documented from his De Claustro animae, Richard’s from his scientific and philosophical readings – both situate the self on the inner surface of a skin that may be that of a human or nonhuman animal. The chapter reads closely the page of the Aberdeen Bestiary portraying the Cedar as a woman with doves and pages of Bestiaire d’amours manuscripts devoted to the mother Ape and her children. It concludes with a redefinition of the manuscript matrix as a skin within which the reading self takes shape, using the example of the chapters on the Elephant in the H bestiary text in Sidney Sussex 100.