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Animals Archive
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Man Bites Dog: Alarming Effects of Medieval Animal Venom
Posted on May 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was part of a fantastic series on mental health and disability in the Middle Ages. It was very humorous. This paper examined various types of bites, the "medieval symptoms" and some cures. So if you don't want to bark like a dog, or lash out at people with your teeth, read on... -
Jewish Hawking in Medieval France: Falconry, Rabbenu Tam, and the Tosafists
Posted on April 29, 2013 | No CommentsFalconry reached an apex in the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, but in the modern era it was displaced to a great extent by the use of firearms. The present article explores the medieval Jewish knowledge of, and especially the exploitation of this technique, centered in twelfth-century Northern France in the communities surrounding the great master Tosafist, Rabbenu Tam. -
The Highland Tiger: Scotland’s critically Endangered Wildcat
Posted on April 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe Highland Tiger has roots that run deep in Scottish consciousness. The area now called Caithness means 'Land of the Cats' or 'Land of the Cat People.' -
Horses for Courses? Religious Change and Dietary Shifts in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsThe spread of Christianity across England over the course of the Anglo-Saxon period brought new worldviews, ways of acting and dietary habits. -
Animals on Trial
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe history of animals in the legal system sketched by Evans is rich and resonant; it provokes profound questions about the evolution of jurisprudential procedure, social and religious organization and notions of culpability and punishment, and funda-mental philosophical questions regarding the place of man within the natural order. -
Why did the English people stop eating horses in the Middle Ages?
Posted on February 20, 2013 | No CommentsPeople living in Anglo-Saxon England were turned off the idea of eating horses once they became Christian as they believed it was ‘pagan’ food, argues a new research paper. -
An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature
Posted on February 16, 2013 | No CommentsJohn Aberth focuses his study on three key areas: the natural elements of air, water, and earth; the forest; and wild and domestic animals. -
Riding To The Afterlife: The Role Of Horses In Early Medieval North-Western Europe
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn order to establish the role of horses in the pre-Christian religions of Anglo-Saxon England, Viking-Age Scandinavia and other Germanic regions in mainland Europe, this dissertation will look for evidence of burial, sacrifice and other rituals involving horses in both archaeological and literary sources -
Animals in Medieval Sports, Entertainment, and Menageries
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsWe shall see that apes, marmosets, and popinjays were hardly the only kinds of animals pressed into service as entertainers for medieval people, for virtually every common European animal - and a large number of exotic imported species as well - took some part, large or small, in games, spectacles, menageries, performances, tournaments, and displays. -
Human Drama, Animal Trials: What the Medieval Animal Trials can Teach Us About Justice for Animals
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThere is a long history, mainly from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking human beings and eating crops. -
Greenland’s Viking settlers gorged on seals
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsA Danish-Canadian research team has demonstrated the Norse society did not die out due to an inability to adapt to the Greenlandic diet: an isotopic analysis of their bones shows they ate plenty of seals. -
An Ecoritical Approach to Chaucer. Representations of the Natural World in the English Literature of the Middle Ages
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe choice to write and present a study of nature in medieval English literature from an ecological perspective has been originated by a personal interest in the urgency of the deep environmental crisis we are faced with and by the drive to expand the eco- oriented study of representations of nature in literature to chronological and spatial areas well beyond those originally typical of ecological criticism. -
Horses of Agency, Element, and Godliness in Tolkien and the Germanic Sagas
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is the contract between man and equine that allows a beast ten times our size and one hundred times our strength to willingly serve in our ambitions? What magnetism (and who placed it) is it that draws humanity and horses together? -
Environmental impact of the Baltic Crusades: deforestation, animal extinction, dogs no longer on the menu
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsA multidisciplinary project seeks to understand the environmental impact of the Baltic Crusades. Horses, for example, aided the Christians in battle, while the castles the Crusaders built decimated forests. -
Fools, Devils, and Alchemy: Secular Images in the Monastery
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe fool is one of the most popular and stable character types throughout cultures and times. This is especially true of medieval Europe. The fool, sometimes a jester, sometimes a clown or a trickster, is always recognizable through his abnormal appearance. -
Avorio d’ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era
Posted on December 1, 2012 | No CommentsWhy, after a scarcity of elephant ivory in northern Europe during the twelfth century, was there sudden access to such large tusks around 1240? -
The Geese Book – medieval manuscript now available online
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsOne of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online - The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. -
Beyond chicken: avian biodiversity in a Portuguese late medieval urban site
Posted on November 14, 2012 | No CommentsBetween 2003 and 2004, prior to the construction of an underground parking in the Avenue Miguel Fernandes, an archaeological rescue excavation was carried out by a team of archaeologists from the company Crivarque...The excavations uncovered 137 silos, of which 109 were fully excavated. The high concentration of silos turned out to be the most striking find of the archaeological works. -
Horse Armor in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: An Overview
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThe history of the development of horse armor generally paralleled that of armor for man, both employing the same materals (principally metal, leather, and textile) and decorative techniques. -
Falcons and Falconry in Al-Andalus
Posted on November 1, 2012 | No CommentsFalconry was valued as a major element of the cultural transfer between the medieval elite of western Christianity and Islam, connecting the pre-Islamic world of the Near East with the Umayyad and Abbasid courts on one hand and Christian Europe on the other. -
Iconography of the Unicorn from India to the Italian Middle Ages
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe earliest unicorn figure discovered in Iran dates to the proto-Iranian cultureof Amlash (9th-8th century B.C.). This consists of a small bronze statue representinga goat with a frontal horn. The unicorn measures four centimeters in height and sixand a half centimeters in length and was part of some grave goods -
Medieval Pets
Posted on October 23, 2012 | No CommentsNew book by Kathleen Walker-Meikle on pets in the Middle Ages -
The archaeological evidence for equestrianism in early Anglo-Saxon England, c.450-700
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsMost of our evidence is drawn from the funerary record,and more specifically from the rite of horse inhumation,or the provision of horse equipment as a grave good. Insacrificing horses to accompany the dead the Anglo-Saxon elite were doubtless influenced by Continental burial theatre, where the rite is to be observed at itsmost explicit. -
Count Robert’s “Pet” Wolf
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No CommentsWhat the count of Artois did do after the wolf’s ravening of the peasants’ livestock in the spring of 1302 could not have been what the villagers wanted. It reads like a joke... -
The Language of Birds in Old Norse Tradition
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsSpecial individuals capable of understanding the language of birds are spread throughout the medieval Icelandic literary corpus. This phenomenon has received surprisingly little academic attention and is deserving of detailed, extensive, and interdisciplinary study. Capable of flight and song, birds universally hold a special place in human experience. Their effective communication to people in Old Norse lore offers another example of their unique role in humanity’s socio-cosmic reality.