Introduction: Animals Stepping off the Page

Abstract

Animals have always been important to humans, both in their materiality and in their variegated symbolic roles. This volume offers a review of some medieval attitudes toward animals between the wake of Late Antiquity and the emergence of the Renaissance through integrated research on written sources, animal bone finds, and iconographic data. By simply reading and discussing each other’s work, medievalists and zoologists from very different intellectual backgrounds can expose new aspects of the way people perceived, treated, and used animals in the Middle Ages. The nature of the resulting complex and tangled interpretations is dependent on shifting definitions of what a particular animal means to both present-day researchers and in the minds of people from different social and geographical backgrounds in the Middle Ages.