Among All Beasts: Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England

Abstract

This chapter explores the position of the creature in the Middle Ages, especially understandings (then and now) of creaturely mentation and its environings. One such understanding was the idea that creatures are part of the famous “Book of Nature,” made up of the signifying texture of things, “written” by an inhuman author. Augustinian discourse regarded creatures as “mirrors of life,” a notion that is arguably not very creature-friendly, because the creature’s only raison d’être is to assist salvific communication between the human and the divine.¹ Creatures’ fondness for their own lives might be acknowledged, but those lives did not matter in themselves; their purpose was the spiritual education (and material support) of humankind. Despite its anthropocentrism, however, the idea of Nature as one of God’s books was perfectly capable of disturbing the peace, by putting divine alterity into play. The Creator is bountiful, but so alien that it can write with earth, wind, and fire. Though the Book of Nature attests the Creator’s desire to communicate with us, it also attests his difference from us: both the Book of Nature and Scripture are difficult to read, but Scripture is at least made of human language, however Other-inspired.

And in alle bestes is vertu of moeuynge and of feelynge, but in some more and in somme lasse… And among alle bestes man may not lyue allone.

John of Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s

De proprietatibus rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), XVIII.i.