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Katherine Stratton, Lewis, Liam. Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 60, Issue 4, October 2024, Page 516, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae070
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Extract
Animal studies scholars have long struggled with the task of disentangling the traces of the living animal from the literary within medieval texts, whose depictions of animals teem with symbolism, allegory and anthropomorphism. By interrogating representations of animal sounds and vocalizations across a variety of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman sources including bestiaries, language treatises, saints’ lives and fables, Liam Lewis rises to this challenge admirably, ultimately providing new and nuanced methods of considering the interconnectedness of human and animal language.
Lewis begins by looking at sound milieus, spaces of ‘immersive in-betweenness’ that form the relationship between the agent producing a sound and the receiver (p. 40), in Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire. The bestiary’s evocation of animal sounds such as lions’ cries or sirens’ songs alongside its allegorical and linguistic lessons acts as a sonic memory aid, enjoining animal sounds to human language acquisition. Chapter 2 expands from the intimacy of the sound milieu to what Lewis terms the ‘sound zone’ (p. 26) in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage. The incorporation of animal utterance into Bibbesworth’s aristocratic language manual is a form of contact zone between languages (French and English) and species where ‘movement between languages is connected to expressions of anthropocentric power and control over class and gender’ (p. 97).
