tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post4585455446298256464..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Feeding the DogsCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79779653092451830152012-09-10T17:31:36.474-04:002012-09-10T17:31:36.474-04:00I'm reminded of the named swords in Beowulf, o...I'm reminded of the named swords in Beowulf, objects/instruments imbued with names and history and even a sort of limited agency. One might say they're loved. They might even "return" that love by not breaking in battle. This is all a delusion, though, a meaningful one, but still a pathetic fallacy. <br /><br />I can't get past a categorical difference between the inanimate and animate. Animals actually can return affection, or at least we interpret it that way, which amounts to the same thing, which makes them much better sites for investing that emotion. So, while inanimate objects are definitely viable sites of investment, animals inhabit a different category. <br /><br />Hunting animals (dogs and hawks, but not horses, I think?) in a way are like the swords in Beowulf in that humans build up whole imaginative constructs about them (usually but not always based on their actual qualities, esp. loyalty), but unlike those swords, the animals (seem) to reciprocate. I don't think you find hunting weapons praised at all, really.<br /><br />For medieval English hunters, the general reluctance to instrumentalize hunting probably had much to do with how closely they identified with them. Do you find a close identification between Umayyad and Abbasid hunters and their hunting animals? European ones with some frequency transform into hawks and bears and harts. <br /><br />Of course, my whole post here is very anthropocentric, all caught up in the mind of the hunter. There may be better ways to look at things. Ryan Judkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05158174415649117899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-7883900628197738332012-09-10T13:51:47.616-04:002012-09-10T13:51:47.616-04:00The fact that a whole genre of ekphrastic poetry d...The fact that a whole genre of ekphrastic poetry devoted to hunting dogs and hawks developed in the Umayyad period and continued into the Abbasid period suggests that people loved and wished to memorialize these animals. The "Blades of the butcher" metaphor is only one of many strange metaphors that are used to extoll their virtue. <br /><br />If anything I'm trying to suggest that the idea we (sort of) have that instruments (animate or inanimate) are not viable objects of genuine affection would have been alien to these writers. That is, loving and "using" are deeply interconnected, and the one doesn't somehow contaminate the other. <br /><br />Or that there is a love that is not anthropomorphizing.<br /><br />I'm not sure that there's any way to know if this is a strategic use of the language of instrumentality or not, and maybe it's actually more interesting if it's not strategic?<br /><br />The Qur'an itself makes the same exception for eating animals killed by hunting dogs with a variation on the Ottonian loophole, that is that because people have trained the dogs, when a dog kills an animals it's as though a person killed it. I think this implicitly depends on a model of distributed will in which animals participate in the will of their human hunting partners. Then again I might be reading that in a willfully anachronistic way.Alexhttp://hart.blogs.brynmawr.edunoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25108520651577426652012-09-09T22:04:25.394-04:002012-09-09T22:04:25.394-04:00Just tried to post and lost it. Having a hard time...Just tried to post and lost it. Having a hard time proving I'm not a robot.<br />Anyway... was just saying that I like the way this is going, Karl. Just reread the Mabinogi for teaching, so I'm reminded of the scene in the first branch where the exchange of bodies between Pwyll and Arawn is preceded by the mingling of their hunting dogs. Of course this happens in the forest, which always reads for me as the Ovidian space of anti-marital same-sex affiliations. Lara Farinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04360944717701168191noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58606555560412779882012-09-09T16:40:40.078-04:002012-09-09T16:40:40.078-04:00"This language of objects, in other words, ca..."This language of objects, in other words, can be strategic rather than a representation of some deeply held belief."<br /><br />That's both brilliant and convincing, Karl, and it brings me back to your non-human assemblages. Might we see the sanctuarians using property laws or medieval hunting lords working through canon law as examples of humans trying to suborn non-human assemblages in order to bring them into line with human emotion?Ryan Judkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05158174415649117899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-57848759670405527302012-09-09T16:19:51.286-04:002012-09-09T16:19:51.286-04:00Ryan, in re: the article. You're welcome! Not ...Ryan, in re: the article. You're welcome! Not sure what else I can say before it's out, since I don't want to tread on JEGP's toes. But, folks, it'll be out in January, and it'll be a very good resource. I definitely learned from it. In re <i>Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts</i>: November! Forgotten it was so soon. Well, that'll be fun.<br /><br />I know the Crane article well (I reviewed <i>Engaging with Nature</i> for JEGP, in fact), but I hadn't made that connection between my beginnings here and the 'baby talk' aspect of her article. Worth following up on.<br /><br />Alex, very cool. While I think Ryan's right that the material we work with doesn't often instrumentalize hunting animals (and great example, Ryan: thanks for those), it CAN, at least in one instance that I talk about in my book. Namely, there's that 9th-century letter to some Ottonian lord that says, basically, yes, you can eat animals your hunting dogs killed, despite the prohibitions against eating <i>morticina</i> (carrion), because your dog is doing it under your command. As the letter explains, when we scratch letters, we don't ascribe agency to the pen, but to the human who writes; likewise with dogs. <br /><br />Now, I doubt the hunting lord thought of his dogs as objects without agency. But I'm sure he appreciated the way out the churchman offered him. I'm reminded of some stories in Rudy's book about people who run private animal sanctuaries. In the ones Rudy's allowed to visit, there's palpable love, but when the state threatens to shut down the sanctuaries, the, er, sanctuarians start talking about property rights! This language of objects, in other words, can be strategic rather than a representation of some deeply held belief.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-39480558326339836382012-09-09T16:08:37.071-04:002012-09-09T16:08:37.071-04:00This November for Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, so...This November for Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, sorry! (Perhaps Karl can edit that.)Ryan Judkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05158174415649117899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-42487125430945588362012-09-09T16:04:27.489-04:002012-09-09T16:04:27.489-04:00@Alex: You know, there are certainly loads of exam...@Alex: You know, there are certainly loads of examples of animals being viewed instrumentally by medieval people, of a horse as a conveyance with no real agency and so forth. Yet, I do not recall that happening with hunting animals at all. The Duke of Milan weeps and composes poetry when his favorite falcon dies (Cummins, p. 2), and hunters tell stories of their favorite dogs and their feats around the fire (see <i>Les dits du bon chien Souillard</i>, for example). In the <i>The Book of the Duchess</i>, the animal-human moment that immediately follows, and breaks, an instrumental view of animals when the Dreamer mounts and then abandons his horse with very few words, is the connection between the Dreamer and the whelp, where the whelp shows him where to go. (I wrote on this moment as part of a chapter in <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=537953" rel="nofollow">Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts</a> due out this January and with loads of good stuff, including an article by Karl.)<br /><br />Perhaps even more compelling, I think animalizations of the human are more common than instrumental depictions of the animal. In <i>Yvain</i>, Yvain rides as swift as a falcon and fights as ferociously as a lion. Hunting-related animals seem to have a special place in medieval hearts and imaginations.<br /><br />I wonder if there's a cultural difference here in views of animals between the Umayyad poetry and late medieval examples?Ryan Judkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05158174415649117899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-10322043753466591692012-09-09T15:50:13.519-04:002012-09-09T15:50:13.519-04:00Seriously, Tobias, if you're still around, I t...Seriously, Tobias, if you're still around, I think you should read that Rabbinic commentary post (link above). I'm not saying that to troll you. I just honestly can't imagine it not being interesting to people, but maybe that's just me.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70251436650938380072012-09-09T15:49:32.045-04:002012-09-09T15:49:32.045-04:00I've been reading a lot of Umayyad hunting poe...I've been reading a lot of Umayyad hunting poetry lately, and I'm struck by the way that animals are transformed by metaphors into tools of their hunters. For example, a hawk with sharp claws is described as being "like the blades of a butcher." Animals may be cognitively closer to the category of things than they are to people, for all the reasons you outlined in How to Make a Human, but something about this way of speaking of animals as objects makes me wonder if these poems are really about the the strange relationship we have to technology. Do we love our hunting dogs the way we love a new sharp knife, the way we love our smartphones -- for the way they elegantly solve the problems that we prioritize? Affect is certainly important here as well, to the disadvantage of things - we don't we love the stone walls of our game parks the way we love our hunting dogs.Alexhttp://hart.blogs.brynmawr.edunoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-58463094711160482562012-09-09T15:46:55.282-04:002012-09-09T15:46:55.282-04:00I'm sure you're familiar with Crane's ...I'm sure you're familiar with Crane's "Ritual Aspects of the Hunt a Force" article. Her comments on the similarity between how humans talk to hunting dogs and to babies really jumped out at me reading this post. If hunting evinces a queer desire that stands at odds with normative human desire (assuming that marriage and male-female love is the norm), then there's perhaps a displacement, even a fetishization, of parental love onto hunting dogs -- and of course, that's one major way pets are conceived of today, as children.<br /><br />And I appreciate the article mention. Thanks very much.Ryan Judkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05158174415649117899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-17746826484019244692012-09-09T15:20:04.918-04:002012-09-09T15:20:04.918-04:00It's interesting, isn't it, that even the ...It's interesting, isn't it, that <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/11/bodies-in-motion-3-or-any-other-beauty.html" rel="nofollow">even the stones copulate on this blog.</a> Must be some fairly perverse writers ... I mean, medieval texts can be fairly perverse sometimes and they are definitely rated M for mature language and themes.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-74097526947679442672012-09-09T15:11:00.906-04:002012-09-09T15:11:00.906-04:00Ah, my apologies for misunderstanding. I'll be...Ah, my apologies for misunderstanding. I'll be unsubscribing from this now. Thanks.Tobias Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05298700784546135263noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-85047292031841642762012-09-09T15:09:58.363-04:002012-09-09T15:09:58.363-04:00Tobias, this isn't a "history" blog....Tobias, this isn't a "history" blog. It's a literature blog. And, anyways, we've written about this kind of stuff for a long time. Here's <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2006/01/erotic-animals_27.html" rel="nofollow">a post on animal erotics from 2006</a>, and <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/11/erotic-animals-ii-adam-in-paradise.html" rel="nofollow">here's a post</a> on Rabbinic commentary about Adam <i>schtupping</i> all the animals in Eden, from 2008. <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/07/collaboration-blogs-and-lively-writing.html" rel="nofollow">And here's a post on the anthology <i>Queering the Non/Human</i>.</a> So, if you think this is something new here, you'll want to dig in our archives, if you can stomach it.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-32579232473876208632012-09-09T14:57:51.078-04:002012-09-09T14:57:51.078-04:00Okay, I'm sorry for the language, but ... what...Okay, I'm sorry for the language, but ... what the hell?<br /><br />This is a blog about medieval life. You start off with a nice lovely story about the masters feeding their animals from the hunt, then bang, cross-species sex? Non sequitur much?<br /><br />I would really, really rather not read anything of this nature on a history blog. Ever. And I doubt I'm alone in this.Tobias Morganhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05298700784546135263noreply@blogger.com