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In light of the dramatic growth and rapid institutionalization of human-animal studies in recent years, it is somewhat surprising that only a small number of publications have proposed practical and theoretical approaches to teaching in this inter- and transdisciplinary field. Featuring eleven original pedagogical interventions from the social sciences and the humanities as well as an epilogue from ecofeminist critic Greta Gaard, the present volume addresses this gap and responds to the demand by both educators and students for pedagogies appropriate for dealing with environmental crises. The theoretical and practical contributions collected here describe new ways of teaching human-animal studies in different educational settings and institutional contexts, suggesting how learners - equipped with key concepts such as agency or relationality - can develop empathy and ethical regard for the more-than-human world and especially nonhuman animals. As the contributors to this volume show, these cognitive and affective goals can be achieved in many curricula in secondary and tertiary education. By providing learners with the tools to challenge human exceptionalism in its various guises and related patterns of domination and exploitation in and outside the classroom, these interventions also contribute to a much-needed transformation not only of today's educational systems but of society as a whole. This volume is an invitation to beginners and experienced instructors alike, an invitation to (re)consider how we teach human-animal studies and how we could and should prepare learners for an uncertain future in, ideally, a more egalitarian and just multispecies world.
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
This article draws on the nearly 1800 letters which survive from the Benedictine convent of Lüne, near Lüneburg in northern Germany, and were written between c. 1460 and 1555. It explores the textual and visual strategies which nuns in the later Middle Ages used to negotiate their enclosed status. It suggests that the language and imagery of openness were a means for the nuns to remind those outside the convent wall of their presence and purpose in life.
The monastic enclosure
(2022)
The moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates' quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets.
This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
Openness and intensity : Petrarch's becoming laurel in "Rerum vulgarium fragmenta" 23 and 228
(2022)
Our paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject's transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet's beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch's poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity.
Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
In "The Book of Margery Kempe", the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The "Life" of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.
This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
This chapter makes the case for a literary history that accounts for the multilingual nature of medieval Denmark, giving particular attention to Danish, German, and Latin. It relates such a project to current research interests such as crossing the boundaries of national philologies; demonstrates the need for it by reviewing existing surveys of the period; and outlines some lines of enquiry, including the translation and transmission of texts, that it could pursue.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
This chapter considers the role of prolegomena and authorial interventions in constraining and contextualizing orally derived saga narratives in high medieval Iceland. It examines the question of whether prolegomena were intended to be included in oral renditions of the sagas and, if so, in whose 'voice' they were understood to be spoken. The 'openness' of a saga text - the extent of editorial freedom enjoyed by those concerned with extracting it from the oral milieu - has been much discussed; however, less attention has historically been paid to the freedom which the written texts then afforded any would-be reciter for emending or adapting their content when reading them aloud to a live audience. Prolegomena provide our most instructive source of contemporary commentary on how the written sagas should be understood and transmitted, and they therefore represent distinct and important critical texts in their own right, which inform our understanding of how 'open' or 'fixed' medieval Icelanders understood these extant written sagas to be.
This chapter examines the meaning of the term 'aperire' ('to open') in the schools of the twelfth century and within early scholastic thought. It argues for a shift from a traditional understanding of opening as a revelation received from God, towards a more technical definition of opening as applying dialectical logic to a text. The act of opening was employed polemically, both in debates between scholastic masters and to distinguish Christian from Jewish exegetical practices.
From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one's heart to God, to the eventual disclosure of God's mysteries to human beings, Augustine seems to trace an implicit conceptualization of openness in his "Confessions". The words of Matthew 7. 7–8 underlie Augustine's engagement with openness up to the very last sentence of the book, which ends with a sequence of verbs in the passive voice that culminates with the desired manifestation of the divine. The entire endeavour of opening oneself up undertaken in the "Confessions" aims at this final passive openness, which is (always) yet to come as much as human opera are (always) yet to come to completion.
The essays in this volume seek to understand manifold kinds of medieval openness that become visible when one refrains from modern assumptions, and are also interested in how articulations of openness in the Middle Ages often stand in creative tension with forms of closure and can even be empowered by them. The chapters highlight the complex relationship between author, work, and text, but also explore several, often paradoxical, ways in which medieval culture mobilizes forms, practices, and experiences of openness without having a single abstract concept for it.
Jameson argues that in 'a society bereft of all historicity', 'what used to be the historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past'. The 'postmodern fate' of the historical novel is to be forced to come to terms with 'a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (1981) and Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum. Die Geschichte eines Mörders" (1984) stand out as two hugely successful novels from this period that raise questions about historical representation within the space of the popular. They might therefore be used as test cases for Jameson's concerns. "Midnight's Children" is a sprawling story of Indian and British imperial and post-imperial history across the twentieth century. "Das Parfum" tells the tightly framed tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France. Seemingly very different texts, they bear one curious similarity: both feature a protagonist with an unusually sensitive sense of smell.
Siarhei Biareishyk beschäftigt sich mit Spielarten der Kritik an der platonischen Ideenlehre, die er von der epikureischen Tradition über Spinoza bis hin zu Deleuze verfolgt. Diese habe ein Denken von prozessualer und "modaler Ganzheit" ("modal whole") herausgebildet, das gerade auf die Instabilität und die Endlichkeit des Ganzen abhebe. Damit arbeite sie der Vorstellung sowohl einer möglichen Pluralität von Ganzheiten als auch der einer inneren Heterogenität jedes einzelnen Ganzen bis heute überzeugend zu. Im Gegensatz zu einem von vornherein als übersummativ konzipierten Ganzen entfalte diese Tradition Formen des Ganzen, die dynamisch sind und sich prozesshaft konstituieren. Biareishyk versteht das als Chance, Diversität und Disparatheit philosophisch fundieren zu können, ohne die Hoffnung auf Ganzheit(en) preisgeben zu müssen. Lukrez und Spinoza attestiert er auf diese Art und Weise philosophisch wie politisch ein ganz ähnliches Potential wie das, das Latour oder Cuntz in der Leibniz'schen Monadologie sehen.
Die Vorstellung eines relational organisierten Ganzen nimmt Bruno Latour zum Ausgang für eine grundlegende Kritik der modernen Imaginationen des Staates und seiner Grenzen. Diese Imaginationen beruhten auf einer fragwürdigen Konzeption des Ganzen, die fatale Folgen für die Bekämpfung des Klimawandels wie für eine adäquate Einschätzung der Migration zeitige. Es seien althergebrachte, an die Natur und den Organismus angelehnte Vorstellungen von Ganzheit und Teil, die eine Affirmation des sogenannten Staatskörpers oder auch die einer ökonomischen Marktlogik bis heute irrtümlich als unumgänglich erscheinen ließen. Gleichnisse wie das eines die Gliedmaßen ernährenden Bauches aus Shakespeares "Coriolan" oder Mandevilles bekannte "Bienenfabel" suggerierten, dass jedes Gemeinwesen sich von innen aus Teilen zusammensetzen und sich nach außen klar abgrenzen müsse. Tatsächlich aber seien Innen und Außen als fundamental durchlässige Phänomene zu begreifen. Die Idee eines solide gestuften Ganzen müsse ersetzt werden durch die Idee pluraler Ganzheiten, die aus ständig sich überlappenden und immer nur provisorisch verbundenen Elementen bestünden. Latour ist es folglich nicht um eine Diskreditierung, sondern um eine Neukonzeption sowohl des Ganzen als auch der Relationalität zu tun. Das hat massive Konsequenzen für deren Formgebung. Um der Komplexität politischer Strukturen und aktuellen Problemlagen begegnen zu können, müssten Ganzheiten als Netzwerke und nicht mehr als aus Teilen bestehende Körper vorgestellt werden.
In recent years, critics and art historians have pointed to an 'educational turn', a rise in participatory pedagogical art projects and artist-led experimental schools. This essay considers artist-led projects and museum programmes that restage or reenact educational experiments from the past, analysing their limits and possibilities in the study and presentation of modern art history. Much like performance art, pedagogy is ephemeral and contingent, and yet it differs in that it does not establish a fixed spectatorial role. To be understood it must be participated in, for, as Josef Albers described his teaching, 'we are gathering experience'.