This article shows how medieval bestiaries exclude animals from human language and Christian history – and also rely utterly on them. This simultaneous inclusion and exclusion produces what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘space of exception’ that can be effaced in a receptive reading of the texts or exposed in a resistant one. The historical–philological practices of bestiaries on which this argument is based are knowledge of Scripture, etymology, and the reading and writing of history, which are present in different degrees in different texts of the bestiary tradition. This tradition is represented, in this article, by the Greek Physiologus, Latin bestiaries of the B-Is type and second-family redactions, and the French adaptations of Philippe de Thaon, Gervaise, Guillaume le Clerc and Pierre de Beauvais. - [Abstract]

Language: English

DOI: 10.1057/pmed.2014.35