British Undergraduate History Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020
Albert, Aristotle, and other animals: new perspectives on the animal world in high medieval learning THOMAS BANBURY
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tudy of the animal world in the medieval period stimulated multiple branches of thought across different social and intellectual milieux. The role of the animal world in this learning was highly contingent on the intellectual tradition that accommodated for it. Between 1050 and 1250, learning and scholarship in medieval Europe developed, incorporated, and adapted a range of new perspectives into its intellectual culture, most prominently in the areas of theology and natural philosophy from Aristotle. The influence of these texts on the epistemology of the 12th century was not limited to discussions about the animal world. However, the incorporation of Aristotelean notions of a demonstrative approach to natural science, and the nature of the animal soul, provides us with a useful point of departure from which to analyse the role of the animal world in medieval learning. It also allows us to trace the contours of the medieval approach to animals before and after the proliferation of new Aristotelean texts. This essay will treat ‘learning’ not just as the cumulative body of knowledge which framed medieval scholarship, but also as an active process of investigation and pedagogy, which considered the animal world both as a subject in its own terms, and as a teaching tool. Through this definition it is possible to integrate the sophisticated zoological projects of Albert the Great for example, in the early 13th century, with the tradition of animal moralisations in the bestiaries and Physiologus, and issues in logic and philosophy investigated through animals at the schools of Oxford and Paris. Medieval scholars offered a number of definitions of ‘animals’ and how they related both to humans and to the rest of the non-human world. These were often rooted in both classical natural histories and earlier Christian authorities, as well as in Scripture. In the most basic definition, gleaned from the account of the Creation in the Book of Genesis, animals were created by God on the fifth and sixth days, firstly birds and sea-creatures, and then ‘beasts of burden and crawling creatures and the wild animals of the earth’, respectively. In his second book of Sentences (c.1150), Peter Lombard characterises the creation of these three divisions of animals as the ‘adornment’ of the three habitable elements of the waters, air, and earth. 1 Peter says that having been made in the image and likeness of God, man ‘surpasses the irrational creatures; but he is made to God’s image according to memory, intelligence, and love’, although he also offers several other interpretations of this phrase in Genesis.2 Animals, therefore, were living creatures created before humans which did not share the special 1 2
P. Lombard, The Sentences, Book 2: On Creation, trans. G. Silano, Toronto, PIMS, 2007, pp. 63-4. P. Rosemann, Peter Lombard, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 105-6.
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