Animal Soundscapes by Liam Lewis examines medieval texts composed between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England to consider a previously understudied area of sensory contact between humans and animals: the sounds we utter, transcribe and imitate. Lewis argues that the 'soundscapes' inscribed in medieval literature produce conditions in which 'ideological networks of relation' among humans and animals become legible and open to interpretation (p. 33). The book's focus on sound opens new channels of inquiry into questions about the pre-eminence of human language and vocal agency that have long troubled critical animal theorists in the literary field. 1 Lewis confronts the paradox of using literature for and by humans to think about 'real' animals but promises to 'move beyond a vision of the Middle Ages that would reduce medieval animals and birds to static carriers of meaning saturated with human symbolism' (p. 19). His readings of a wide variety of medieval genresincluding bestiaries, language treatises, hagiography, and fablesdemonstrate the ways in which medieval vernacular texts invite audiences to consider multiple interpretive possibilities, even as the texts themselves grapple with contradictory understandings of relations between humans and animals. Importantly, the book's archive focuses on texts written in England but composed in Anglo-Norman French, thus addressing a gap in scholarship on England's literary history that often focuses on Middle English and Latin. Lewis makes a compelling case that the plurality of England's linguistic landscape challenged a straightforward narrative of man's vocal superiority established in the Latin scholastic tradition, thereby exposing moments in which the meanings of animal sounds shift in translation or resist interpretation.Lewis uses 'soundscapes' to think beyond the interpretive strictures of linguisticshe draws instead from musicologydelivering illuminating insights into the ways in which we understand sound through listening, imitating, recording and translating it. Throughout the book, Lewis interweaves Anglo-Norman vocabulary, such as the verb entendre (to hear, listen, or understand), in ways that illustrate his point about the plurality of language and the interpretive possibilities of sound. He navigates criticism that
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