“Names of the Beasts: Tracking the Animot in Medieval Texts”, 2012 (; backlinks):
Christopher de Hamel suggests that medieval writers emphasized the names of animals to reassert human control. Nor did onomastic dominion weaken, according to a common meta-narrative, until the modern or even the postmodern era: Darwin and other 19th-century scientists undermined the Christian paradigm of “superiority and dominion”; in the 20th century, philosophers have at last challenged the view maintained “throughout Western civilization” that the animal existed to serve the human. In a pattern familiar to medievalists, the meta-narrative casts premodern positivism as the Other of postmodern questioning.
Like most such self-congratulatory stories, the notion that we are only now rattling the semantic cages constructed by premoderns rests on oversimplifications, both historical and theoretical. Naming practices in medieval animal texts are hardly uniform. Derrida is right that medieval writers do not criticize animal explicitly, but they certainly scrutinize it. Moreover, some use this term, or beast, with destabilizing inconsistency, alternately including and excluding human beings. And many medieval texts name and rename nonhuman creatures dynamically, mixing levels of abstraction to suggest an interplay of generic and singular identity. Thus they demonstrate that naming can signal not control but recognition, even deference.
After sketching some medieval theories of appellation, I will follow animal namings in the encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the Middle English “Owl and the Nightingale”, Caxton’s version of the Reynard cycle, and a remarkable 13th-century lyric called “The Names of the Hare” [pg41], finding in most of them complex ways of representing species that avoid linguistic and conceptual bêtise.