Joseph R. Johnson | Animals, Speech and Reason in the Middle Ages | Cambridge University Press | 2026

Medieval authors commonly imagined humanity as the only animal that possessed the rational-discursive faculty: the ability to think rationally and speak in words. But what was the true nature of the relationship between reason, speech, and species identity in medieval thought – and what can the material traces of authors’ efforts to find an answer reveal about how humans have constructed their identities in relation to other animals? In the first book-length, interdisciplinary study of animals and reason in the Middle Ages, Joseph R. Johnson investigates a range of medieval genres in French, Latin, and Occitan: literary works, biblical texts, philosophical and theological treatises, and more. Leveraging an experimental methodology to examine fine-grained details in the handwritten texts of medieval manuscripts, he argues that the concept of humanity as the only rational, speaking animal depended on the same process that destabilized it from within: the representation of species relationships in words.

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