Eloquent animals: narrative conceptualisations of human-animal relations in 14th to 16th century germanophone Animal Literature

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia Weitbrecht
• Subject Area: German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259169715

Divided into three sub-projects, the project investigates the ways in which both Beast Literature (Fable and Epic) and natural history represent and functionalise animals during the 14th to 16th centuries. Texts from both these spheres not only unanimously project animals as characters possessing distinctive qualities, but also collectively place them (either on the level of plot or of interpretation, or as a part of the particular knowledge imparted) in a specific relation to Man. Said texts will be treated jointly as Animal Literature in the sense, that it reflects and reflects on human-animal relations by confronting both parties and letting them interact. Animals are not anthropomorphised, nor are they necessarily endowed with speech; yet through their linguistic representations they nonetheless become eloquent in the sense that they address humanity. As animals are thus encountered also in their character as agents of processes of knowledge generation, the project intends to extrapolate the diverse ways in which in Animal Literature they communicate and continually re-produce the boundary between Man and Beast. In the period under study, a vast variety of vernacular encyclopaedia, corpora of fables and beast epics emerges, which bespeak a productive approach to until then comparatively stable traditions of representing animals. Shedding its ties with pragmatic, educational demands, vernacular Animal Literature enters different contexts and thus generates new formations of knowledge, all the while recasting and increasing the imaginative potential of the eloquent animal within a sphere subject to the requirements of knowledge and narrativity alike. Both encyclopaedic and narrative literature extensively dwell on the "nature" of animals. The relation between knowledge about animals and narrating animals, however, is one of interdependence rather than of mere parallelity. Texts relating to natural history distribute a form of knowledge about animals that is organised in sets of distinctive qualities, with moralising and allegorical narratives taking up the latter in order to interrelate them with Man. Conversely, natural historical writings derive their knowledge from narrative sources and/or impart it in narrative form. Investigation of these interferences therefore carries the promise of insights into specific narrative conceptualisations of human-animal relations that generate a form of animal-related knowledge shaped by its historical context of gradual differentiation between literarisation and scientification. The project aims to trace a pre-modern poetics of knowledge about animals by following three lines of systematic inquiry, focussing on the relation of knowledge and narrativity (SP 1), on conceptualisations of space in negotiations of human-animal relations (SP 2), and on projections of wars between species (SP 3), respectively.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants