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The Nose Knows: Encountering The Canine In Bisclavret, Alison Langdon
The Nose Knows: Encountering The Canine In Bisclavret, Alison Langdon
English Faculty Publications
For much of literary history, scholars have tended to focus on the symbolic valence of animals, to read their behavior and characteristics as representative of explicitly human interests and concerns. In the past medievalists have perhaps been even more prone to this, given that many of our sources providing descriptions of animal behavior, such as bestiaries, similarly emphasize the metaphorical or allegorical over the ethological.1 Thus when we read something like Bisclavret, Marie de France’s twelfth-century Anglo-Norman lai, scholars frequently discuss its werewolf protagonist as a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife. Michelle Freeman, …