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carolynn van dyke, ed., Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 286. isbn: 9-781-13704-073-2. $90.
The ethically and philosophically praiseworthy purpose of Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, a collection of sixteen essays, is to push the vertical axis of traditional humananimal relations on its side. In part this involves resisting, and sometimes actively deconstructing, metaphoric animals (e.g., 'the greedy wolf')-those that are to be decoded as readily as livestock to be butchered. In her essay 'Among All Beasts: Affective Naturalism in Late Medieval England' (a kind of theoretical prologue), Aranye Fradenburg argues that, 'when animals appear, they are never simply symbols for something else; the very feet that they can serve as such is already the sign of our commonality with them' (27). Hardly subservient, animals exist alongside humans in an interdependent, sometimes co-adaptive, earthly community.
While too often instrumentalized by Homo sapiens, animals in Chaucer's texts are not, according to these authors, easily reducible to anthropocentric conceptualization and activity; they may, for example, point to what Karl Steel describes as all mortals' shared 'noncapacity...to elude exposure to injury and decay (189). Similarly, the image of 'p roude Bayard' subdued with...