Udo Friedrich: Menschentier und Tiermensch. Diskurse der Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter

In Menschentier und Tiermensch Udo Friedrich investigates medieval ideas concerning the boundary, and transgressions of the boundary, between humans and non-human animals for what they can tell us about the ways in which people in the Middle Ages understood themselves and their relation to the world around them.

Friedrich begins by situating his investigation in a cultural studies framework. He understands culture “als symbolische Ordnung”, as a network of discourses, institutions and practices interrelated in complex ways. Such an understanding of culture, which challenges familiar but reductive oppositions between fiction and reality or ideology and material life, insists that meanings cannot be distinguished from things and that our understanding of our actions shapes them as much as it is shaped by them. Medieval studies has long benefitted from such an approach, even before we learned to invoke names like Bourdieu, Foucault, Geertz, and Greenbatt, when investigating phenomena – like knighthood, courtliness, marriage, sexuality – that figure both in texts, whether learned or vernacular, and in everyday life and politics. Friedrich wants to investigate the relation of animal and human, especially the way the boundary between them is drawn and transgressed, because the animal “fungiert als leitendes Prinzip kultureller Selbstreflexion” (p. 23).

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