Ben Parsons’s Introducing Medieval Animal Names is a fascinating addition to the Medieval Animals series, which includes introductions to the dragon, ass, swan, fox, snail, and bear. Introducing Medieval Animal Names is simultaneously encyclopedic and charming, chock-full of individual and stereotypical zoonyms, or proper names—not taxonomic species names—for animals in history and literature. As Parsons acknowledges, medieval names for individual animals are not as well-attested as names in the Classical and post-medieval world. Thus, the book spends significant time discussing Egyptian names for pet cats and dogs, lingers in the Greek and Roman worlds, dips into the Middle Ages, and pushes into the early modern period. By spanning a considerable number of centuries, this study supports some wide-ranging conclusions about an under-studied subject.
The Introduction, “Where Are You?: Naming and Its Questions” opens with the entertaining French fabliau “Estula,” whose humor hinges upon a dog’s name. The dog’s name Estula puns with “Es tu la?” (Are you there?), causing a series of misunderstandings that allow two orphans to successfully steal vegetables from a wealthy man’s garden. This apt opening demonstrates a paradox in the naming of medieval animals, one Parsons threads throughout the book’s entirety: endowing animals with names implies the existence of agential selfhood beyond the human species, but naming does not necessarily guarantee equality of identity, nor recognition of animal subjectivity. This paradox leads to fundamental, and perhaps unanswerable, questions about what it really means to name an animal.
Chapter 2, “Uncommon Nouns: Hunting for Animal Names,” emphasizes the paucity of personal names given to individual animals in records of medieval Europe. This practice is not universal; in the Islamic, Buddhist, Classical, and post-medieval worlds, animal naming was relatively wide-spread. However, Parsons enumerates three main categories by which medieval European animal names were selected. They might indicate (1) monetary value or prestige, (2) the emotional esteem of a human owner for the animal, or 3) some form of rhetorical value, either banal or allegorical. Throughout the book, Parsons amasses an impressive array of primary materials, and the highlight of this chapter is Les épîtres de l’amant vert (“The Letters of the Green Lover”), a metrical consolatio by Jean LeMair de Belges. Addressed to the recently widowed Margaret of Austria, the poem’s speaker takes the persona of Margaret’s deceased green parrot, who assures Margaret of the paradisical joys of the afterlife, both for humans and animals. This unorthodox reassurance of an animal afterlife catalogues the righteous animals of the Roman, Biblical, and medieval French worlds, from Noah’s dove to the famed Orleans porcupine. The chapter concludes with animal naming of the Tudor and Stuart periods, in which witches were typically accused of illicitly christening their animal familiars with sinister names like Mephastophilus and Lucifer, or banal names like Tibb or Prettie. At this point, it may have been useful to address the question of how gender influenced medieval and early modern naming practices. After all, literary scholarship has explored how medieval authors often left wives and daughters unnamed. Perhaps even more significantly, it would be interesting to hear what Parsons has to say about the frequent anonymity of medieval authors and scribes.
The third chapter, “Former Address: Naming Before the Middle Ages” examines the ancient and antique roots of naming practices. The earliest recorded zoonyms appear in ancient Egypt, where the earliest proper name for an animal is Abuwtiyuw, a guard dog of the second dynasty. Parsons then demonstrates that zoonyms appear in greater quantity in the ancient Greek and Latin worlds than in other contexts, and claims that these names tend to be more self-aware than in ancient Egypt. These names were usually related to traits of the animal, often functioning as synecdoche for an animal’s behaviors that are useful to humans. For example, Homer names Odysseus’s dog Argus (Watchful) and Virgil calls Pallas’s war-horse horse Aethon (Fiery). Roman monuments record names like Parthenope (Siren) and Fuscus (Dark).
“Type Casting: Naming and Species”, the fourth chapter, turns to the Middle Ages, observing how the medieval scala naturae can be usefully compared to the modern phylogenetic tree. However, in practice, medieval dogs and horses were often elevated as the creatures nearest human beings. Dogs often had names, usually identifying their (1) emotional value or household role, (2) work tasks, or (3) role in hunting. Names might be generic (Bodri, Talbot, or Soldan) or more idiosyncratic (Artus, Nobody, or Hey You). Similarly, horse names might resemble dog names, such as Tencendor (Turmoil) or Pessecerf (Deerhunter), or they may be purely descriptive, such as Lyarde (Dapple) or Bayard (Bay). The chapter concludes with a survey of less-named animals, including cats, birds, monkeys, sheep, oxen, and an interesting note that elephant names of the Islamicate and south Asian worlds are generally grandiose and exotic, denoting the owner’s wide-ranging influence. A more comprehensive discussion of non-European animal names would be welcome, perhaps in a future volume of this series.
The book’s main critical intervention appears in the final body chapter, “Improper Nouns: Human and Animal Names.” Here, Parsons rejects the school of thought that medieval culture embraced a taboo against zoonyms. Instead, Parsons posits, medieval people such as animal satire author Philippe of Novara saw “any boundary between naming systems as permeable and manipulable rather than inviolable” (107). However, this boundary was less permeable for cherished or high-ranking identity groups. The most common medieval zoonyms were also names given to humans, or anthroponyms: Gibbe and Raoul for cats, Colle, Goby, and Hog for dogs; Tyb for geese, and Malle and Wilkin for sheep. Idiosyncratic names suggest the same: Kate the falcon, Athelstan the horse, Wyl Bucke the deer, and Symon, Little Walter, Ralphy, and Hugh the horses, had names generally given to humans.
One of the book’s most interesting points builds Parsons’s thesis to a significant intervention. This is the study of how anthroponyms metamorphosed into animal names over time. For instance, the bird known as redbreast came to be known as “robin,” a diminutive of Robert. The chattering bird also known as the chough, once known as pye, came to be “mag-pie,” incorporating the anthroponym Magge, a diminutive of Margaret. These morphing anthroponyms are almost universally plebeian, connected to the lower classes. Animal naming is peasant naming. This association of lower classes with animality extends to ethnic and racial categories as well; the early fifteenth-century Master of Game recommends Jewe, Turke, Sodan, and Saresyn as good animal names, a fact Parsons links to the eighteenth-century European practice of giving Classical names to both animals and enslaved Africans. Studies of naming suggest complex slippage between human and animal, between center and periphery: “After all, this is a culture which regarded the edge of the human world not as a hard border, but as a frayed hem that shaded by degrees into bestialism (122). Bringing animals into the world of humans could signify recognition and esteem; yet doing so to a significant, widespread degree (to the point that it affects language in the twenty-first century) only occurred within the framework of human hierarchization. In “Final Call: Conclusions,” Parsons reiterates that medieval naming “does not ignore the interconnectivity of between human and animal, with its readiness to see human culture bleeding into the wider landscape, and to attribute humanlike personalities to even the remotest creatures” (131).
This short book offers both delight as well as richer food for thought, intervening in ongoing discussions about the social and literary lives of medieval animals. The sheer number of animal names compiled here will interest both scholarly and popular readership. The incorporation of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman materials will likewise interest the reader seeking beyond the Middle Ages. Readers seeking early modern animal names will find much material here, as Parsons often provides relatively late evidence that he retrofits into the medieval period, seemingly with general success. Parsons’s enumeration of naming patterns within specific periods and frameworks is also quite useful. Though they cannot be taken as definitive statements, these assertions provide an important baseline for future scholarship on medieval anthroponyms and their significance.
One significant strength of the book may also be a weakness. By placing historical and literary animal names side by side, Parsons expands the corpus of animal names significantly. The risk here is fusing literary-creative names with historical, quotidian names in the search for generalizable patterns. On the whole, this approach facilitates the discussion, though there is room for greater depth of analysis. Uneven treatment of source materials may be unavoidable here; passing references to the extended poem on the feline Pangur Bán (Fuller White) might be more fleshed out, while discussion of fables that only reference animals in passing or reinforce their absence (Estula) might be reduced. That said, the book is not written specifically for readers in animal studies or in posthumanism. This approachable text offers a nuanced consideration of a significant subject in need of deeper discussion, and will no doubt support further inroads into the world of animal names.