Human, Animal, and Technology: Multiple Hybridizations In Perceforest
(2018) British Animal Studies Network Meeting “Animal Machines / Machine Animals” — Location: Exeter (2.November.2018)
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- Abstract
- In the late Middle Ages, hybrids invade the imaginary space of literature and art. Abnormal bodies of humans with animal features were common in human imagination since at least the Antiquity, but Perceforest, a 14th-century masterpiece of French romance and an extraordinary testimony of late medieval European culture, invents new hybrid bodies that, although inspired by the previous tradition on monsters, combine uniquely human, animal and artificial objects. These combined bodies create animal-machines, in which the human works as a passage, a temporary form bridging the organic and the artificial. Such animal-machines are not dissimilar to what Donna Haraway calls a “techno-hybrid”, as they too represent an alternative to the human appropriation of nature. But what is the purpose of these techno-hybrids in late medieval chivalric literature? And what is their place in pre-modern imagined biosphere? In this paper, I will tackle two examples of techno-hybr ds from Perceforest: the Chevaliers de mer, fully armored fish-knights, and Passelion, literally “Over-lion”, a child-knight born with a crossbow in his body. I will argue that the romance uses the human-animal-technology hybrids to imagine an alternative relationship between nature and culture, and disrupt monolithic concepts of the human through ironic and utopian discourse.
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Sciancalepore, A. (2018). Human, Animal, and Technology: Multiple Hybridizations In Perceforest. British Animal Studies Network Meeting “Animal Machines / Machine Animals”, Exeter. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/127170