Liam Lewis
I'm a medievalist at Cardiff University and author of the book, Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts (D.S. Brewer, 2022), an in-depth study of animal noises in medieval literature written in English and French. My work focuses on medieval animal studies and the environmental humanities. I write about premodern concepts of nature and the environment, in particular in the following areas:
• Animas and companion species
• Medieval environmental studies
• Medievalism, peformance, and textual reception
Recently, I have been part of a large team working on the history of bear baiting in the British Isles and France. The team comprises archaeologists (zooarchaeology, biomolecular archaeology), literary historians and archivists, and performance practitioners including professional wrestlers. I am working with zooarchaeologist Professor Hannah O'Regan at the University of Nottingham to trace the medieval history of bears and exotic animals.
My next project is called Medieval Biophilia: Picturing Apocalypse in Manuscripts. This project considers how ecological crisis and sustainability are represented and told as stories in medieval manuscripts that feature motifs such as Creation, Doomsday and global flood, animal life and transformation, and human or supernatural management of the environment. My research looks into these themes in light of contemporary discussions in anthropology, ecocriticism, and the translation of science.
I am also interested in questions of sound and music, and poetry and performance, especially performance-as-research approaches to medieval song.
Finally, I have a growing research focus in the reception of medieval ideas in contemporary culture, especially religion and spirituality. My project in this area focuses on medievalism in contemporary neopaganism.
Supervisors: Emma Campbell, Jane Gilbert, Anna Saunders, and Christiania Whitehead
Address: John Percival Building
Colum Drive,
Room 2.43,
Cardiff,
CF10 3EU
• Animas and companion species
• Medieval environmental studies
• Medievalism, peformance, and textual reception
Recently, I have been part of a large team working on the history of bear baiting in the British Isles and France. The team comprises archaeologists (zooarchaeology, biomolecular archaeology), literary historians and archivists, and performance practitioners including professional wrestlers. I am working with zooarchaeologist Professor Hannah O'Regan at the University of Nottingham to trace the medieval history of bears and exotic animals.
My next project is called Medieval Biophilia: Picturing Apocalypse in Manuscripts. This project considers how ecological crisis and sustainability are represented and told as stories in medieval manuscripts that feature motifs such as Creation, Doomsday and global flood, animal life and transformation, and human or supernatural management of the environment. My research looks into these themes in light of contemporary discussions in anthropology, ecocriticism, and the translation of science.
I am also interested in questions of sound and music, and poetry and performance, especially performance-as-research approaches to medieval song.
Finally, I have a growing research focus in the reception of medieval ideas in contemporary culture, especially religion and spirituality. My project in this area focuses on medievalism in contemporary neopaganism.
Supervisors: Emma Campbell, Jane Gilbert, Anna Saunders, and Christiania Whitehead
Address: John Percival Building
Colum Drive,
Room 2.43,
Cardiff,
CF10 3EU
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Books by Liam Lewis
The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, to reconceptualize animal soundscapes for interpretation.
Animal soundscapes draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, Lewis provides an important resource to theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal’s role in the interpretation of the natural world.
Papers by Liam Lewis
Cet article retrace les manières dont des textes médiévaux écrits en anglais et en français adoptent le lien entre le langage humain et le rugissement ursin pour inscrire l’ours dans le paysage poétique. Cette discussion se situe dans le contexte des preuves archéologiques, qui révèlent une augmentation constante de la présence d’ours en Angleterre après la conquête normande, avant laquelle ils étaient éteints, ce qui mène finalement vers les arènes de combat d’ours du début de l’époque moderne en Angleterre. Je montre que des œuvres, telles que le Femina, le Roman de Renart et l’Ovide moralisé, dépeignent les ours de manière à refléter un intérêt fondamental dans les liens qui unissent l’acte d’écrire à une réflexion zoopoétique sur l’animalité. Ainsi, les ours dans la littérature ne sont pas limités par leur extinction réelle d’un pays, ou au contraire par leur présence comme marchandise. Au contraire, les ours littéraires peuvent être lus en dialogue avec un paysage historique et archéologique complexe et en voie d’évolution.
Many bears were therefore intimately acquainted with the sights and sounds of human habitation in early modern England, but some were ‘blinded’ and deprived of their visual senses for sport. This renders Derrida’s visual model for ethical enquiry with the nonhuman significantly more complex. The encounters generated by animal baiting in this context thus enjoin us to reconsider some of the trickier components of the multi-layered relationship between bears and humans in urban, performative contexts, especially when violence, disability and exploitation are juxtaposed with the bear as a posthuman, companion figure. Bears were humanized through naming, animalized alongside lower status humans, and ascribed super-human characteristics such as strength, stamina, and, perhaps, courage, which brought into question the more rigid conceptions of able-bodiedness and species difference that defined the humanist agenda.
Medieval gibberish exposes the queerness of untranslateable chant as the sounds of demonic names are received in unpredictable ways that mirror the protagonists’ shifting desires for each other’s bodies. Using theories of translatability, I show how the incantation mobilises networks of queer spirituality reaching to an indigenous and transtemporal past to continually resist meaning and reassert an untranslateable identity in the present. By continuously rediscovering itself as a queer spirituality resistant to cultural translation, witchcraft draws attention to itself as a vanguard not only for the material and the mainstream, but also for a queer experience of transcendence.
Cet article explore les possibilités de dialogue entre les études littéraires médiévales et certaines perspectives actuelles sur le son et le ré-ensauvagement de l’environnement, en se concentrant sur deux récits sur la transformation d’identité : Yvain et Mélusine. Les études du son ont récemment rendu possible une réflexion philosophique plus large sur les intersections entre le langage, l’écologie et l’identité. Dans cet article, j’exploite une friction entre les perspectives philosophiques sur le « cri » français et une « acoustémologie » de l’écologie pour illustrer cette réflexion. Si, comme le suggèrent certains écologistes contemporains, le ré-ensauvagement est un processus souligné par une gestion prudente de la part de l’humain afin de restaurer le sauvage dans le paysage, nous pouvons dire la même chose pour des moments de transformation narrative révélés par le son dans les textes médiévaux. Comment ce genre d’interprétation textuelle offrirait-il d’autres possibilités de faire le lien entre le ré-ensauvagement textuel et la transformation des sujets humains et non-humains ? Pour conclure, je suggère comment l’écoute des textes médiévaux, y compris leurs pivots narratifs et les changements des phénomènes sonores, peut modifier la façon dont nous considérons l’identité non-humaine dans la littérature médiévale (et non-médiévale).
Book chapter in English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, vol. 1, ed. by Aidan Norrie, Carolyn Harris, Joanna Laynesmith, Danna Messer, and Elena Woodacre.
Book Reviews by Liam Lewis
The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, to reconceptualize animal soundscapes for interpretation.
Animal soundscapes draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, Lewis provides an important resource to theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal’s role in the interpretation of the natural world.
Cet article retrace les manières dont des textes médiévaux écrits en anglais et en français adoptent le lien entre le langage humain et le rugissement ursin pour inscrire l’ours dans le paysage poétique. Cette discussion se situe dans le contexte des preuves archéologiques, qui révèlent une augmentation constante de la présence d’ours en Angleterre après la conquête normande, avant laquelle ils étaient éteints, ce qui mène finalement vers les arènes de combat d’ours du début de l’époque moderne en Angleterre. Je montre que des œuvres, telles que le Femina, le Roman de Renart et l’Ovide moralisé, dépeignent les ours de manière à refléter un intérêt fondamental dans les liens qui unissent l’acte d’écrire à une réflexion zoopoétique sur l’animalité. Ainsi, les ours dans la littérature ne sont pas limités par leur extinction réelle d’un pays, ou au contraire par leur présence comme marchandise. Au contraire, les ours littéraires peuvent être lus en dialogue avec un paysage historique et archéologique complexe et en voie d’évolution.
Many bears were therefore intimately acquainted with the sights and sounds of human habitation in early modern England, but some were ‘blinded’ and deprived of their visual senses for sport. This renders Derrida’s visual model for ethical enquiry with the nonhuman significantly more complex. The encounters generated by animal baiting in this context thus enjoin us to reconsider some of the trickier components of the multi-layered relationship between bears and humans in urban, performative contexts, especially when violence, disability and exploitation are juxtaposed with the bear as a posthuman, companion figure. Bears were humanized through naming, animalized alongside lower status humans, and ascribed super-human characteristics such as strength, stamina, and, perhaps, courage, which brought into question the more rigid conceptions of able-bodiedness and species difference that defined the humanist agenda.
Medieval gibberish exposes the queerness of untranslateable chant as the sounds of demonic names are received in unpredictable ways that mirror the protagonists’ shifting desires for each other’s bodies. Using theories of translatability, I show how the incantation mobilises networks of queer spirituality reaching to an indigenous and transtemporal past to continually resist meaning and reassert an untranslateable identity in the present. By continuously rediscovering itself as a queer spirituality resistant to cultural translation, witchcraft draws attention to itself as a vanguard not only for the material and the mainstream, but also for a queer experience of transcendence.
Cet article explore les possibilités de dialogue entre les études littéraires médiévales et certaines perspectives actuelles sur le son et le ré-ensauvagement de l’environnement, en se concentrant sur deux récits sur la transformation d’identité : Yvain et Mélusine. Les études du son ont récemment rendu possible une réflexion philosophique plus large sur les intersections entre le langage, l’écologie et l’identité. Dans cet article, j’exploite une friction entre les perspectives philosophiques sur le « cri » français et une « acoustémologie » de l’écologie pour illustrer cette réflexion. Si, comme le suggèrent certains écologistes contemporains, le ré-ensauvagement est un processus souligné par une gestion prudente de la part de l’humain afin de restaurer le sauvage dans le paysage, nous pouvons dire la même chose pour des moments de transformation narrative révélés par le son dans les textes médiévaux. Comment ce genre d’interprétation textuelle offrirait-il d’autres possibilités de faire le lien entre le ré-ensauvagement textuel et la transformation des sujets humains et non-humains ? Pour conclure, je suggère comment l’écoute des textes médiévaux, y compris leurs pivots narratifs et les changements des phénomènes sonores, peut modifier la façon dont nous considérons l’identité non-humaine dans la littérature médiévale (et non-médiévale).
Book chapter in English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, vol. 1, ed. by Aidan Norrie, Carolyn Harris, Joanna Laynesmith, Danna Messer, and Elena Woodacre.