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From pet keeping to sky burials, a posthuman and ecocritical
interrogation of and challenge to human particularity in medieval
texts Mainstream medieval thought, like much of mainstream modern
thought, habitually argued that because humans alone had language,
reason, and immortal souls, all other life was simply theirs for
the taking. But outside this scholarly consensus teemed a host of
other ways to imagine the shared worlds of humans and nonhumans.
How Not to Make a Human engages with these nonsystematic practices
and thought to challenge both human particularity and the notion
that agency, free will, and rationality are the defining
characteristics of being human. Recuperating the Middle Ages as a
lost opportunity for decentering humanity, Karl Steel provides a
posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of a wide range of medieval
texts. Exploring such diverse topics as medieval pet keeping,
stories of feral and isolated children, the ecological implications
of funeral practices, and the "bare life" of oysters from a variety
of disanthropic perspectives, Steel furnishes contemporary
posthumanists with overlooked cultural models to challenge human
and other supremacies at their roots. By collecting beliefs and
practices outside the mainstream of medieval thought, How Not to
Make a Human connects contemporary concerns with ecology, animal
life, and rethinkings of what it means to be human to uncanny
materials that emphasize matters of death, violence, edibility, and
vulnerability.
From pet keeping to sky burials, a posthuman and ecocritical
interrogation of and challenge to human particularity in medieval
texts Mainstream medieval thought, like much of mainstream modern
thought, habitually argued that because humans alone had language,
reason, and immortal souls, all other life was simply theirs for
the taking. But outside this scholarly consensus teemed a host of
other ways to imagine the shared worlds of humans and nonhumans.
How Not to Make a Human engages with these nonsystematic practices
and thought to challenge both human particularity and the notion
that agency, free will, and rationality are the defining
characteristics of being human. Recuperating the Middle Ages as a
lost opportunity for decentering humanity, Karl Steel provides a
posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of a wide range of medieval
texts. Exploring such diverse topics as medieval pet keeping,
stories of feral and isolated children, the ecological implications
of funeral practices, and the "bare life" of oysters from a variety
of disanthropic perspectives, Steel furnishes contemporary
posthumanists with overlooked cultural models to challenge human
and other supremacies at their roots. By collecting beliefs and
practices outside the mainstream of medieval thought, How Not to
Make a Human connects contemporary concerns with ecology, animal
life, and rethinkings of what it means to be human to uncanny
materials that emphasize matters of death, violence, edibility, and
vulnerability.
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