Animal Miracles

The emerging interdisciplinary animal studies shares its central commitment with posthumanist, environmental, and biopolitical studies: to shift critical thought from subtending human supremacy and to explore instead the webs of interdependence that enmesh humans with all other forms of life, technologies, and materialities. Animal studies search for a better apprehension of this interdependence by drawing on several theoretical initiatives: post-humanist and neo-humanist efforts to move beyond post-structuralism’s fascination with language to the exclusion of further modes of being; multispecies ethnographies and zooarchaeolgies that analyze animal husbandry and niche environments; and histories of the senses that emphasize how sensations suffuse consciousness and link sensory bodies together. All these approaches participate in critiquing the version of culture-making in which individuals shape an inert environment. These approaches argue instead that humans are always in reciprocity with other kinds of beings, always affected as well as affecting.  Scholars have long been in agreement that the animal miracles of medieval saints are of little importance in the British hagiographic traditions. With regard to the livestock miracles in which a saint commands a wolf to stop killing cattle and take up guarding them instead, the scholarly tendency is to read the miracle metaphorically, as a representation of the saint’s charismatic authority over human groups, or to read it doctrinally, as the saint’s recovery of Edenic harmonies, or to dismiss it altogether as fanciful boilerplate carried over from earlier hagiography. Animal studies would urge closer attention to such miracles for their cultural perceptions of human-animal relationships in the living world. My example reads the twelfth-century Life of Saint Modwenna for its commentary on species cohabitation. An animal studies perspective reveals a saintly profile based not on charismatic authority but on species crossing interdependence, and a saintly project based not on Edenic recovery but instead on environmental innovation.