{"word_count": 340, "character_count": 2468}
Animal Languages: Interspecies Communication in the Middle Ages&#160;Editor : Alison Langdon, Western Kentucky UniversityDate limite des propositions (300-500 mots) : 1 août 2015&#160;Until relatively recently, scholars have tended to focus on the symbolicvalence of nonhuman animals, to read their behavior and characteristicsas representative of explicitly human interests and concerns. With theadvent of critical animal studies, new work has begun to critiquetraditional humanist scholarship by challenging any absolute distinctionbetween the categories of ³human² and ³animal." This has led to newreadings of animals in the medieval world as living creatures ratherthan merely figurative representations of human experience and values.Language provides a particularly rich locus for this exploration.Drawing on a tradition stretching back to Genesis, many medieval writersidentified the capacity for language as evidence of possession ofreason, that faculty which was seen to separate humans from all the restof God¹s creation. At the same time, many animals were understood topossess language of their own and in some cases to participate in humanlanguage. Although medieval philosophers generally deny intention andsignificance in animal vocalizations, a range of medieval textualtraditions suggests that animals were commonly seen to communicatewithin and between species.This interdisciplinary volume seeks articles of 6,000-9,000 words fromall fields of medieval studies exploring language, broadly construed, aspart of the continued interrogation of the boundaries of human andnonhuman animals in the Middle Ages. How, when, and with whom didanimals talk in the medieval world? What kinds of communicativestrategies did medieval people recognize in the animal world, and howwere they interpreted? How was human meaning imposed on animalvocalizations? How does the use of animals as symbolic language inverbal and visual texts draw upon empirical understanding of nonhumancommunication (body language, etc.)? How might nonhuman animals remindus of the embodied nature of language itself?&#160;Proposals of 300-500 words should be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Alison Langdon at the following address: alison.langdon@wku.eduDeadline for proposals is August 1, 2015. Notification of accepted proposals will be made by August 15, 2015, with complete chapters due by June 1, 2016. The volume has been invited for submission to Ashgate and Amsterdam University Press.