IL CAVALIERE E L’ANIMALE

In the novels and in the songs of medieval gesta the knight appears as an assemblage of identify traits that tie the individual to the community through a constant mediation on animals. Consulting a large group of texts from the rich literary French environment of the 12^th and 13^th centuries, this volume explores overall ways in which animals intervenes to construct a knight's identity. Through this textual path the author shows us the symbolic complexity of the animal in the medieval codification of masculinity, nobility and violence. She also invites readers to maneuver within the relationship of intimacy and otherness that bind humans and animals in the longue durèe of European culture.

About the Author
Antonella Sciancalepore is a researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain. After graduating in European Literary Cultures at the University of Bologna, she received the PhD cotutelle in Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences at the Universities of Macerata and Edinburgh. Currently her researches relate to animality and wildness in French and Italian chivalrous literature and to the human-animal hybrids between science and literature at the end of the Middle Ages.