ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the connections between animals and nationalism, and specifically the role of nonhuman animals in the propagation of 'national' histories. It focuses on the business of collective memory, or rather more precisely cultural memory, asking which animals are remembered, which animals forgotten, and why. The book explores the question of why animals' materiality really matters. It explores the role of emotion and sentiment in animal–human history. It considers animals, violence, and the meaning of the 'medieval' and key historiographical problems. The book provides the strangeness of the middle ages, and so to complicate the conventional chronologies of cruelty and violence and compassion. It outlines the genealogy of the conception of 'agency', and in particular the problems involved in suggesting that humans have distinctive attributes that gives them an 'agency' or power that all other animals signally lack.
