ABSTRACT
Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale contains one of the most celebrated representations of interspecies empathy in medieval literature. The teaching creatures of romance provide a powerful counterpoint to more familiar anthropocentric narratives which offer nonhuman animals as allegorical, or as inferiors to be dominated by humans. Many conversations about medieval animals revolve around genres that use animals allegorically: bestiaries, fables, sermons, and beast epics in which animals are vehicles for anthropocentric messages often keyed to Christian moral precepts. In envisioning creatures who interact with humans to shape their choices and actions zöopedagogy recognizes something like the paradigm of cognition and cognitive assemblages recently articulated by N. Katherine Hayles. Extensive hunting scenes and protracted descriptions of dressing the kill typically focus attention on the human actors and the hunting dogs who act as their proxies. The tropes of romance, where the natural and supernatural collide, surface in present-day discussions of figures like the therapy horse.
