ABSTRACT
Though the lines between humans and animals merged in literature, metaphor, and people’s minds, one might ask whether there was any practical change in how people treated the animals that shared their world? We can see just such a change in two areas of animal/human interactions: the law and the household. In both areas beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some animals began to be treated like humans, demonstrating the power of metaphor to change not only people’s minds but their actions.
