‘Man Spekeþ, bere brayeþ’: The Zoopoetics of Bear Roaring and Silence in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This article traces how medieval texts written in English and French adopt the link between human language and bear roaring to inscribe bears into the poetic landscape. I place this discussion in the context of archaeological evidence, which reveals a steady increase in the presence of ursids in England after the Norman conquest, before which they were extinct, and culminating in the bear fighting arenas of early modern England. I show that works such as the Femina, the Roman de Renart and the Ovide moralisé depict ursids in ways that reflect a foundational interest in the ties that bind the act of writing with a zoopoetical reflection on animality. In this way, bears in literary texts are not limited by their extinction from a landscape, or conversely by their presence as commodities. Rather, literary bears may be read in dialogue with a complex and evolving historical and archaeological record.