Alison Langdon is Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University, USA. She is the editor of Postscript to the Middle Ages: Teaching Medieval Studies through Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (2009) and has published articles on the women troubadours, Chaucer and his contemporaries, and canines in medieval literature. Her current projects center on the liminality of human/animal identity in the medieval imagination.

Challenges rather than reinforces the human-animal divide, setting itself apart from previous full-length studies on this topic

Acknowledges the various modes of meaning through which human and nonhuman animals communicated between and among themselves in the Middle Ages

Includes a breadth of discussions that range from falconry and horsemanship, as well as imaginative literature and medieval anthropocentrism

1 Introduction.- Part I Communicating Through Animals.- 2 Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse.- 3 As faucon comen out of muwe": Female Agency and the Language of Falconry.- 4 Saints and Holy Beasts: Pious Animals in Early-Medieval Insular Saints' Vitae.- 5 The Speech of Strangers: The Tale of the Andalusi Phoenix.- Part II Recovering Animal Languages.- 6 Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity, and Boundary in Old English Animal Voice Catalogues.- 7 In Briddes Wise: Chaucer's Avian Poetics.- 8 Understanding Hawk-Latin: Animal Language and Universal Rhetoric.- 9 "Dites le mei, si ferez bien": Fallen Language and Animal Communication in Marie de France's Bisclavret.- Part III Embodied Language and Interspecies Dependence.-10 On Equine Language: Jordanus Rufus and Thirteenth-Century Communicative Horsemanship.- 11 No Hoof, No Horse: Hoof Care, Veterinary Medicine and Cross-Species Communication in Late Medieval England.- 12 Medieval Dog Whisperers: The Poetics of Rehabilitation.- 13 Embodied Emotion as Animal Language in Le Chevalier au Lion.