Eloquent animals: narrative conceptualisations of human-animal relations in 14th to 16th century germanophone Animal Literature

该项目分为三个子项目，调查动物文学(寓言和史诗)和自然历史在14至16世纪表现动物并使其发挥作用的方式。这两个领域的文本不仅一致地将动物塑造成具有独特品质的人物，而且将它们共同置于与人的特定关系中(无论是在情节或解释的层面上，还是作为所传授的特定知识的一部分)。这些文本将被共同视为动物文学，它通过对抗双方，让双方互动来反映和反映人与动物的关系。动物不是拟人化的，也不一定被赋予语言能力；然而，通过它们的语言表现形式，它们仍然变得雄辩起来，在某种意义上，它们针对人类。由于动物也是知识产生过程中的代理人，因此，该项目旨在推断动物文学中动物交流的不同方式，并不断地再现人与兽之间的边界。在研究期间，出现了各种各样的白话百科全书、寓言语料库和野兽史诗，这表明在此之前，代表动物的传统是一种富有成效的方法。白话动物文学摆脱了与实用的教育需求的联系，进入了不同的语境，从而产生了新的知识形式，同时在受知识和叙事性要求的范围内重塑和增加了雄辩动物的想象力潜力。百科全书和叙事文学都广泛地阐述了动物的“本性”。然而，关于动物的知识和叙述动物之间是一种相互依存的关系，而不仅仅是平行的关系。与自然历史有关的文本传播了一种关于动物的知识形式，这种知识是以一系列独特的品质组织起来的，道德说教和寓言叙事采用了后者，以便将它们与人类相互联系。相反，自然历史作品从叙事来源获取知识，并/或以叙事形式传授知识。因此，对这些干扰的调查有望洞察人与动物关系的具体叙事概念化，这些概念化产生一种与动物相关的知识形式，形成于其逐渐区分文学化和科学化的历史背景下。该项目旨在通过三条系统的研究路线来追溯关于动物的前现代知识诗学，分别关注知识与叙事性的关系(SP1)、人与动物关系谈判中的空间概念化(SP2)和物种间战争的预测(SP3)。

Divided into three sub-projects, the project investigates the ways in which both Beast Literature (Fable and Epic) and natural history represent and functionalise animals during the 14th to 16th centuries. Texts from both these spheres not only unanimously project animals as characters possessing distinctive qualities, but also collectively place them (either on the level of plot or of interpretation, or as a part of the particular knowledge imparted) in a specific relation to Man. Said texts will be treated jointly as Animal Literature in the sense, that it reflects and reflects on human-animal relations by confronting both parties and letting them interact. Animals are not anthropomorphised, nor are they necessarily endowed with speech; yet through their linguistic representations they nonetheless become eloquent in the sense that they address humanity. As animals are thus encountered also in their character as agents of processes of knowledge generation, the project intends to extrapolate the diverse ways in which in Animal Literature they communicate and continually re-produce the boundary between Man and Beast. In the period under study, a vast variety of vernacular encyclopaedia, corpora of fables and beast epics emerges, which bespeak a productive approach to until then comparatively stable traditions of representing animals. Shedding its ties with pragmatic, educational demands, vernacular Animal Literature enters different contexts and thus generates new formations of knowledge, all the while recasting and increasing the imaginative potential of the eloquent animal within a sphere subject to the requirements of knowledge and narrativity alike. Both encyclopaedic and narrative literature extensively dwell on the "nature" of animals. The relation between knowledge about animals and narrating animals, however, is one of interdependence rather than of mere parallelity. Texts relating to natural history distribute a form of knowledge about animals that is organised in sets of distinctive qualities, with moralising and allegorical narratives taking up the latter in order to interrelate them with Man. Conversely, natural historical writings derive their knowledge from narrative sources and/or impart it in narrative form. Investigation of these interferences therefore carries the promise of insights into specific narrative conceptualisations of human-animal relations that generate a form of animal-related knowledge shaped by its historical context of gradual differentiation between literarisation and scientification. The project aims to trace a pre-modern poetics of knowledge about animals by following three lines of systematic inquiry, focussing on the relation of knowledge and narrativity (SP 1), on conceptualisations of space in negotiations of human-animal relations (SP 2), and on projections of wars between species (SP 3), respectively.