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，研究了14至16世纪动物文学（寓言和史诗）和自然历史如何表现和发挥动物的功能。这两个领域的文本不仅一致地将动物作为具有独特品质的角色，而且还集体地将它们（无论是在情节或解释的层面上，还是作为传授的特定知识的一部分）置于与人类的特定关系中。从某种意义上说，这些文本将被共同视为动物文学，它通过面对双方并让他们互动来反映和反思人与动物的关系。动物不是拟人化的，它们也不一定会说话；然而，通过他们的语言表现，他们在表达人类的意义上变得雄辩。由于动物作为知识生成过程的代理人，因此该项目打算推断动物文学中它们交流的多种方式，并不断再现人与兽之间的界限。在研究期间，出现了大量的白话百科全书、寓言语料库和野兽史诗，它们表明了一种富有成效的方法，直到那时，表现动物的传统相对稳定。乡土动物文学摆脱了与实用主义和教育需求的联系，进入了不同的语境，从而产生了新的知识形式，同时在一个受制于知识和叙事要求的领域内，重新塑造和增加了雄辩动物的想象力潜力。百科全书和叙事性文献都广泛地讨论了动物的“本性”。然而，关于动物的知识和叙述动物之间的关系是相互依存的，而不仅仅是平行的。与自然历史相关的文本传播了一种关于动物的知识形式，这种知识被组织成一系列独特的品质，道德和寓言叙事将后者与人类联系起来。相反，自然历史著作从叙事来源中获得知识，并/或以叙事形式传授知识。因此，对这些干扰的调查带来了洞察人类与动物关系的具体叙事概念化的希望，这些概念化产生了一种与动物相关的知识形式，这种知识是由文学化和科学化逐渐分化的历史背景形成的。该项目旨在通过遵循三条系统的探究线来追溯关于动物的知识的前现代诗学，分别关注知识和叙事的关系（SP 1），关注人与动物关系谈判中的空间概念化（SP 2），以及物种之间战争的预测（SP 3）。

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.