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Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). xii + 354 pp. ISBN o- 8122-3162-9. ¿33-95·
A book in English on medieval Latin beast poetry will be welcomed by many, and Jan M. Ziolkowski must be congratulated for providing such a learned and wide-ranging contribution to this field. In the introduction he offers a definition of medieval Latin beast poetry, explaining that it cuts across several literary genres and cannot be identified simply with the three genres with which it has most in common: beast fable, the bestiary tradition and the vernacular Reynard cycle. In the first chapter he discusses the literary back* * considering at length various forms of beast poems existing before the Latin Middle Ages, in particular beast fables which continued to be popular for educational purposes, before proceeding to his exploration of medieval beast poetry in the subsequent chapters. Here he offers a series of detailed analyses of minor and major poems alike, from the thirty-one hexameters of Alcuin's The Cock...