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Inaugural lecture. Tuesday 5 June, 18.30-19.30. Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, UCL. Drinks reception and afterparty to follow.
Medieval art and literature are densely populated with images of grieving hounds. Dogs rest at the feet of countless tomb effigies. They attend the funerals of selected saints and kings. Or, in a widely-disseminated story with multiple variants, they remain with their murdered masters' corpses for days on end, lamenting their fate and setting in motion a chain of events that brings the perpetrators to justice. A thread of feeling runs through these various depictions of canine mourning: invariably, the creatures' sorrow is treated as an index of 'love' for the persons whose lives they grieve. But imagery of lamenting, loving dogs was also harnessed in the service of moral or political arguments, linked to questions of who or what gets to count as fully human. Focusing especially on the motif's associations with imagery of war and conflict, this lecture assesses the role of medieval dog love in articulating a politics of loss.
Image: Detail from bestiary, c.1226-50. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 764, fol. 31v. Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Source: digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk