Director, Institute for the Humanities; Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities; Professor of French, Women's Studies and Comparative Literature
peggymcc@umich.eduOffice Information:
2030 Tisch
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., French Literature, Yale University, 1989
B.A., French, University of North Carolina, 1981
In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France
Peggy McCracken
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.
Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Peggy McCracken
The fascinating account of how the story of the Buddha was transformed into the legend of a Christian saint. The tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up his wealth and kingdom to follow Jesus, was widely told and read in the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages, and even cited by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Only in the nineteenth century did scholars note the parallels between the lives of Buddha and Josaphat. In Search of the Christian Buddha traces the Buddha’s story from India to Persia to Jerusalem and then throughout Europe, as it was rewritten by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian authors, illustrating its unsuspected integration into European culture. Through a comparison of the tale’s various versions, this book reveals surprising convergences and divergences—between Christianity and Buddhism on subjects including the meaning of death, the problem of desire, and the view of women. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Month of Publication: April Year of Publication: 2014 Location: New York, NY
