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I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, \t\t\t\tMini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and \t\t\t\tlove them. When they die, I'll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury's \t\t\t\teye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know \t\t\t\tnow how weird all that is.\nPeople in the Middle Ages did not, so far as we know, \t\t\t\tlove their animals. As Joyce points out, they used them, ate them, and even had sex \t\t\t\twith them. But they do not seem to have loved them, any of them. They did, or at \t\t\t\tleast some of them, think about animals rather deeply. They wanted to know what \t\t\t\tanimals were, really. They knew animals were God's creatures. But there were \t\t\t\tnettlesome questions, like whether animals had souls. Well, probably not. Some of \t\t\t\tthem, however, like lambs, were put forward as models for holy behavior ("the Lamb \t\t\t\tof God"). So do lambs, unlike all other animals, have souls? Another question: Could \t\t\t\tyou eat animals? If they didn't have souls, then you certainly could. But which \t\t\t\tones? Not clear. The Christian Bible--unlike the Hebrew Bible--is rather short on \t\t\t\tdietary regulations. Yet another question: Could you have sex with animals? They \t\t\t\twere, after all, only things, and it didn't really matter what you did with things \t\t\t\t(though "spilling your seed" in any case was a no-no). That said, having sex with an \t\t\t\tanimal is rather unseemly. Still another question: If an animal killed someone, was \t\t\t\tit "guilty." Aristotle said animals didn't have reason, so that would suggest that \t\t\t\tanimals couldn't be "guilty" or "innocent." Fine, but some animals were awfully \t\t\t\tsmart, like the sly fox that everyone heard about in folk tales. So if some animals \t\t\t\thave some reason and are therefore human-like, are there some humans who are a touch \t\t\t\tbestial and therefore animal-like? Where exactly was the line between humans and \t\t\t\tanimals? Thinkers of the Middle Ages had some interesting things to say about all \t\t\t\tthese questions, many of which still have resonance today. Read Joyce's fine book \t\t\t\tand learn all about it.