A01=Julia Pineau
Author_Julia Pineau
Category=DSBB
Category=NHDJ
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eq_history
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Introducing
Product details
- ISBN 9781837723720
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2026
- Publisher: University of Wales Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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When one thinks about medieval animals, snails rarely come to mind. Just as history has long had its biases, so has the study of animals – both have long focused on the ‘crowned heads’. A focus on the seemingly insignificant, on the small and the frail, offers a fresh point of view. This book studies the uses and representations of medieval snails, spanning material culture, medicine and gastronomy as well as a great variety of texts and images – taking into consideration bestiaries, sermons, poems and insults, as well as marginalia, sculpture, paintings and painted ceilings. Observing the Middle Ages from the viewpoint of a snail can be surprising, and lead us to delve into material everyday life as well as the core of culture-building. This study concludes with a novel reading of the famed ‘snail-combat motif’, in which a knight cowers faced with a ferocious mollusc, making a connection between Gothic marginalia and a new, most malleable cultural expression: the meme.
Julia Pineau currently teaches literature, translation and medieval studies at the Sorbonne. Though her PhD is on the topic of medieval snails, her research also delves into fourteenth-century literature, oaths and promises, monstrosity and marginality, as well as medievalism.
