‘ Man Spekeþ, bere brayeþ ’

This article traces how medieval texts written in English and French adopt the link between human language and bear roaring to inscribe bears into the poetic landscape. I place this discussion in the context of archaeological evidence, which reveals a steady increase in the presence of ursids in England after the Norman conquest, before which they were extinct, and culminating in the bear fighting arenas of early modern England. I show that works such as the Femina, the Roman de Renart and the Ovide moralisé depict ursids in ways that reflect a foundational interest in the ties that bind the act of writing with a zoopoetical reflection on animality. In this way, bears in literary texts are not limited by their extinction from a landscape, or conversely by their presence as commodities. Rather, literary bears may be read in dialogue with a complex and evolving historical and archaeological record

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · CONQUEST · Context (archaeology) · Literature · Poetry · Silence · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Medieval Literature and History