THE FINAL CHAPTER of this book brought this discussion of animal soundscapes to a conclusion emphasizing the competing perspectives at play in texts that represent animal sounds alongside animal discourse. These alternative forms of utterance sit alongside each other in Anglo-Norman literary cultures and encapsulate a wider practice of representing animal utterance as similar to human speech, but not quite. From this book's first dabble in nonlinguistic animal sound in the example from Marie de France's lai Le Frêne, we have come back to this author to consider animal speech as a metaphor for human discourse. The sounds of animals and birds in medieval texts are thus encoded in different forms of ‘humanese’, that is, a rewriting and interpreting of nonhuman sounds through human languages. Representations of contact between humans and animals based on language have come under considerable criticism in recent years, but over the course of this book I have shown how animal soundscapes develop modes of thinking about language that also enjoin audiences to pay attention to their own linguistic natures and vocal abilities. These abilities are often positioned in relation to animal voices and sounds. By considering how sonic phenomena are integrated into the broader acoustic and epistemological networks of medieval texts, I have drawn attention to the possible relationships between human and animal agents that such sounds might engender. This has therefore been an examination of the textual and aural conditions that provide a platform for continually reassessing human exceptionalism, even as it is asserted in some forms of dominance through language itself.

My readings of the sounds of animals and birds in medieval texts have been, first and foremost, explorations of the ways that written sonic phenomena create acoustic environments in texts that communicate the perspectives and understanding (entendement) of nonhuman figures for different audiences. In investigating how such sounds are depicted through and across languages, I have focused on the structures that allow such perspectives to emerge, and the ways that these structures are represented for interpretation, while also attending to how they are challenged by depictions of sound found therein. In our last encounter with animal soundscapes, I would like to return to the question of textuality, and its place in the representation of animal sound, by looking beyond the Fables, discussed in Chapter 4, to another curious text with which they are bound.