THE INVESTIGATION OF relations between animality and manuscript materiality in Sarah Kay's meticulous contextualisation of bestiary production, Animal Skins, evidently draws on and advances her earlier explorations of the shape and nature of subjectivity, whether understood as embodied or as dependent on the second skin(s) of language and text for its contouring and sensations. All the time attentive to specificities of illustration, ordering, and wording in particular manuscript versions, Animal Skins illuminates both long-standing traditions and immediate contexts, situating the bestiary's handling of nature in relation to educational practices and currents in thought. Through this, Kay's work targets the recto–verso complexities of the gospel word according to our dumb neighbours: ‘Being animal is both good news and bad for humans, for in the animal their identity is both lost and found.’ Animal skins materially support instruction that is, in the words of Thomas of Chobham, ‘useful to us in the body, but also […] useful in the soul’, therefore defining and refining humanity; but at the same time they ‘shape readers’ understanding by the constant, if silent, challenge to rethink the grounds of their identity’ (Animal Skins: 156). As with the songbirds of Parrots and Nightingales – creatures testifying to the insistence of language, poetry especially, either welling up from inside or witlessly repeated – the trouble between animality and human subjectivity finds a mirror in the parchment page's conjunction of beast and book. In this context, the animal materiality underpinning medieval textual cultures – whether concretely as books or as an intellectual and imaginative framework – appears simultaneously mute and eloquent, gifted through human agency with something akin to a voice otherwise thoughtlessly denied in the ordinary run of exploitation.

By exploring the bestiary's dialectical engagement with human exceptionalism, Animal Skins and its related studies offer rich insights into the uncertain terrains that readerly intuition and apprehension negotiate or are given to occupy. Such a focus also reflects Kay's previous engagements with the function of contradiction (in both topical logic and Marxism) and the unconscious as both spaces for and challenges to thinking.