L’invention de l’animal au Moyen-Âge, avec Pierre-Olivier Dittmar

In March 2025, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar (EHESS) presented Les monstres des hommes. Un inventaire critique de l'humanité au XIIIe siècle, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar & Maud Pérez-Simon, éds & trads (Honoré Champion, "Classiques", August 2024). L'invention de l'animal. Essai d'anthropologie médiévale Gallimard, "Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires", March 2026 There were no animals in the Middle Ages. Pigs and birds, oxen and weasels, rabbits and bears, wolves and bees, unicorns even, yes. But while animals were present in numbers, sharing territory and many other relationships with humans, the animal as a category, as we know it today, did not exist. Yet the invention of this concept not only creates a divide between humans and the rest of the world, it also produces a second, less visible, more intimate division, giving rise to an "animal part" within each individual. The aim of this book is to bear witness to a world, a period, that was unaware of this double divide and brought it to the fore. At the crossroads of religious and intellectual history, art history and the history of food, it sheds light, notably through images, on a particular way of relating to the living and a decisive moment in the history of Western societies.