Fills a gap in medieval studies by exploring the significance of the snail.

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—long focusing on the “crowned heads” of creatures such as lions and unicorns.

This book offers a fresh point of view with its focus on the small and seemingly insignificant snail. It studies the uses and representations of medieval snails, spanning material culture, medicine, and gastronomy, but also a great variety of texts and images—taking into consideration bestiaries, sermons, poems, and insults as well as marginalia, sculptures, paintings, and painted ceilings.

Introducing the Medieval Snail concludes with a novel reading of the famed “snail-combat motif,” in which a knight cowers when faced with a ferocious mollusk, making a connection between Gothic marginalia and a new, most malleable cultural expression: the meme.