The Wild Word

Seeing animals through the eyes of the gospels, in the ancient world and today.

The Wild Word presents new readings of the way animals are used in the Gospels to create, reinforce, and transgress social boundaries, as well as to enforce and collapse the categories of domesticity/wildness and natural/unnatural.

Placed in a manger as an infant, Jesus seems to have been born into a world teeming with animal life. Yet read the stories again. Does Mary ride a donkey? Does the centurion ride a horse? Animals are everywhere in the gospels, though not always in the ways we expect. Where animals are visible, their presence means more than we realize.

The Wild Word explores the gospels’ well-known, forgotten, and missing portrayals of animals. Jaeda Calaway examines the many interactions between humans and other animals in these biblical texts, first considering forms of consumption, such as eating animals, wearing animal products, working animals, and sacrificing animals. She then turns to symbolic animality: how humans assign animal traits and archetypes to other humans, how divine and demonic powers intersect with wild and domestic animals, and what queer and trans readings of gospel animals can illuminate.

Told and retold for two thousand years, the gospel stories are deeply imprinted on Western culture. The Wild Word reveals how many of their associations with animals, animality, and wildness remain with us today.