Distributed for University of Wales Press
Introducing the Medieval Snail
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.
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.
144 pages | 1 color plate, 21 halftones | 5.08 x 7.8 | © 2026
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
Preface
List of illustrations
Introduction
1 – What is a snail? A slippery scope
2 – Concrete uses: waste not, want not – from frugality to luxury
3 – Snails in texts: meanings most malleable
4 – Snails in visual art: devil in the detail
5 – Molluscs in Marginalia: the snail-combat motif
6 – Success and posterity: introducing the “Memedieval”
Conclusion
Bibliography
Endnotes
List of illustrations
Introduction
1 – What is a snail? A slippery scope
2 – Concrete uses: waste not, want not – from frugality to luxury
3 – Snails in texts: meanings most malleable
4 – Snails in visual art: devil in the detail
5 – Molluscs in Marginalia: the snail-combat motif
6 – Success and posterity: introducing the “Memedieval”
Conclusion
Bibliography
Endnotes