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This seminar explores the boundaries between humans and animals in the medieval world and beyond. Reading literary texts such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante and medical texts such as Girolamo Fracastoro’s On Contagion, we will trace the formation of distinctions between species. The categories we will use to investigate the distinctions between animals and humans include metamorphosis, contagion, education, taxonomy, subjugation, hunting, representation, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, wilderness, misogyny, and promiscuity. To probe these categories and distinctions, we will make use of a series of critical approaches, from critical animal studies to posthumanism, within the disciplinary specificity of Medieval Studies.