67 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Bartosiewicz, A. M. Choyke (eds.), Medieval Animals on the Move, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63888-7_4 CHAPTER 4 Medieval Animals: The Fast and the Slow Gerhard Jaritz … nos deux mondes se rejoignent. L’animal peut faire parfois mieux que l’homme. Il peut également faire aussi mal. (Lenoir 2017, 81) The interest in animals in the Middle Ages has several explanations: eco- nomic perspectives, social aspects, agricultural, alimentary, medical, reli- gious, or “natural scientifc” viewpoints, and so on. All of these interests and perspectives were certainly not neutral but have to be seen as con- nected with particular positive or negative qualities and evaluations of spe- cifc animals, as well as with the products based on or assembled out of them. One of them, with regard to the living animals themselves, is cer- tainly their respective speed or slowness. One regularly fnds references to those characteristics in a variety of textual and visual sources and source types, and in different contexts. They are often connected with compari- sons between specifc animals or between animals and humans in an alle- gorical or metaphorical way. This contribution aims at offering a sample of G. Jaritz (*) Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Vienna, Austria e-mail: jaritzg@ceu.edu