For the natural science theorists in the late Middle Ages, Aristotle's word was law - and advancing interpretations that were too novel required some very careful side-stepping and sliding around in order to make it seem like there were no conflicts with the theoretical standard. The Resl's "Philosophical Beliefs" chapter references this complication quite explicitly, most memorably in the case of Jean de Jandun and Albertus Magnus's suggestion that some degree of imagination and fantasy exist in all animals - and it wasn't that Aristotle's denied this in his description of bees and ants in De Anima but rather that the translator must simply have gotten it wrong.
For this reason, among a host of others, it behooves us to take a closer look at pre-Medieval natural science commentators. These men, who lived their lives in the wake of the sack of Rome and before the full onset of the Dark Ages, interpreted the hierarchy of beasts in Christian Neo-Platonist terms - often in the best cases with Aristotle as a non-infallible commentator and source. Of these, perhaps Boethius is one of the most well-established early Aristotelians and most ultimately influential authors (as is noted in the Resl, it was his early Latin translations of Aristotle's logical corpus that eventually found their way into the Medieval mind). In his Consolation of Philosophy, he makes this powerful remark about the moral symbolism of animals and the construction of the tripartite soul:
