This is a draft version of ‘Introduction’ to Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures, Erica Fudge ed. (University of Illinois Press: Urbana and
Chicago, 2004). Please cite from the published version.
Erica Fudge
Introduction
In 1634 William Prynne was called before the Star Chamber for ‘writing
and publishinge a scandalous and a libellous Booke againste the State,
the Kinge, and all his people.´ The book, Histrio-Mastix, was
‘condempneth ... to bee in a most ignominyous manner burnte by the
hande of the hangman,´ and Prynne himself was condemned, among
other things, ‘to loose an eare at eyther place´.1 Three years later,
following an apparent plot ‘to set up the puritan or separatist faction,’2
Prynne, with John Bastwick and Henry Burton, was once again sentenced
to have his ears clipped and to have his cheek marked with the letters S
and L, for ‘a seditious libellour.´ Because of the previous punishment ‘the
court examined whether Prin had any eares left; they found they were
cropt, soe they went to sentence.´3 This time Prynne lost his ears
completely.
Nine years after the punishment of Prynne, Bastwick and Burton,
protest against which Christopher Hill has seen as one of the key starting
points of the English Revolution,4 the birth of a child with its ‘face upon
the breast, and without a head´ in Lancashire put a new spin on the story.
God, that rather than I shall be a Roundhead, or bear a Roundhead, I may
bring forth a Childe without a head.´ Her neighbors agreed that her words
‘might be a great meanes to provoke God to shew such testimony of his
displeasure against her, by causing her to bring forth this Monster.´ But it
was not only the woman’s words that were at issue, according to the
pamphlet that recorded the appearance of this wonderful child. The
actions of the woman’s mother were also presented as part of the context
for understanding the advent of the aberrant infant. The pamphlet
records, ‘amongst other scornes which her mother cast upon religious
people she too her Cat; and said that it must be made a Roundhead like
Burton, Prinne and Bastwicke, and causing the eares to be cut off; called
her cat Prynn (instead of Puffe).´5
This story, involving politics, religion, punishment and justice, offers
a picture of human-animal relations that is extreme, but that
simultaneously calls up an attitude that is typical of the period under
discussion in this collection of essays. What is brought to the fore is the
dual nature of animals that pervades much of the thinking on the subject
in Northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
At first glance, the story of the crop-eared cat called Prynne testifies
to a completely instrumental use of animals. The cat becomes the means
for this Catholic woman to mark her protest, and to mock the beliefs of
her neighbors. The cat as cat disappears: it is a blank page onto which she
writes her message. But, as well as this, and persisting throughout the
period as well as in this sad story, is the danger represented by the
the monstrous child offers in microcosm the connection that was
frequently traced in this period between animals and the fragility of the
status of the human. Animals may be mere instruments for human use,
but that use can bring with it a reminder not only of human dominance
but also of human vulnerability. Even as it sets the cat up as the opposite
of the human, the story reveals that God’s punishment here, and in so
many other cases of monstrous births, is to destroy human status, or to
reveal the stability of that status to be brittle.6
But there is more. The story also implies a link between the
‘Roundhead´ human, Prynne, and the ‘Roundhead´ cat, Prynne. On one
level, of course, this animalizes the Protestant protestor, but on the other
it bespeaks a belief, present in popular, if not comfortably in literate,
culture of the similarity of human and animal abilities to suffer.7
Ear-clipping moves from being the sign of possession by a shepherd on his
1S.R. Gardiner ed.,Documents Relating to the Proceedings Against William
Prynne in 1634 and 1637 (London: Camden Society, 1877), 1 and 17.
2 P.S. Seaver, Wallington’s World, cited in John Spurr, English Puritanism
1603-1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 94.
3 Gardiner, Documents, 76 and 75.
4 Hill argues that the Revolution was ‘started by a wave of popular protest
at the cruel sentences passed on the Rev. Henry Burton, lawyer Prynne
and Dr Bastwick.´ The World Turned Upside Down: Radical ideas during
the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972), 241.
5 A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster: Born in Kirkham
sheep, to a sign of punishment by the state on its prisoner, to a sign by a
Catholic of her power over her cat. Human and animal are marked by the
same means, are linked in their capacity to be interpellated into a
community: of ownership, state justice or dominion.
An instrumental attitude, by which animals are objectified, coexists,
then, with concepts of the frailty of humanity as a species and the shared
sentience of human and animal. The boundary between the two
groupings, apparently so clear and unbreachable, is revealed to be, to use
Margaret Healy’s description of the human body in this period, ‘porous
[and] vulnerable.´8 But the boundary between human and animal is also,
and inevitably, firmly reiterated throughout the period. Where there is a
6 See, for example, A discription of a monstrous Chylde, borne at
Chychester in Sussex (London, 1562); A Most certaine report of a monster
borne at Oteringham in Holdernesse (London, 1595); Signes and wonders
from Heaven (London, 1645). The theme of Edward Fenton’s statement
that ‘It is most certaine that these monstrous creatures, for the most part,
do proceede of the judgement, justice and chastisement of God, which
suffreth that the fathers and mothers bring forth these abhominations, as
a horrour of their sinne´ is repeated in all of these pamphlets and
broadsheets. Edward Fenton, Certaine Secrete wonders of Nature
(London, 1569), 12v.
7 This, I have argued elsewhere, is part of the power of bear-baiting in the
period. See Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early
Modern English Culture (2000, reprinted Urbana and Chicago: University
fear of the collapse of difference, there is also an urgent need to reiterate
human superiority. This reiteration can be found in the ways in which
people use animals--hunting, riding, eating, vivisecting, staging and
caging them--it can also be traced in the ways in which people thought
with them in different discourses: religious, demonological, satirical,
linguistic. The essays in this collection, in a variety of ways, address these
different dominions and dangers.
But the essays in this collection also address another issue, that of
the place of animals in historical work. In their history of the English pig
Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris note that ‘[h]istory being
written by humans, is mostly about humans.´9 They go on to argue that
ignoring the presence of animals in the past is ignoring a significant
feature of human life. Such a recognition--obvious as it may seem--is
reflected in the emergence of new ways of thinking about the place, role
and understanding of animals. Historians such as Harriet Ritvo, Kathleen
Kete and Joyce E. Salisbury have offered new and important evaluations of
the past through an attention to attitudes towards and uses of
non-humans.10 This collection is an attempt to take that work into the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
That is not to say that animals have until now been wholly absent
from the study of this period. What I think is important is that these
8 Margaret Healy, “Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: ‘Plausibility´ in
Renaissance Domestic Tragedy,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts,
Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge,
essays read the animal as a significant figure in early modern cultural and
intellectual history. This has not always been the case: often animals,
even when present, are not assessed as animals. Keith Thomas’s
magisterial study, Man and the Natural World (1983), showed that animals
(and nature more generally) were an important aspect of intellectual,
cultural and social debate in the early modern period.11 However, in his
book animals, like plants, were objects of analysis, not, as Jonathan Burt
has recently argued in his study of the development of film technology in
the nineteenth century, ‘an important motive force.´12 Setting aside the
very different subjects being analyzed in their work, the difference
between Thomas’s and Burt’s ideas about animals is crucial; the latter’s
proposal allows us to think about animals as creatures who are objects of
human analysis (such has ever been the case), but also as beings in the
world who may themselves create change. These change-provoking
animals might be real--Joan Thirsk and Peter Edwards have both shown
9 Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History
(London: Hambledon Press, 1998), 29.
10 See, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and
Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987, reprinted London: Penguin,
1990) and The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the
Classifying Imagination (Cambridge MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 1997); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in
Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 1994); Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle
how significant the horse was to the development of the economy of
Tudor and Stuart England, while Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have shown
the horse’s importance in East-West relations and trade in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, for example.13 But change-provoking animals
might also be housed in the realm of ideas: concepts of human status in
religious, humanist, legal, and political writings were in part motivated by
an understanding of the nature of animals, as I have argued in Perceiving
Animals.
Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, writing from a geographical
perspective, likewise propose that we need to rethink how we
conceptualize animals, but they go further than Burt. They argue that the
proliferation of non-humans in ‘human society´ makes it ‘impossible to
recognize a pure “human” society.´ Using Actor Network Theory, they
propose that ‘[r]esources, technologies, animals, and so on, all actively
participate in, refine and frame ... processes of interaction.´14 Their focus
is on modern culture, but the same would, I think, hold true of early
modern culture. Animals can be agents within culture, they are never
always only objects. But as well as this, humans cannot think about
themselves, their cultures, societies, political structures, without
recognizing the importance of non-humans to themselves, their cultures,
societies and political structures. To assert such a possibility is to propose
a re-evaluation not only of the period of study--in the case of this
collection, from 1550 to 1700--but of how we conceptualize the nature of
that study itself. New questions must be asked if we begin to think about
in our conceptualization of both subject matter and period. An example of
how this shift might work can be traced in a brief look at one recent text.
In his fascinating study Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and
Stuart England, the eminent historian David Cressy unearths what he
terms ‘some of the strangest and most troubling incidents from the
byways of Tudor and Stuart England.´15 His work is particularly useful here
not only because it contains two stories of human-animal interactions, but
also because Cressy is very self-reflexive about his role as historian. The
eccentricity of the stories he is dealing with leads him to wonder about his
own place in relation to the material, to contemplate the nature of the
questions he should ask of it. What this allows for is two-fold: we get to
hear of extraordinary events, and we are asked to think about how we
analyze those events. It is the bringing together of these two issues in the
stories about animals that is particularly useful for me here.
11 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England 1500-1800 (1983, reprinted London: Penguin, 1984).
12 Jonathan Burt, “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of
Light and Electricity in Animal Representation,” Society and Animals 9:3
(2001): 210.
13 Joan Thirsk, Horses in early modern England: for Service, for Pleasure,
for Power (Reading: University of Reading, 1978) and Peter Edwards, The
Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests:
Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000),
In the first animal story Cressy tells the tale of Agnes Bowker’s cat.
It begins with ‘the unwanted pregnancy of an unmarried domestic
servant,´ Agnes Bowker, who, ‘in 1569, at Market Harborough, gave birth
to a cat.´ Cressy’s essay about what he terms ‘a unique and unsettling
incident´ traces the context, testimony and evidence in the subsequent
case that came before the church courts, and is an attempt, he writes, ‘to
capture some lost voices and anxieties from early modern England.´ In
one piece of evidence, given by a midwife, Bowker was reported to have
said that she had been approached by ‘a thing in the likeness of a bear,
sometimes like a dog, sometimes like a man and [that this thing] had the
knowledge carnal of her body in every such shape.´ Bowker later claimed
that this thing also came to her ‘in the likeness of a black cat,’ and again,
had ‘knowledge of her body.´ The suggestions here of bestiality fit, as
Cressy notes, with contemporary belief in the possibility of cross-breeding.
The commissary of the enquiry into the case of the cat, Anthony
Anderson, however, was unsatisfied with this explanation, and decided to
investigate the matter further. In a moment that displays the emergence
of empirical science in the mid-sixteenth century, he writes:
14 Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal spaces, beastly places: An
introduction,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New geographies of
human-animal relations, ed. Philo and Wilbert (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 17.
15 David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart
England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
I caused another cat to be killed and flayed, and betwixt the one
[Bowker’s] and the other in the whole this was the difference and
only the difference, the eyes of my cat were as cats’ eyes that be
alive, and the monster cat’s eyes were darker than blue. I cast my
flayn cat into boiling water, and pulling the same out again, both
in eye and else they were altogether one.
Cressy notes that despite clear evidence to suggest the fraudulent nature
of the cat’s birth, no confession from Bowker was forthcoming, and the
truth of the matter was never fully established. Bowker ‘soon returned to
oblivion, her subsequent history unknown.´
Having offered such a detailed description of the case, and of some
of its possible meanings, Cressy then turns from the evidence to think
about his role in this narrative: ‘[h]ow does the historian,´ he asks, ‘decide
what questions to ask, what lines of inquiry to pursue?´ He offers a
number of suggestions: ‘a deeper political and religious
contextualization ...[a] detailed local and cultural account ... [c]omparative
reading of the history of bastardy ... [m]ore work on sorcery and
diabolism.´ Never does he mention a more profound understanding of
human-animal relations, which is interesting, as he has offered a
fascinating insight into those relations in his essay. It is as if that aspect of
the context is either not perceived to be worth further development or
understanding, but that more established modes of scholarship--political,
might actually be the case, Cressy has not recognized that human-animal
relationships might have a role to play in understanding the past in and of
itself.
This marginalization of the animal is also the case in the second
animal story in Cressy’s collection; this time it is the tale of the baptism of
a horse. In 1644, as Thomas Edwards recorded in Gangraena, a horse was
baptized with urine by parliamentary soldiers in a church in Yaxley in
Huntingdonshire. Cressy notes other similar ‘mock religious´ ceremonies
involving animals in the period: in the same year another horse was
baptized, this time with holy water, at Lostwithiel in Cornwall; earlier
‘travesties´ (to use Cressy’s term) included the baptism of a cat, the
marriage of a goose and a gander, the mock churching of a cow. Cressy
looks to the religious context of some of the actions--citing the possibility
that the baptisers of the horse had taken the concept of ‘the priesthood of
all believers´ to its extreme--but he also recognizes briefly the role of the
animal in these tales, proposing that the baptism of beasts ‘profaned
sacred ceremony and blurred the boundary between humans and beasts.´
This question of the boundary is, however, taken no further, and Cressy
proposes that the actions of these men were ‘not just a profanation of the
church but a dishonour to God.´ The alternative possibility he cites comes
from ‘a tradition of folk magic´ in which it might be believed that ‘the
baptism of beasts was intended to secure them benefits.´ This suggestion,
however, he sees as ‘more ingenious than persuasive.´17
16 Cressy, “Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Childbirth, Seduction, Bestiality and Lies,”
I don’t want what follows to be interpreted as a wholesale criticism
of Cressy’s work. Indeed, the two essays offer fascinating and disturbing
glimpses of the early modern period that might be lost, ignored, and
remain unknown without his important archival work, and his questions
about the incidents are important in that they recognize the difficulty of
understanding them. What I do want to highlight is that in both essays the
animal is a persistent problem for the historian. I am (perhaps unfairly)
using Cressy’s work as a way of thinking through broader problems of
historical analysis that seem to be concentrated in his two chapters.
In the first chapter the cat and the meanings associated with it are
simultaneously central to Cressy’s discussions and sidelined in his list of
potential further areas of research. This sidelining is reiterated in his
summing up. He writes: ‘[t]he testimony in this case touches a range of
issues: normal and abnormal childbirth, gender relations and sexuality,
monsters and the imagination, the proceedings of ecclesiastical justice,
community discourse and authority, storytelling and the standards for
establishing truth.´18 Here animals are missing, replaced by, perhaps,
monsters, but these are two very different things. It is as if the cat cannot
be regarded as a significant aspect of history: as if boiling a moggy is an
event unworthy of comment, or understanding.
The essay on horse baptism poses a rather different problem, one
that Cressy himself is aware of. ‘Baptisms of beasts,´ he writes, ‘are
17 Cressy, “Baptized Beasts and Other Travesties: Affronts to Rites of
Passage,” in Cressy, ibid., 171-185, passim.
puzzling phenomena, and it is by no means clear how they fit into our
larger understanding of history.´19 The problem, I would argue, is not
Cressy’s, but history’s. The categories that we use to think about the past
do not comfortably offer explanations for such enigmatic events, not
because there are no explanations, but because those explanations may
come from categories that we might find it difficult to think within. This is
a part of Cressy’s implicit, if not explicit, focus in his book, and his
self-reflexive understanding of the puzzling nature of the baptism of the horse
reflects his recognition that the event is worth understanding even if, as it
stands, we can only offer very partial explanations. One thing that comes
from Cressy’s work is a recognition that we constantly need to develop
our ways of reading the past. Including animals in our view of the past
would, I think, be a sensible and productive development.
If we agree that there is no such thing as a pure human society (and
I think the number of day-to-day interactions between humans and
animals in numerous fields of cultural life make this a fair possibility) and
we don’t expand our horizons to include animals, ultimately we will be
ignoring an important aspect of the cultures we interpret. One other issue
of this is that the conceptualization of animals in historical work will not be
wholly different from the conceptualization that is present in the
ear-clipping incident recorded in 1646. Where in that incident the cat was
merely a blank onto which the Catholic mother could write her own
meaning, so we would be taking animals to speak about issues already in
place in social and cultural history and this would ignore the animality of
the animal and overlook its presence as meaningful in and of itself. In
doing this we might not only be underestimating the importance of
animals, we might also be denying ourselves access to an enhanced
understanding of the past.
But this is, as I have noted, beginning to change. Scholars of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Cressy’s two essays show, are
starting to recognize the importance of animals. This in itself is not a new
development, but the motivation for the recognition of animals’
importance does seem to have shifted. In older scholarship much work on
animals was a part of emerging antiquarian research, and represented
animals often in order to depict folk rituals, and the pleasures of ‘the
lowest of people.´20 Alternatively, it was presented as an attempt to
contextualize a canonical author like Shakespeare; to understand the
references to different creatures in his work.21 Early theater history of the
20Samuel Pegge, “A Memoir on Cock-fighting,” Archaeologia III (1774):
132-150, quote, 139. See also Pegge, “The Bull-Running at Tutbury, in
Staffordshire, considered,” Archaeologia II (1773): 86-91.
21 See, for example, Sir Sidney Lee, “Bear-baiting, Bullbaiting and
Cock-fighting,” in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners
of His Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1916), II, 428-436; Herbert W. Seager,
Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (London: E. Stock, 1896); A.E.
Shipley, “Zoology in the Time of Shakespeare,” Edinburgh Review 216
(1912): 120-133. As recently as 1972 a collection of Renaissance
animal-lore was compiled by Alan Dent under the title, The World of Shakespeare:
period also provided a context in which to study entertainments such as
bear-baiting, but again, the focus was on the differences and similarities
between the two sorts of entertainment, and not on the animals in
anything beyond a very general sense.22
While current Shakespeare studies has thrown up some interesting
analyses of animals in early modern culture, the study of animals here is
still, inevitably, merely a means of further understanding the plays, rather
than further understanding the animals (although this is often a welcome
by-product).23 Contemporary theater history, though, is, if somewhat
coyly, shifting its focus: in a fascinating article on dogs on the early
modern stage Michael Dobson rather self-consciously begins by saying
‘[m]y field of inquiry may seem a twee one ...´ What follows in his article
makes a strong case for overturning such a suggestion.24
Social and cultural history, perhaps recognizing a logical progression
from the study of the working class, of women, of ethnic minorities, of
homosexuals and lesbians, to the study of animals,25 has begun to pay
22 For example, C.L. Kingsford, “Paris Garden and the Bear-baiting,”
Archaeologia second series 20 (1920): 155-178; and sections on the Hope
Theatre--home of baiting in the early seventeenth century--in the classic
studies of the theater:
E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), II,
448-471; Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1968), VI, 200-214; and Leslie Hotson’s study of “Bear Gardens
and Bear-Baiting,” in Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage
attention to the non-human in new and, I think, productive ways. Recent
work by Dan Beaver, Mary Fissell and Mark Jenner has begun to correct
this gap in our historical record by looking at, respectively, the social
networks of honor involved in the hunting and possession of animals, the
confusingly humanizing discourses in writings on the eradication of
vermin, and the ‘cultural logic’ of the dog massacres that were so central
to attempts to wipe out plague.26 All of these essays ask us to re-evaluate
not only the particular aspects of the period--social relations, concepts of
cleanliness and fear--but also to think again about the role and function of
animals.
Intellectual history is likewise revealing the importance and value of
turning to animals. Just as medical history has noted the important
differences between the Galenic, Paracelsian and Vesalian
conceptualizations of the human body and its treatment in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, so animals also were represented via
competing worldviews, and historians are beginning to recognize this. In
his essay on ‘the virtues of animals,´ for example, Peter Harrison sees
‘three distinct positions´ being taken up in philosophical debate;
theriophilic, Aristotelian, and Cartesian.27 In another article looking at the
concept of the animal soul he highlights panpsychism as an argument
offered against Cartesianism during the period.28 Other competing
cosmologies that have been posited to offer an understanding of early
modern attitudes towards animals include William B. Ashworth Jr’s
‘emblematic worldview,´ characterized by adage, allegory and analogy,
Revolution.29 The study of animals in the early modern period is no longer
a simple one.
Other work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas is also
showing the important role that animals can play in our understanding of
the period. Nigel Smith has traced, in the work of Thomas Tryon, a late
seventeenth-century vegetarian, a link between the religious enthusiasm
of the Civil War, and enlightenment ideas, modes of thinking routinely
regarded as antithetical in scholarly work.30 Susan Wiseman has shown
how ideas in the political sphere can be traced alongside empiricism in
comparative anatomy, and has argued that it is only by paying heed to
both that a full comprehension of the meaning and status of animals, and
of politics can be reached.31 Karen L. Raber has read William Cavendish’s
horse training manuals as a way of rethinking current scholarly
assumptions about the emergence of ‘notions of identity and
self-possession’ in Locke’s work.32
Certain fixed hypotheses about the period seem to be dismantled
when the animal enters the equation, and there is no intellectual sphere, I
would argue, that did not take up, and develop (to greater or lesser
extents) the animal question in the early modern period. Even in areas
that might be regarded--especially in the so-called age of Descartes--as
the realm of the human, animals raise their heads, and this is something
that is now being taking note of. Discussions of concepts of language and
reason in the period have turned to think about concepts of animal
language and animal reason to extend our understanding of those ‘human
example, Laurence Babb, in his study of Renaissance physiology and
psychology of 1951, argued that ‘[i]n human nature ... there is a continual
warfare between the rational and the sensitive, the human and the
bestial, the intellectual and the physical,´ what he was proposing was a
simple--and classical--opposition between humans and animals in the
discourse of reason in which animals are mere emblems of what humans
can become.34 In 1998 Peter Harrison proposed something rather
different. Like Babb before him, Harrison traced the fear of the
post-lapsarian bestiality of human nature in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century ideas, but took it further, arguing that the animal is by no means
to be read in this debate as a mere metaphorical presence. By
understanding the passions, humans, Harrison argued, ‘established three
levels of control: of self, of others, and of nature.´35 The decline in human
control of the self--the fall into passion--caused a loss of command over
the natural world itself: metaphorical animals are simultaneously real.
What appears to be a debate about human nature is shown also to be
about human relationships with nature. It seems that such a possibility
was not within Babb’s ‘field of vision,´ a vision that, in 1951, was wholly
focused on humanity.36 By shifting our gaze we can learn something new.
So far I have attempted to show how animals might be important in
this period--that is, I have thought about Renaissance beasts. It is worth
now shifting the focus of the question to ask: why Renaissance beasts?
Why might this period be important in the history of animals?
For Harrison, the seventeenth century is linked to the twentieth by
early modern and the modern share a fixation on them that marks both
periods out as crucial to developments in the understanding of human
relationships with animals, and also marks animals out as vital figures that
historians of all kinds must take notice of if we are to offer a full
assessment of that past, and if we are to fully understand our own
interests in the present.
The history of animals, a new and evolving sub-discipline, might be
figured as requiring two things: two things that are focused, I think, in my
differentiation of Renaissance beasts from Renaissance beasts. First and
foremost it must be ‘good´ history: that is, it needs to fulfill the standards
of research and analysis set in all other areas of history. In the case of the
early modern period, it must offer us a new way of thinking about what is
a well-established area of study. Without both of these things--standards
of research, and a new approach to the period--it can never expect to be
taken seriously. Secondly, it should evaluate its relation to the modern
world in which it is created. It might, for example, be empowered by
recognizing the fact that, as with history from below, women’s history, the
history of ethnicity and so on, it has a role to play in current ethical,
environmental, social and political debates. I am not prescribing that one
position be taken up in the history of animals, but that a link might be
made between scholarship and society, between the academy and the
abattoir.38
So, having said that, what is it that early modern scholarship can
offer to the history of animals? The term ‘early modern´ might actually
it is often easy to regard this phrase as a merely objective, neutral
designation of a period that spans from c.1500 to c.1750. It is the period
that comes after the medieval and before the modern, that has, the
designation would appear to say, some of the medieval, but rather more
of the modern in it. This kind of understanding certainly seems to fit when
looking at developments in some areas of culture; for example, at natural
philosophy, natural history, and empirical science in the period. A text like
Edward Topsell’s Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (1607) reveals both the
significance of the classical inheritance to the study of animals in the
period, but also the emergence of something new, something more
empirical and recognizably ‘modern.´ Conrad Gesner, one of the key
sources for Topsell’s work, is simultaneously writing his natural history
from books and from experience. The medieval world of emblems and
fables is still present, but alongside it is something that we might class as
modern: the representation of living animals.
In other areas of culture in which animals feature prominently, the
early modern period seems much less early modern and much more
post-medieval. In religious attitudes towards animals, for example, there is
little evidence for the kind of welfare arguments that are proposed in
many early twenty-first century writings. In 1612 John Rawlinson
presented the orthodox early modern argument when he wrote ‘Save a
beast’s life and save a Mans.´39 That is, he argued, following Thomas
Aquinas, that concern for animals would produce concern for humans,
while cruelty to animals would produce cruelty to humans, and that in
could inculcate cruelty more generally (implicitly, towards other ‘men´).
The animal as animal is absent here in a way that is completely alien to
contemporary conceptions of cruelty to animals: the R.S.P.C.A. and other
welfare organizations prosecute on behalf of the animals, not on behalf of
the endangered soul of the human perpetrators of the cruelty. That shift
from thinking of animals as reflections of and rehearsal rooms for human
moral status to thinking of animals as holding a moral status of their own
is, in broad terms, to be associated with the developments of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the early modern.40
It may seem then that the designation ‘early modern´ is random,
applicable in its forward-looking sense to some aspects of culture, but not
to others. But it is this randomness that, I think, may well be the source of
the importance of the study of the early modern period to the currently
emerging study of animals in history. In this period can be found what is
recognizable from a twenty-first century perspective, but simultaneously,
what can also be traced is what is alien, almost unthinkable to
contemporary minds. The combination of these two apparently
antithetical signs in the figures of animals upsets our sense of the
40 On the development of animal welfare organizations see, Hilda Kean,
Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London:
Reaktion, 1998). To offer just one exception to this dating, in the third
century A.D. Porphyry, in On Abstinence from Animal Food, argued that
‘justice requires us to spare animals, inter alia because they are rational.´
Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the
naturalness of our relationships with animals, and might work to
undermine some of the ways in which we currently live with, think with
and use them.
By understanding the past we can begin to re-assess the present in
ways that might upset some of the apparent stability in our current modes
of living. As the editorial collective of the first issue of History Workshop
Journal wrote in 1976, ‘history is a source of inspiration and
understanding, furnishing not only the means of interpreting the past but
also the best critical vantage point from which to view the present.´41
Their focus was (is) on the history of the working class, labor history and
women’s history, but, as the inclusion of Mary Fissell’s article on vermin in
early modern England in the journal in 1999 shows, the history of our
relationships with animals can respond to these same ideas: our current
relationships with animals can be better interpreted and criticized from a
historical perspective. The study of the early modern period has much, I
think, to offer to the understanding of human-animal relations in the
present because it unsettles the naturalness of those contemporary
relations.
But, of course, this collection is not called ‘Early Modern Beasts,´ it
is called Renaissance Beasts, and both words in the title are worthy of
brief analysis here. The word ‘Renaissance´ invokes a particular formation
of culture that might include humanism’s and Reformation theology’s
return ad fontes, to the source. That might not be so important to this
collection--although many of the essays do reveal the significance of
important, I think, is the linking of the term ‘Renaissance´ to ‘beast.´ The
latter is a term that has always-already prejudged its referent: where the
term ‘animal´ may be merely an albeit problematically general zoological
description (as in, not human), ‘beast´ implies concepts of animality that
may not be altogether the property of animals.42 The Renaissance beasts
23 See, for example, A. Stuart Daley, “The Idea of Hunting in As You Like
It,” Shakespeare Studies 21 (1993): 72-95; Stephen Dickey,
“Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42:3 (1991):
255-275; Frederick B. Jonassen, “The Stag Hunt in The Merry Wives of
Windsor,” Bestia: A Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society (1991): 87-101;
Jeffrey Theis, “The ‘Ill kill’d´ Deer: Poaching and Social Order in The Merry
Wives of Windsor,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43:1 (2001):
46-73.
24 Michael Dobson, “A Dog at All Things: The Transformation of the
Onstage Canine, 1550-1850,” Performance Research 5:2 (2000): 116. An
alternative argument to Dobson’s can be found in Matthew Bliss,
“Property or Performer? Animals on the Elizabethan Stage,” Theatre
Studies 34 (1994): 45-59.
25 This is always a somewhat unfortunate formulation that seems to
reiterate some particularly unpleasant concepts of a chain of being that
placed white, western man at the top, and animals at the bottom, with
various human and ‘sub-human´ groups in between. I have attempted to
list the growing range of interests in historical study in a chronological
in this collection are both human and animal; both the horses that are
ridden and many of the riders themselves.
This places the term in direct opposition to its more famous
forebear: ‘Renaissance Man.´ Jacob Burckhardt’s great individual was a
creation, as Tony Davies reminds us, of the nineteenth century, to be
found not only in Machiavelli and Vasari, but also in Samuel Smiles and
‘the ethos of manly independence forged by the public school.´43
‘Renaissance Beast´ may well be an equivalent creation of the early
twenty-first century, reflecting the unease with which much contemporary
represents them as the most recent addition to historical analysis.
26 Dan Beaver, “The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor, and
Communication in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 38
(1999): 187-216; Mary Fissell, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern
England,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 1-30; Mark S.R. Jenner,
“The Great Dog Massacre,” in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. William G.
Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1997), 44-61. The repeated trope of “The Great ... Massacre” here is
evidence of the significance of Robert Darnton’s seminal article to the
emergence of the animal in social history. See “Workers Revolt: The Great
Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in Darnton, The Great Cat
Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, reprinted
London: Penguin, 1991), 79-104.
27 Peter Harrison, “The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century
philosophy has come to view humanity, but like Burckhardt’s creation, I
hope that it might offer a way of thinking about the earlier period.
Perhaps it is better to see the term ‘Renaissance´ in this collection
not as designating a particular formation of culture so much as
designating a rebirth of animals as beings with histories, and, I hope,
28 Peter Harrison, “Animal Souls, Metempsychosis and Theodicy in
Seventeenth-Century English Thought,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy 31:4 (1993): 519-544.
29 William B. Ashworth Jr, “Natural History and the Emblematic World
View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg
and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
303-32. Other work on animals and early modern science include J.J.
Macintosh, “Animals, Morality and Robert Boyle,” Dialogue--Canadian
Philosophical Review 35:3 (1996): 435-472 and Nathaniel Wolloch,
“Christiaan Huygen’s Attitude toward Animals,” Journal of the History of
Ideas (2000): 415-32.
30 Nigel Smith, “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Of food, filth and slavery,”
in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture,
1550-1850, ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 106-118.
31 Susan Wiseman, “Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape-Human Transformations
in Hobbes, Bulwer, Tyson,” in At the Borders of the Human, 215-238.
32 Karen L. Raber, “‘Reasonable Creatures´: William Cavendish and the Art of
futures. It might also signal, perhaps, a rebirth of a new kind of human,
always living with and thinking with animals.
The essays in the collection are arranged in broadly chronological order.
The collection begina with the use of speaking animals in satire, and ends
with the liberation of the animals from Louis XIV’s Ménagerie in 1792.
and Simon Grant (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 61.
34 Laurence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in
English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State
College Press, 1951), 18. A similar opposition between man and
beast--and the fear of the possibility that humans might slide into the bestial--is
also voiced in George Coffin Taylor, “Shakespeare’s Use of the Idea of the
Beast in Man,” Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 530-543.
35 Peter Harrison, “Reading the Passions: The Fall, the passions, and
dominion over nature,” in The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in
the Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (London and New York,
1998), 61.
33 On language see Bruce Boehrer, “‘Men, Monkeys, Lap-dogs, Parrots,
Perish All!´ Psittacine Articulacy in Early Modern Writing,” Modern
Language Quarterly 59:2 (1998): 171-93, R.W. Serjeantson, “The Passions
and Animal Language,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62:3 (2001):
425-444, and Matthew Senior, “‘When the Beasts Spoke´: Animal Speech and
Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine,” in Animal Acts: Configuring
the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior
Between these start and end points the essays introduce some of the
many and various ways in which animals were used and thought with and
about in early modern culture. In many ways, the uses of animals
represented in these essays are unsurprising: in science (Cummings,
Harrison), religion (Fudge, Wiseman), literature (Perry, Sheen, Knowles),
sport and pastime (Schiesari, Stewart, Graham, Senior). However, each of
the essays offers a new way of thinking about these uses, and each
proposes that we revise our assumptions about the place, role and
function of animals in early modern thought.
In her essay Kathryn Perry proposes that the use of talking animals
in satire has a role beyond mere convention; that it impacts upon the
boundary between human and animal, a boundary often established
through the possession of speech. Reader pleasure, she argues, comes
“‘Reasonable Creatures´,” 43-66.
36 The phrase ‘field of vision´ was brought to my attention as an apt way of
thinking about relationships with animals in Jonathan Burt’s work. He, in
turn, has adapted it from Jacqueline Rose. Burt,“Illumination,” 208.
37 Harrison, “Virtues of Animals,” 463.
38 I have looked in more detail at the ethics of writing the history of
animals in “A left-handed blow: Writing the history of animals,” in
Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2002), xx-xx.
39 John Rawlinson, Mercy to a Beast (Oxford, 1612), 33.
41 Editorial Collective, “History Workshop Journal,” History Workshop: A
through the overwhelming animality of the animals and the brutal
reduction of the status of some humans. This notion of the brutality of
humanity emerges once again in Juliana Schiesari’s study of Henri III’s
desire for ‘little dogs´. Schiesari argues that the pet is a figure of desire
that uproots social, sexual and gender identities, and that brutalizes the
desirer. Criticisms of the rule of Henri III, concentrating as they did on his
love of dogs, bring this bestialisation of humanity to the fore. Species
identity is once again scrutinized in S.J. Wiseman’s study of werewolf texts
from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Discussions of
the human and the werewolf, Wiseman argues, are an exploration not
only of religious issues (does a werewolf have a human soul?) but of social
and civil debates in the period. Ultimately, the early modern werewolf can
be read as being generated by the very civility it would seem to
challenge. The dead animal, in the form of meat, is the focus of Erica
42 William Meredith Carroll argues that ‘beast´ can be used ‘literally to
designate an animal,´ but it also signifies ‘man´ in recognition of the fact
that ‘he´ is the only creature ‘capable of governing his passions through
the exercise of reason.´ If he fails, he will become a ‘beast.´ The terms
‘beast, beastly, beastliness, brute beast, brute, brutish and brutishness´
are, Carroll argues, ‘favourite words´ in the Elizabethan period. William
Meredith Carroll, Animal Conventions in English Renaissance
Non-Religious Prose (1550-1600) (New York: Bookman Associates, 1954), 46.
43 Tony Davies, Humanism (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 15
and 17. Burckhardt’s influential study is The Civilisation of the
Fudge’s essay, and what she traces the role of animal flesh in Reformed
theology, and reads the act of eating meat as simultaneously an
expression of human dominion and of human vulnerability. Consuming an
animal enacts human superiority, but it may actually also undo it: human
status is a fragile thing in the face of even the dead animal. Erica Sheen’s
essay turns to Shakespeare, and links the use of animal imagery in play
texts to legal debates about property rights over animals. Discussions
about originality and textual transmission are read through the literary
use of animals, and by recognizing this, animals, Sheen argues, become
not mere imagery but producers of meaning. Alan Stewart’s essay
likewise takes up what has been assumed to be a purely conventional use
of animal imagery: James VI and I’s naming of his Chancellor, Cecil, his
‘Little Beagle´. Stewart traces a direct link between James’s predeliction
for hunting and his method of rule in which Cecil’s role as ‘beagle´ is
revealed as more than mere frippery. The animal here is revealed as
simultaneously real, emblematic, and politically powerful, and it reveals
much about the operation of power in early seventeenth-century England.
This multifaceted role of animals is also recognized in Elspeth Graham’s
essay on the horse. Graham argues that in two different seventeenth
century texts in which horses play central roles, can be traced not only
details of human-animal relations but some of the key cultural shifts of the
period. The horse is never mere object of discourse, she argues, it is a
producer of meaning. James Knowles returns us to a royal court, this time
that of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Taking as his focus the status of the
the ‘ape´ of humanity, Knowles reads Aurelian Townshend’s masque,
Tempe Restored, as a response to the attacks on the queen’s masquing
by William Prynne. The status of the monarch is, in the neo-platonism of
the masque, defended against the accusations of descent to the beast
that can be traced in Prynne’s antitheatrical diatribe and the possibility of
human agency and reason used as a way of countering his fear of
becoming animal. Brian Cummings takes Pliny’s oft repeated work on
elephant language as his focus, and traces the ways in which Renaissance
thinkers abandoned a conception of animal language and reason that can
be traced in this classical source. Looking at discussions of animal
language in Montaigne and Descartes, Cummings traces early modern
concerns about human language and human reason that distinguish that
work from its classical forebears. Peter Harrison also looks at the
significance of mechanical philosophy in ideas of the period, and reads
work by a range of experimental philosophers arguing that, rather than
regarding vivisection as evidence of a disregard of animals, we pay
attention to early modern scientists’ perspective of their work as actually
raising the status of animals by revealing them as the sources for an
increased understanding of God. The new science spelt the end of the
medieval worldview, but actually produced a new sense of the powerful
emblematic qualities of animals. Finally, Matthew Senior turns to Louis
XIV’s Ménagerie which he reads as containing a range of different, and
competing discourses: of science, spectacle, fable, and politics. Caught up
in this royal spectacle, Senior argues, is the issue of consciousness, and
ends in 1792, when the animals were released from Louis’s Ménagerie by
a committee of Jacobins. What is traced in this ‘liberation´ is a shift in
understanding, he argues, from animals as signifiers of royal power to
animals as symbols of virtue. However, the Revolution does not undo all
existing relations: even in the new zoo of the republic, human difference
from animals is re-asserted.
This collection is about animals, but among those animals it is
perhaps the human itself that comes under the greatest scrutiny. In the
early modern period, as now, animals were not easy beings to
contemplate. They raised the specter of human limitation; they provoked
unease about the distinction of humanity; they undid the boundaries
between man and beast even as they appeared to cement them, and in so
doing they offer us another way of thinking about Renaissance man,