Perceiving Animals, Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (review)

Abstract

Perceiving Animals's final chapter on Richard Overton is a powerful example of why animals matter. For Overton the line between human and beasts was rather unclear. He contradicted Reform theology on two key points. He believed that the soul was wed to the body so that at death the soul dies, only to be resurrected on Judgment Day, and he maintained that animals were innocent creatures condemned to suffer because of man's sin but due to their innocence granted a place in heaven. In both cases the barriers that differentiate the human from the animal are leveled. For Overton, key human abilities of reason (humanism), conscience (theology), and science remain unnatural elements of culture unless they are regulated by education. With such a claim, as Fudge explains: "Overton is proposing that the qualities of human-ness become the substitutes for the human. There is an incomplete being which can be termed human, and this being is completed by learning which can, for Overton, as for humanist writers, be lost. The a priori human has disappeared from view" (153). With his belief in humanity as a state to be attained rather than granted, Overton considers political reformation crucial for regaining our prelapsarian humanness. Erica Fudge presents a similar logic throughout Perceiving Animals. Scientists, humanists, and theologians attempt to make distinctions and raise barriers between the human and the animal. Yet in each case they expose degrees of similarity rather than difference in kind between species. While the book focuses on early modern culture, it speaks to culture today. As we have less and less contact with animals in our daily lives and as the humanities reinforce anthropocentric constructions of the world, Perceiving Animals gives us an important reminder of the unstable distinction between ourselves and other living beings. [End Page 139]