The Historical Animal

Abstract

The environmental concerns that have rippled through academe since the 1970s prompted scholars to consider human-animal relationships from a variety of perspectives. Texts such as Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975), Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980), and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983) marked the start of an “animal turn” that infiltrated the humanities and social sciences and drew heavily on feminist and Marxist theories. Historians kept their distance, even as the emerging field of environmental history led a few—for example, Harriet Ritvo, Jon T. Coleman, and Virginia Anderson—to show that animal agency, representation, and human-animal interactions are essential to understanding the past. Susan Nance's superb edited volume The Historical Animal signals a new openness to the field of animal studies among a broad range of historians, even as it offers methods for writing animals back into historical accounts. According to Nance, the book is both “an invitation for more work” in animal history and an attempt to take animals seriously “as historically contingent and relevant beings … whose past is intrinsically valuable and illustrative of human life” (p. 8). It is a welcome and accessible intervention that will engage scholars and undergraduates.