Erica Fudge Research Articles

Animal Studies

Abstract This review essay explores some key contributions to animal studies in 2023. In Section 1, Humanitarianism Beyond Humanism, I consider how Benjamin Meiches’s Nonhuman Humanitarians tracks animal labour as a form of post-humanitarianism. Section 2, Animalist India, turns to Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference and Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India, two complementary examinations of human–animal relations in India. Then, in Section 3, Zoological Marx, I compare Leigh Claire La Berge’s Marx for Cats and Dinesh Wadiwel’s Animals and Capital, both fusions of Marxism and animal studies that represent and realize a much-needed synthesis of these two fields. Before I begin, though, a confession and a celebration. A more comprehensive review than this might have discussed Maan Barua’s fine-grained account of Delhi’s macaques and London’s parakeets in Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology; Sharon Patricia Holland’s disruption of the ‘hum/animal’ distinction through the category of Blackness in an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life; Richard O. Prum’s theorization of a queer evolutionary biology in Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference; Sandra Swart’s history of colonialism and animals in The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past; and Robert McKay and Susan McHugh’s collection of essays on parodic literary forms, Animal Satire. A superior essay, written under different circumstances, would have been of more use to its readers by engaging with how each of these texts makes a noteworthy intervention into animal studies. If my review last year was deliberately modest, this year’s has turned out regrettably incomplete. But this incompletion is nonetheless a testament to the breadth and depth of work in the field, to the seriousness of its arguments and the careful attention they demand from the reader. This was brought home to me by the topics and questions that I heard discussed at this year’s British Animal Studies Network, the final meeting of the network after more than a decade of events at the University of Strathclyde, organized brilliantly by Erica Fudge. So: a thank you to Erica, for your hospitality and comradeship.

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations

Erica Fudge. Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 264. $ 29.95 (paper)

Erica Fudge. Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 264. $ 29.95 (paper)

Russian Cosmism by Groys Boris (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 540 Helfant surmises that it was a practical solution to an intractable issue, provoked by the peasants’ frustration against landowners, who only organized wolf-hunts in certain months — leaving them vulnerable to wolf attacks for the rest of the year. Helfant’s monograph draws on recent work on animals in Russian literature by Amy Nelson, Jane Costlow and Henrietta Mondry, as well as key ecocritical researchers like Erica Fudge. Garry Marvin’s work on English foxhunting helps Helfant to demonstrate the vast semiotic difference between pursuing wolves across wild, untamed Russian land and chasing foxes in the tidy English (and European) countryside. S. K. Robisch, in his recent and expansive study, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (which, oddly, Helfant ignores), concludes that the ways in which we read the wolf, whether through fiction or folklore, are important because they shape our real-life interactions with the animal and its environment. Minutely researched and grippingly presented, with vivid illustrations, That Savage Gaze is a fine example of ecocriticism: as representations of wolves lend us insight into the context of nineteenth-century Russian society, we follow Russian writers’ struggles to see the world through lupine eyes. It’s time to reintroduce the wolf, and other threatened species, to Russian Studies. Department of Modern Languages Muireann Maguire University of Exeter Groys, Boris (ed.). Russian Cosmism. e-flux, Inc. and MIT Press, New York and Cambridge, MA, 2018. ix + 249 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Author biographies. Index. $27.95: £22.00. The new anthology, Russian Cosmism, contributes to a growing engagement with the holistic and anthropocentric views of this movement, whose adherents endeavoured to redefine the role of mankind in the universe by blending occult traditions and the sciences of the future. In the founding text of this tradition, Philosophy of the Common Task (Filosofiia obshchego dela, 1906), the Orthodox Christian philosopher and librarian Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) called for the unification of the whole of humankind with the goal of overcoming disease and death, the resurrection of the deceased and the coming immortal human race, which would colonize space. After Russian Cosmism remerged as a broad intellectual movement in Russia at the end of the 1980s, artists and scholars in the West have turned to Fedorov’s view of the universe and the work of scholars he inspired, drawing on his belief in progress and unity in the face of contemporary ecologic, economic and social chaos and disintegration. REVIEWS 541 This volume presents a single text from Fedorov alongside twelve others from revolutionary anarchists and Marxist thinkers who expanded on his philosophy following the October Revolution. Most of these writings are here translated into English for the first time, having only recently been published in Russia after being suppressed since the 1930s. Bibliographic information about the writings and short biographies about each of the authors are included at the end of the volume. Boris Groys’s introductory essay contextualizes the collected texts by focusing on how Russian Cosmism conceived of technology as a messianic force, which would preserve the living and restore the dead, leading to a profound transformation of human society and culture. In pursuit of immortality, the restorative and preservation work of museums was held up as a model for overcoming the limits of death. Working toward the highest goal also entailed that human beings would continue to evolve, utilizing reason to reconstruct a society in which human relations as individuals would no longer be separated by death and private time. Without temporal and spatial limits, humanity would come to know true social solidarity. This pursuit required individuals to be united by a central, powerful state, which could guarantee the new basic right to exist and the freedom to move through space. Presenting various strands of Russian Cosmism, the writings included in this volume coalesce around the notion of human development and progress as it relates to man’s struggle with nature and mortality, and humanity’s relationship to space. The two texts by Aleksandr Chizhevskii connect human beings directly to cosmic activity, as he asserts a causal relationship between an increasing number of sunspots and the sociological characteristics of mass behaviour...

ANIMAL HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of “the animal's point of view,” animal agency (animals understood as “historical” agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in “anthropocentric” archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals’ testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve “interspecies competence” (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispecies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals’ perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co‐authorship?

The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality by Randall, Catharine

Reviewed by: The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality by Randall, Catharine Susan Broomhall Randall, Catharine, The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014; paperback; pp. 192; R.R.P. US$28.00; ISBN 9780268040352. Although it acknowledges the arguments of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Erica Fudge, and Diana Donald in favour of a radical re-centring on animals within a new conceptual framework, Catharine Randall’s thought-provoking study is fundamentally concerned to analyse how specific early modern authors, predominantly Catholic, understood the relationship of animals to, primarily theological, authority. Each chapter focuses on a particular author, or set of debates about animals in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century France. Randall first explores the views of Michel de Montaigne, who drew upon proto-scientific observations to suggest that animals were, on some occasions, morally superior to humans. In a more literary reading, Randall argues that this positive appreciation of animals’ wisdom and creativity extended to their constructions, most notably the nesting behaviours of swallows, that in many ways paired with Montaigne’s own knowledge and textual structuring. By contrast, Calvinist Guillaume du Bartas considered animals within the framework of a kind of early modern conceptualization of ‘dominion theory,’ in which the loss of the wonder and beauty of fallen nature only served to echo the paucity of post-lapsarian human experience. As the lone Protestant author in the text, it might have been productive to compare Du Bartas’s thought in more depth with that of contemporaries such as fellow Protestant Bernard Palissy, for example, for all his idiosyncrasies. For both Montaigne and du Bartas, Randall contends, animals were ‘vehicles for knowing’ (p. 11), principally for knowing where and how humans fit in God’s hierarchy for the natural world. With the seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation came the development of new genres such as the devotional manual in which the nature and places of animals could be considered in relation to humans. François de Sales interpreted animals as intimate others whose alterity provided human readers with valuable lessons. Animals were instrumentalized to help humans on their path towards God. Randall thus suggests that this para-ecclesiastical genre opened up key possibilities for exploration of new ideas within Catholicism about animals as ‘vehicles for our knowing’ (p. 12). Two authors who attempted to skirt condemnation for their provocative contributions were Jean de La Fontaine, who addressed his ideas as musings to Madame de la Sablière, and Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant putatively to a young lady. However, Bougeant’s Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes (1730), which considered whether animals had not only language but even souls (specifically, those of devils), was less successful in this strategy; he was condemned for heresy, exiled and forced to publish a retraction. In that sense, Randall’s suggestion in the conclusion that had Bougeant composed his [End Page 189] thoughts in the devotional genre he might have been protected (p. 134) seems to run counter to her argument in this chapter about the shocking theological novelty of his thought. This short work raises many questions and is at times a little uneven in its analysis. Was there something specific about the French intellectual or religious traditions that made animals a particular source of interest? Indeed, how widespread was an interest in animals in the terms analysed here? Certainly, others in France, women and men, were thinking through the value of animals as exemplars and tools for thinking. Were the authors studied representative or unique in their conceptualizations? Randall argues that many of these authors’ ideas were framed using ‘sensory, often synesthetic referents’ (p. 9) in a world spiritualizing the senses after Trent and the Wars of Religion. The ways in which the corpus ‘synesthetically evokes animal existence’ (p. 13) are at times a little hard to grasp; in practice, it seems to mostly entail the senses of sight and sound. One might also add that emotions appear present for some authors as a conduit to understanding animal-human relations. Both de Sales and Bougeant appear to explicitly foreground comprehension through the emotions for their intended female...

Solitude and Difference in Books 8 and 9 of Paradise Lost

Solitude and Difference in Books 8 and 9 of Paradise Lost Christopher Koester From the melancholic speaker of Il Penseroso to the solitary narrator of Paradise Lost, John Milton's literary personas frequently emphasize their own physical, mental, and spiritual apartness. Nor is this solitary condition limited to his poetic voices; the same can be said about most of Milton's major characters. Beginning with his God, who describes himself as "alone / From all eternity" (PL 8:405–06), solitude is the modus operandi of characters as diverse as the Son, Samson, Satan, and the Lady of Comus, as well as the subject of the present discussion, Adam and Eve.1 Despite its nearly ubiquitous presence in his poetry, though, the solitary is often overlooked among critics who identify Milton as a man more committed to religious and political solidarity than individual solitude. As I argue, however, Milton's notion of solidarity, including marital solidarity, actually depends on his concept of solitude. Without solitude, solidarity risks turning into conformity, as the search for unity erases the individualities of those seeking it. Aware of this dilemma, yet still an avid supporter of unity, Milton attempts to solve the problem in his epic by depicting Adam and Eve as simultaneously committed to unity and individuality, marital society and personal solitude. Focused [End Page 155] primarily on Adam, my essay investigates the way he responds to this dual commitment during moments of critical decision, beginning with his original solitude and subsequent request for a mate in book 8, followed by his conversation with Eve in book 9 about the function of solitude in marriage. I conclude that solitude in Milton's first humans should not be regarded simply as a passing condition or imbalance of bodily humors but instead as an ongoing orientation predicated on the idea that their differences from each other protect them from conformity. The better to understand the connection between solitude and difference, I begin with an analysis of Adam's origin story in book 8. Through a vividly conceptualized account of Adam's solitude, Milton depicts the first man's growing awareness of his differences from beast and God, differences that ultimately prompt him to decline both the surrounding creatures and the deity as potential companions.2 By gradually asserting his difference from the beasts and God, Adam embodies the early modern belief that, as Erica Fudge writes, "humans are created and not simply born."3 Though equipped with certain innate human faculties, including the capacity to speak and think rationally, Adam does not become a fully realized human until after he gains self-knowledge, a progression that shows Milton adhering to the early modern belief that humanness depends to some degree on education and a creation of self through processes of development and discovery. With this acquisition of self-knowledge through education, however, comes the possibility of losing it. According to Fudge, early moderns well understood "the risk that humans may cease to be human, may stop acting according to their education, and may revert back to their natural sensuality."4 Such a loss occurs in the wake of Adam's decision to eat the fruit, which sees him momentarily regressing from a fully realized human to a more animalistic state, as indicated by his lust-filled sex with Eve, as well as his desire to "In solitude live savage, in some glade / Obscured" (9.1085–86). If humanness, for Milton, entails knowing oneself aright, an education that occurs through a sincere commitment to contemplative solitude, then refusing—or, in the case of an indissoluble marriage, [End Page 156] being forbidden—to act on that self-knowledge can result in a loss of humanity and a return to the much more "savage" solitude that Milton repeatedly denounces throughout his divorce tracts. As these last comments about marriage make clear, Adam's struggle to know himself and to recognize his difference from the creatures around him does not end with the creation of Eve. Instead, Adam brings the lessons he learns in solitude concerning difference with him into marriage, a marriage based, at least in part, on Milton's belief, stated in Tetrachordon, that the soul "cannot well...

Laurie Shannon The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean LocalesThe Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.

<i>Laurie Shannon</i> The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales<i>The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales</i>. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.

Response: Equal Rights for All Dirt

Previous articleNext article No AccessResponse: Equal Rights for All DirtBruce BoehrerBruce BoehrerFlorida State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Spenser Studies Volume 302015 Copyright © 2015 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Building the Necropolis: Killing Mother/Nature in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus

The story of the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western man. —Ted Hughes Like evolutionary chains, the trajectory of ideas about nature has puzzling loops and dead ends, and it does not pr...

The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing by Rachel Poliquin (review)

Reviewed by: The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing by Rachel Poliquin Ty Fishkind (bio) Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series, vol. 1. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012, 272 pp. $34.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. In Erica Fudge’s 2012 essay “Renaissance Animal Things,” she proposes two terms that urge us to reconsider human relationships to animal matter: the animal-made object and the animal, made object.1 Fudge injects this variation into the ongoing conversation on animal bodies to “remind us of the concurrent status of animals as both agents and matter” (p. 43). This insistence that animals, made object actively bear immense cultural weight is the central theme of Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, the first in the Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series by Pennsylvania State University Press. The Breathless Zoo is a methodically organized, accessible, and comprehensive contribution to the recent surge in the study of taxidermy. Culling examples from history, science, popular culture, and art, Poliquin asserts the ways in [End Page 234] which human desire articulates a need to preserve an animal just so, in a fixed state that captures its aesthetic presence, its size, form, or strangeness. In The Breathless Zoo, a taxidermic animal-object becomes an accidental host for human longing and a desire for connection with an idealized version of Nature. The agency of the animal, made object, as Poliquin describes, lies in its persistent and sometimes aggressive, albeit lifeless, hoisting of those desires and anxieties back onto its creators, collectors, and admirers, eliciting a visceral reaction—a “bodily knowing” that occurs during encounters with taxidermy (p. 39). Poliquin situates Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1993) as the scaffolding upon which she constructs her study of seven “narratives of longing.”2 Poliquin credits each of these narratives with being a catalyst for the necessity and perseverance of taxidermy—the practice of stretching preserved animal skins over synthetic molded armature and fashioning them into lifelike postures. These incentives are demonstrated in seven chapters. The first, “Wonder,” discusses early explorers’ collective impulse to acquire and preserve curious pieces of incomplete animals or bizarre natural anomalies—including a stone removed from a dog’s bladder, a two-headed cat, or the molted skin of a Kimono dragon—to represent the marvels of the exotic natural world. This section includes catalogs of early curio cabinets and evidence of the role of obscure animal collections in mythmaking about the unfamiliar world. These random groupings of strange preserved animal parts, according to Poliquin, represented “warehouses of raw potentiality” to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturalists, who used modern empirical methodologies to extract knowledge about the natural world through these incomplete, or “opaque,” animal objects (p. 36). Here, Poliquin traces the beginning of systematically collecting and preserving animal parts for scientific speculation. The author continues to structure the following chapters by anchoring narrative tropes to a particularly relevant or exemplary specimen, drawing attention to those that both illustrate the many dimensions of longing under which they were created and articulating the ways in which they serve as visual referents to which the reader can apply a thematic template. Poliquin rounds out her examples by offering complete historical, scientific, and cultural data on the animal in relation to the theme. The effect of this representational methodology is that the selected animal becomes a kind of totem for the dimension of longing it represents. Poliquin’s consistent message, that humans employ taxidermy as a conduit to nature by painstakingly recreating nature on human terms, is evident in each specimen she presents. For example, in the chapter on “Spectacle,” the lion becomes the standard-bearer for the sublime thrill of a human encounter with a natural predator. Here, various renderings of lions demonstrate the violence not done to them in the event of their own deaths, but rather the terror they bestow on other creatures, including humans. She introduces the lion in a painting by Henri Rousseau; in an instructional rendering from a nineteenth-century taxidermy manual; in a grizzly scene of a lion mauling an agonized camel and its human rider; and in the...

“HOW DOES YOUR COLLAR SUIT ME?”: THE HUMAN ANIMAL IN THE RSPCA'S ANIMAL WORLD AND BAND OF MERCY

There is a central contradiction in human relationships with animals: as Erica Fudge notes, “We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects” (8). Such a contradiction is also, of course, present in human interactions, in which power relations allow for the objectification of one human being by another. In an analysis of images and texts produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the nineteenth-century, I want to examine the overlap in representations of animals and humans as subject to objectification and control. One common way of critiquing human treatment of animals within the RSPCA's journals, Animal World and Band of Mercy, was to have humans trade places with animals: having boys fantastically shrunk to the size of the animals they tortured, for example, or imagining the horrors of vivisection when experienced by humans. Such imaginative exercises were meant to defamiliarize animal usage by implying a shared experience of suffering: what was wrong for a human was clearly just as wrong for an animal. However, I argue that some of the images employed by the society suggest the opposite; instead of constructing animal cruelty in a new light, these images instead work to underline the shared proximity of particular humans with animals. In texts that focus specifically upon humans wearing animal bonds – reins, collars, and muzzles – the RSPCA's anti-cruelty discourse both critiqued the tools of bondage and, I suggest, invited the audience to see deep connections between animals and the humans taking their place. Such connections ultimately weaken the force of the animal/human reversal as an animal rights strategy, suggesting as they do that humans themselves often have use value in economies of labor, affect, and are subject to the same power relations that produce an animal as “animal.”

‘Not Having God Before his Eyes’: Bestiality in Early Modern England

In February 2006, the BBC briefly reported an odd news item from the Sudan.1 A certain Mr Alifi alerted the authorities when he witnessed his neighbour, Mr Tombe, having sex with Alifi's goat.2 The matter was taken before the local Sudanese elders and they ordered Mr Tombe to pay Mr Alifi a dowry of 15,000 dinars (roughly forty pounds sterling). According to the elders, this was an appropriate punishment because Tombe had used the goat as he would have used his wife. While the BBC reported the item because it seemed strange and somewhat noteworthy (the quaint actions of a rustic and traditional people), none of the people directly involved found it so. Indeed, Alifi appears to have accepted the judgment of the elders as eminently fair and reasonable and Mr Tombe willingly paid the dowry and still had the goat in his possession at the time the story was written. This anecdote is offered here as an entry point into the topic of bestiality, which still seems somewhat foreign and incomprehensible even in our present climate of often wide sexual tolerance.In modern western culture, a measure of ambiguity persists as to how bestiality should be viewed, and whether or not it should be tolerated, punished as a form of animal abuse, or perceived as a sign of mental disturbance. Piers Beirne has succinctly framed the question thus: 'how should we approach bestiality: is it an outrageous and perhaps perverse act or, as the law's increasing tolerance of it suggests, a relatively benign form of social deviance? Why have sexual relations involving humans and animals been so vociferously and ubiquitously condemned and so little studied?'3 Narratives of bestiality, indeed any discussion of the topic, have a disturbing and uncomfortable ring to modern ears, yet such contact has almost surely always occurred for as long as people have lived in close contact with their animals.4 While modern scholars do not shy away from examining the history of other areas of sexuality or other sexual crimes, bestiality remains largely outside the political agendas and ethical debates that occupy many scholars and, as such, it has remained within the background as a part of the seedy underbelly of early modern culture. We have been mostly content to observe such mentions of animal-human sexual contact as do survive either with passing prurient interest or harsh condemnation. In our animal-rights-minded age, not only does such behaviour seem a clear transgression of human sexual propriety, but also a gross violation of an innocent animal.5While inhabitants of early modern England were not particularly concerned with the concept of the nascent dignity of animals (and they did not commonly envision beasts as having souls or as being anything other than creations inferior to men, intended to be used to serve human needs), they too reacted with horror at the idea of men engaging in lewd acts with an animal.6 Most people considered it a victimless crime, although, if a victim had to be identified, it was the abstract notion of the correct manner in which humans were supposed to behave. As such, it was a crime against ideas, rather than people or property.7 As with all crimes, bestiality was tied to larger cultural and social perceptions and realities and, for people living in the period, bestiality (alongside other sexual behaviours viewed as lewd or subversive of the natural order) had a powerful cultural resonance.The cries of inhabitants of the period rigorously denouncing bestiality were a comparatively recent development. While animal-human sexual contact was condemned by earlier moralists, these condemnations achieved a new degree of ferocity by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this appears to suggest that social attitudes shifted between the medieval and early modern period with respect to bestiality. Using evidence such as the punishments mandated to those who confessed to bestial intercourse in medieval penitential manuals, Erica Fudge has found that bestiality was often held to be of the same level of sinfulness as masturbation and was also viewed less harshly if committed by a single, as opposed to a married, man. …

Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Erica Fudge . Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. ix+224.

Authors like Montaigne, however, do not duck the implication of a disintegrating binary but embrace it as an alternative basis for ethical behavior: for them, aversion to cruelty was an entirely rational response to the common ability of humans and animals to suffer pain. Humans in this schema are not superior to animals but “fellow beings” (83). Indeed, some writers found that close observation of animal behavior led to the conclusion that animals had a degree of knowledge that humans could not claim, that in many ways animals were not inferior but superior to humans in senses and in natural virtue. Plutarch, reaching back to Plato, provided the philosophical basis for arguing this position: animals are not “slaves to instinct; rather it is humans who are slaves…of their customs, of their civilization” (91), while animals demonstrate prudence, pleasure, and reason unfettered by the chains of culture. One reaction to the deconstruction of human superiority by theriophilics was, in Fudge's reading, skepticism: “It is not going too far, perhaps, to argue that the reemergence of skepticism offers writers a way of thinking through the various logical breakdowns in the discourse of reason” (122). If such a claim is hard to prove, it nonetheless suggests the crucial role animals played in any and every attempt to define the human via the capacity to reason.

A Horse is a Horse . . . and More: Some Recent Additons to Early Modern Animal Studies

Erica Fudge. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 224 pp. $45.00.Kathryn Shevelow. For the Love of Animals: Rise of the Animal Protection Movement. New York: Henry Holt, 2008 1st edition; 2009 paper. 352 pp. $17.00.Donna Landry. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 240 pp. $50.00.Work on animals is necessarily interdisciplinary. Discussion of, for example, subjectivity, symbolism, husbandry, vivisection, pet keeping, wildlife, welfare, and rights overlaps many areas: philosophy, history, literature, art, ecology and environmental studies, medicine, childhood, feminism, empire, and postcolonial studies. list goes on. Respected, established scholars who hail from literature and language departments wrote all three of the books under consideration here. Erica Fudge is Reader in Literary and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University; Katherine Shevelow is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, San Diego; and Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent. All three authors are concerned, broadly speaking, with agency in the, broadly conceived, early modern period (from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries) in Britain. And all three contribute to and cultural studies by also deploying feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist theories. But perhaps what is most significant here is not what these three books have in common, but that, despite all of the authors' grounding in literary studies, they offer three very different contributions to the burgeoning field of studies. Indeed, the diversity of these books suggests that scholarship focusing on nonhuman animals has matured to the point that our offerings are expanding beyond the usual suspects and perhaps gaining stature and recognition beyond the usual haunts. Fudge's book continues her pioneering work in studies in the early modern period with a contribution here to the history of ideas; Shevelow's first contribution to the field of studies is a book aimed at a popular rather than scholarly audience; and Landry offers a very pointed analysis of one kind of horse to add to her multiple contributions to feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical cultural studies.Following Derrida's denunciation of the term in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), it has become de rigueur in studies to avoid using the term animal as one that denotes and demarcates the nonhuman in an imprecise and monolithic way. Early modern Britons used it to precisely this effect. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which the concept of reason was defined and figured into the categorization of the in the early modern period (defined here more traditionally as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries). Fudge cites concern for the impact of Descartes on early modern attitudes about and actions toward nonhuman animals as inspiration for her book. She suggests that modern scholars too often impose our own post-Cartesian perspectives on the period and thus inadequately consider other animals or elide them from history altogether. She begins by exploring the construction of the category and its instability and proceeds to explicate complicated attitudes toward nonhuman animals in turn. She suggests the two are inextricable and that too many historians have torn asunder unthinkingly what cannot be taken as distinct: the history of humanity and the history of nonhuman animals. To explain the it seems, is to explain the animal; or perhaps that should be reversed: to explain the is to explain the human, she argues (6). All too often modern scholars read metaphor and symbol where there is an actual to be seen. Fudge is concerned to uncover the real animals in early modern considerations of reason, not simply the metaphorical animals that reflect human concerns. …

Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England

Early modern discussions of human nature routinely drew upon notions of what human beings were not: the human being was classified, for instance, as not God, not an angel, not an animal, and not a plant. Definitions of selves, as the rather tired truism goes, incorporate definitions of ‘others’. Erica Fudge is interested in the relationship between ideas about humans and animals in early modern England, and argues that, rather than being one of straightforward or absolute opposition, it was frequently one of confusion and ambiguity. To understand what contemporaries thought it was to be human in this period, therefore, we must simultaneously understand the animal: ‘To explain the human, it seems, is to explain the animal’ (p. 6). As Fudge correctly asserts, rationality was the principal criterion used to differentiate between humans and animals and determine their relationship. Were animals considered to have reasoning capacities? Typical answers given were generally—though not always absolutely—negative, and so the definitive characteristic of the human became the possession of rational faculties or powers of soul. Chapter One of Brutal Reasoning begins with a brief outline of ideas about the soul found in vernacular works of orthodox psychology in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, emphasising that it is the human's possession of an immaterial and immortal rational soul (rather than its sensitive or vegetative counterparts) that sets it apart from animals in these texts. Human beings are thereby held to be capable of understanding, judgement, speech, laughter, free will, prudential consideration of the future, intellective (as opposed to sensitive) memory, reflective self-knowledge, and prophetic dreaming. Lacking such capabilities, animals in this understanding are characterised as ignorant and purely passionate beings. Chapter Two illustrates the gradual manner in which a fully human status was thought to be achieved, through biological development—from the point of seminal mixture onwards, through infancy and childhood—or by means of education. This gradualist perspective on human nature is said to underpin colonialist conceptions of the irrational and sub-human native, constituted by an intermingling of the categories of the human, child and animal. Chapter Three charts the manner in which humans were considered by English moralists to be capable of descending to the moral status of animals, particularly through the failure to control passions or the indulgence of vices such as cruelty. But whereas typically for such authors descriptions of animals merely serve to illustrate human failings, Fudge here argues that a novel focus on the sensibility of animals, and a concomitant emphasis on the similarities between humans and animals, are detectable in the writings of Montaigne, and subsequently those of Joseph Hall, John Bruen and Robert Cleaver.

How to do things with Shakespeare: new approaches, new essays

Notes on Contributors. Introduction: Laurie E. Maguire (Magdalen College, University of Oxford). Part I How To Do Things with Sources. 1. French Connections: Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Montaigne and Shakespeare: Richard Scholar (Oriel College, Oxford). 2. Romancing the Greeks: Cymbeline's Genres and Models: Tanya Pollard (Brooklyn College, City University of New York). 3. How the Renaissance (Mis)Used Sources: Art of Misquotation: Julie Maxwell (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge). Part II How To Do Things with History. 4. Henry VIII, or All is True: Shakespeare's Favorite Play: Chris R. Kyle (Syracuse University). 5. Catholicism and Conversion in Love's Labour's Lost: Gillian Woods (Wadham College, Oxford). Part III How To Do Things with Texts. 6. Watching as Reading: Audience and Written Text in Shakespeare's Playhouse: Tiffany Stern (University College, Oxford). 7. What Do Editors Do and Why Does It Matter?: Anthony B. Dawson (University of British Columbia). Part IV How To Do Things with Animals. 8. The dog is himself: Humans, Animals, and Self-Control in Two Gentlemen of Verona: Erica Fudge. (Middlesex University). 9. Sheepishness in Winter's Tale: Paul Yachnin (McGill University). Part V How To Do Things with Posterity. 10. Time and the Nature of Sequence in Shakespeare's Sonnets: In sequent toil all forwards do contend: Georgia Brown (independent scholar). 11. Canons and Cultures: Is Shakespeare Universal? : A. E. B. Coldiron (Florida State University). 12. Freezing the Snowman: (How) Can We Do Performance Criticism?: Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford). Index

Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 Karen E. Carter Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, eds., Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2006). Pp. viii, 341. $105.00. The title of this collection of essays is somewhat misleading. First, although most of the thirteen essays can make claims to add to a broader European perspective on childhood, nine of them deal primarily with British subjects and sources. Second, only three of the essays treat children's literature explicitly. Two authors successfully rehabilitate eighteenth-century texts once dismissed as overly moralistic: The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) and the Abbé Pluche's Spectacle de la nature (1732–1751). Patricia Crain provides a fascinating look at changing views of literacy and property through her analysis of Goody Two-Shoes, demonstrating that when individuals could no longer rely on property ownership to cement their status in society, they could look to literacy to perform a similar function, even though literacy did not automatically guarantee monetary wealth. Cynthia J. Koepp convincingly argues that Pluche's illustrated encyclopedia for children anticipated the Encyclopédie and promoted bourgeois, Enlightenment thought as well as innovative pedagogical methods. Finally, Jan Fergus's persuasive essay comments on the reading habits of eighteenth-century schoolboys through a bookseller's ledgers. In contrast to scholars who argue that children had to be forced to read didactic literature, Fergus shows that schoolboys living in a state of "licensed war" often made unexpected choices and willingly read books like Goody Two-Shoes because they served as reminders that a rosier future awaited them if they could withstand the trials of childhood. [End Page 183] The remaining essays provide valuable contributions to the literature on children and childhood. Recently, Nicholas Orme has demonstrated the richness of material on children in the Middle Ages, and the authors in this collection have made similar claims for the early modern period. Through careful readings of texts, the authors show the nuances that a study of children can bring to a wide variety of themes, including knowledge and learning, gender, family, religion, power, agency, print culture, and the Enlightenment. Erica Fudge uses Aristotelian logic to analyze one of the primary characteristics that made an infant human: laughter. Yet children had to be taught to laugh properly, and the writers who offered instruction on this matter provide details on the early modern educational system as well as contemporary ideas about knowledge and learning for both children and adults. Michael Witmore explains further in his essay that the story of the demonic possession of several young English girls can highlight the shifting ideas of knowledge, evidence, and demonstration in the sixteenth century. The fact that those suffering from possession were children was a key reason authorities believed their accounts. The two essays by William McCarthy and Jill Shefrin address knowledge and learning in the Enlightenment period; Shefrin examines the pedagogical theories of a group of English aristocratic mothers and their desires to teach Enlightenment values to their daughters; and McCarthy presents case studies of three different teachers to show the conflict over what learning actually was in the eighteenth century—and who was capable of learning. Children in Shakespeare's plays illustrate another theme: nature versus nurture. Marianne Novy's analysis of characters who lost their parents at a young age and were subsequently reunited with them as adults exposes contradictory beliefs about the relative importance of heredity and environment. Kristina Straub explores the juxtaposition of servants and children in eighteenth-century Britain—authors of conduct manuals portrayed servants as children so that they would then be subordinate to the family hierarchy. Religion is the central theme in Michael Mascuch's essay about a popular adolescent spiritual minister, Sarah Wight. Mascuch believes that Wight's popularity was the result of the comfort her physical presence brought to the women to whom she ministered. Like them, she was frustrated by her inability to participate in Protestantism's print culture and sought a more tangible avenue for religious belief. Although Mascuch thus argues against those scholars who have claimed that Wight's popularity was the result...

:Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England

Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being human meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look. From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture.

Erica Fudge. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. x + 224 pp., figs., index. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. $45 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsErica Fudge. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. x + 224 pp., figs., index. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. $45 (cloth).James A. SerpellJames A. Serpell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 99, Number 1March 2008 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/589360 Views: 34Total views on this site © 2008 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.