Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEquestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity. Edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. vi+276.Richard NashRichard NashIndiana University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis recent contribution to the expanding field of animal studies offers a mapping of modernity from a paradigm of human dominion to one of human belonging. A dozen well-balanced essays present valuable case studies in a range of critical investigations of horse-human relations, spanning the last three centuries of Western culture. Organized by the rubrics of “Science and Technology,” “Commodity and Consumption,” and “National Identity,” each section contains a four-essay arc from early modernity to contemporary culture, providing readers with a sense of how these organizing concerns of modern culture have inflected horse-human interactions over time and across the globe.Implicit in that temporal trajectory is how modern culture revalues (and commodifies) what was at the period’s beginning primarily a relationship of labor and service (a workhorse was once more than a figure of speech), but has been transformed during this period into, variously, a luxury commodity, a companion, or an avatar of cultural identity. Not surprisingly, given the historical parameters of the volume, the thoroughbred—and the vexing issues of eugenics and racialized identity encoded into the construction of that breed—plays an important part in this drama; but the editors have assembled a sufficiently disparate collection that offers a more comprehensive array, from workhorse to brumby, photographs to foodstuff. The retracing of temporal steps across the collection’s organizing categories allows the shifting relations of horse and human under modernity to emerge in a way that powerfully reminds the reader of how much familiar tropes of modernity (new, improved, unique, alienated) remain fantasies arising from a ground of familiar established collaborative belongings.Monica Mattfield’s essay, “Machines of Feeling,” offers a careful reading of the bit as techne, a tool for facilitating communication between horse and human, one in which the shifting preferences for curb and snaffle illustrate shifting understandings of such cross-species communication, from what might be thought of as illusions of “top down” control to more responsive dialogic interaction. And yet that facilitating technology is, itself, quickly subsumed into a larger techne of the war machine described in Donna Landry’s powerful discussion, “Horses at Waterloo, 1815.” The assemblage here is vast and sprawling, growing out from the communication of horse and rider to the horrible mechanized destructive power of cavalry artillery and the infantry it both supports and slaughters. Battlefield carnage is powerfully rendered as emanating from the destruction of this cross-species partnership: “The image of combined human and equine carnage at Waterloo, the heaps of dead of both species immortalized by Byron but also present in so many eyewitness accounts, would forever unite horse and horseman, regardless of nationality or rank” (33). Byron’s line compresses still more forcefully: “Rider and horse—friend, foe—in one red burial blent” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 3.28). Sinan Akilli’s essay picks up immediately on the trope of equine death in the novels of Eliot and Hardy, here offering a generative and innovative reading of the deaths of Wildfire and Prince in Silas Marner and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, respectively, that expands quickly to consider these deaths in terms of narrative agency for novelists acutely aware of, and attentive to, the role of the nonhuman in human cultural formations. I found this a particularly provocative and valuable contribution. That awareness is visibly on display in the photographs of Charlotte Dumas, discussed by Rune Gade, in which we see the workhorses of military funerals, not in their public labor, but in moments of rest and repose in their domestic habitat; or in which we see the feral horses of Nevada wandering through a landscape in which marks of human settlement are incorporated into their natural habitat. The back and forth of entangled communicative exchange across species barriers, then, operates across each of these essays, at once illustrating a cross-species entanglement functioning throughout modern science and technology and preparing the ground for the essays that follow in the next two sections, as the theoretical issues raised here find various critical articulations in the ensuing arguments.The central section of this collection, “Commodification and Consumption,” emphasizes economic, art, and cultural history in the entangled “symbolic communication” of horse-human partnerships. The elaborate and impressively decorated Pommersfelden stables of Weissenstein Castle, built for the nonequestrian Lothar Franz von Schonborn were, if anything, more intent on aesthetic than equestrian display; the architectural design and intricate artistic trappings performed princely power and privilege in ways that the cleric who commissioned them himself never attempted on horseback. The Narragansett Pacer, a breed of horse originating (and disappearing) under the management of colonial Rhode Island settlers, was, we learn from Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, integral to (and dependent on) the rise (and ultimate fall) of the sugar trade, with horses bred in New England and sold to labor alongside the slaves imported from Africa in the sugar colonies of Suriname and Barbados. The punishing tariffs of the Sugar Act and the Molasses Act dealt a serious blow to this colonial traffic. While the breed lingered into the nineteenth century, it had “emerged in response to a specific set of circumstances, and when those circumstances changed in the nineteenth century, the breed faded out and new and more versatile types of horses emerged” (108–9). The complexly entangled agency of horses and humans in a system of slavery is brought front and center in Jessica Dallow’s “Race and Racehorses in the Art of Edward Troye,” a rich and detailed discussion about an important nineteenth-century sporting artist. Dallow notes how much Troye’s artistic reputation revolves around the trope of “liveliness” (123), and how both horse and human seem captured in his portraits in the middle of some action in which they seem to become aware of the viewer’s presence. Kristen Guest’s discussion of racehorse biography in the essay that follows picks up on the persistence of these tropes of liveliness in their depiction of “heart” and “character,” charting how emotional and economic value are poised against one another in delicate balance, registering “the tension at the core of modern formulations of subjectivity, between the idealization of identity as self-determining and the influence of social and economic contexts in which that identity unfolds” (142).Tatsuya Misuda’s fascinating account of the breeding practices of the state studs of Prussia from 1750 to 1900 offers a revealing counterpoint to the much better-known story of the ascendancy of the thoroughbred in England (and later, America). In this account, a range of cultural attitudes toward both traditional equestrian performance (valorized) and the emerging sport of horse racing (viewed with suspicion and hostility) govern the decisions made by those responsible for managing the breeding of Prussian warhorses. Susanna Forrest examines how arguments for and against the practice of hippophagy braided their appeals from the stout twine of rationalism, class status, and xenophobia. In a particularly compelling essay, “Circus Studs and Equestrian Sports: Turn of the Century France,” Kari Weil offers a fascinating view of the practice and politics of aristocratic male self-display: “Through discipline and hygiene, the spectacle of the male body, whether on horseback or in the gym, would no longer be the sign of idle wealth or of a feminized desire to be seen, but, rather would reflect the physical and moral virility needed to govern both self and others” (200). In a final essay, Isa Menzies does a splendid job of describing “what happens when a pest species is reframed as a heritage icon” (214). Bringing the collection to a graceful close, she returns us to the theoretical stakes of entanglement raised in earlier essays, here specifically grounded in current debates over environment, ecological disruption, and the highly politicized contests over what counts as heritage and for whom. Her final note about the brumby has one very specific reference for the debate she describes, but it speaks as well to a refrain that has appeared in various forms throughout the volume’s description of horse-human relations in modernity: “The brumby has come to function as an avatar of belonging” (215). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 4May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708449HistoryPublished online March 04, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.