REVIEWS 232 not be enough evidence to prove the suspects guilty of adultery; nonetheless, he suggests that though it would be unfair to convict them, they were not necessarily innocent. Bernard examines Anne’s innocence first through three main documentary sources, and then by evaluating the queen’s general demeanor. The sources include a poem by Lancelot de Carles, letters of Sir William Kingston, and Chapuys’s accounts of the trial. De Carles’ poem features perhaps too centrally, and is coupled with references to Anne’s natural flirtatiousness. Bernard also highlights the testimony of the countess of Worcester, who, as one of the queen’s ladies, was ideally positioned to be cognizant of Anne’s actions. Although Bernard does not believe the countess’s accusations about Anne and her brother to be accurate, he does consider them as representative of the queen’s overall behavior. This behavior comprised, among other things, “adultery with Norris, probably with Smeaton, [and] possibly with Weston” (192). Although Bernard’s evidence is meager in its quantity and scope, the implications of his argument are significant for existing perceptions of the innocent and religiously notable queen. Such assessments of Anne’s behavior, moreover, have associated connotations about the nature of the king: here, Henry VIII was the instigator of the break with Rome, and the main agent in reforming the church. The king was also prepared to abstain from sexual relations with Anne until the success of their marriage was imminent. In this account of their relationship then, it was Henry who labored to ensure the solidity of his marriage, and Anne who damaged it with her affairs. JENNIFER S. NG, History, UCLA Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) 238 pp., 8 ill. In his most recent book, Bruce Thomas Boehrer continues a ten-year investigation of animals in early modernity. He argues that the rise of the literary subject in the eighteenth century and its most salient genre, the novel, were preceded by a gradual stripping away of subjectivity from the non-human world, and the animal world in particular. Boehrer’s target in this book is the human-animal divide and the discursive modes that reify that distinction (the novel, but presaged by polemic, parody, and satire) and those that deny it (the romance, beast fable, travelogue, and epic). He argues that “the notion of character develops in English writing … as a means of manufacturing and perpetuating the distinction between people and animals” (5). The book ends in the zero-sum bullring of Cartesian thought (if humans can reason, then animals cannot), but it begins much earlier. In a breakneck tour of the notion of character in the western tradition, Boehrer begins with Aristotle’s idea of character as impure and hybrid, and concludes that Aristotle is trying to have it both ways: his conflicting comments reflect the recognition of a continuum of consciousness between humans and animals, while trying to maintain a distinction based on a human capacity to reason. Theophrastus adds to Aristotle ’s definition of character a definition still in use by literary critics today—a fictional person created by a writer. But even in this early transitional moment, these dispositions are “shared by human and nonhuman animals alike” (16). REVIEWS 233 The two potential heirs to and revisers of that hybrid tradition are Descartes (who maintains the human-animal distinction by positing that humans, through a process of inner-directed skepticism, are the only beings in possession of an immortal, rational soul) and Darwin (who famously placed humanity on a relative spectrum of species). For all its scholarly positioning in the introduction, the bulk of the book comprises “a set of interrelated zooliterary histories, or perhaps less pretentiously …a series of character studies of early modern animals” (3). The chapters are allocated to animals in three groups based on their utility to humanity: haulage, companionship, and food. The first chapter on horses deals with the fortunes of horses, whose heroic and chivalric baggage is treated both nostalgically and comically by Shakespeare, and is finally translated to the spiritual realm by Milton in Paradise Lost. A chapter on parrots traces...