At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period

by Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert (Editor), Susan Wiseman (Editor)

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renogotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen, and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying, and pornography).

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2002

About the author

Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London. Fudge was Director of Research for English, Creative Writing and Journalism there from 2011 to 2014. Her academic research focusses on historical human animal relations, with particular interest in the early modern period, and has written on the place and representation of animals in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; on philosophical debates about animal reason and concepts of animal interiority in the period; on animal things; and, on human livestock relations. She has also published on the implications of bringing animals in to historical research. As well as this academic work, Erica has written about human animal relations in historical and contemporary culture for a wider public in her books Animal and Pets, and in the magazine History Today. She is the Director of the British Animal Studies Network, the leading network for those inside and beyond academia who are working on, and with, animals which meets twice a year and is based at the University of Strathclyde.