Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture

by Erica Fudge

The boundaries between human and beast forged a rugged philosophical landscape across early modern England.  Spectators gathered in London's Bear Garden to watch the callous and brutal baiting of animals.  A wave of "new" scientists performed vivisections on live animals to learn more about the human body.
 
In Perceiving Animals, the British scholar Erica Fudge traces the dangers and problems of anthropocentrism in texts written from 1558 to 1649. Meticulous examinations of scientific, legal, political, literary, and religious writings offer unique and fascinating depictions of human perceptions about the natural world.
 
Views carried over from bestiaries--medieval treatises on animals--
posited animals as nonsentient beings whose merits were measured solely by what provisions they afforded food, medicine, clothing, travel, labor, scientific knowledge.  Without consciences or faith, animals were deemed far inferior to humans.
 
While writings from the period asserted an enormous biological superiority, Fudge contends actual human behavior and logic worked, sometimes accidentally, to close the alleged gap.  In the Bear Garden, even a man of the lowest social rank had power over a tortured animal, sinking him, though, below the beasts.  The beast fable itself fails to show a true understanding of animals, as it merely attributes human characteristics to beasts in an attempt to teach humanist ideals.  Scholars and writers continually turned to the animal world for reflection.  Despite this, scientists of the period used animals for empirical and medical knowledge, recognizing biological and spiritual similarities but refusing to renege human superiority.
 
Including an insightful reexamination of Ben Jonson's Volpone and fascinating looks at works by Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Richard Overton, among others, Fudge probes issues of animal ownership and biological and spiritual superiority in early modern England that resonate with philosophical quandaries still relevant in contemporary society.
 

Genres: History

248 pages, Paperback

First published December 3, 1999

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.

Reviews

[a duck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fascinating study of animals in early modern Europe from Erica Fudge.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really useful for what I am using it for. Not sure what else I could or should say about it. I did really like it for that fact, and actually wish I had read it sooner.