Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures

by Erica Fudge (Introduction)

Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain.
 
Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle and entertainment, language, science and skepticism, and domestic and courtly cultures.
 
Within these pages scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss numerous kinds of texts--literary, dramatic, philosophical, religious, political--by writers including Calvin, Montaigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Through analysis of these and other writers, Renaissance Beasts uncovers new and arresting interpretations of Renaissance culture and the broader social assumptions glimpsed through views on matters such as pet ownership and meat consumption.
 
Renaissance Beasts is certainly about animals, but of the many species discussed, it is ultimately humankind that comes under the greatest scrutiny.
 

Genres: History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

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]

Erica Fudge (historian, University of Strathclyde) is a must-read author for anyone interested in medieval or early modern historical animal studies, and this volume provides an important entry into the field.