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

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.
 

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Erica Fudge 1. Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire Kathryn Perry 2. "Bitches and Queens": Pets and Perversion at the Court of France's Henri III Juliana Schiesari 3. Hairy on the Inside: Metamorphosis and Civility in English Werewolf Texts S. J. Wiseman 4. Saying Nothing Concerning the Same: On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England Erica Fudge 5. "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?": Shakespeare's Animations Erica Sheen 6. Government by Beagle: The Impersonal Rule of James VI and I Alan Stewart 7. Reading, Writing, and Riding Horses in Early Modern England: James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) and Gervase Markham's Cavelarice (1607) Elspeth Graham 8. "Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?": Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage James Knowles 9. Pliny's Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought Brian Cummings 10. Reading Vital Signs: Animals and the Experimental Philosophy Peter Harrison 11. The M,nagerie and the Labyrinthe: Animals at Versailles, 1662-1792 Matthew Senior Contributors Index

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Animals and civilization Europe History 16th century, Animals and civilization Europe History 17th century, Animals (Philosophy) Europe History 16th century, Animals (Philosophy) Europe History 17th century

Review :
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2005.— CHOICE