Erica Fudge

At the borders of the human : beasts, bodies and natural philosophy in the early modern period

What is, what was the human? This book argues that the development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy apparently established boundaries between the human and its others, but 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). Essays focus on literary, cultural and scientific texts from the mid-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century.

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

Where are all the animals in history? Renaissance Beasts begins to answer that question by exploring numerous ways in which animals played a key role in Renaissance culture: as werewolves, meat, performers, experimental tools. Animals, as Levi-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 Menagerie 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.

Calling Creatures by their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man

In seventeenth-century ideas of the philosophy of science ‘mythic’ pronouncements were demonised as unscientific, irrational and vulgar, while induction and experiment were proposed as the new ways of realising human potential and power in the study and control of the natural world. Within this scheme Francis Bacon is regarded as the ‘Father’ of the new movement, offering, in numerous works, a philosophical basis for future investigative endeavours. It is somehow fitting that this Father should represent the movement of the New Science as being not only from myth to proof, but from infancy to maturity.

Renaissance Animal Things

This article uses thing theory to explore the uses of two animal things common in Renaissane culture: leather and civet. It argues that, even as the animal is dismembered and its parts used in the manufacture of commodities - gloves, perfume - those objects have a power to change the world in which they are used: that animal things are not inert, and are not simply evidence of human dominion, but are themselves active presences in culture.

Introduction to special issues : Reading animals

This article is an introduction to a special issue of Worldviews. It discusses reading animals.

The Animal Face of Early Modern England

This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure from humanism. Taking a journey through ways of thinking that will, perhaps, be unfamiliar, the revised vision of human-animal relations outlined here emerges not from a history of philosophy but from an archival study of people’s relationships with and understandings of their livestock in early modern England. At stake are conceptions of who we are and who we might have been, and the relation between those two, and the livestock on 17th-century smallholdings are our guides.

The human face of early modern England

This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningfully because they have no bodily control, and as such they are faceless beings without individuality and without a sense of self-consciousness. The ethical implications of such a reading of the human face are far reaching.

Pocohontas’s baptism: reformed theology and the paradox of desire.

Seeking to elucidate certain elements of Reformed theology, the writer explores the conversion narrative concerning the baptism, in the early 17th century, of the Native American woman Pocahontas. She explains that in a letter detailing his anxieties about his relationship with Pocahontas, the English settler John Rolfe denies the desire of carnal affection while celebrating his longing to convert Pocahontas. She highlights this link between the desire for the flesh and the desire for the spirit, and she traces the ways in which these longings operate in Rolfes letter and in the baptismal theology informing the conversion of Pocahontas. She suggests that an analysis of the desires of the convertor and of the connection between the feared yearning for the flesh and the sacred desire for the divine reveal important aspects of Reformed thought.

Judging Like a Malt-Horse: The Humanist Interpretation of Humanity

‘Speak that I may see you’: Socrates’ dictum, cited by both Erasmus in the early sixteenth century and Jonson in the early seventeenth, comes to life at the end of Valentine and Orson.1 Orson becomes visible through his ability to communicate, and his contemplative state at the end of the text reveals a new notion of the species, one which can be termed humanist rather than Reformed. Speech and identity are inextricably linked: just as Orson needed to gain his voice to truly enter the human community, so humanists proposed that spoken communication was a signifier of humanity. This emphasis on speech would seem to offer a solution to the dangerous frailty of human status offered by the Reformed emphasis on conscience. But at the same time as eloquence was emerging as the site of human-ness the question of interpretation was also an issue. Eloquence was only a signifier of the human if it could be understood; in fact, eloquence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The human can be as eloquent as is humanly possible, but if his eloquence is not understood, if he is not interpreted aright, then his eloquence counts for nothing, and as such interpretation becomes the skill which defines the human.

Wild Beasts Making Havoc of the Soul: Animals, Humans and Religion

William Perkins offers what seems like a very straightforward definition of the difference between the human and the animal: the proper subjects of co[n]science are reasonable creatures, that is men and Angels. Hereby conscience is excluded … from bruit beasts: for though they haue life & sense, and in many things some shadowes of reason, yet because they want true reason, they want conscience also.1