Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: The emerging scholarship within Animal Studies or human–animal relations represents a rapidly developing field. It is chiefly marked by a change in scholarly attitude: where once animals were a backdrop to human history, they are increasingly seen as authentic and autonomous historical agents who had a real impact on the world around them. The early form of the study of animals in history focused on human ideas about animals, where, like René Descartes’ automata, animals were indifferent and reflexive presences, open to the meaning we assigned them. Thankfully, this approach has long been cast aside. As the animal historian Erica Fudge has observed, today scholars strive to trace ‘the many ways in which humans construct and are constructed by animals in the past’.1 This shift encourages us to examine the part that both humans and animals have played in shaping each other’s lives and the broad spectrum of relationships they have had with each other. As a discipline, Animal Studies has benefited greatly from work in a wide range of fields. Its beginnings can be traced to the animal rights movement of the 1970s and foundational texts such as Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987; rev. ante, cvi [1991], 229–30). Important discussions also happened in the field of theoretical literature with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on ‘becoming-animal’.2 Thus, rather than a unified approach, Animal Studies encompasses a variety of methods adapted from participating disciplines. Consequently, the theories that guide much of the work in Animal Studies vary. Yet at their core, these theories resist a whole series of traditional binaries—human/animal; male/female; nature/culture—that reinforce systematic oppression and inform reductionist systems. The five books reviewed here highlight some of the methods and challenges of the study of animals—or, better yet, what Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells term ‘interspecies interactions’. Each book aims to develop a better understanding of such interactions by examining and valuing particular cases, and ultimately rejecting the broad conceptual distinction between humans and all other animals. The challenge for historians is how to consider the presence of animals as historical or literary actors in a way both to contest assumptions and to broaden our understanding of the past. Erica Fudge’s response to this challenge in Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and their Animals in Early Modern England is to examine closely the ways in which humans and animals lived alongside each other in the home and on the farm in seventeenth-century England. Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells seek similar ‘moments of entwinement’3 between humans and animals in their edited volume Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity. Animals are regarded as historical actors to a lesser extent in Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert and Dagmar Schäfer. Rather, this extensive collection examines how animals played a central role in thought processes throughout Chinese history. Turning to imaginative literature, Sarah Kay’s Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries presents a thorough examination of the page as a site at which human and animal converge, while Peggy McCracken’s In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France explores ideas of power and authority in medieval texts against a backdrop of human–animal relationships. These books each provide rich material for reflection about how animals both invite and disrupt ideas about ‘natural’ relations or divisions. I begin with Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes (2018), in which Erica Fudge examines such relations through seventeenth-century wills from the Essex Record Office. Focusing on the period 1620 to 1634, Fudge claims that wills are particularly useful in detailing human lives lived alongside animals by tracking people’s concerns and intentions after death. They reveal ‘a world of ongoing negotiation and tentative collaboration’ where the lives of human and animal were not only entwined but interdependent.4 Although only about 10 per cent of the wills in the Essex Record Office included specific bequests of animals, Fudge argues that the descriptions of animals that do exist imply that animals had more than just financial meaning to testators. Her emphasis is thus on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis as she examines passages that make visible what would otherwise be invisible. Fudge is upfront regarding the limitations of her work, acknowledging that the wills she examines were made mainly by those in upper and middle ranks (very little is revealed about those of lower status), and women are chronically under-represented. Nonetheless, she confronts issues that are ubiquitous in Animal Studies: what to do with ambiguous terminology? How should scholars interpret animal absence? Perhaps most importantly, how can historians grant animals an active role in history when our access to them is through sources created by humans? To address these questions, Fudge takes a good look at the lives of real animals, and with a little imagination illustrates the relations between animals and humans which were not only vital but constant. The first two chapters look at the varying terminology used to classify owned animals. How testators categorised entities that were constantly changing in concise legal terms was challenging. Furthermore, terms were often polysemous: ‘cattle’ could refer to cattle (that is, bovines) specifically, to livestock more generally, or even to other possessions that were movable but not, in the words of Fudge, ‘self-moving’.5 Animals might even be subsumed within a catch-all phrase such as ‘the rest of my goods’. The overarching question of these chapters, and indeed the book, is whether the use of a particular term indicated a particular attitude toward animals or whether the language used in wills was shaped and constrained by the legal limitations inherent in such documents. By acknowledging the purpose of a will (ensuring uninterrupted ownership and avoiding disputes) as well as the fact that animals, as living beings, move, change and age, Fudge argues that phrases that seem detached and unfeeling might ‘evidence not the objectification of animals but their particular natures and how important bequeathing them was’.6 Personal names, as examined in Chapter Three, worked in a similar manner. Of the wills that Fudge examines, 0.3 per cent contained named animals. Yet for Fudge, this lack reflects the legal constraints and formalism of wills, since naming animals was certainly widely practised. For instance, in his diary from 1651, Ralph Josselin named every one of his cows. According to Fudge, such individualisation demonstrates that these animals were part of the human community and important as co-workers, even while their personal names played no role in the law. In fact, it was downright risky to name an animal in a will: if the specific animal bequeathed had perished or was otherwise unavailable after the testator’s death, the legacy was void. It was thus far safer to use general terms to ensure the legatee received something. This created, as Fudge puts it, a gap between ‘legal definition and lived relation’.7 In Chapter Four, Fudge explores evidence suggesting that farm animals were valued for more than their productivity and financial worth. Beginning with bees and lambs, Fudge looks at the possibility of animal bequests as having a symbolic or spiritual value when read alongside practical and religious manuals. Finally, in her last chapter, Fudge looks at people who lived separately from animals in an urban environment and how this might affect the way that animals were perceived. To do this, she compares the wills from Essex to those written and probated in the diocese of London from 1620 to 1635. It seems that few people living in the capital included specific animal bequests in their wills (less than 1 per cent). Fudge is therefore forced to interpret this silence, concluding that Londoners experienced different encounters with animals, not that animals disappeared from their lives. For instance, people in the city often lived in spaces converted from animal use to human use and food might be brought in rather than produced on site. Animals would still have been present in daily life, but this ‘species isolation’ would have meant a very different lived experience from that of the country.8 Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes presents a thorough investigation of mid-seventeenth-century wills, in which animals play multifaceted roles as ‘agents and things, symbols and goods, colleagues and meat’.9 Fudge demonstrates that recognising animals as both stock and individual creatures were not contradictory methods but different means of distribution available to testators. Furthermore, the co-operation of such animals—on whom the lives of humans vitally depended—was essential, allowing the animals a certain leeway to dictate the human–animal exchange. Similar efforts to centre the lives of animals are explored in the edited volume Interspecies Interaction: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity. The collection aims broadly to take the animal experience as seriously as the human experience; like Fudge, the editors, Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells, are keen to find ways of granting animals an active role in history. To de-centre the human, they focus not on how humans and animals lived together, but rather on how humans and animals ‘produced emotions and acts in each other’.10 As a result, the chapters in this collection cover a wide historical range spanning the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although largely Eurocentric, a variety of sources are also used, including letters (Cockram, Peter Edwards), newspapers (Helen Cowie), legal records (Wells), and recipe books (Karen Raber). Comprising ten chapters overall, the first section looks broadly at emotional responses and connections between humans and animals. The second section highlights the ‘use and abuse’ of animals, while the final section covers the theme of identification and classification. Like Fudge, Cockram and Wells acknowledge that much of the evidence derives from humans, which limits how fully the animal can be centred in their investigation. Yet there are several chapters that stand out in their efforts to highlight moments in which animal agency or resistance were recognised. In Chapter Four Peter Edwards explores the lives of horses in his study of the Levinz Colt bred in Nottinghamshire in the 1720s. Using his background as a socio-economic historian, he stresses that the relationship between man and horse is ‘a two-way process’, and strives to construct what he calls an ‘animal biography’.11 To do this, Edwards traces the Levinz Colt’s life and temperament through a series of letters, allowing him to study the horse not only as an individual, but one which shaped the workings of an eighteenth-century breeding stable. Another strong contribution is Andrew Wells’s ‘Blurred lines: Bestiality and the Human Ape in Enlightenment Scotland’. Here Wells considers discussions of interspecies sex as a way to determine species difference alongside cases of bestiality that came before the Scottish courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that in both situations the behaviour of the animal participant was important. In bestiality cases, eyewitnesses were often rare, so evidentiary rules were stretched to include animal behaviour as proof that the crime had occurred. Such behaviour, ranging from resistance to affection, was given considerable testamentary weight in court. An animal’s behaviour was also considered in a late eighteenth-century thought experiment which imagined intercourse between humans and apes. The desire (or lack thereof) to mate with a human partner was taken to indicate that the animal did or did not belong to the same species as humans. Animals were thus key not only to convicting those engaged in the act that was ‘not to be named’ but also in determining their own taxonomic fate. Wells’s article compellingly reminds us that animal agency (albeit as interpreted by humans) includes the capacity to determine ideas and events. Such capacity is clearly demonstrated in Krista Maglen’s essay, an intriguing piece detailing the role of dangerous native animals in the development of colonial Australia. Her chapter, entitled ‘“The Monster’s Mouth…’: Dangerous Animals and the European Settlement of Australia’, considers the role of sharks, snakes and other creatures in framing the European understanding of Australia, where stories of the danger posed by such creatures were actively disseminated in order to deter convict escape and police early colonial settlements. Although used to regulate and control human movement, Maglen notes that these animals ‘did not passively and compliantly conform to the spatial framing imagined by the settlers’.12 Dangerous creatures could be found within the of the just as as they could be found They could be found in around the home or in the that were meant to be and These animals not but were agents that in their to By acknowledging and this to humans and animals were not only but shaped each other’s The theme of interspecies interactions in Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, where animals play a part in human This edited volume presents a good from which to the relationship between animals and The of the collection is to how animals were seen as ‘a human and a useful but one which the human In fact, the chapters here largely animals in their symbolic or and the use of in early the of bees from to role the and examines for animal life as a for in late Such chapters could from more to the between constructed animals and real animals, between the lived and literary by on the of animals through or these provide an of how animals were valued by of As the in the to be taken when the historical to the human–animal of and the than as human, both animals and humans might the same or within Chinese for explores animal of in in his essay, and Animals in Early Medieval he were often as the act of or in would provide food to The key difference between humans and animals, to these was not that humans could act and animals could Rather, humans on the of the animal behaviour focused on the of As a result, animals were similar to humans and rather than For this that of animals and humans as part of the same their acts of the same that only by Animals what might consider human can be seen in Martina as and Using ideas of and she explores which scholars with animal and on both a species and an individual animals were constructed in as to use many of were from or other written for were constructed in order to highlight certain a were as multifaceted they could and even In one a by a to the who a from his were from but as historical from rather than as creatures the could in his own Siebert argues that the of living animals to the to be and in each of animals could thus be by and by The of animals through the of a book is when that book is made from animals, a fact in Sarah Kay’s work, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French In her examination of medieval a of the book, at the page as well as what is or on the history of the book and her work in the that is both a of and an of For the page the site at which human and ‘a between livestock and Kay’s overarching is that the of a moments of that the to the book, and by so the constantly between human and she means by is on in which the distinction between and is Bestiaries are a particularly intriguing in this with their focus on animals, it is the material form of that a between and it is on the of an animal that animals are read as The chapters are and in with in both and and The first two begin with as with where the of animals are as a to history. In Chapter for looks at the and which can be and thus the of In one snakes are as similar to a man who the same out against of the of the a between human the of the and the of the The between and is not only by an but also by the and in the The of is explored in the second of chapters, and the of whether or and the this The to the it all the more visible as the of his or her own Of particular in Chapter Four are in which animals have the capacity to humans. In the most produced Latin animals are with of animals that other animals, including humans. The to and the of but the that is is In one the like the in Chapter as is the man he is in the of in a for they are each other’s as the his to the we the the man has in the they the same the same This as a of between the human to the lives and of other and the by those creatures against the of this By the on humans and them the these animals question and thus The final two chapters focus on recognising and between humans and other animals, and the this has for the By how as animal or the presents a work which explores how the of and difference that they are to By the to the book, we are with the presence of animals not only made the book but also our own The page thus and the between all out on the page is also explored by Peggy the animal in her work, In the Skin of the Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval by us to of the of power and authority in the of human–animal relationships. a range of literary texts and between the and fifteenth with a focus on and argues that the use of in stories animals and of highlights issues of and on this and the of demonstrates that power are at work in relations around the as well as the of the animal means by the of in in and power Such relations are explored in each of her five chapters, in terms of and In Chapter she explores animal their use as a and their of human while also that animals resist such The of the and the of the and of animals, which as a of human that human animals as well as and other human In the of the the of the a and is it human a is and acts as a for the The on the other of animals for their by humans. the animals could the they would resist the of their for symbolic of human power and Chapter on the of relations as in and These texts as an relationship in which animals as or even human In the of and a about their natures for life human To them for their the are or a food which they Such of use of animals to of similar to the at by the are on similar between animals and humans can be seen in Chapter Three, which the theme of as Using Deleuze and Guattari’s of is in ‘the of between the animal and the and the use of animal and in of In late of the a to and the who has him from a takes on the of his not only his name but on his which was on and the is to a he so by a who a symbolic use of an animal as a of his here the of animal the and from the of the of who him the and of her The to is thus to the which not only but his In Chapter Four, her investigation to the role of and of and The of this is to highlight the ways in which is used in medieval to about the relationship between and power Here on of that is in encounters with these women the of their presents the who them with of their and thus a to Finally, in the last chapter, takes of the that the distinction between human and animal is not as as might be In the of the and the of a human to his human while a to the animals who explores such human–animal relations as the very of human us to whether is an rather than a animals history is not the for historians to include animals as and actors as as As a Animal Studies has made while acknowledging that a more and a more approach to is the same a question how to the and of relationships with that and on the evidence before By that human are interspecies the five books reviewed here each seek evidence or ways of evidence to reveal how life was experienced and entwined with animals. The efforts of these to centre the animal and the human their are key to the human–animal relationship and the way in which this is throughout history. As Animal Studies to and challenge the of the from history, we can look to more that look to moments in which animals within or even human
Source: The English Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ceab023
Author: Lesley B Macgregor
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,894
OpenAlex ID: W3133851931