From the pet that we live with and care for, to news items such as animal cloning, and the use of various creatures in film, television and advertising, animals are a constant presence in our lives.An
Fudge (literary and cultural studies, Middlesex U., England) intended to study beliefs about the reasoning capacity of animals before Descartes' 1637 beast-machine hypothesis. She found that people th
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 anim
Why do we live with pets? What are these beings who are kin but not kind? Erica Fudge looks at the answers offered by modern thinkers. Moving from an analysis of the philosophical importance of the La
Examining the representations of animals in law, religious and political writings, literature, and science, Fudge (English literary studies, Middlesex U., UK) argues that scholars of the early modern
What was the life of a cow in early modern England like? What would it be like to milk that same cow, day-in, day-out, for over a decade? How did people feel about and toward the animals that they wor
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatis
What was the life of a cow in early modern England like? What would it be like to milk that same cow, day-in, day-out, for over a decade? How did people feel about and toward the animals that they wor
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 co
Notions of humanity in the early modern period are analyzed in a dozen thought-provoking essays on such topics as apes, cartography, pornography, hermaphrodites, cyborgs, whether Peter the Wild Child
