Erica Fudge
My work is in the fields of animal studies and early modern studies, and in people and their relationships with their livestock in early modern England.
I am the director of the British Animal Studies Network, which ran from 2007-9 in London, funded by the AHRC and Middlesex University. It is now running again in Glasgow, with funding from the University of Strathclyde. Details of future meetings and audio recordings of many papers from past ones can be found on the network website: www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk
The best weblist for general animal studies stuff (cfps, conference announcements etc.) remains h-animal. Go to http://www.h-net.org/~animal/ to join.
Address: Department of Humanities,
University of Strathclyde,
Lord Hope Building, Level 4,
141 St James Road,
Glasgow G4 0LT
UK
I am the director of the British Animal Studies Network, which ran from 2007-9 in London, funded by the AHRC and Middlesex University. It is now running again in Glasgow, with funding from the University of Strathclyde. Details of future meetings and audio recordings of many papers from past ones can be found on the network website: www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk
The best weblist for general animal studies stuff (cfps, conference announcements etc.) remains h-animal. Go to http://www.h-net.org/~animal/ to join.
Address: Department of Humanities,
University of Strathclyde,
Lord Hope Building, Level 4,
141 St James Road,
Glasgow G4 0LT
UK
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Papers by Erica Fudge
raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The essay traces shifts in the idea
that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential
for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recovering an
animal’s point of view in historical work using the findings of animal welfare science. It also engages with the nature
of the documents available to historians of animals, and uses some contemporary theoretical work—particularly
that of Vinciane Despret—to think about new ways of engaging with the intraspecific and interspecific encounters
of animals and humans in history.
raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The essay traces shifts in the idea
that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential
for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recovering an
animal’s point of view in historical work using the findings of animal welfare science. It also engages with the nature
of the documents available to historians of animals, and uses some contemporary theoretical work—particularly
that of Vinciane Despret—to think about new ways of engaging with the intraspecific and interspecific encounters
of animals and humans in history.
For further details of the British Animal Studies Network go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk
6 and 7 October 2017
This meeting of the British Animal Studies Network will take place at the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. A map of the campus is here. We are in Building 38/40 on Friday until 6pm, and then are in Building 32/1015 for John Bradshaw's talk. Saturday's sessions will take place in Building 44, Lecture Theatre A. Please go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/FutureMeetings/WorkingwithAnimals.aspx for a link to register
By focusing on interactions between people and their livestock, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes restores animals to the central place they once had in the domestic worlds of early modern England. In addition, the book uses human relationships with animals—as revealed through agricultural manuals, literary sources, and a unique dataset of over four thousand wills—to rethink what quick cattle meant to a predominantly rural population and how relationships with them changed as more and more people moved to the city. Offering a fuller understanding of both human and animal life in this period, Fudge innovatively expands the scope of early modern studies and how we think about the role that animals played in past cultures more broadly.
Book published September 2018
Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.
Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.
While many collections originate as a series of separately planned conference papers drawn together only by editorial fiat, the essays that comprise Killing Animals were regarded as parts of a larger whole from their inception. The result is a remarkably collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that includes eight individually authored chapters and a collectively written introduction. Rather than attempting to produce a single ethical understanding from their diverse views, however, the group aims instead to demonstrate the value of the wider academic study of the place of animals in human history. The conclusion to Killing Animals takes the form of a discussion among the eight contributors, with each expanding upon issues raised earlier in the book.
"Killing Animals by the Animal Studies Group provides compelling material for academics wishing to study our relationship to animals, which consists mostly of violence towards them. This collection of essays is refreshingly informed in its analysis of how this brutality manifests itself in cultural forms."--VegNews
"The eight contributors to the collection entitled Killing Animals provide sufficiently diverse perspectives on the subject to make this book a worthwhile addition to the growing literature regarding animal rights and wrongs."--H-Animal
The Animal Studies Group consists of the following British scholars: Steve Baker (art history, University of Central Lancashire); Jonathan Burt (independent scholar); Diana Donald (art history, Manchester Metropolitan University); Erica Fudge (literary and cultural studies, Middlesex University); Garry Marvin (social anthropology, Roehampton University); Robert McKay (literature, University of Sheffield); Clare Palmer (philosophy and environmental studies, Washington University in St. Louis); and Chris Wilbert (geography, Anglia Ruskin University).
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 automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed.
Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the human and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being "human" meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look.
From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the human perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture.
In Perceiving Animals, the British scholar Erica Fudge traces the dangers and problems of anthropocentrism in texts written from 1558 to 1649. Meticulous examinations of scientific, legal, political, literary, and religious writings offer unique and fascinating depictions of human perceptions about the natural world.
Views carried over from bestiaries--medieval treatises on animals-- posited animals as nonsentient beings whose merits were measured solely by what provisions they afforded humans: food, medicine, clothing, travel, labor, scientific knowledge. Without consciences or faith, animals were deemed far inferior to humans.
While writings from the period asserted an enormous biological superiority, Fudge contends actual human behavior and logic worked, sometimes accidentally, to close the alleged gap. In the Bear Garden, even a man of the lowest social rank had power over a tortured animal, sinking him, though, below the beasts. The beast fable itself fails to show a true understanding of animals, as it merely attributes human characteristics to beasts in an attempt to teach humanist ideals. Scholars and writers continually turned to the animal world for reflection. Despite this, scientists of the period used animals for empirical and medical knowledge, recognizing biological and spiritual similarities but refusing to renege human superiority.
Including an insightful reexamination of Ben Jonson's Volpone and fascinating looks at works by Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Richard Overton, among others, Fudge probes issues of animal ownership and biological and spiritual superiority in early modern England that resonate with philosophical quandaries still relevant in contemporary society.
"This innovative work uses animals to rethink humans and concepts of humanity in new and compelling ways, from the gripping first chapter, ‘Screaming Monkeys,' to the metaphorical bull-baiting of the Epilogue. A stimulating and important addition to the cultural history of early modern England."--Barry Reay, professor of history at the University of Auckland and author of Popular Cultures in England, 1550-1750
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.
Animal is a timely overview of the many ways in which we live with animals, and assesses many of the paradoxes of our relationships with them: for example, why is the pet that sits by the dinner table never for eating? Examining novels such as Charlotte’s Web, films such as Old Yeller and Babe, science and advertising, fashion and philosophy, Animal also evaluates the ways in which we think about animals and challenges a number of the assumptions we hold. Why is it, for example, that animals are such a constant presence in children’s literature? And what does it mean to wear fake fur? Is fake fur an ethical avoidance of animal suffering, or merely a sanitized version of the unacceptable use of animals as clothing?
Neither evangelical nor proselytizing, Animal invites the reader to think beyond the boundaries of a subject that has a direct effect on our day-to-day lives.
Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal.
Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion and ability to live alongside others is evident in our relationships with our pets, those paradoxical creatures who give us a sense of comfort and security while simultaneously troubling the categories human and animal. For what is a pet if it isn’t a fully-fledged member of the human family? This book proposes that by crossing over these boundaries pets help construct who it is we think we are. Drawing on the works of modern writers, such as J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Jacques Derrida, Fudge shows how pets have been used to think with and to undermine our easy conceptions of human, animal and home. Indeed, Pets shows our obsession with domestic animals reveals many of the paradoxes, contradictions and ambiguities of life. Living with pets provides thought-provoking perspectives on our notions of possession and mastery, mutuality and cohabitation, love and dominance.
We might think of pets as simply happy, loved additions to human homes but as this captivating book reveals perhaps it is the pets that make the home and without pets perhaps we might not be the humans we think we are. For anyone who has ever wondered, like Montaigne, what their cat is thinking, it will be illuminating reading.
REVIEWS:
" . . . demonstrates that the complex relations between people and animals may very well be integral to our understanding and appreciation of everyday life, and adds significantly to existing accounts of the mutual constitution of people and animals. Pets invites scholars to actively take up creative and ethical methods that both explicitly account for, and are accountable to, our others." – International Journal of Cultural Studies"
The book is published as part of the series 'Living Books About Life':
From http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/about.html
Series editors: Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.
By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.
All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.
Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions: Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.
A spectrum of scholarship on humans' deadly relationship with animals
Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.
Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.
While many collections originate as a series of separately planned conference papers drawn together only by editorial fiat, the essays that comprise Killing Animals were regarded as parts of a larger whole from their inception. The result is a remarkably collaborative, cross-disciplinary work that includes eight individually authored chapters and a collectively written introduction. Rather than attempting to produce a single ethical understanding from their diverse views, however, the group aims instead to demonstrate the value of the wider academic study of the place of animals in human history. The conclusion to Killing Animals takes the form of a discussion among the eight contributors, with each expanding upon issues raised earlier in the book.
"Killing Animals by the Animal Studies Group provides compelling material for academics wishing to study our relationship to animals, which consists mostly of violence towards them. This collection of essays is refreshingly informed in its analysis of how this brutality manifests itself in cultural forms."--VegNews
"The eight contributors to the collection entitled Killing Animals provide sufficiently diverse perspectives on the subject to make this book a worthwhile addition to the growing literature regarding animal rights and wrongs."--H-Animal
The Animal Studies Group consists of the following British scholars: Steve Baker (emeritus art history, University of Central Lancashire); Jonathan Burt (independent scholar); Diana Donald (emerita art history, Manchester Metropolitan University); Erica Fudge (literary and cultural studies, University of Strathclyde); Garry Marvin (social anthropology, Roehampton University); Robert McKay (literature, University of Sheffield); Clare Palmer (philosophy and environmental studies, Texas A$M University); and Chris Wilbert (geography, Anglia Ruskin University)."
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: werewolves, meat, performers, experimental tools.
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, 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.
"This stimulating work explores the boundaries between the species in a way that moves well beyond even the most innovative of studies. There is simply no book like it."--Patricia Parker, author of Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context
Contents:
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.
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 menagerie and the labyrinthe : animals at Versailles, 1662-1792 / Matthew Senior.
"All [the essays] are lively and original, and offer new perspectives on a provocative and... inexhaustible subject" --Eileen Reeves, Renaissance Quarterly
Contents
Introduction: the Dislocation of the Human; E. Fudge, R. Gilbert, S.J. Wiseman
1. Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology; A. Stewart
2. Animal Passions and Human Science: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World; B. Cummings 3. Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: "Plausibility" in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy; M. Healy
4. Midwifery and the New Science in the Seventeenth Century: Language, Print and the Theatre; J. Sanders
5. Calling Creatures By Their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man; E. Fudge
6. Cartographic Arrest: Harvey, Raleigh, Drayton and the Mapping of Sense; S. Speed
7. "The Doubtful Traveller": Mathematics, Metaphor, and the Cartographic Origins of the American Frontier; J. Edwards
8. Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and Early Modern Hermaphrodites; R. Gilbert
9. "Forms Such as Never Were in Nature": The Renaissance Cyborg; J. Sawday
10. Bodies Without Souls; The Case of Peter the Wild Boy; M. Newton 11. Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape-Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Rousseau; S. Wiseman
12. The Economy of Nymphomania: Luxury, Virtue, Sentiment and Desire in Mid-Eighteenth Century Medical Discourse; M. Peace