Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Giovanni Battista Gelli, Circes of John Baptista Gello, Florentine, trans. Henry Iden (London, 1557), sig. c5v–r, m1r. A sort of lineage of the story of Ulysses and Gryllus can be found in Merritt Y. Hughes, “Spenser’s Acrasia and the Renaissance Circe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4:4 (October 1943): 381–99; Hughes also describes the arguments by humanists for and against the theriophilic position Gelli and other similar dialogists seem to adopt, as well as the Circe’s influence on authors from Montaigne to Spenser. All references to Gelli’s text are to this edition. 2. Most of the animals also cite social distortions that produce misery among humans, but the body seems the starting point for almost all the eventual points of happiness— particularly the notion repeated often that each animal is perfect in itself as nature made it, and therefore is happier than any human who can never be so perfect. 3. Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88–93. Fudge’s discussion of Plutarch’s Gryllus sets it against the Homeric and Ovidian versions, in which Gryllus is thrilled to be restored to humanity; Gelli’s text, unlike Plutarch’s, does obviously embrace an Aristotelian system, which clearly provides the structure to Ulysses’ arguments, dividing rational from sensitive and even vegetative soul. 4. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (London, 1615), 9. All references to this text are by page number to this edition. 5. Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici,” “Letter to a Friend,” and “Christian Morals,” ed. W. A. Greenhill (London: Macmillan, 1926), 341. 6. Fudge’s works include Brutal Reasoning; and Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare, or Before the Human,” PMLA 124:2 (2009): 472–79: Simon C. Estok, “Theory from the Fringes: Animals, Ecocriticism, Shakespeare,” Mosaic 40:1 (March 2007): 61–78; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); 190 Notes to Pages 9–13 and Juliana Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). Shannon’s The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) belongs in this category, although it appeared too late to be fully considered for this project. 7. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6. 8. René Descartes, “Discourse on Method” and “Meditations,” trans. John Veitch (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 45. 9. Ibid., 84. 10. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 48. 11. Boehrer, Animal Characters, 8–9. 12. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 179. Fudge includes Stephen Greenblatt and Francis Barker in this group. 13. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 14. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): the Tenth Plateau addresses “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible” (232–309). 15. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Posthumanities) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 20. 16. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 95. 17. See Donna Landry, Cary Wolfe, et al., “Speciesism, Identity Politics, and Ecocriticism : A Conversation with Humanists and Post-Humanists,” The Eighteenth Century 52:1 (2011): 87–106. Yet this forum does not include any extended consideration of animal bodies , despite the participants’ apparent sympathy to that approach. 18. Boehrer (Shakespeare among the Animals) and Schiesari (Beasts and Beauties), for example, treat issues of bestiality; on dogs and national identity, see Ian MacInnes, “Mastiffs and Spaniels: Gender and Nation in the English Dog,” Textual Practice 17 (2003): 21–40; on vermin, see Mary E. Fissell, “Imaging Vermin in Early Modern England,” in The Animal-Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives, ed. Angela Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 77–114. 19. Foucault’s work has broad implications for animal studies, but his treatment of madness specifically references the use of images of animality in representations from the Renaissance and after; see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization...