The Bloody Shouldered Arabian and Early Modern English Culture

"They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented."¹ Marx's formula regarding French peasants in The Eighteenth Brumaire is uncannily applicable to animals, who cannot create their own documents, oral or written, or author their own historical accounts.² Like women in Virginia Woolf's account of male-authored history in A Room of One's Own, animals require the pro-animal equivalents of a social movement and new scholarship to represent them.³ Working toward a less exploitative, more just set of relations with animals, our fellow creatures, requires decentering human interests by working a critique of anthropocentrism, human sovereignty.⁴ What happens if we investigate how animals might have affected human culture as well as the other way around?

Donna Haraway, waxing ironic at the expense of conventional accounts of domestication—"Man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible"—observes that "Deep ecologists love to believe these stories in order to hate them in the name of Wilderness before the Fall into Culture, just as humanists believe them in order to fend off biological encroachments on culture."⁵ Haraway herself prefers the new "distributed" versions of domestication stories, in which dogs and other nonhuman species get to make the first moves, because these newer stories, although faddish, have a "better chance of being true."⁶ If examined with an eye toward the newer, "distributed" stories of domestication and human-animal relations, as Haraway proposes, the verbal and visual record reveals how crucial horses were to what emerged as distinctively "English" culture in early modern England.

Early modern England produced a rich verbal and visual record of obsession with the equine species. We might say that horses functioned as ideal selves for early modern people in the British Isles as "Englishness" emerged as culturally dominant in the forging of a "British" nation.⁷ The Irishman Jonathan Swift, who lived in England as well as Ireland, satirized this confusion of horses with ideal selves in his expose of Houyhnhnmland in part 4 of Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726. In the land of the whinnying ones, horses were the only rational creatures.

Swift's contemporaries during the first four decades of the eighteenth century were so horse-obsessed that many of them devoted their lives to dealing, breeding, stabling, shoeing, medicating, schooling, riding, driving, hunting, and racing horses, and to their artistic representation. If the upper classes were often obsessed with the status conveyed by ownership of famous bloodlines, the lower classes could be equally obsessed, often in a professional capacity, as they derived their livelihood from horse coping. Horse ownership in England had increased dramatically during the seventeenth century. In the 1590s only a fifth of the householders of a modest parish such as Yetminster in Dorset had owned horses, but by the 1660s three-fifths owned them.⁸ If titled aristocrats possessed the lion's share of Eastern equine bloodstock during the eighteenth century, there were by 1750 many landed gentlemen of smaller means who owned horses descended from Eastern blood as well as paintings and engravings of them as the ideal of equine beauty. The horse portrait was an eighteenth-century innovation, and sporting art was the definitive eighteenth-century English contribution to the history of painting.

Early modern treatises on horsemanship undoubtedly idealize what were often brutal relations between humans and their equine partners in service.⁹ The treatises' insistence on securing a horse's cooperation rather than beating a horse into submission suggests that the latter was a common enough practice to require chastisement. The early modern language is often oddly affecting to the modern ear used to more scientific-sounding discourse as appropriate for training or schooling. "But aboue the rest," wrote Thomas Bedingfield in his 1584 translation of Claudio Corte's Il Cavallenzzo, "make him to loue your person, and (as it were) be in loue with you."¹⁰ "Cherishing" was an effective...