Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (review)

Erica Fudge is a leading figure in current scholarship on animals and their cultural significance in early modern England, and Renaissance Beasts should prove essential reading for anyone interested in such scholarship and what it has to offer. This collection of essays provides a nice compendium of animal-related work at its best — and perhaps at its silliest as well.

The eleven contributions to this volume are framed by an introduction by Fudge, to which I shall return below. They proceed in rough chronological order. Kathryn Perry's mediocre discussion of talking animals and their place in early modern satire leads to Juliana Schiesari's lucid treatment of Henri III's fetish for toy dogs, which segues into Susan Wiseman's tedious study of werewolf stories in the Renaissance, which feeds into Fudge's own excellent examination of the theology of meat-eating in early modern England, which yields place to Erica Sheen's annoying essay on animal-imagery in Shakespeare. These, in turn, give way to Alan Stewart's exemplary treatment of James I's political style as instanced in his letters to his "beagle," Robert Cecil, which is followed by Elspeth Graham's enlightening study of horse culture in the writing of Shirley and Markham, which ushers in James Knowles's smart examination of the relation between Tudor and Stuart performing apes and actors, which precedes Brian Cummings's bizarre but intriguing work on traditions of elephant literacy in Pliny and others, which cedes place to Peter Harrison's informative analysis of the early modern culture of animal experimentation, which eventuates in Matthew Senior's scattershot discussion of the French royal menagerie from 1662 to 1792.

As the foregoing summary suggests, there's a lot to like in this book, and Erica Fudge's "On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England" fairly represents the best of it. Fudge's piece opens with a brief account of the seventeenth- century English vegetarians Thomas Bushell and Roger Crab, acknowledges the "theological logic" (72) underpinning their dietary regimens, and then asks why, given the possibility of this logic, vegetarianism wasn't more prevalent in early modern England. Fudge's answer starts with the inevitable burden of original sin, which casts the eating of meat as an essential marker of our postlapsarian condition. But it continues from there, contending that the carnivorous practices of early modern England differ from those of the twenty-first century in demanding, rather than suppressing, the food-animal's recognizable presence at table. The argument makes a thoughtful and far-reaching contribution to the new and interrelated fields of animal and food studies.

But alas, not everything in the volume is so inspiring, and Erica Sheen's piece on "Shakespeare's Animations" provides an unfortunate case in point. To argue that a word meaning (among other things) "buoyant, lively" (87) in seventeenth-century English should be read as activating a pattern of dog-references in Shakespeare because the same word would be associated, centuries later, with certain animals by virtue of their buoyancy and liveliness of behavior: that's basically what Sheen's essay does, and it's not terribly clever. Nor is it improved by the fact that Sheen opens her piece with a complacent-sounding attack on Stephen Greenblatt. If Sheen wants to disagree with Greenblatt, that's their affair: let her take a number. But if she wants to gain sympathy in the process, she might fall to the onslaught with a little less smugness, to say nothing of a sound argument.

On the broader structural level, this volume displays certain other defects. For one thing, the title of Renaissance Animals is wrong, being simultaneously too narrow (the essays collected here focus almost exclusively upon England and France, as if no part of the Renaissance occurred in, say, Italy or Spain) and too capacious (since when was Louis XVI a Renaissance monarch? or again...