Perceiving Animals, Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (review)

Perceiving Animals's final chapter on Richard Overton is a powerful example of why animals matter. For Overton the line between human and beasts was rather unclear. He contradicted Reform theology on two key points. He believed that the soul was wed to the body so that at death the soul dies, only to be resurrected on Judgment Day, and he maintained that animals were innocent creatures condemned to suffer because of man's sin but due to their innocence granted a place in heaven. In both cases the barriers that differentiate the human from the animal are leveled. For Overton, key human abilities of reason (humanism), conscience (theology), and science remain unnatural elements of culture unless they are regulated by education. With such a claim, as Fudge explains: "Overton is proposing that the qualities of human-ness become the substitutes for the human. There is an incomplete being which can be termed human, and this being is completed by learning which can, for Overton, as for humanist writers, be lost. The a priori human has disappeared from view" (153). With his belief in humanity as a state to be attained rather than granted, Overton considers political reformation crucial for regaining our prelapsarian humanness. Erica Fudge presents a similar logic throughout Perceiving Animals. Scientists, humanists, and theologians attempt to make distinctions and raise barriers between the human and the animal. Yet in each case they expose degrees of similarity rather than difference in kind between species. While the book focuses on early modern culture, it speaks to culture today. As we have less and less contact with animals in our daily lives and as the humanities reinforce anthropocentric constructions of the world, Perceiving Animals gives us an important reminder of the unstable distinction between ourselves and other living beings.

Fudge begins her book with a dramatic first chapter, "Screaming Monkeys." Alessandro Magno describes the tourist attraction of the Bear Garden in London: a monkey dressed like a human is set atop a horse and while the horse gallops around the ring, packs of hungry dogs are set to attack the horse and rider. Magno finds the monkey-baiting to be entertaining sport but finds the next show, bear-baiting, unpleasant to watch. Fudge wonders why the distinction. As the chapter proceeds, she finds that animals miming human activity is considered humorous for the spectator only when there is a clear sense of what constitutes the human and the barrier between animal and human is steadfastly in place. As Magno watches the show, "his sense of his own humanity is constantly being reinforced" (13). With bear-baiting, the bear is chained to a pole and the spectators are locked in the Bear Garden ostensibly for their own protection. The spectators' confinement mimes the bear's and suggests that human mastery of nature has its limits. Furthermore, the cruelty of baiting reveals the base nature of humanity, putting humans below rather than above beasts. As Fudge succinctly explains: "The violence involved in taming wild nature—in expressing human superiority—destroys the difference between the species" (19).

Later in the chapter Fudge looks at the comparisons between women, slaves, and people of other nations to animals. These people are only nominally human but, to show their base inferiority, they are figured as bestial. Turning analogy against itself: "If what happens to animals is a representation of what is happening to some humans then animal suffering must be staged to replicate human suffering, therefore there must be a belief that animals can suffer in a way which is analogous to the human" (17). To be cruel is to assert similarity. Who is human and what counts as human is increasingly clear. Perceiving Animals is about using animals, perceiving and reading them, in an attempt to define human-ness.

Chapter Two examines the theological definition of human as a...