Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (review)

Even when speaking for themselves, animals in literature represent human understanding – of humans themselves, of their relationship with nature, of their moral concerns. Taken together, qualities ascribed to animals amount to literary characters that can tell us, as Bruce Boehrer demonstrates, about paradigmatic shifts of representation of human character, the most important of which is marked by the Cartesian delimitation of what it means to be human. Descartes’s inward focus on the human ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity marks the beginning of what would result in the flourishing of the novel as a genre. But with the breakdown of the Cartesian worldview came a crisis of defining the boundaries of humanity and with that, a crisis of literary character.

Boehrer argues that the study of animals offers a useful perspective from which to study both the development of literary character and its crisis. His chosen method is ‘a set of interrelated zooliterary histories’ (p. 3), the aim of which is ‘to sketch in a bit of western literary history by studying the development of concepts of literary character from the standpoint of interspecies relations’ (p. 27). Animal Characters is a book of metamorphoses – transformations of animal representations that show us both the transient nature of models used to describe nature and some surprising continuities.

An animal inseparably connected with the tradition of chivalry, the horse is a fitting marker of the rise and fall of the heroic literary character of romance. Reading the works of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, and Milton, Boehrer contrasts the end-stage of courtly romance tradition in which the horse embodied the potential for human-like representation in a heroic setting (Baiardo of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso) with the works of Shakespeare and Milton where the horse is no longer given a recognizable character.

Although parrots were known in the West during the Middle Ages, it was not until the fifteenth century that they became relatively common – and with that their appearance and ability to mimic voices underwent a transformation from wonderment to a focus on annoyingly repetitive parroting. In tandem, as Boehrer observes, their etymological and symbolic association with the papacy moved during the Reformation to an emphasis on the repetitive, mindless performance of Catholic liturgy.

In the third chapter, Boehrer brings us to a world where the torture, burning, and killing of cats was viewed as entertainment or could be used to ward off evil. Boehrer shows how Protestantism, far from abandoning the practice, translated it to attack Catholicism: cats were tortured and burned all the same, but rather than warding off evil they represented the backwardness and corruption of the Catholic Church.

When encountering the turkey, explorers classified the exotic looking bird, in terms of the familiar, as a variety of peacock. The ensuing species transference resulted in the turkey inheriting the peacock’s characteristics (regality, delicacy, but also vanity and pride) – until the discovery of its culinary qualities and the rapid spread of consumption among the middle classes resulted in the devolution of the turkey to a common festive food, and a marker not of exotic tastes but of gluttony.

The ‘Vulgar sheepe’ of English literature that Boehrer explores are an essential, metaphor-clad element of bucolic descriptions, as well as an important commodity that can be bought, sold, and stolen – and suffer from mildew rot. Yet urbanization, contingent on enclosure and opening land to sheep, created an environment in which bucolic themes were idealized, and ‘real’ sheep were no longer described.

Boehrer’s treatment of transformations from exotic to quotidian is lucid and engaging, and his intimate portrayals of animal characters in their literary contexts are convincing. The effect of the book, however, is weakened by several factors. The near-absence of the Middle Ages is understandable given Boehrer’s chronological scope (1400–1700), but a substantial reference to the considerable medieval discourse on...