Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds. A Cognitive Historical Analysis by Steven Wagschal (review)

Steven Wagschal's Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds. A Cognitive Historical Analysis is an essential volume, the first in Hispanism to combine and apply Cognitive and Animal Studies approaches to literature of early modern Spain and the New World. The meticulous analyses reveal Professor Wagschal's command of pertinent theoretical literature on animal cognition, which he applies skillfully to a wide range of primary sources from both continents.

This study's objectives are stated clearly in the introduction and reiterated at critical junctures: "The overarching thesis of this book is simple: People tend to conceptualize the minds of animals in ways that reflect their own uses for the animal, the manner in which they interact with the animal, and the place in which the animal lives. Often this has little if anything to do with the cognitive abilities of the animal as understood scientifically" (4). This premise is deceptively straightforward and well known in Animal Studies, a wide-ranging multidisciplinary field that in many ways predates studies of animal cognition. A foundational tenet of Animal Studies is that human views and the resulting treatment of non-humans cannot be uncoupled from our historically often utilitarian, culture-bound attitudes toward animals as companion species. Minding Animals delves into these perceptions in early modern Hispanic writings and gives prominence to the complementary notion that human conceptualizations and attitudes are rarely founded on science-based discoveries in animal cognition.

Wagschal examines fictional and non-fictional texts from a historical perspective for their implicit and explicit ways of "minding" or considering animals. He heeds both the modes of interaction between animals and humans (such as farmer/farmed, hunter/hunted), as well as the animals' habitational parameters, such as the location and conditions under which the species generally lives. By reading a series of medieval and renaissance writings to learn how people regarded animals and animal minds, Minding Animals opens up original lines of inquiry on canonical texts, such as medieval fables, the Cantigas de Nuestra Señora, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Sahagún's Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, and other works. Minding Animals also examines non-canonical texts, among them early modern treatises on husbandry and hunting, as well as works of natural history. These approaches are especially innovative among cognitivist literary scholars, who tend not to include non-human animals within their purview.

Composed of an introduction, four substantial chapters and a brief epilogue, Minding Animals constructs and fleshes out a history of writers during the chosen period who created the "first realistic, scientifically-plausible representations of non-human animal phenomenal consciousness" (9). The concise introduction lays the theoretical foundations from animal cognition "in order to ascertain which are realistic or plausible representations of animal minds and which are not" (5). Wagschal thus presents the concepts that guide the subsequent analysis. "Constructive anthropomorphism" makes informed, careful inferences about animals' minds based on knowledge of their species-specific behaviors, a process defended in recent years by ethologists and philosphers such as Frans De Waal and Kristin Andrews. In contrast, "anthropectomy" completely denies to animals anthropomorphic traits such as cognitive abilities. "Gratuitous anthropomorphism", on the other hand, is scientifically inappropriate or impossible, such as when in fables animals speak and act as humans in disguise.

Chapter one explores how medieval Christian and didactic texts such as Marian and hagiographic narratives, bestiaries, fables and exempla do not conceive animals exclusively as symbols, as has been conventionally maintained. As Wagschal asserts, "To reduce the writing on animals of this vast swathe of textual and artistic practices from many places over ten centuries to the merely 'symbolic' overlooks important ways in which symbolism reveals significant aspects of human cognitive functioning and in which the various kinds of symbolic representation reveal a plethora of ideas about animal cognition" (23–24). Consonant with that view, Wagschal points out...