Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity ed. by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld (review)

One might wonder about the wisdom of reviewing this collection in Eighteenth-Century Studies when only five of the twelve essays engage in a sustained treatment of anything before 1815. The argument of the volume, however, builds from long-standing claims that the horse is somehow deeply linked to ideas and practices of modernity and that the roots of that linkage can be found in the seventeenth and, especially, eighteenth centuries. As Daniel Roche, describing rapid transformations in both France and horses in his 2008 essay for Past and Present on "Equestrian Culture," confidently argued, "We can say with some certainty that horses changed more radically during the two hundred years between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries than they had done in the previous five thousand years, back to the era of their first domestication."¹ For Roche and others, histories of modernity can only benefit from consideration of both how the horse carried and pulled the European imperial project and how that project itself fundamentally transformed a human-animal interdependence that stretched back millennia.

Calling horses "perhaps the most influential animal in human history" (5), editors Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld set the tone for Equestrian Cultures with a brief discussion of George Stubbs' large 1762 painting of the chestnut racing horse Whistlejacket. The foregrounding of a painting of this thoroughbred scion of notable Turks, Arabians, and Barbs heralds the preoccupations with breeding, class, race, nation, power, wealth, violence, aesthetics, speed, strength, ownership, connoisseurship, and heritage that course throughout the volume. The collection is divided into three sections—I: Science and Technology, II: Commodification and Consumption, and III: National Identity—themes, of course, well suited to discussions of modernity. Essays in each section follow roughly chronological succession, presenting accounts based in English, French, German, and American contexts, with a final essay focusing on wild horses and heritage debates in Australia. This relatively narrow focus presents a history of both modernity and the horse that excludes most of the world, and one should consider whether the claims hold up when one takes a somewhat larger view. These are familiar criticisms with this kind of work, however, and while they might lessen the impact of the overall assertions of the volume, they do little to make the essays themselves any less interesting.

The first section presents essays by Mattfeld on Richard Berenger (d. 1782) and his advocacy of the snaffle bit over the more traditional, leverage-based curb bit; Donna Landry on debates about the relative abilities of French and English horses in the Battle of Waterloo; Sinan Akilli on the significance of the deaths of horses in Eliot's Silas Marner and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles; and Rune Gade on recent works by Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas of the caisson horses of Arlington Cemetery and wild horses around Dayton and Carson City, Nevada. While each of these essays has a tight research focus, together they share an argument. The authors' broader point is that while horse-human relations have traditionally been about a kind of domination, in recent centuries the relationship has been more about shared experience, shared risk, shared communication, and shared lives. When Mattfeld writes of a "sensitively discursive interspecies dialogue made possible by technology" (24) and Landry describes "something more like collaboration, a working together, grounded in a willingness on both sides" (28), they are echoed by Akilli writing of a "multispecies entanglement of existence" (53) and Gade urging "recognition of a deeper latency of interdependence" (70). All insist that to make sense of the encounter between horses and humans in modernity, we must see the horse as more than simple utility.

The four contributions to the second section on "Commodification" include essays by Magdalena Bayreuther and Christine Rüppell on the stables in early eighteenth-century Weißenstein Castle in Pommersfelden; Charlotte Carrington-Farmer on...