Abstract
There was a Bear Garden in early modern London. In it the spectators watched a pack of mastiffs attack an ape on horseback and assault bears whose teeth and claws had been removed. People enjoyed the entertainment. We know this from the numerous reports of the baitings which have survived. What we don’t understand is the nature of their enjoyment. This book began as an attempt to comprehend the pleasure through an examination of the ways in which the spectators related to animals, those silent and, until recently, forgotten creatures of history.1 What emerged from my reading surprised me. An anxiety could be traced in the ways in which animals were represented: an anxiety which was not about the animals. My attempt to read the Bear Garden revealed a struggle more significant than the one played out by the dogs and the bears, it revealed a struggle over the nature of being human itself.
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Notes
The magisterial study of this issue in the early modern period is Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1984).
For important works on the human perception of animals in other periods see Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1994);
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London: Penguin, 1990);
and Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (London: University of California Press, 1994).
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 1.
John Simons, ‘The Longest Revolution: Cultural Studies after Speciesism’, Environmental Values, 6 (1997), 491.
Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurs’ (1612), in C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, ed., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), Volume VIII, p. 94.
Thomas Carew, ‘To Saxham’ (c.1640), in R. G. Howarth ed., Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century (London: Dent, 1953), p. 86.
George Herbert, ‘Providence’ (1633), in C. A. Patrides, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (London: Dent, 1974), p. 129.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 167–8.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, ed., The Works of Francis Bacon (1859; reprinted, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), Volume IV, p. 54.1 return to Bacon in more detail in Chapter 4. On the similarities of Nietzsche and Bacon,
see Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 105–6.
Diana Fuss, ‘Introduction: Human, all too Human’, in Fuss, ed., Human, All too Human (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 5–6.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’, in Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Séan Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 153.
Ibid., p. 152: David Clark, ‘On Being “The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas’, in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, ed., Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 168.
Throughout the book I am following Alister E. McGrath’s definition of the term ‘Reformed’ to mean broadly Calvinist ideas. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 8.
Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 214 and 363.
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© 2000 Erica Fudge
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Fudge, E. (2000). Introduction: The Dangers of Anthropocentrism. In: Perceiving Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62415-7_1
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