Abstract
In early modern culture the notion of an a priori humanity, a separate and distinct category, is continually under threat from the beasts which seem to support it. Qualities of human-ness rely on the presence of the animal, but where there is an animal these qualities which seem to define what is human about the human are revealed to be beastly. This loss of status is evidenced in an anxious anthropocentrism which results in the increasing exploitation of animals. In order to declare superiority humans stage baitings, deny animals access to God, objectify them in fables, place them on the anatomist’s table, mark and brand them as possessions. But in each exercise of dominion the antithetical position emerges: humans become the animals they attempt to dominate.
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Notes
The reference is in [Richard Overton], The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), in William Haller ed., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 230. Nigel Smith sees Overton’s Mar-Priest tracts as ‘partly motivated by the hostile response accorded to his defence of the mor-talist heresy, Mans Mortallitie’. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 302. For the repetition of ideas compare Mans Mortallitie, p. 17 with Overton, An Appeale Prom the degenerate Representative Body (1647), in Don. M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944; reprinted, London: Frank Cass, 1967), p. 158. I discuss this in more detail below. Zagorin also notes the significance of Richard Overton’s access to a printing press in attributing Mans Mortallitie. Zagorin, ‘Authorship’, 181.
I am not concerned with the enlarged version of the text here, but Don M. Wolfe has suggested that it was written by Overton in collaboration with Milton. See Wolfe, ‘Lilburne’s Note on Milton’, Modern Language Notes, 56: 5 (1941), 360.
Ibid., p. 22. This point in itself was enough to place Mans Mortallitie beside ‘John Milton’s tract on divorce and Roger Williams’ Bloody Tenet of Persecution as among the most scandalous yet seen in England.’ Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 82.
See also H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, ed. (1961; reprinted London: Spokesman, 1976), p. 52.
H. N. Brailsford makes only one mention of the text in his study of the Levellers, arguing that it was ‘a little book’ which merely repeated the General Baptist heresy of mortalism ‘with the addition of confirmation drawn from biology.’ Christopher Hill in his encyclopedic work The World Turned Upside Down emphasises Overton’s interest in brushing ‘the whole theological approach to politics aside’, thus removing Mans Mortallitie from the political (and implicitly important) Leveller canon. Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, pp. 51–2; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 133.
Harold Fisch, ‘Introduction’ to Fisch, ed., Mans Mortalitie (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968), p. xvi.
Christopher Hill, ‘Why Bother About the Muggletonians?’, in Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians (London: Temple Smith, 1983), p. 8.
Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, p. 33. Following this lead William Lamont has worried that in recent histories the Levellers’ ‘political and social ideas have seemed more interesting than their religious ones.’ Lamont, ‘Pamphleteering, the Protestant Concensus and the English Revolution’, in R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, ed., Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 83.
G. W. Bromiley, Baptism and the Anglican Reformers (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), p. 101.
Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 10.
Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, healer of children since the thirteenth century, translated by Martin Thorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 136.
Overton, Mans Mortallitie, p. 17. On the conventionality of this see Manfred Pfister, “‘Man’s Distinctive Mark”: Paradoxical Distinctions Between Man and His Bestial Other in Early Modern Texts’, in F. Lehmann and B. Lenz, ed., Telling Stories: Studies in Honour of Ulrich Boich on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1992), p. 23.
This passage has been informed by the deconstructive theory of the supplement, for which see especially Jacques Derrida, ‘“… That Dangerous Supplement …”’, in Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 141–64, and Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1983; reprinted London: Routledge, 1994), p. 104.
Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness (1649), in Leonard Hamilton, ed., Gerrard Winstanley: Selections from his Work (London: Cresset Press, 1944), p. 18.
On the links between Overton and Winstanley see Maurice Goldsmith, ‘Levelling by Sword, Spade and Word: Radical Egalitarianism in the English Revolution’, in Colin James, Malyn Newitt and Stephen Roberts, ed., Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in Honor of Ivan Roots (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 68.
The Prerogative of Man: Or, His Soldes Immortality (1645), sig.Bv. Joseph Frank attributes this text to John Warre. Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (New York: Russell and Russell, 1955), p. 278.
Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), title page, and pp. 20, 26 and 27. Edwards also attacked what he perceived to be the levelling tendency of Leveller ideas. He writes of another heresy: ‘That Pigeons in Dove Houses are common for all men to take and eat them, as well as those who are owners of those Dove Houses, because Pigeons are fowls of the aire, and so common to the sons of men.’ (p. 9). This is a response to a legal debate about the ownership of pigeons such as that found in ‘Dewell versus Sanders’ (1619), recorded in Sir George Croke, The Second Part of the Reports of Sir George Croke (1683), p. 492. For a summary of the changing place of the animal in response to the changing place of the land see P. B. Munsche, ‘Introduction’, in Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 107. On the limiting of the franchise see John Lilburne and others, To The Supreme Authority of England, the Commons Assembled in Parliament (1648), in Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes, especially p. 269. For a critique of Macpherson see Keith Thomas, ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, in
G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 59. The Levellers also imply that women be excluded as well. This is a point noted by R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, ‘Introduction’, in Richardson and Ridden, ed., Freedom and the English Revolution, p. 11. For a discussion of the role of women in the Leveller movement see
Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Under down (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 162–88.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia (1579), Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1985), p. 224.
On this see Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965; reprinted London: Granada, 1972), p. 257;
and Brian Manning, ‘The Levellers and Religion’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, ed., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 67.
Gary K. Waite, ‘Talking animals, preserved corpses and Venusberg: the sixteenth-century magical world view and popular conceptions of the spiritualist David Joris (c.1501–56)’, Social History, 20: 2 (1995), 146 and 147.
Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 334–6.
A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, ‘Introduction: The Significance of the Metropolis’, in Beier and Finlay, ed., London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986), p. 20.
Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1958; reprinted London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 58–125.
This term comes from Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 128.1 use it earlier in relation to humanist ideas, p. 86.
J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal, 35: 3 (1992), 523.
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© 2000 Erica Fudge
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Fudge, E. (2000). The Bestialisation of Humanity and the Salvation of the Beast: The Politics of the Animal Soul. In: Perceiving Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62415-7_7
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