Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Haney Foundation) - Hardcover

Buch 16 von 65: Haney Foundation Series

Raber, Karen

 
9780812245363: Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Haney Foundation)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812245369 ISBN 13: 9780812245363
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives.

To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen Raber is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and author of Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama.

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Introduction
Absent Bodies

Giovanni Battista Gelli's Circe of 1549 recounts Ulysses' efforts to convince a variety of beasts, transformed from men by Circe, that they should return to their human form and leave her island with him. Ulysses begins with the humblest of creatures, the oyster and the mole (also the simplest and humblest of humans, a fisherman and a ploughman respectively), but upon being soundly rejected, decides to move on to other creatures more likely to understand his appeal to reason: "Thou shalt find some [men] of such knowledge and wit," he remarks to Circe, "that they are almost lyke unto the goddes, and some others of so grosse wytte, and small knowledge, that they seme almost bestes." Assuming he has met only men who were dull witted in their human forms, or "whiles they were men, never knew themselves, nor never knewe their own nature, but they attended onely to the bodye," Ulysses keeps trying new tacks with new interlocutors. Moving through his own version of a great chain of being to a snake, a hare, a lion, a horse, a goat, a hind, a dog, a calf, and an elephant, Ulysses proposes different arguments in support of human superiority. But in each debate, the famous orator's persuasion returns again and again to the idea that reason is the basis of human excellence; so he tells the lion that animals cannot claim true virtues because "amongst beastes there is no fortitude at all, but onle amonge menne," since fortitude "is a meane, determined with reasonne, betwene boldenes and feare . . . because you have not the discourse of reason, whereby you might eyther knowe the good or the honest, and by occasion thereof, onely you put your selves in daungers; but you do it eyther for profyte or for pleasure, or to revenge some injurie. And this is not fortitude" (sig. l4r). Again, he tells the horse, "temperance is an elective habit, made with a right discourse of reason; howe can you then have this virtue in you?" (sig. n4r). However, each and every animal rejects Ulysses' proposed gift of humanity, arguing that its beastly condition is superior. Not until he debates with the elephant, once a human philosopher, does he find someone who shares his philosophical language, and whom he is able to convince that humans are the most noble, the most virtuous creatures because they are rational, and are not limited by the sensory memory, experience, and instinct that is all animals possess. Transformed, the elephant, now restored to human identity as Aglafemos, cries out, "Oh what a marveylous thing it is to be a man!" (sig. t2r).

Of course, having found his convert, Ulysses must then warn him that there are some things that even human beings cannot know, such as the first cause of life, because they are hampered by their bodies and the shortness of their lives. Although he has categorically rejected the claims of all his targets to a better life in animal form by privileging reason and discounting the body, it turns out that the body is a limiting factor even for humans. Indeed, this conclusion of the Circe sends us back to reevaluate the positions of even the very simplest of the animals, each of whom makes a strong case that human bodies are, in fact, far inferior to beastly ones. The oyster, for instance, argues that unlike humans animals do not have to labor to create their food and clothing, and goes on: "I have reason, consideringe besides this that nature hath set so litle store by you, for besides the bringing forth of you naked, she also hath not made you any hose or habitation of your own, wher[e] you mought defend you from th'injuries of the wether, as she has made to us, which is a plaine toke that you are as rebelles and banished of this world, having no place here of your owne" (sig. B4r). Likewise, the mole answers the charge that his condition is defined by lack, particularly of sight, by pointing out that humans come into the world weeping because they are embarking on a life of misery and suffering. "And why for syns it [seeing] is not necessarye to my nature, it is sufficient to me, to be perfit in myne owne kynde," concludes the mole, and reiterates, "for that I am perfecte in thys my kynd" (sig. c3r). Even the oyster and the mole, the lowest of low creatures, see themselves as physically and therefore morally perfect in contrast to humans, and assert that it would defy reason—their "perfect" reason, which accepts their god-given condition in life—for them to return to their human forms.

Gelli's dialogue derives its premise from Plutarch's "Whether the Beasts Have the Use of Reason," also titled Gryllus, in the Moralia. Where Plutarch offers only one recalcitrant pig, however, Gelli explores additional dimensions of animal and human reason and embodiment, as well as issues of class and economic privilege, through his additional animal characters. Gelli's text was popular, enjoying numerous reprints by the end of the century. Its first English translator, Henry Iden, justifies his efforts by recommending the dialogue for those "who know no other language than their owne, to see herein how lyke the brute beast, and farre from his perfection man is, without the understanding and folowinge of dyvyne thynges" (sig. a2r). And indeed, Ulysses' ostensibly rational positions are again and again ignored, inverted, or countered with narrow examples of animal contentment. However, the conversion of Aglafemos hardly counterbalances the influence of the other animals' often compelling positions, nor does it fully vindicate the self-blind and blithely self-congratulatory Ulysses. Where the text underscores human frailty, the tone shifts to pathos, suggesting (perhaps despite its apparent goals) that human reason is small compensation for the evils of existence in a weaker human body, subject to social, political, and economic forces that make life harder, not more rewarding. In this, Gelli expands on elements of Plutarch's original dialogue, in which Gryllus does a pretty good job of defending animal intelligence and impugning human "virtues."

As I've noted, Gelli's Ulysses insists on the perfection of the human based on the exclusive property humans presumably have in reason. Yet the text's debates offer a more complex set of propositions about types of reason, focusing especially on the razor-thin line between sensory knowledge combined with experience and what he calls "understanding," or cognition, the ability to think beyond the body's inputs, to construct scenarios and options that might not exist in reality unconstrained by "quantity, or place, time, or variety, and such like appertaining to ye matter" (sig. r8v). But despite every angle Ulysses covers, arguments about reason and soul, it turns out, cannot be extricated from the condition of the body. The oyster and the mole, being the simplest of creatures, have the simplest connection to their embodiment, and so might be expected to have the most limited perspective on themselves—something Ulysses keeps asserting in defense of his failure to convert them to humanity. Yet the rest of the animals also argue with increasing complexity their superiority to human beings based on the virtues, knowledge, and "perfections" that derive from their particular physical relationships to the world and its challenges. The snake, for instance, who was once a physician, details the miseries of human suffering, while celebrating the fact that animals never fall prey to excessive appetites or other vices; the hind was once a woman, and so cannot be persuaded to return to her life of servitude and submission; the dog points out that humans have to borrow animals' natural skills or imitate animal appendages to make many of their inventions work. Gelli's creatures are all convinced that they are happier, are more secure, and have more pleasurable lives than do any and all humans precisely because they don't...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812245369
ISBN 13 
9780812245363
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
248
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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