Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
to represent the vacuous extravagance of the Catholic elite who owned them and to epitomize the mindlessness of prayer in ancient languages and set forms. Once parrots had thus acquired a new sort of literary character, in keeping with the sectarian tensions of the Reformation, that new character could be further translated—as it is by writers such as Shakespeare and Jonson—into a generic, secular model of empty-headed silliness that remains common even today.
On a humbler level, it is in the 1500s and 1600s that cats make the transition from tolerated household scavengers to beloved animal companions. In examining this shift, I concentrate on the semiotic residue of earlier social practices as these inform a tradition of cat torture that survives even into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again, this tradition speaks to an early understanding of the cat as character—marginal, tricky, inscrutable, opportunistic, associated with demonic or diabolical forces. In this vein, the practice of cat torture develops in pre-Christian times as a means to ward off evil by punishing its representatives, and medieval Catholicism assimilates such pre-Christian practices to its own spiritual agenda via calendar festivals and witch lore. However, during the Reformation such practices become representative of Catholic superstition more generally, and here the tale takes its most ironic turn. Rather than rejecting the superstitious devices of its despised enemy, the Protestant faith actually adopts them, but with a difference, translating cat torture from an efficacious ritual to an insulting sign of Catholic ignorance. Thus, even as the rise of Protestant belief makes possible a culture of sentiment in which house pets notably participate, it also keeps alive the bloody practices of an earlier spiritual dispensation, which serve now as an index of the reformed faith's relative enlightenment.
When it comes to the relationship between people and food animals, we approach a subject of primary anthropological significance, a centerpiece of the emerging discipline of food studies. For early modern Europeans, it is also a subject deeply embedded in complex systems of social precedence and spiritual significance. In the three centuries from 1400 to 1700 it undergoes a rapid series of changes as new food animals become available to European diners, new modes of culinary preparation and consumption come to the fore, and regimens of diet and health undergo a major shift. As Robert Appel-baum has put it, “The early modern period…constituted a unique chapter in the history of food and food practices” (xv). In the process it also changed the way people treated and viewed the animals they ate.
From the standpoint of what we might call the food of privilege, I see this change embodied in the most important new animal foodstuff to reach the Old World from the Americas: the turkey. While it participates, over the course of two centuries, in a broad transformation of western culinary practices, this fowl at first gains European acceptance by being assimilated to traditional medieval models of courtly dining. Indeed, the turkey gradually claims for itself the traditional spectacular position reserved on the medieval table for grand banqueting birds. In the process, as successful domestication leads to an increase in their numbers and a decline in their cost, turkeys also make it possible for a form of the grand banqueting fowl to appear more frequently and on humbler tables, in ways that force a reconception of the idea and character of elite dining.
Thus the turkey begins its western existence as a culinary marker of aristocratic culture but gradually metamorphoses into something more modest. In a reversal of this pattern, one of the commonest and most humble of European food animals, the sheep, acquires symbolic preeminence through its association with the Eucharist and the figure of Christ as Agnus Dei. However, this is only one of many narrative figurations through which sheep acquire significance as characters in early modern writing; one may mention as well their association with the pastoral mode, with emergent literatures of animal husbandry and georgic nationalism, with debates over enclosure and engrossing, and with the conflict between carnival indulgence and Lenten abstinence. In exploring the various relations between these forms of meaning, I conclude that animal character is always necessarily figurative, a result of socially generated patterns of meaningful action that ethologists have arguably discerned within animal behavior, prior to its contamination by the human. To this extent—and despite Erica Fudge's exhortation that we attend to “the literal meaning of animals” in early modern texts (Brutal Reasoning 4)—one emerges with a sense of animal character as that which arises through group interaction, in the space between individuals. Whether the groups in question are intraspecies or cross-species, they generate a sense of social being that cannot be reduced, as it were, to a literal notion of the Tier an sich.
From Chapter 1 forward, this book draws on an eclectic variety of cultural materials with the aim of showing readers how particular kinds of animals acquire a distinct set of attributes and meanings within the framework of early modern society. To that end, discussion includes the romances of Renaud de Montaubon, Luigi Pulci, Matteo Boiardo, Lodovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso; the verse of John Skelton and Jean Lemaire de Belges; the prose fiction of François Rabelais and William Baldwin, Miguel de Cervantes and Sir Thomas More and the Roman de Renart; paintings by Jan van Eyck and Andrea Mantegna, Hans Baldung Grien and Vittore Crivelli; husbandry manuals by such writers as Gervase Markham and Leonard Mascall and Conrad von Heresbach; natural histories by the likes of Edward Topsell and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo; plays by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and others; as well as travel narratives, cookbooks, theological treatises, and more. My aim is not to provide a thorough treatment of any of these genres of cultural production but rather to draw from them all, as necessary and appropriate, to illustrate the character of the animals that are my more immediate concern. The book concludes with a brief coda addressing the work of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and most particularly her Blazing World (1666). Coming as it does toward the end of the three centuries of cultural activity surveyed here, this peculiar narrative helps to summarize many of the concerns of this book as a whole, while also providing a sense of the new character dispensation that enters European experience with the Cartesian revolution.
The Species Divide and Theories of Literary Personhood
This book traces notions of literary character, and animal character in particular, through the Aristotelian and Theophrastan tradition of classifying types by their shared attributes. This tradition manifests itself both in works on human behavior such as Theophrastus's Characters and in the conventions of natural history as these developed from Aristotle's Historia Animalium through Pliny, the Physiologus, and the bestiarists. This model of character study has the advantage of participating in a well-recognized, influential school of ancient philosophical practice, and it also forges etymological (and therefore conceptual) links between classical thought and modern literary conventions. But such an approach to character also deserves to be situated amid more recent scholarship on the subject of literary character.
The scholarly discussions of literary character to appear since 1970 exhibit predictable differences of methodology and nuance, but they share certain emphases worth mentioning here. For one thing, they are frequently committed to a notion of character that privileges interiority—a notion I have presented as consistent with Cartesian definitions of the human. This focus is perhaps most clear in works such as Dorrit Cohn's Transparent Minds, which casts itself as a study of literary “modes for rendering consciousness” (11): the techniques whereby an author creates “beings whose inner lives he can reveal at will” (4). This premium on the inner life of literary personages leads Cohn to a heavy concentration on the nineteenth-century novel. Similarly, Martin Price locates literary character in “that stream of images, feelings, ideas, and fantasies that make up mental life” (38). For him, too, literary character is largely invested in “intellectual history” (39), thus producing a kind of “(virtual) being” that encourages one to speculate “about what characters think and feel” (64). Unsurprisingly, Price, too, finds his test cases of literary character in the realm of the novel: Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Eliot, James. Using a more varied and idiosyncratic vocabulary, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty marshals a series of related terms—for example, character, figure, person, self—to distinguish different modes of literary personage; however, in the process she, too, repeatedly privileges the inward turn, emphasizing “dispositional characteristics” (80), “insight” (91), and “the tensions within selves” (92) in a critical lexicon that presents “the idea of a person [a]s the idea