The Accommodated Animal
Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
312 pages
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4 color plates, 25 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.
Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
“No other early modernist prosecutes a case with the exactitude of Laurie Shannon, whose ethical attention to the exercise of rights and authority informs every word she writes. With acumen and grace, she reveals the presence of a zootopian constitution, in which humans and other animals were all included within the scope of meaningful justice. Beyond issuing a potent challenge to the common practice of reading animals as metaphors for human behaviors—and thereby radically revising our interpretations of central texts—she opens a capacious window onto the cosmopolity of early modern culture.”
Cary Wolfe, Rice University
“In this wonderfully written and deeply researched book, Laurie Shannon unearths in early modern culture what teems beneath the generic designation, ‘animal,’ to which we have become accustomed over the past four hundred years: a wild and woolly ‘zoography’ of fish and fowl, ‘beasts’ and ‘brutes,’ nonhuman agents and four-footed actors, all cheek to jowl with human beings as ‘fellow-commoners’ in a trans-species polity, where questions of sovereignty, tyranny, and justice bear directly upon how we treat nonhuman beings. Ranging across legal, literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific texts, The Accommodated Animal finds posthumanism very much alive and well, avant la lettre, in the early modern period’s soul-searching attempts to secure our place among the remarkable variety of life that challenges our most cherished and self-flattering biases about the human animal.”
David Bevington, University of Chicago
“Beautifully written, Laurie Shannon’s book explores ways in which questions of sovereignty and rule bear on our treatment of non-human beings, posing a wonderful challenge to our complacent view of what we think it means to be human. A book to set beside Montaigne.”
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History: History of Ideas
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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