Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture

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“…In Renaissance literature the ideal of the horse-man, made possible by horsemanship skill and adherence to a chivalric code, was promoted (Raber, 2013). In Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture, Raber proffers Sir Philip Sidney's character Musidorus in Arcadia (1590 as evidence of "the more generalized image of the rider-as-centaur … where the centaur's hybrid nature expresses human triumph in appropriating and exploiting animal power and grace through the aristocratic arts of horsemanship" (Raber, 2013, p. 75).…”

“Come Aloft, Jack-little-ape!”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie

“…44 We are indebted to early modern animal studies for the realization, in the words of Karen Raber, that "the boundary that divides human from animal is neither fixed nor stable in this period, but is in the process of being established." 45 Studies in that field have repeatedly pointed out the porosity between the categories of the human and the animal before the Cartesian turn reified the distinction between them. As Erica Fudge puts it, early modern animals "raised the specter of human limitation; they provoked unease about the distinct nature of humanity; they undid the boundaries between human and beast even as they appeared to cement them."…”

Shakespeare and Animal Studies

“…Early modern humoralism extended to animals, Gail Kern Paster observes; in her readings of I Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra , she discusses the challenge posed to species distinction by materialist understanding of the body. Raber argues that in its account of the verminous colonization of both the political world and the human corpus that is the world's microcosm, Hamlet expresses anxiety about the relationship between the open, porous body (and the self it “houses”) and the crowded environment in which it must dwell ( Animal Bodies 109–23; “Vermin and Parasites”). One of the more widely considered aspects of embodiment in Shakespeare's plays is sexual desire: in addition to Boehrer's and Roberts's work noted above, a number of essays treat the “bestial” nature of sexuality.…”

“…Dympna Callaghan casts the animal (and vegetable) life in Venus and Adonis as an example of early modern cultural fears about bestiality and incest that demonstrates the violability of the supposedly inviolable categorical difference between human and animal. Raber concludes that the poem mobilizes knowledge of horsemanship's subtle queer pleasures to implicate both humans and animals in mutual entanglements of identity ( Animal Bodies 75–101). Richard Rambuss echoes many of the implications of Callaghan's, Raber's, and Boehrer's readings by finding not only animal cross‐species erotic connections throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream , but also “botanical bondage” and Puckish preposterousness (238, 241).…”