Animal characters [electronic resource] : nonhuman beings in early modern literature / Bruce Thomas Boehrer.

9780812242492 (acid-free paper)
0812242491 (acid-free paper)
9780812201369 (e-book)

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2010.

English

238 p. : ill.

PR149.A7 B64 2010eb

820.9/374

"Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World's Most Talkative Bird Bruce Thomas Boehrer" "'As both a fiction writer and a lover of parrots, I was delighted and enlightened by Parrot Culture. This is an enchanting book."---Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" "'Engrossing ... Bruce Thomas Boehrer concentrates his well-stocked mind on what over the centuries we humans have done to, and done with, parrots."---Times Literary Supplement" "During the Renaissance, horses---long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant---gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and with it their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once the miraculous, articulate companions of popes and emperors, declined into figures of mindless mimicry. Cats, which were tortured by Catholics in the Middle Ages, were tortured in the Reformation as part of the Protestant attack on Catholicism. And sheep, the model for Agnus Deiimagery, underwent transformations at once legal, material, and spiritual as a result of their changing role in Europe's growing manufacturing and trade economies. While in the Middle Ages, these nonhumans were endowed with privileged social associations, personal agency, even the ability to reason and speak, in the early modern period they lost these qualities at the very same time that a new emphasis on, and understanding of, human character was developing in European literature."

Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-227) and index.

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