Fed on Scraps: Bits of Animals in the Early Modern Archive
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Renowned researcher Erica Fudge discusses animal-human relationships past and present.
All too often animals have been marginalised and objectified. Work in the field of animal studies has, over the past 30 years, attempted to change that by focussing on the nonhuman creatures that have been and continue to be simultaneously vital and erased. Different disciplines have approached this in different ways, and our reconsideration of our shared human-animal histories has complicated our understanding not only of the past, but also of how we live now by reassessing the complexity of the world in which animals played such a crucial role. This talk will focus on some mundane encounters between the species – the little engagements that can be traced in the fragments of the legal archive - and through them it will attempt to bring the worlds of the people and animals of the early modern past to life. In it we will encounter the mutilated hen, the disobedient dog, the clipped sheep, and the drunk human. Bees will be drowned, pigs skinned, and geese stuffed into places they really should not be, and through all these creatures we will trace a world which was not only full of beasts, but was also a surprisingly complicated in its understanding of them. And we will ponder, too, why it is so surprising to us now that that past was so complicated.
NB no need to book if you are already booked for Writing Town and Village.
Contact name: Sue Wiseman
SpeakersTags: