LANGUAGE, ANIMALITY, AND THE EMERGING MODERN IN SPENSER, BALDWIN, AND CERVANTES

Abstract

This study considers the ways in which notions of animality contribute to early modern discussions of what it means to be human. The talking animals in the selected works of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), William Baldwin (c. 1518-1563), and Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616) are not the animals of beast fable. Spenser's, Baldwin's, and Cervantes' talking apes, foxes, cats, and dogs register a residual animality typical of medieval habits of mind, but compounded with an emerging, early modern notion of a sovereign animal that reveals complex networks of competing cultural forces. By using the genres of the medieval beast fable and the bestiary to contextualize the notion of the "beast" in these authors' works, the emerging permutations of a "novel" sense of animality can be traced, from Spenser's poem "Mother Hubberds Tale" (1591), which troubles conventions of the beast fable, through Baldwin's novel Beware the Cat (1570), which features two kingdoms--cat and human--functioning sovereignly, to Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs (1613), which depicts complex partnerships between members of the canine and human worlds. Considering animality and how it bears on the concept of "human"--especially though techniques of satire and technologies of narrative framing--deepens our understanding of ontological and epistemological shifts in early modernity. Shifting shapes in the works by Spenser, Baldwin, and Cervantes mirror the larger philosophical, religious, and social metamorphoses that both arise from and further transform the changing nature of authority. Representations of animals in the period give humans the opportunity to think about their own places in society, about animal as greater than "beast," and reveal the contours of humanity's reforming self-conceptualization.