Ebrary electronic monographs.

Animal characters : nonhuman beings in early modern literature / Bruce Thomas Boehrer.

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2010]

©2010

238 pages : illustrations.

Haney Foundation series.

"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 (pages 209-227) and index.

English

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2013. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.

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

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