a MmD ifErica Fudge considers what it meant to be described as an animal in the 16th and 17th centuries, and

what divided humans from the rest of creation.

IN 1621, WRITING UNDER THEpseudonym 'Democritus Junior',the Oxford clergyman and author

Robert Burton (1577-1640) producedwhat is perhaps the most famous earlymodern exploration of self, TheAnatomy of Melancholy. At the centre ofBurton's discourse is a Renaissancecommonplace: 'Nosce teipsum' - knowthyself. But Burton's call for self-knowledge comes in a particularform. Men, he writes,

... are sufficiently informed in allother worldly businesses as to make agood bargain, buy, and sell, to keep &make choice of good Hawk, Hound,Horse, etc. but for suchmatters as concern theknowledge ofthemselves, they arewholly ignorant andcareless, they know notwhat this Body and Soulare, how combined, ofwhat parts and facultiesthey consist, or how aMan differs from a Dog.

not a phrase implying real possibilityof a species crossover. However, ananalysis of early modern construc-tions of perception and the role ofthe passions, reveals somethingslightly different. Here it is possibleto trace a logic in which humans canactually become animals throughtheir actions. The starting point isoften the brain, which, in thehuman, was understood to be thebodily seat of reason, the home ofthe capacity that distinguished manfrom dog. Such simple anatomicaldifferentiation had its foundation inthe classics - Aristotle, had proposedman as the 'rational animal'. But in

The final phrase here- 'how a Man differsfrom a Dog'- seems tobe mere hyperbole: anextreme rendition of acasual human careless-ness. But Burton's claimis a familiar one. In theearly modern periodthe description of manyvices - heavy drinking,gluttony, lust and so on- were represented ashaving the power totransform humans intobeasts. These represen-tations would seem toplay into a theologicaland moral conceptuali-sation of the world, rather than a Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of the'zoological' one. We might think that compendium The Anatomy of Melancholy.'Atheistical dog', for example, a The first edition appeared in 1621, but herecognisable insult in the period, is continued to revise the text until his death.

early modern discussions of percep-tion and movement, an alternativereality emerges in which the opposi-tions human/animal and reason-able/ unreasonable were never soclearly polarised. Instead there was adangerous 'grey area' into whichmany, too many, so-called humansmust be placed. In fact sometimesthe difference between a man and adog, as Burton said, is hard to find.

All animals, humans included, donot exist in a vacuum; they exist inthe world, and have to make sense ofthat world in order to act within it.In early modern thought perceptionwas understood to be a very bodily

thing. The foundation ofthe ideas about the rela-tionship with, and experi-ence of, the externalworld was classical. Aristo-tle's ideas came down tothinkers like Burton viamedieval writers such asAvicenna and Albert theGreat, who presented thebrain as a clearly struc-tured object, and in TheAnatomy of Melancholy,Burton proposed that thebrain, 'a soft, marrowish,and white substance,' wasmade up of 'two parts, thefore and hinder part'. Hestated that the fore part ofthe brain contained threeventricles, and the hinderpart, one. The left andright of the three ventri-cles of the fore part werehome to the commonsense, while the middle,

... is a common concourseand cavity of them both; andbath two passages; the oneto receive Pituita [phlegm],

the other extends itself to the fourthcreek [ventricle, or the hinder part],in this they place Imaginatdon.

38 HISTORYTODAY JuNE 2003

rs Pro aD5~- .,

.4 - -,

I. 1

This 'fourth creek,' or 'Cere-bell' is 'the place where they saymemory is seated'. The brain,then, is structured to access,translate, contemplate andrecall the material world. Itis the place where externalforms enter the interiorof the mind.

Burton and otherearly modern writerssuggested that thephysical worldentered the brainthrough themouth, the nose,and touch, theeyes and theears. These vari-ous sensory formsmade an impact first on thlargest part of the brain's front ven-tricle, the 'common sense'. ForNicholas Coeffeteau, writing in 1620,it was in the common sense that the'forms wvhich are sent unto it fromother senses' 'flowv' into the brain. In1631 Daniel Widdowes proposed

The History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607)outlined the physical characteristics ofdogs, and compared their humours withthose of Man (describing those of dogsas hotter and drier).

A man is what he eats?: Gluttony, from'The Seven Deadly Sins' by HieronyinusBosch.

that this faculty 'more fully distin-guisheth sensible things'. To Wid-dowes, the common sense firstbrings outer forms into the mind,but does so only when those formsare present to the senses. It requiresan external form to engage with: itneeds the action of the senses to

make its common sense.But the common sense was also

thought to have another function: itwas here actual forms are translat-ed into ideal forms. Coeffeteau

noted that the common sense

..not only receives the formswhich the other senses send

unto it, but it also Comparesthem, Discerns them, andjudgeth of them; the

which the particularsenses cannot do, for

that they are limitedand tied to their

particular objects,and never exceed

the bounds thereof.

Tecommon sense, then,was where shape, texture, smell and

*so on are brought together to reformthe representation of the wholeexternal object in the mind. The eyeon its own can only see, the nose,only smell: the common sense was

*thought to put the messages of allthe individual senses together.

From the common sense, percep-tion, in Burton's model, travelledthrough to the middle ventricle ofthe forepart of the brain - the imagi-nation - where it became possiblefor an object to be contemplated inits absence (as in day-dreaming) andfor the creation of compoundimages, things that have never beenseen (such as what a human-dogcrossbreed might look like). Finally,the perceived object could enter intothe rear ventricle of the brain, thememory. There it would be storedfor future reference.

So far, the capacities of the brainoutlined here were shared byhumans and animals. But, despitethe similarities of the structure ofhumans' and animals' brains, a dis-tinction was made based on the ani-mal's relationship with time. Accord-ing both to classical and earlymodern arguments, animals live onlyin the present. The sheep, sb thisargument goes, needs the wolf infront of its eyes to know from memo-

JuNE2003 HisToRYTODAY 39

I

S ''I*�O' be

Dissection of the brain from Vesalius' De

Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), showingthe corpus callosum that links the twohemnispheres of the brain.

ry that the wolf is to be judged asdangerous, whereas a human canrecollect the intention of a wolf in itsabsence, and can feel fear on thebasis of an imagined animal. AsGulielmus Gratarolus put it in 1562:humans can remember 'w'out yepresence of ye object', while 'withthe presence of the object [suchremembrance] is also found in bruteBeasts'. The source of this distinc-tion is Aristotle's De memoria et remi-niscentia. Aristotle here distinguished

between memory, as a form of per-ception that animals share withhumans, and recollection, which isonly available to humans, as it is 'asort of reasoning'. This latter point iscrucial, as this form of memory wasnot understood to be undertakenwith the brain - a bodily organ.Rather, it was the property of theinorganic soul.

As Katherine Park and EckhardtKessler have shown (1988), there wasa crucial difference between the'organic' and the 'inorganic' soul inthis period. Following ideas pro-posed in Aristotle's De Anima, the'organic' soul is understood to bethat bodily essence that allows, at abasic level, for nutrition, reproduc-tion and growth, and on a higherlevel, perception and movement.Such activities come from the body:the liver was regarded as the centreof the basic functions, and the heartand the brain as homes to percep-tion and movement. The organicsoul was shared by humans and ani-mals (and even plants had some ofthe basic aspects - nutrition, repro-duction and growth). However,humans had something more thanjust the organic soul: they possessedthe inorganic soul, that immaterialessence that gave a person access towill, intellect and intellective memo-ry. To say that a human being is arational animal is to say that a

human has an inorgan-AA} ic soul. Animals cannot

reason, so this argu-ment goes, not because

_ B they are stupid, but. because they lack the

,' essential qualityrequired for the exer-cise of reason. Animalsare stuck with the body,the organic, whilehumans can transcend

.. their bodily frame andJ-O` have access to the

immaterial, the spiritu-al realm. By extension,animals are stuck in thepresent, whereashumans have access tothe past and the future

Diagram of the inter-action of eye, brain andmotor functions,according to ReneDescartes in 1644.

A diagram from G; Reisch MargaritaMundi (1504), showing the ventricles ofthe brain (the sites of fantasy, cogitation,estimation and memory) and process ofdreams (the annotations A-E showing theinfluences of cognition, dream, senses,stars, and soul) within the first ventricle.

also.This might appear to offer a clear

dividing line_between humans andanimals, between man and dog, butfurther examination of the processesof perception and movement reveala point at which the division breaksdown; where humans become beastsin more than merely metaphoricalterms. This can be found when therelationship between perception andaction, between brain and body, isexamined.

The 'Moving Faculty', for Burton,as for other contemporary writers, ishoused in the heart and brain.According to Burton the moving fac-ulty had two functions: appetite andmotion. This appetite is housed withthe common sense, and just as thecommon sense is situated in two ven-tricles, so appetite is 'divided intotwo powers, or inclinations, Concupis-cible or Irascible'. The former 'covetsalways pleasant and delightsomethings, and abhors that which is dis-tasteful, harsh, or unpleasant', whilethe latter avoids 'danger and indig-nation'. Writing twenty years beforeBurton, Thomas Wright had arguedthat the two inclinations could betermed more simply 'coveting and

40 HisroRY TODAY JUNE 2003

I---

invading appetites.'Passions, or affections that include

fear, hate, love, hope and so on, thatare grouped under the concupiscibleand irascible appetites, are not spiri-tual but bodily. Burton makes thisclear: 'The good affections arecaused by some object of the samenature'. That is, an external object(or a memory, or imagined versionof it) must be in place in order forpassions to be aroused. Burton con-tinues:

... and if present, [the objects]procurejoy, which dilates the Heart,and preserves the body: If absent,they cause Hope, Love, Desire,Concupiscence.

In these terms, sudden happiness- an expansion of the heart - cancause it to burst: one can truly die ofjoy. The passion is inseparable fromits bodily source.

What follows from the arousal ofpassion is motion, for, as Burtonnotes:

... in vain were it otherwise to desireand to abhor, if we had not likewisepower to prosecute or eschue, bymoving the Body from place to place.

The 'efficient cause' of movementin man, he continues, is 'Reason, orhis subordinate Phantasie, whichapprehends this good or bad object.'

Thomas Wright presents this move-ment in slightly different terms:

Passions and sense are determined toone thing, and as soon as theyperceive their object, sense presentlyreceives it, and the passions love orhate it: but reason, after sheperceiveth her object, she stands indeliberation, whether it beconvenient she should accept it, orrefuse it.

Once again, a difference betweenhumans and animals appears here.An animal follows its passions (it hasno choice as it has no reason) where-as a human can deliberate anddecide whether to act or resist act-ing. Yet this process of deliberation isnot as straightforward as Burton andWright would seem to suggest. Therewas always a possibility that the pas-sions could overwhelm reason; that,like an animal, a human couldmerely follow his or her desires.

A diagram of the layers of the head,from Magnus Hundt's Antropologium(1501), showing the three ventricles ofthe brain, with intellect at the centre.

'See here how Nature's Book unclaspedlies/Whose pages Aesop reads withpearcing eyes,/Who through wiseapologies from Beasts derived/Tells manthey for his conduct were contrived.' Analternative view of the respective moralsense of man and beast, from a 1666edition of Aesop's Fables.

The classical model for represent-ing this point came from Plato. InPhaedrus he wrote of the soul asbeing like 'the natural union of ateam of winged horses and theircharioteer'. One of the horses isbeautiful and obedient, while theother ugly and disobedient. Thecharioteer has to steer both along hischosen path, and this is not an easytask. For early modern writers thisimage of equine managementremained the conventional way ofdescribing control of the bodilyurges - the passions. For LaurentJoubert in his 1579 Traite du Ris(Treatise on Laughter), the relation-ship of the will (inorganic) and theheart - the seat of the passions islikened to 'a child on the back of afierce horse that carries it impetu-ously about'. There is, Joubert

JUNE 2003 HISTORY TODAY 41

I

argues, some reining in of the pas-sions by the will but ultimately thewill needs the passions ('it is unableto perform its functions withouttheir aid') and can be overwhelmedby them: appetite, Joubert writes,'often contradicts the will'. A reason-able human may work to control, tobridle desires; and such bridling isitself evidence of humans' reason-able nature.

Robert Burton was a Protestantthinker, and the denigration ofhumans in Protestant theology(Calvin regularly termed the humanbeing a 'worm') fitted with the psy-chology he described:

Our concupiscence is originally bad,our Heart evil, the seat of ourAffections captivates and enforcethour Will: So that in voluntary thingswe are averse from God andgoodness, bad by Nature, byignorance worse, by Art,Discipline, Custom, we get manybad Habits, suffering them to 4domineer and tyrannise over us,and the Devil is still ready athand, with his evil suggestions, totempt our depraved will to someill-disposed action, to precipitateus to destruction.

One limit upon our innate evilis the word of God, the other isour reason, or whatJohn Donnecalled God's 'viceroy in me'. Butreason is often for Donne 'weakor untrue', and likewise Burton

People in the 16th century believed aman could voluntarily transform intoa werewolf by putting on a wolfskinor through the application of magicsalves or ointments. Illustration byLucas Cranach (1510-15).

argues that it is, 'over born by Pas-sion'. The image Burton uses is trulyconventional: 'as so many wild horsesrun away with a chariot, and will notbe curbed', so the will might be over-whelmed by the passions but mustlearn to restrain them.

But if restraint fails, or if restraintis not sought after at all, the effectsare clear. Joubert terms a laugh thatis purely bodily - that involves nomoral or intellectual understanding- 'dog laughter'. Likewise, greed, agiving in to fleshly temptation, is adescent from human to animal. AsThomas Cogan wrote in The Haven ofHealth (1584):

Now, what a reproach is it, for manwhom God hath created after his ownlikeness, and endued with reason,whereby he differeth from beasts, to

Man's best friends: caring for huntingdogs from a 14th-century book ofhunting.

be yet beastlike, to be moved by senseand serve his belly, to follow hisappetite contrary to reason? for asmuch as by the very order of nature,reason ought to rule, & all appetitesare to be bridled and subdued.

Eight years earlier, Thomas New-ton had asked,

Who is he, that being thoroughlywhittled in drink, doth not beastlyrush into venerous lust, and filthydesires? For when the body isbumbasted with drink, andbellycheer, the privities and secretparts do swell, and have a marvellousdesire to carmal coiture.

The word 'beastly' here appearsa commonplace adjective, adescription with some moralovertones, but there is a logicthat makes beastliness not onlythe antithesis of godliness, but

e also a real possibility. Giving into the desires of the body - toover-indulgence in food, alco-hol, sex and so on - means thatreason is being overwhelmed bypassion, and if reason is over-whelmed and not used thenthat which separates human

i from animal is gone. Followingthis logic, as Burton was, it is infact frequently hard to tell the

f difference between a man anda dog.

t This failure to achieve humanf status, or the failure to main-

tain it once it had beenachieved, was not only Burton's

F preoccupation, then. ForJohni Baptista Nenna the destruction

42 HISTORY TODAY JuNE 2003

S . ' 1 * ' I. . i ! ;i; 1 _ i !3

Riding high: the equestrian portraitprovided the ultimate image of humannobility. Francis I of France, painted inc.1540 by FranVois Clouet.

of the difference between humansand animals was a type of destruc-tion of a bloodline; the end of anoble house. In his Treatise of Nobilityhe states:

True and perfect nobility of man,consisteth only in that part, whichmaketh man different from beasts;and that is reason, by the which he iscalled a reasonable creature, and theother [i.e. animal] unreasonable ...He then who leadeth this mortal lifeswerving from reason, is not to beaccounted or called Noble, albeit thathe descend of noble blood: For albeithe hath the outward shape of a man,being deprived of the most Noblepart, which God hath given unto man(I mean reason) he remainethwithout doubt to be reckonedamongst unreasonable creatures, andto be compared unto beasts: whichbeing not partakers of reason, do leadtheir life according as their senseteacheth them.

Self-knowledge, what Burton feltwas lacking in many men, requiredjudgement, discernment, qualitieshoused in the inorganic soul. A lackof self-knowledge, in these terms,revealed an absence of the inorgan-ic, and showed the human to be allbody, like a beast. Even, for Nenna,nobility of blood could not counterthis. Beastly status, it would seem,was equally available to all.

But it is not only in following thedesires of the body rather than thedeliberation of the mind that earlymodern humans found their statuscompromised. Ill health was regard-ed as evidence of a moral failing onthe part of the individual. As the cul-tural historian Michael Schoenfeldthas noted, 'health assumed the roleof a moral imperative'. The individu-al is 'the agent rather than the victimof his or her health,' and can beblamed 'for the illness that arbitrari-ly afflicts him or her'. That is, illnessis a marker of immorality; individualsare not helpless in the face of dis-ease, rather they are perceived to

Horse training: woodcuts byjost Amman,1599.

create the situation in which thosediseases appear. According toThomas Cogan,

..mean and temperate diet ... ismore commendable than all thedelicate fare in the world, and oughtof the godly to be esteemed as a thingthat best contenteth nature, andpreserveth health.

By implication, intemperance (giv-ing in to one's passions) not onlyendangers health, but ill health alsoreveals one's intemperance: it is avicious circle.

Illness in this interpretationexhibits the individual's failing as ahuman being. If excessive indul-gence in fleshly pleasure is evidenceof the overwhelming of reason by

JUNE 2003 HisToRY TODAY 43

the passions, and the passions arethe product of the body's (asopposed to the mind's) relationshipwith the external world, then givingin to the passions reveals a humanwho lacks that which makes himhuman in the first place. Greed, inthis reading, is immoral, and it dehu-manises: and that last term is to betaken literally. When Robert Burtonwrites that he wants to enable his(not so) human readers to be able totell the difference between a manand a dog, we should take him liter-ally.

The logic works in the other direc-tion, however. There is one placewhere we can see the creation of ahuman who is truly distinct from ananimal. We look neither to theology,nor to psychology to find this, ratherwe look at horse-training manuals.Where the image of the rampant pas-sions overwhelming reason hadbeen, since Plato, that of the uncon-trollable chariot, so rule over horsesin a very different discourse alsospeaks of the establishment of thestatus of humanity.

The Fall was understood to be themoment when human status wasoriginally compromised. It was when,as William Perkins put it in his Expo-sition of the Symbole (1595), humansbecame 'deformed children ofwrath'. The Fall simultaneouslycaused the animals who had, in Par-adise, been tame, to become wild.John Moore wrote that with the Fallhumans 'procured ... the disobedi-ence of all the creatures towardshimself. Hereof comes the fiercenessof lions, bears, tigers, wolves and all

the wild beasts.' Just as Adam wasafflicted with the sweat of labour,and Eve with the pain of childbirth,so all humans were blighted with theenmity of animals.

This theological discussion findsits way into texts that seem to us farfrom religious in their interest. InThe Perfection of Horsemanship (1609),for example, Nicholas Morgan notedthat after the Fall man 'lost all obedi-ence, which by original creation wassubject unto him, & ... now the obe-dience of all creatures must beattained by Art, and this same pre-served in vigour by use and practice'.Horseriding, for Morgan, is anemblem of successful human domin-ion, and it replicates the relationshipwith animals that was held by Adambefore the exit from Eden. To ride ahorse, in these terms, is to return toa perfect natural order. In fact, train-ing - making an unreasonable crea-ture act as if reasonable (no morethan this as jf could be expected) -was by logical extension a display ofthe humanity of the rider. Exercisingcontrol over a 'lower animal' reallydid give evidence of control over theself.

Such a construction of the train-ing and riding of horses allows for,almost calls upon, some of the terrifi-

The 'Getulian' or 'Mimic' dog(possibly a poodle) was thought toresemble an ape and to have beenpopular in ancient Egypt and Romefor the tricks it could be taught toperform. From Edward Topsell'sHistory of Four-Footed Beasts (1607).

Taming of the shrew? A human coupleand a canine one both get to know oneanother better in Matthias Scheits'sgenre painting of the later 17th century.

cally cruel training methods used inthe period. The training manualsreveal not only early modern human-ity's sense of animals' lack of moralvalue (inflicting pain upon them ispedagogically useful, and not some-thing to worry about), but also, inthe image of the use of whip andchain, a vicious human desire toregain the stability of self-knowledge.Nowadays cruelty to animals is oftenperceived as a failing in the humanprotagonist. In the early modernperiod such cruelty had anothermeaning: ironically, a well-trainedhorse could speak volumes about thetruly human nature of its owner.

FOR FURTHER READINGErica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans andBeasts in Early Mbdern English Culture (Universityof Illinois Press, 2002); Stephen Gaukroger ed., TheSoft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in theSeventeenth Century (Routledge, 1998); DavidHillman and Carla Mazzio ed., The Bodyin Parts:Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe(Routledge, 1997);Katherine Park and EckhardtKessler in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinnereds., The Cambridge History of RenaissancePhilosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1988);Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned:Dissection and the Human Body in RenaissanceCulture (Routledge, 1995); Michael C. Schoenfeldt,Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England:Physiology and Inwardness in SpenserShakespeare, Herbert and Milton (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999).

Erica Fudge is Senior Lecturer in the Schoolof Arts at Middlesex University.

44 HisToRY TODAY JUNE 2003

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TITLE: How a Man Differs From a DogSOURCE: Hist Today 53 no6 Je 2003

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