Black rams and unruly jades : reading animals in the landscape of renaissance cultural geography

From King of Tars to Volpone, animals frequently coded for cultural difference, whether that "entailed" race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. And, ritually, scholars have noted that this correlation exists. Regarding the Middle Ages, Peggy McCracken writes in In the Skin of a Beast about how animal "society" was seen as a 1:1 mirror of human society and had similar cultural differences of its own. But, while many scholars note that animals appear when discussing representations of race and cultural difference, a visible gap remains: no one has discussed significantly the crossover of animals and cultural geography in premodern texts or even what that crossover signifies. My dissertation, Black Rams and Unruly Jades: Reading Animals in the Landscape of Renaissance Cultural Geography seeks to address that gap. With a combination of case studies and literary surveys, I track multiple ways that reading animals into cultural geography significantly alters our interpretation of many of the period texts. Just as Kim Hall works to understand a rhetorical dichotomy of "fair"/"dark" in terms of a contemporary racial discourse and Ian J. Smith reads literary instances of Others' "barbarism" in the construction of cultural difference, I show how the socially constructed image of animals in the Renaissance informed contemporary understandings of cultural geography as evident in primary literature. I link primary dramatic works to contemporary animal discourse, often in the form of husbandry manuals, encyclopediae, and manege treatises. This historicist lens allows for the argument that contemporary knowledge of animal-human interactions informed these animal representations of human difference at the time. The first chapter examines Shakespeare's Othello in terms of its animal-racial imagery. As Iago constantly refers to people as different animals, he iterates a social hierarchy of cultural difference through these animals. Each species reference calls to contemporary knowledge of the animal world and informs our reading of the play by providing additional layers of meaning based on the specific species referenced. Chapter two moves into English drama, starting with the Christopher Marlowe play, Tamburlaine the Great. The chapter starts with a longer survey of Renaissance Turk Plays to show the archetypes the Turk could hold in these narratives as well as the frequent animal connections that appeared in rhetoric around the Turk. This survey works at a macro scale, revealing the sheer volume of English drama that centered on the Turk and the English fascination with the exotic. The third chapter focuses on Lust's Dominion and the way that characters give animal appellations to other characters. The chapter starts with background and synopsis of Dekker's play and then constructs a theoretical framework for the chapter, claiming that naming a person an animal in the Renaissance responds to a rhetoric of cultural difference. The chapter ultimately argues that understanding the cultural significance of different animal species at the time informs our reading of the characters' understanding of self and other in Lust's Dominion. The final major chapter reads The Tempest alongside early colonial American texts, comparing descriptions of indigenous fauna to the island nature in the play. This ultimately works to paint Caliban as an indigenous person who is animalized in ways similar to indigenous Americans. The aspects of animal control and domestication play into the civilized-wild dichotomy here, specifically in fish management.