For scholars interested in early modern intellectual history, the work of René Descartes looms large. But Descartes is also of great interest to the growing number of scholars interested in the history of human-animal relations. For these scholars, Descartes’ ideas figure as a kind of shorthand for the Western tradition's orthodox and unchallenged anthropocentrism. Published in 1637, Descartes’ Discourse on Method defined the human essence as the ability to reason and denied the same to animals. But did Descartes simply codify a set of widely held and long-standing beliefs—that humans were superior to animals in the chain of being, and that this superiority was located in humans' reasoning capacity—or did he introduce a new set of ideas about human and animal nature? And how orthodox did his ideas really become?

Building on her previous work on human-animal relations, Erica Fudge's latest work examines these questions. In a series of thematically focused chapters that range over religious, philosophical, natural-historical, literary, and even comic texts, Fudge demonstrates that prior to Discourse on Method, the line separating humans from animals was blurry. Likewise, the impact of Cartesian thinking on English thought and practice was less thoroughgoing than Descartes’ subsequent canonization might suggest. Fudge further argues that previous scholars’ assumption that Descartes’ ideas were continuous with, rather than a departure from, the wider body of early modern thought demonstrates the extent to which animals have been obscured from both history and historiography.

Though sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Englishmen may not have held Descartes’ rigid view of the human-animal boundary, they did believe there was a clear difference between the two. The orthodox intellectual position comprised a “discourse of reason” (4) that recapitulated the Aristotelian distinction between the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls. While animals and humans shared the first two types of souls, only humans possessed the latter. Reason enabled humans not only to exercise control over corporeal passions but also to exist in time, to remember the past, and to plan for the future. Animals, by contrast, while sentient, were controlled by sensory stimuli and bound to the present. Writing in 1601, Thomas Wright explained in his Passions of the Minde that “beasts regard only or principally what concerneth the present time, but men forecast for future euents” (22). Reason, the source of temporal transcendence, also transcended the body—it was immaterial, invisible, and irreducible.

Though the orthodox position divided humans from animals rather clearly on the basis of reason, it was beset by internal contradictions. For one thing, there was a problem of verification. If mankind was constituted by all three types of souls, how could a given human action be correctly attributed to one or the other of the souls? If the rational soul was immaterial, how was it to be located and witnessed? Sir Walter Raleigh thought he had the answer: “As the fruit of tells the name of the Tree,” he wrote in his 1614 Historie of the World, “so do the outward works of men (so far as their cogitatios are acted) giue vs whereof to gheß at the rest” (37). Reason, in other words, could be inferred from actions. This, of course, was hardly a solution, for such inferences were subjective and prone to error. The most definitive trait of humanity turned out to be the least accessible, subject only to indirect observation and secondhand proof. But if reason could be verified only by external, empirical proof, what should observers conclude about those humans who seemed unwilling to engage in, or incapable of, reasoned action? What of men who acted, in drunkenness and depravity, as beasts? Did they lose their humanity? And what of infants, who could not control their actions? Were they reasonable in the absence of proof? Was reason truly inherent, or was it something acquired and easily lost? Fudge argues that discourses surrounding both the colonization of the New World (which promised to civilize beastly natives) and the education of children (which promised to raise children above their passionate nature) suggested that even in the orthodox discourse of reason “truly human status is achieved only over the space of time, only through learning” (57). Firm distinctions between body and mind, animal and human notwithstanding, in early modern England, humans were made, not born, were cultural rather than natural.

The orthodox discourse of reason was strained not only by its own insistence on reason's immateriality, but also by other strands of thought that Fudge recovers in the writings of authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Viret, Pierre Charron, and Thomas Rogers. The first strand derives from the revival of Plutarch. Drawing on Plutarch, these unorthodox authors maintained both that “animals are reasonable and that they are more virtuous than humans” (87). The second external challenge to the discourse of reason arose from the revival of skeptical thought with the 1562 publication of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Scepticism. Skeptics' insistence on the limited, partial nature of human knowledge posed obvious problems both for claims to human rationality and for the orthodox position's reliance on empirical proof. “How does [man] know … the secret internal stirrings of animals?” asked Montaigne in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Indeed, as Charron pointed out in his 1607 Of Wisdome, man is hardly equipped to judge the difference between himself and animals, for “he is a partie and to be suspected” (115). Finally, the orthodox human-animal distinction was challenged by a good deal of popular and practical knowledge—from the pages of dog- and horse-training manuals to the wildly successful performances of Morocco the Intelligent Horse, English of all classes “knew” that animals learned. Indeed, many staked their livelihood on it.

Given both the insistence upon and the instability of the human-animal distinction in early modern thought, Fudge argues that Descartes’ ideas represent a “radical” (174) departure designed to “make firm what had become a fragile boundary” (159). Though his ideas were not immediately and universally accepted, they have since been made to stand in for the early modern view of humankind. But this, Fudge claims, is an anachronistic reading of the past. Rather than attending to the ambiguous and unstable definition of humanity that litters the pages of early modern texts, historians assume, as Descartes did, the givenness of the human subject. Scholars persist in this error because they disregard how often, and how carefully, so many early modern writers discussed animals. Though animals have become invisible to modern scholars, they were abundantly, and troublingly, present for early modern men and women. Animals were not only coconstituents of the everyday world, but also a constant reminder of the fragile, partial state of being human. The “human,” history's ostensible subject, is really its product.