What was it like to live with animals in early modernity? What did it mean to establish a bond with an animal, balancing affection with exploitation? In Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes, Erica Fudge attends to these questions by developing an original perspective. She chooses as her primary sources a selection of wills from the Essex Record Office, relating to a space of only fifteen years (1620–1634). In the wills, she looks for traces of how humans treated real animals, and she seeks to demonstrate that the ways in which animals are listed in the wills can help us regain a sense of how humans lived with animals, and how this relationship changed over time. Especially in the case of farm animals, these wills contain a number of fascinating details about their lives. Some animals are named or described because of their physical peculiarities: thus, they were recognized as individuals. In other cases, the order in which animals are listed in a will is used to inquire about what it meant to own an animal and what value was attached to it. Furthermore, Fudge argues convincingly that the bequeathing of an animal tells much about the relationship between the people involved, as animals were viewed at the same time as source of sustenance and as carrying symbolic value. Her approach is nuanced on this point because “[animals] exist in reality and in representations, and in the complex moments in between those two” (xii). Nevertheless, the main focus lies in unearthing actual relationships to real animals. Fudge's book is a welcome and needed complement to existing literature on animals as symbols and allegories in early modernity, and it is a reminder that ethical concern for animals is not—as is still too often assumed—a modern invention.
Methodologically, the innovation of Fudge's book is that she brings together two fields in which scholars often work side by side on the topic of animals without actually collaborating: early modern cultural studies and animal studies. Her claim is that analyzing the development of the relationship between humans and animals has an ethical bearing, going beyond mere historical curiosity. In the last part of the book, she compares the wills from the Essex Record Office with selected wills from London and Middlesex from the Diocese of London (London Metropolitan Archives) in order to understand how the relationship with animals changed in the urban setting, where humans did not live in such close contact with animals as in the countryside. This comparison forms the background for one of the most interesting questions discussed in the book: Does physical proximity to an animal lead humans to treat it with kindness? Conversely, does the removal of this closeness ultimately lead to the ethical aberration we see in present-day industrial use of animals? Fudge seems to answer with a tentative “yes,” even if she convincingly argues that the challenge that comes from reading the early modern sources is to see that “instrumentality and affection often went hand in hand” (169).
Fudge includes a number of literary sources but consciously omits philosophical ones, because “discussions of animal rationality in the seventeenth century are often purely theoretical, and real animals—animals who bark, moo, neigh, kick, bite, smell—and those who work with them tend to be absent” (15). The only philosopher repeatedly mentioned in the book is Descartes, and the assumption is that mechanicism did not offer a foundation for ethical concern. Yet I would like to suggest that adding philosophy to the equation could enhance the fruitful results of Fudge's work.
Philosophical speculation did take into account real animals, too, as was the case, for instance, with the early modern debate on the theory and practice of vegetarianism, to which Descartes's contemporaries Tommaso Campanella and Pierre Gassendi contributed. Sometimes philosophers even lived with animals: Descartes, who apparently preferred a vegetarian to a carnivorous diet, lived with a real animal, a dog he had named Monsieur Grat (Adrien Baillet, La vie de Monsieur Descartes [1691], II, 448 and 456). Most importantly, philosophical arguments can help cast light on the broad ethical implication of Fudge's insightful and detailed historical reconstruction. An interesting example is the conception of “kindness”: what does it mean to be “kind” to an animal? Is a farmer who lets the cow choose when to be milked—a country practice discussed by Fudge—“kind”? After all, milking is a need, because the breasts fill with milk for a calf that was taken away. The tragedy of the situation is perhaps most evident in verses from Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 2, which Fudge aptly quotes to offer context for her reading of the wills (121). Shakespeare describes the tears of a cow crying for the loss of its calf to the knife of the butcher as “unhelpful”: not just in the sense of “ineffective” or “annoying,” as Fudge suggests (121), but also in the tragic sense of “helpless,” not met with any help from the human side (OED). The idea of animal suffering was acutely present in many philosophical discourses throughout early modernity: bringing early modern philosophical theories into dialogue with Fudge's materials would help understanding the development of concepts such as kindness, (animal) happiness, and sentience.
One of the virtues of Fudge's book is that it makes clear that there are boundaries to what can be regained of the history of the human-animal relationship: real animals tend to slip away, and not just because their lives were rarely recorded, but also because the human ethical compass has changed as a result of changing worldviews. Fudge's book offers much material not just to (cultural) historians and animal studies scholars, but to philosophers, too: it provides readers with a fascinating glimpse into early modern farm life, but it can also help to frame theoretical questions about the ethics of the human use of animals.
