The Horse as Cultural Icon PDF Download

Author: Peter Edwards
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900421206X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
In spite of the importance of horses to Western society until comparatively recent times, scholars have paid very little attention to them. This volume helps to redress the balance, emphasizing their iconic appeal as well as their utilitarian functions.

Author: Kevin De Ornellas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611476593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Kevin De Ornellas argues that in Renaissance England the relationship between horse and rider works as an unambiguous symbol of domination by the strong over the weak. There was little sentimental concern for animal welfare, leading to the routine abuse of the material animal. This unproblematic, practical exploitation of the horse led to the currency of the horse/rider relationship as a trope or symbol of exploitation in the literature of the period. Engaging with fiction, plays, poems, and non-fictional prose works of late Tudor and early Stuart England, De Ornellas demonstrates that the horse—a bridled, unwilling slave—becomes a yardstick against which the oppression of England’s poor, women, increasingly uninfluential clergyman, and deluded gamblers is measured. The status of the bitted, harnessed horse was a low one in early modern England—to be compared to such a beast is a demonstration of inferiority and subjugation. To think anything else is to be naïve about the realities of horse management in the period and is to be naïve about the realities of the exploitation of horses and other mammals in the present-day world.

Author: Natália Pikli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000431614
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between the 1580s and 1630s. Natália Pikli approaches this study with a thorough and interdisciplinary examination of hobby-horse references, with commentary on the polysemous uses of the word, offers an informative background to reconsider well-known texts by Shakespeare and others, and provides an overview on the workings of cultural memory regarding popular culture in early modern England. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture, cultural memory, and iconography.

Author: K. Raber
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137097256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This volume fills an important gap in the analysis of early modern history and culture by reintroducing scholars to the significance of the horse. A more complete understanding of the role of horses and horsemanship is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the early modern world. Each essay in the collection provides a snapshot of how horse culture and the broader culture - that tapestry of images, objects, structures, sounds, gestures, texts, and ideas - articulate. Without knowledge of how the horse figured in all these aspects, no version of political, material, or intellectual culture in the period can be entirely accurate.

Author: Donna Landry
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801890284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Stubbs's portrait of Whistlejacket.

Author: Anastasija Ropa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This volume provides a unique introduction to the most topical issues, advances, and challenges in medieval horse history. Medievalists who have a long-standing interest in horse history, as well as those seeking to widen their understanding of horses in medieval society will find here informed and comprehensive treatment of chapters from disciplines as diverse as archaeology, legal, economic and military history, urban and rural history, art and literature. The themes range from case studies of saddles and bridles, to hippiatric treatises, to the medieval origins of dressage literary studies. It shows the ubiquitous – and often ambiguous – role of the horse in medieval culture, where it was simultaneously a treasured animal and a means of transport, a military machine and a loyal companion. The contributors, many of whom have practical knowledge of horses, are drawn from established and budding scholars working in their areas of expertise.

Author: PiaF. Cuneo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351576437
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

Author: Erica Fudge
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252070686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The boundaries between human and beast forged a rugged philosophical landscape across early modern England. Spectators gathered in London's Bear Garden to watch the callous and brutal baiting of animals. A wave of "new" scientists performed vivisections on live animals to learn more about the human body. In Perceiving Animals, the British scholar Erica Fudge traces the dangers and problems of anthropocentrism in texts written from 1558 to 1649. Meticulous examinations of scientific, legal, political, literary, and religious writings offer unique and fascinating depictions of human perceptions about the natural world. Views carried over from bestiaries--medieval treatises on animals-- posited animals as nonsentient beings whose merits were measured solely by what provisions they afforded humans: food, medicine, clothing, travel, labor, scientific knowledge. Without consciences or faith, animals were deemed far inferior to humans. While writings from the period asserted an enormous biological superiority, Fudge contends actual human behavior and logic worked, sometimes accidentally, to close the alleged gap. In the Bear Garden, even a man of the lowest social rank had power over a tortured animal, sinking him, though, below the beasts. The beast fable itself fails to show a true understanding of animals, as it merely attributes human characteristics to beasts in an attempt to teach humanist ideals. Scholars and writers continually turned to the animal world for reflection. Despite this, scientists of the period used animals for empirical and medical knowledge, recognizing biological and spiritual similarities but refusing to renege human superiority. Including an insightful reexamination of Ben Jonson's Volpone and fascinating looks at works by Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and Richard Overton, among others, Fudge probes issues of animal ownership and biological and spiritual superiority in early modern England that resonate with philosophical quandaries still relevant in contemporary society.

Author: David W. Anthony
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

Author: Monica Mattfeld
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027107972X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one’s gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur, into something other—something powerful, awe-inspiring, and mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and ephemera produced by some of the period’s most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding houses such as Angelo’s Academy and Mr. Carter’s; and the public perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places such as Astley’s Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders, in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status, reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to consider the role of animals in shaping man.