ABSTRACT
If the bereavement analogy is about not having the child one expected but having a different one, supplied perhaps by the Devil, it is tacitly also about having a child who perhaps belongs not to the human species but to a different one. Having dealt with explanations provided by everyday medicine as well as those lying further back in the praeternatural or occult, this chapter describes the story of classification. This can be posed in two ways. One of them has to do with natural history: where, objectively, do human beings lie on the scale of nature? The second is normative: what, subjectively, are the criteria by which we define ourselves as human? The chapter examines a few items from a vast hinterland of late medieval and early modern texts on the specific operations said to make up this ability, in particular logical reasoning and abstraction.
