ABSTRACT
Of the enormous number of animals that entered London in the latter half of the sixteenth century, few ever left the city alive. This process is a larger version of what Erica Fudge calls “animal-made-objects,” and by its logic the city itself can be considered the center of a vast tool for turning animals into objects. But Fudge also coined her term to conjure up its reversed meaning: not animals objectified but “objects constructed from animals.” If we extend both meanings of the term more widely, we might say that while early modern England made animals into objects, it was also a country made out of animals: it was itself an animal-made-object. In the past 15 years, early modern animal studies has explored animal bodies largely through individual details and a close attention to the living animal. In this chapter, I take a different approach to the issues. Rather than choosing a particular variety of animal or a particular animal-related event, as so many, including myself, have done before, I view the various animal-human networks of early modern England as from a great height. I analyze early modern England’s “procedural rhetoric” (borrowing a term from Ian Bogost’s game theory) with respect to the animal bodies that had come to shape the country and particularly its capital city both economically and materially. I take as a primary source multiple layers of geographical content such as those created by Janelle Jenstad and others in the Map of Early Modern London project (MoEML), layers which can be combined (GIS-fashion) to demonstrate visually the interrelationship between different stages in animal-encounters throughout the country, from generation through transportation, processing, and consumption. For example, domestic animals largely flowed towards and into London and other major towns through established paths, with common destinations, and guided by traditional forms of labor (drover, etc.). All of these left their mark upon the landscape in street and place names that encode both location and direction. Animal processing is revealed, for example, in many of the London’s great liveries: Skinners, Salters, etc. Those animals not usually consumed as food but still part of the network are marked through traditional places of entertainment and labor like the baiting arenas of Southwark or the stables of the Royal Mews. I draw also upon a variety of literary and extra literary sources from Shakespeare to Stow to authenticate in a more familiar textual sense the larger procedural rhetoric of the nation. Ultimately, I argue that rather than demonstrate an instrumental or objectifying relationship with nonhuman animals, the procedural rhetoric of early modern England constantly drew its human inhabitants into multiple and historically persistent forms of identification with animal material, shaping their behavior, their language, and their sense of communal identity.
