ABSTRACT
At the 2006 International Spenser Society Conference, one of the more memorable panels was 'Animal Being', in which Jane Bellamy, Joseph Lowenstein, and Elizabeth Harvey each explored various conjunctions of literary criticism, cultural theory, and taxonomy. Animal studies, both in early modern studies and often concerns itself with the category of the human, including how it is defined and delimited, and how it is related to other forms of life, such as animals, plants, and minerals. For Martin Heidegger, animals live and die in ways subordinate to the ways of men; they are merely ready-to-hand or present-to-hand. Spenser’s affection for dwelling upon taxonomical liminality is shared by his contemporary George Puttenham, whose Art of English Poesy frequently dwells upon borderline and hard-to-define instances of rhetorical figures. Puttenham’s definition of prosopopoeia is often invoked in discussions of Mother Hubberds Tale.
