Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, And Humanity in Early Modern England

Fudge (literary and cultural studies, Middlesex U., England) intended to study beliefs about the reasoning capacity of animals before Descartes' 1637 beast-machine hypothesis. She found that people then were not very interested in that, and in fact only brought it up as an opening to talk about humans. So she here explores what people through being human meant, how humans could lose their humanity. These questions lead naturally to what they thought made an animal an animal, why they looked at animals at all, and how they understood and misunderstood what they saw when they did. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)