Animal History in the Modern City ― Exploring Liminality

Animals are increasingly recognized as fit and proper subjects for historians, yet their place in conventional historical narratives remains contested. This volume argues for a history of animals based on the centrality of liminality - the state of being on the threshold, not quite one thing yet not quite another. Since animals stand between nature and culture, wildness and domestication, the countryside and the city, and tradition and modernity, the concept of liminality has a special resonance for historical animal studies.

Assembling an impressive cast of contributors, this volume employs liminality as a lens through which to study the social and cultural history of animals in the modern city. It includes a variety of case studies, such as the horse-human relationship in the towns of New Spain, hunting practices in 17th-century France, the birth of the zoo in Germany and the role of the stray dog in the Victorian city, demonstrating the interrelated nature of animal and human histories.

Animal History in the Modern City is a vital resource for scholars and students interested in animal studies, urban history and historical geography.

Clemens Wischermann is Chair of Economic and Social History at the University of Constance, Germany. He has published widely on the history of industrialization and urbanization in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. He is the author of Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (2000).

Aline Steinbrecher is Fellow at the University of Constance, Germany. She is a cultural and social historian of the early modern period and one of the leading German authors in the field of animal history.

Philip Howell is Reader at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (2015) and Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (2009).