Investigations of a Dog

Back in October 2006 I posted about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria has posted a list of 80 recommended history blogs. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the history blogosphere, this is a great place to start. Down in the I section is Investigations of a Dog. This would happen at a time when I’ve hardly posted anything for ages. It’s nice to get recognition, but all my usual reservations about ranking blogs apply. I like to think of blogging as acentric and non-hierarchical. I think some blogs are better than others, but better for me. It all depends on personal taste. Every history blog on the Cliopatria blogroll has something good in it. The only history blogs I consider completely worthless turned out to be worthless because they were sockpuppets for a troll.

So this is Ralph Luker’s top 80 and not necessarily anyone else’s. But Ralph Luker knows the history blogosphere better than anyone. I’m honoured that he thinks IoaD is in the top 8% along with the likes of Airminded, Digital History Hacks, In The Middle, Mercurius Politicus and all the rest. I just hope this isn’t a poisoned chalice - my Technorati rating went right down after I got into Brett Holman’s top 5 military history blogs! Expectations might have been raised at a time when I’m not posting much. But it might also encourage me to improve. I don’t think IoaD has ever been as good as it was in its first few months. I want to recapture some of that eclecticism and enthusiasm. I had already decided to stop posting about the historiography of the causes of the English Civil War. Those posts were necessary to help me with an article I’m writing, but I’ve nearly finished it now. I always thought those posts were a bit too esoteric. Although some of them were technically very good (and some of them weren’t) they were only ever likely to appeal to a small minority of readers (and that minority turned out to be even smaller than I thought). In fact even I’m not really that interested in the causes of the civil war! I’m still interested in the civil war but there are lots of other questions about it and early-modern England that I find more interesting. So no more “bloodsport”. In the coming weeks I might be revisiting some of the things I wrote about in the early months, as well as trying to think of new and different things to write about.