Horses and Gendered Language
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?
- Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
- Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
- 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).
Comment by Nick — 1:02 pm, 21 July 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
This is a really thought-provoking post. Interestingly, not all Romans thought cats were feminine. The late Latin form “cattus” or “catus” is actually a masculine noun… although there is some suggestion it’s a borrowed word from Africa so that might explain why it’s a second-declension noun (these usually end with -us or -um). But it’s this form from which the English “cat” is derived, not “felis”. Similarly the the Irish for stalion – stail – is a feminine noun, apparently! I know very little about languages assign gender, but Wikipedia suggests a few broad types of reason, not all of them cultural:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Gender_assignment
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 7:17 am, 22 July 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks, that’s a great link. The Alamblak system is almost too Freudian to be true!
If these authors were just blindly following Roman conventions (and considering the intertextuality between these drill books and their general obsession with all things ancient, Ward might even have translated that passage word for word from a classical text) that has a couple of implications. First, I might not need to explain why the Romans assigned genders to things the way they did. Although it’s an interesting question it’s also very big and difficult. Second, it adds an extra layer of complication to the whole meaning/intentions thing. Even if the gender of these pronouns wasn’t a conscious intentional move by the author to assert that war horses were or should be male, and wasn’t an unconscious assumption that war horses were or should be male, some readers might still have found that meaning there. A gendered pronoun can suggest second order meanings about gender whether the author likes/knows it or not. But we can’t get any clues about what people might have thought about a text unless they wrote something in response to it.
And sometimes the gender of Latin words was directly relevant to early-modern gender ideology. For example in the title of Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman (1620) the juxtaposition of a masculine pronoun with a feminine noun meaning woman emphasises the paradox of gender swapping.
Comment by Siegfried Herzog — 7:13 am, 14 August 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
The German word for “cat”, the cognate “Katze”, is female. Since English is a germanic language and this word seems to have entered the germanic languages before English and German parted ways, maybe the female gender ascribed to it once was still known in the English of the 1600s.
As a German speaker with male, female and neutral grammatical genders to contend with, I feel a bit uncomfortable with the conflation of genus and sexus, i.e. biological and grammatical gender. The Romans used two different words for it, presumably for a reason. Maybe we ascribe too much meaning to it all.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 9:01 am, 14 August 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Yes it seems more likely that cat came from Katze rather than cattus.
You’re right that genus and sexus are supposed to be two different things, but I’m just wondering how many people get them mixed up, and what effect that might have on their perceptions.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:36 am, 26 June 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Looks like I was right on the money with this. Babel’s Dawn reports experimental evidence that the grammatical gender of nouns influences how people perceive the objects that they refer to, in a way that is also influenced by cultural gender stereotypes. Genus and sexus are not separate in people’s minds.