Investigations of a Dog

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next. (more…)

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).

So the FORWARD Symposium was a bit of an anti-climax as not many people turned up. Maybe it’ll be like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club: in a few years time everyone will be saying they were there. Was good to see Martyn Bennett again. It doesn’t seem like 7 years since he examined my PhD thesis. If I wanted to compare the speakers to British indie bands (and why wouldn’t I? It’s a perfectly normal thing to do) I’d say that Lucy Worsley was Velocette, Rodreguez King-Dorset was Radiohead, and I was The Indelicates. Make of that what you will. In the evening we went to Lincoln Drill Hall to see Richard Holmes and Gordon Corrigan talking about the First World War. They were both very good.

Below is my paper, along with a Zotero-able bibliography. It’s slightly different from what I actually said as I ad-libbed some extra bits but it’s near enough. (I had some trouble uploading the pictures through Wordpress so some of them might be too big for some people, but I just couldn’t be bothered to set up thumbnails manually.)

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Over at Medieval Cripples, Crazies and Imbeciles Pope Bonkface VIII (call him by his name) posted about a memorial plaque to a “dumb” astronomer which highlights the potential absurdities when “dumb” can mean unable to speak or just stupid. This made me realise that disability is yet another thing that intersects with my work on animals. In early-modern England (and presumably in other pre-modern cultures too) speech and reason were supposed to go together, and were supposed to set humans apart from animals. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that “dumb” has those two meanings: in early-modern culture they were very closely related. People who couldn’t speak might not just be seen as stupid, they could potentially have been seen as not entirely human. So Bruce Boehrer’s concept of relative anthropocentrism could apply to disability as well as race, gender, age, class etc.

Next week, on Wednesday 28th May, I’ll be speaking at the FORWARD Network Early Modern Social History Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to talk about non-human animals in early-modern society: how we can bring them into social history and why we need to. The keynote speaker will be Lucy Worsley, and they also have what should be a fascinating paper on black dance by Rodreguez King-Dorset.

You can download a leaflet with more details here.

I’m very grateful to Rita Wierzbicki for inviting me to speak at what should be a very exciting event.

Abstract of my paper below: (more…)

Chris at Mixing Memory posted an amazing video of Joshua Klein talking about crows. He isn’t just talking about how clever crows are (they’re really clever) but about how we can find new kinds of relationships between humans and other species which aren’t based on domination or extermination. I think he’s achieved that most difficult of things: a view of the non-human which avoids anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism (interesting that Firefox’s spellchecker recognizes the second of those words but not the first – what does that tell us about dominant ideologies?). This is also another problem for the old anthropocentric view that speech and reason go together and that both define the human. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that crows are very good at thinking, but their communication system is very rudimentary. That suggests that thinking isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, linguistic (although there is also plenty evidence that once language enters the picture it does influence thought, even at the level of perceiving differences between colours). The example of crows also suggests that culture doesn’t depend on language: crows can exhibit learned behaviour which varies between groups. Where’s the animal/human boundary now?

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

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For the first 9 weeks of this year I didn’t read any books or articles – mainly because I’ve been concentrating on Python programming and XML markup. This weekend I broke the embargo in style by reading two exciting new pieces: Karl Steel’s ‘How To Make A Human’ and Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’. This might sound like a horrible cliche, but both articles are about the blurring of boundaries.

Karl argues that in the middle ages the animal-human boundary was maintained not just by asserting that animals were different from humans, but by subjugating animals to humans. Owning and killing animals was necessary to maintain the distinction between animals and humans. He concludes with the suggestion that taking away the right of the lower classes to hunt was seen as taking away their humanity. This is something that I’m likely to be quoting a lot in my work on horses in the English Civil War, as it could equally be suggested that when soldiers took away people’s horses they were also taking away their humanity.

Esther suggests that gender swapping in online gaming is likely to be a lot more common than many people think. She points out how common it is for players to ask female avatars whether they’re female in real life. This suggests a certain amount of anxiety about gender bending, but although this anxiety might ostensibly be based on an assumption that playing an avatar of a different gender is deviant, the assumption undermines itself. If the question is asked so often, that leads to the conclusion that gender swapping is quite normal, even if you don’t want to admit it. If it’s supposed to be so unusual why waste time asking every female avatar if she’s really a man?

Esther’s article focuses on an issue which was largely glossed over in the Fibreculture article that I posted about the other day: we really don’t know how many women are playing online games because there’s often no way of knowing who’s behind an avatar. If someone plays a female avatar in game but posts on the forum as a male there’s clearly some gender bending going on, but which way? Is a forum persona necessarily any more real than an avatar in a game? (See also my old post on roleplaying in Livejournal) Therefore Fullerton, Morie and Pearce might be assuming too much (or should I say too little?) about female participation in gaming. Could it be that female gamers adopt male personas when playing stereotypically masculine games? Nobody knows whether they do or don’t. Ultimately Esther shows that even when mainstream gaming is dominated by a narrow range of gender stereotypes many gamers are undermining those stereotypes in ways that are really not that deviant or unusual. As Paul Westerberg said, “tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?”.

1. Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, ‘A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space’, Fibreculture, (2008).
2. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’, Eludamos, 2 (2008).
3. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.