[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.

In my first post I naively expected animals to be a state of nature where there was only biological sex and no gender. I don’t think this is viable now. I’m increasingly following Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur in the view that gender versus sex is a false dichotomy. Perceptions of the body are always gendered. Furthermore it now looks hopelessly wrong to assume that non-human species have no culture or gender. Dominance hierarchies can be heavily gendered. Chimpanzees have patriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by violence, but Bonobos have matriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by lesbian sex, despite the genetic similarities between the two species (see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender).

This actually leads to a simpler way of putting the question: if humans always perceive each other in gendered ways, why wouldn’t they also perceive animals in gendered ways? In fact there is scientific evidence that humans even perceive inanimate objects in gendered ways! A post at Babel’s Dawn mentions an experiment which showed that the grammatical gender of a noun affects how people perceive and describe the physical object which the noun refers to. Genus and sexus are not separate in people’s minds. They bleed into each other in a way which can interfere with perception. This could also have major implications for metaphors. Saying that one thing is like another might cause people to perceive them as the same thing, with serious consequences for how they get treated in reality (we all know about early-modern misogynists who said women were more like animals than men).

As I started to read more about early-modern gender I realized that some of my own assumptions about the relationship between gender and biology were specifically modern. While perceptions of the body (and especially the genitals) have always played a part in gender ideology, modern science has made the reproductive organs appear more important than they did before. In early-modern England clothes were probably more important than bodies. This opened up many possibilities for gender swapping. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat, David Cressy looked at the case of a young man who passed as a woman for long enough to gatecrash a lying-in party (one of the few kinds of all female spaces in England at this time). Diane Dugaw wrote a whole book about warrior woman ballads which featured women dressing as men in order to join the army or navy. She showed that this behaviour was possible and not even particularly uncommon in real life (although I now think the differences between ballads and reality might be significant – in ballads the woman was always found out eventually, usually by exposure of the body, although usually not specifically the genitals; in real life they weren’t always found out and sent home; how many more were never discovered at all? Were the ballads a way of dealing with anxiety about this possibility?). If people could change gender by changing their clothes (and since the female soldiers were perceived and treated as male, their gender effectively was male) where does this leave horses?

When I read Dugaw I thought that this was a problem because horses didn’t wear clothes, but then at the Roehampton horse conference Erica Fudge reminded us that horses did wear clothes. I had a quick chat with Erica afterwards, and the point I should have got straight to is that although horses did sometimes wear clothes, sometimes they didn’t. Horses sometimes had their genitals on display in public in a way which would have been very unusual for humans. So where does that leave us? Horses can wear clothes, but don’t have to, which seems to open up even more possibilities and raise even more questions. Why don’t displays of horse genitals cause the same anxieties that displays of human genitals cause? (Or do they? Did William Prynne have issues with this?) Is a stallion with big balls on display the epitome of masculinity? Do the trappings of a medieval war horse signify masculinity? Or does covering up the body (especially the genitals) make a horse less masculine? Can a mare in trappings masquerade as a stallion? Does a more masculine horse make the rider look more masculine? How male are geldings? How does the creation of an artificial third sex through routine castration complicate the ideas of male and female? This is why I was asking strange questions about testicles at the conference.

As Jennifer Flaherty reminded us at the Roehampton conference, there are lots of representations of war and horses in Shakespeare’s history plays, and lots of interesting ways that they intersect with gender. She told us about the substitution of horses for women, and how horsemanship contributed to masculinity. I think there’s a lot more potential for looking at how the horses themselves are gendered, and especially how their roles in war are gendered. I’m hoping that Jennifer or someone else will have done this, or will be doing it, but I just have a few observations on Henry V:

Good war horses usually seem to be referred to as steeds. This is a very masculine word, coming from the Old English for stallion (as does stud) according to the OED.

Bad horses are referred to as jades. The OED is vague on the etymology: it might come from a Norse word for mare, but there doesn’t seem to be much definite proof. Jade meaning bad woman seems to appear later than jade meaning bad horse, but the relationship between them isn’t very clear from the OED. In any case one might still connote the other. In the light of the experiment about grammatical gender that I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be surprising if two unrelated meanings of the same word can bleed into each other in people’s minds. After all, this is how puns work.

Shakespeare seems to assign a lot of agency to horses. They threaten each other, they neigh for present service, they seem to want to keep fighting when their riders are dead. Does this suggest that horses were imagined to be active participants in combat, and not just transport for their riders? How widespread was this idea? Does it require the horses to be male because only men were supposed to fight?

When I started out on this project I was heavily influenced by Joshua Goldstein’s hypothesis that war, gender, and the exclusion of women from combat roles all appear to be more or less universal, and that war and gender shape each other. The more I think about it the more problems I can see with his model. As I pointed out here, his assumption that the point of gender roles is to create warriors doesn’t seem to hold for early-modern England, where (according to Alexandra Shepard) manhood was defined mostly by domestic paternalism (where age, wealth, marital status and other things intersected). War and soldiers were often viewed with ambivalence, and it seems to me that a career in the military was no more than a second best kind of masculinity. As Bruce Boehrer pointed out in Shakespeare Among the Animals, the third Earl of Essex turned to soldiering after the failure of his marriages and his humiliation as an impotent cuckold.

Goldstein acknowledged that although some form of gender is found in every culture, there are wide variations in the forms it takes and the meanings it has. I suspect that if we look closer we might find similar variations in the forms and meanings of war. Although women have mostly been excluded from combat roles in most cultures at most times, I’m not sure that this translates to a universally rigid boundary between active male and passive female roles. The boundary might sometimes be more or less rigid or in a slightly different place, and there might be very different justifications for it. The exclusion of women from combat roles in early-modern England might not have been as exclusive as in later periods. For example, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby was that they were carrying knives.

That’s all for now. There’s still obviously a lot to do, and I’m still not entirely sure what that is, so it’ll be a long time before I have anything publishable. There’s a whole world of possibilities for looking into gendered perceptions of animals. I’m limiting myself to horses in war to keep it manageable, so there’s plenty of scope for other people to do horses in other situations, and every other species.

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford Paperbacks, February 2001).
3. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
4. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
5. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
6. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
7. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

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).

Not really a proper post, just some random things:

Bill Turkel is always right.In the first of his excellent posts on analysing the Old Bailey Proceedings he recommended DownThemAll. This is a Firefox extension that lets you download all the files linked to from a web page in one go. You can set up filters to only download certain types of file, or you can select the files by clicking on a list, then download them all with one click. As well as the obvious benefits for digital historians it’s very handy if you want to download a whole album from LastFM.

Over at Glod’n'Epix Esther posted some interesting thoughts on sexual harassment and gender stereotyping in live action role playing, which also led to some discussion of cross-dressing and gender swapping.

Gary Smailes has launched a new website called OneBook which features brief posts from different people recommending a book. Anyone can submit a post and they don’t have to be very long.

The Difficult Second Article is getting there but still needs a lot of work. Once this is out of the way I never want to hear anything about the causes of the English Civil War ever again.

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Apart from lots of useful historical insights it made me think that my generation’s equivalent of the bible is probably Star Wars.

And finally the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at jliedl.ca.

Beginning Shakespeare (2005; ISBN: 0719064236) is a brief and accessible introduction to Shakespeare criticism aimed at first year undergraduates. I had high hopes for it because it’s in the same series as Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory (2002; ISBN: 0719062683), which I found very useful and informative despite (or perhaps because of) it being written for first year English Literature undergraduates. Beginning Shakespeare turned out to be not quite as good. Although I got some valuable things out of it, there are some shortcomings which can’t all be explained away by it being a basic introduction for 18 year olds.

The biggest problem with Lisa Hopkins is that she allows her own opinions too much influence. While I accept that true neutrality and objectivity are not necessarily attainable or desirable, I think that a book of this kind needs to take extra care to explain a wide range of opinions without privileging some over others. Peter Barry is very good at this. In Beginning Theory he admits that he finds structuralism more interesting than post-structuralism or postmodernism but still manages to present a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of a wide range of theoretical approaches. In contrast, Hopkins dismisses computer based analysis of texts apparently because she finds it boring and doesn’t understand it. By her own admission, seeing numbers makes her “feel faint” (p. 124), and after quoting Thomas Merriam she responds (p. 122):

Few literary scholars will be able to respond to this, because most will be hopelessly lost after the first sentence. Certainly when Merriam goes on to suggest, on the basis of this methodology, that the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus may well be by Marlowe rather than by Shakespeare, I have no idea whether this is plausible or not.

Ignorance is nothing to be proud of. If Merriam is wrong (and the hypothesis that Shakespeare used the letter O more frequently than Marlowe has some obvious limitations) then he needs to be refuted by a critical examination of his evidence and methodology.

Hopkins fails to mention post-structuralism despite its very obvious influence on her thinking. She repeatedly points out that readers can find many different meanings in Shakespeare’s plays, and that the texts do not necessarily tell us anything about the author, but the theory behind this is never explained. The absence of structuralism is more understandable, because it isn’t a very fashionable theory now. Although it’s an important ancestor of many other branches of theory it’s covered adequately in Beginning Theory and isn’t directly relevant to current Shakespeare criticism. However, I find it quite shocking that a book on literary criticism published in 2005 doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of eco-criticism. Peter Barry managed a whole chapter on it in 2002, and Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among The Animals (also published in 2002; ISBN: 0312293437) made a direct link between eco-criticism and Shakespeare.

Overall I find a disappointing lack of eclecticism in this book. Hopkins is very deeply entrenched in her own discipline and dismissive of anything outside it. After asking students to stop and think whether history and literature are separate categories, she confidently states that they are and falls back on the holocaust (does Godwin’s law apply here?) to “teach us the dangers of failing to realise that some things are facts” (p. 82). This seems like a very old fashioned liberal humanist view (history is about facts, literature is about fiction). Some historians have started adapting literary theory and applying it to their work, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between documents and reality. The growth of cultural studies shows that there are many potential benefits of merging history and literature. Cultural history arguably makes literary texts more important than a purely aesthetic approach does.

One final limitation is that the book is mostly about what other critics have written. It offers little practical advice about how to apply theory to Shakespeare’s texts yourself. This will be useful for undergraduates who need to know who has written what in order to discuss it in their essays, and provides plenty of further reading. However, Peter Barry goes much further by providing helpful examples of critical theory in action which show you how to do it.

This is definitely a useful book for the target audience, but I didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped. I would recommend Beginning Theory much more highly because it covers a wider range of theories, providing a balanced view of each one, and practical examples of how to apply them. Given all this it doesn’t take much imagination to transfer any of these theories to Shakespeare, or to history.

Bibliography

1. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2002).
2. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
3. Lisa Hopkins, Beginning Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, March 2005).