| This dissertation is about the representation of human and animal kinship in medieval and early modern literature. In it, I argue that scholarship places a disproportionate emphasis on disaffective views. Bruce Boehrer, for instance, in Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England, posits that there are three basic views of animals found in the literature of those times: anthropomorphism, absolute anthropocentrism, and relative anthropocentrism. All of these are negative and refute kinship between humans and other species. Boehrer is typical in overlooking numerous indications of more positive feeling about our kinship with other animals. This bias is, I argue, rooted in the teachings of many of the most influential thinkers of the ages---the Church fathers and other philosophers to whom the public looked for answers to questions about humans' place in the world.;However, the idea that animals are beings with whom we share many areas of emotional, moral, and religious experience is not just post-Darwinian ideology based on modern science, the animal rights movement, growing environmental consciousness, or new age spirituality. Then as now, because humans engage with the world around us as affinitive beings rather than merely logical ones, we also find positive views of animals and human relations with them, although these get little attention and are too often explained away as a literary device which doesn't reflect anything real or valuable about animals and the ways we thing about, interact with, and represent them. I call these positive views of animals and our kinship with the affinitive anthropomorphism.;I also argue that reading animals only through the lenses of the teachings of past authorities ---as many present day scholars do obscures important indications of more affinitive feeling toward beasts, thus limiting our understanding of the range of potential meanings to be found in these texts. I explore three areas of potential kinship---emotional, moral, and spiritual---as they are seen by our own authorities and those of the time-frame of this dissertation, and as we find them affinitively represented in a variety of poetry and drama.;KEYWORDS: medieval and early modem, animal representations, disaffection, anthropomorphism, affinitive anthropomorphism. |
