16th
animals in the eighteenth-century
I am looking at animals both living and dead in the eighteenth-century. I am using the ideas of ‘object biographies’ to trace the journeys of these animals from their arrival in Britain to dissection and display in museums and other collections. I am also borrowing from ideas of ‘it-narratives’ in eighteenth-century literature - novels that talk about objects and their circulation. I am interested in applying ideas of animals as ‘things’ (albeit objects that feel and suffer) to a museological look at animal objects.
I do not believe that animals are objects but rather subjects or persons. But I want to show how contemporary ideas about animals as objects and the contradictions that are inherent to this perspective, emerged in the eighteenth-century. I don’t ahere to any progressive historical narrative of increased ‘humane’ attitudes towards animals throughout the eighteenth-century and into the contemporary. Instead I want to demonstrate how animals are culturally configured and contingent. I want to try and write a cultural biography of animals in the eighteenth-century that takes seriously eighteenth-century conceptions of animals. But in this process I hope that my work will reflect on contemporary ideas about animals as objects - and the challenge this poses to the status of zoological gardens and natural history musuems. More broadly I support a radical reassessment of our relationship with animals and a recognition of animals as autonomous subjects worthy of ethical consideration.
