How to Do Things with Animals: Thoughts on/with the Early Modern Cat

Abstract

This is an essay about cute furry little cats and kittens.1 If that statement, opening a scholarly essay in a volume on early modern ecostudies, makes you pause, or worse, squirm with discomfort, you would be in excellent company. Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World includes cats, as well as horses and dogs, among the “privileged species” that grew closer to humans than other animals than their wild or domesticated fellows, but where most serious historical and cultural criticism is concerned, the cat is not a privileged animal at all. There is a hierarchy of animals in the world of animal studies: dogs and horses are excellent subjects; monkeys, birds, wild animals, cattle are all acceptable, and even vermin are worthy of attention. Such a hierarchy reflects broader early modern cultural studies interests in human identity, status, disciplinary boundaries, global trade, economic change, and so on. Cats, for some reason, fall off this hierarchy, or perhaps simply vacillate within and without it—although they are ubiquitous in the literature, art, and quotidian experience of early moderns, they do not make much of an appearance in the scholarly record.