Abstract
William Perkins offers what seems like a very straightforward definition of the difference between the human and the animal:
the proper subjects of co[n]science are reasonable creatures, that is men and Angels. Hereby conscience is excluded … from bruit beasts: for though they haue life & sense, and in many things some shadowes of reason, yet because they want true reason, they want conscience also.1
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Notes
See R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘The Puritan Death-bed, c.1560–c.1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, ed., The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 124. For the reasons outlined in Durston and Eales’ useful introduction to this collection I avoid the term ‘puritan’ throughout the rest of this book. See Durston and Eales, ‘Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700’, especially pp. 1–6.
Ian Breward, ‘Introduction/ to Breward, ed., The Work of William Perkins (Appleforth: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), p. 42.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On The Dignity of Man (1486), translated by Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 5.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559 edition), translated by Henry Beveridge (London: James Clarke & Co, 1949), Volume I, pp. 210–11.
Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 240.
Stevie Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Davies ed., Renaissance Views of Man, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p. 15.
On this see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (London: Harvard University Press, 1936).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, translated by James F. Anderson (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 267.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, translated by R. J. Batten (London: Blackfriars, 1975), p. 91. For a more detailed discussion of Aquinas’ understanding of animals see
Peter Drum, ‘Aquinas and the Moral Status of Animals’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 66: 4 (1992), 483–8.
For an overview of the literature dealing with the animal soul and the possibility of animal immortality see Peter Harrison, ‘Animal Souls, Metempsychosis, and Theodicy in Seventeenth-Century English Thought’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31: 4 (1993), 519–44.
Robert V. Schnucker writes that ‘the Catholic Church had argued that children were not capable of mortal sin until the age of seven’. Schnucker, ‘Puritan attitudes towards childhood discipline, 1560–1634’, in Valerie Fildes, ed., Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 114.
William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (1634), p. 528. On this issue see Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1978), especially pp. 47–8.
G. W. Bromiley, Baptism and the Anglican Reformers (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), p. 32;
Jonathan D. Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). I am indebted to Trigg’s account in the following paragraphs. For the ideas of other Reformed thinkers see McGrath, Reformation Thought, pp. 170–85.
Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther, pp. 23–5, quote, p. 24. On the vestiarian controversy, see M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (1939; reprinted London: Chicago University Press, 1970), pp. 187–216.
See e.g. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child Rearing, Religious Experience and The Self in Early America (New York: Meridian, 1979);
and John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
H. C. Porter argues that ‘the only pastoral answer to the problem [of predestination] was to assume that all pious hearers of the word were elected; however Calvinist in the study, the preacher must be Arminian in the pulpiť. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 312.
William Coster, ‘“From Fire and Water”: The Responsibilities of Godparents in Early Modern England’, in Diana Wood, ed., The Church and Childhood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 305.
Figure from Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1982), p. 190.
See Ian Green, ‘“For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”: The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37: 3 (1986), 397–425. Green states that ‘over 350 different catechitical forms or works can be traced, the vast majority of which, it should be added, were of English origin and were published after 1570’ (400).
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1591), 1, line 14, in Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 117. On the similar issue of erected wit and infected will in The Defence of Poetry (1579) Alan Sinfield argues that Sidney’s position is between ‘two stools of protestant thought’, Calvin’s and Hooker’s.
Sinfield, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Defence of Poetry’, in Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore, ed., Sir Philip Sidney and The Reinterpretation of Renaissance Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 135–6.
On the issue of the problem of double-predestination, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’ to Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3.
Adam Douglas, The Beast Within: Man, Myths and Werewolves (London: Orion, 1992), pp. 91–2. The last wolf in England was in captivity in the Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London, ‘kept on purpose because no wolves are to be found in England’. Gottfried von Bülow, ed., ‘Diary of the Journey of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, through England in the Year 1602’, T.R.HS., NS 6 (1892), 7.
For a discussion of the case and other printed material surrounding it see Caroline Oates, ‘Metamorphosis and Lycanthropy in Franche-Comté, 1521–1643’, in Michel Feher with Ramona Nadoff and Nadia Tazi, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part One (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 315–16.
Ibid., p. 16. Michael MacDonald has noted that the most serious crime at the time was a crime within the family: infanticide, matricide, parricide. These crimes, he argues, were often understood in terms of madness. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 128.
Henri Boguet, An Examen of Witches (1590), translated by E. Allen Ashwin (London: Richard Clay & Sons, 1929), pp. 143–4.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1613), in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ed., The Selected Plays of John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), especially V. ii. 1–80.
On Digby’s support of Decartes’ ideas see Marjorie Nicolson, ‘The Early Stage of Cartesianism in England’, Studies in Philology, 26 (1929), especially 357–8.
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637), translated by F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 74.
See, for example, Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men In The Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 85;
Norah Carlin, ‘Ireland and Natural Man in 1649’, in Francis Barker et al, ed., Europe and Its Others (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), pp. 91–111;
and John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 197.
See Hayden White, ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea’, in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, ed., The Wildman Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 7.
Arthur Dickson, ‘Introduction’, in Dickson, ed., Valentine and Orson (London: EETS O.S. 204, 1937).
Lloyd De Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in De Mause, ed., The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse, second edition (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988), p. 31.
W. G. Craven, Giovanni Pico Delia Mirandola, cited in Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 95.
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Fudge, E. (2000). Wild Beasts Making Havoc of the Soul: Animals, Humans and Religion. In: Perceiving Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62415-7_3
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