Milking other men's beasts

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also—and inseparably—asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so frequently goes without comment in historical (as in other humanities) scholarship. Using work from historiography, sensory history, social history, anthropology, and contemporary animal science, the article proposes that introducing animals as actors and not just as objects into historical work will not only broaden and deepen what we might know about the past, it will also challenge some assumptions as to what the focus of our discipline might be.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)n/a
Number of pages16
JournalHistory and Theory
Volumen/a
Issue numbern/a
Early online date7 Oct 2013
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013

Keywords

  • animal studies
  • historiography
  • renaissance
  • sensory studies
  • legal history
  • agricultural history

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