Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature

This book explores how humans in the Renaissance considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically, yet post-Cartesian readings have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Bach shows how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture. Asking how and why Renaissance categorizations differ so much from modern classifications, and why those have shaped much Animal Studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare’s and other Renaissance texts.