Fish climbing trees, storks taking care of their parents⦠Premodern textual and visual culture presents us with a fabulous bestiary that reveals ingenious and rich reflections on the animal kingdom. The studies united in this volume will allow you to discover animals in all their possible states: are they simple anthropomorphic images of man? Models to follow? Or autonomous beings, equal or even superior to man? By exploring a large diversity of texts â fables, poetry, novels, travel narratives, emblematic works â and visual media â paintings, tapestries, jewellery, this richly illustrated volume displays the fruitful premodern exchanges between natural history and culture. It follows new trends in cultural criticism by implicitly interrogating the need to move beyond the reigning paradigms of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism.
Alisa van de Haar is an assistant professor of French historical literature at Leiden University. Her research is devoted to the French language and literature of the sixteenth-century Low Countries (The Golden Mean of Languages. Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1540-1620, Brill, 2019).
14 Marcus Gheeraerts, Source of Inspiration for Tapestry-Designers
âSixteenth-Century Fable-Illustrations Used in Seventeenth-Century Tapestries
âDirk Geirnaert
15 The Unicornus Marinum of Dr Nicolaes Tulp
âA Scottish Sea-Unicorn Adrift
âM.M. Zijlstra-Mondt
26 Figurations animalières dans les Åuvres poetiques (1606) de Jean Passerat
âFrançois Rouget
27 Horses of Power and Passion
âHorses and Their Riders in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Adaptations of the Spanish Comedia
âOlga van Marion and Tim Vergeer
28 But What Does He Do All Day?
âBeing an Animal in Paradise Lost
âJan Frans van Dijkhuizen
29 De vol en vol â Raymond Roussel et les oiseaux
âSjef Houppermans
30 Mythographie animalière dans Le Roi des aulnes de Michel Tournier
âNicolaas van der Toorn
31 Slow Reading on the Wing
âEntangling Enactive Literary Criticism, the Energia of Early Modern Imagining, and Artistic Research
âSophie van Romburgh