Sexuality, Festivity, and Animality in the English Renaissance

Catalog description

This course surveys early modern texts to ask what roles sex and sexuality and celebrations and festivities play in constructing the concept of the animal (human and non-human)? This course will explore the strategies that early modern texts (poems and plays, religious and scientific tracts, works of political philosophy and household management) used to represent, categorize, know, and speak of and for animals (human and non-human). Scholarly essays, articles, book chapters, and the occasional book will invite us to consider how the early modern texts continue to live within works of history, theory, literary criticism, and popular culture. More particularly, we will investigate how critical writings form objects of study, such as sex and sexuality or ritual celebrations and festivities, through their engagement with the early modern texts we are reading