This book outlines a central thesis, which, put simply, asserts that the study of early modern attitudes toward animals, mainly in the long eighteenth century, has unjustifiably concentrated on the history of philosophy and science and has failed to give adequate attention to emerging historiographical and economic conceptions of animals. A concomitant of this traditional approach has been an undue concentration on debates about the physical, and mainly mental, similarities and dissimilarities of humans and animals and also, in many cases, an overstatement of the rise of a modern morally sensitive attitude toward animals in the Enlightenment. In departing from this common historiography, the book begins intentionally with a discussion of the more familiar territory of the intellectual history of attitudes toward animals in science and philosophy but then gradually moves to the history of historiographical and economic conceptions of animals. In this way the importance of the more familiar materials is not denied, but at the same time the novelty of the less familiar materials can be comparatively appreciated. From a methodological vantage point as well, the interdisciplinary nature of the discussion, and specifically the integration of visual artistic sources into the field of intellectual history, is meant to show that the history of early modern attitudes toward animals is far from a limited philosophical or scientific topic.

Not long ago, the study of the history of attitudes toward animals still seemed to require justification. Recent years have seen a growing stream of publications in this field, making any such justification all but redundant. Particular attention has been devoted to early modern attitudes toward animals. This is no accident. It was during the early modern era that the cultural and intellectual consideration of animals gradually assumed its modern form. By the end of the eighteenth century, the way people viewed and discussed animals was in many ways similar to the way they are perceived today. In this as in so many other respects, the long eighteenth century proved to be the transition to modernity. A major topic of interest among scholars of this topic has been the difference between early modern theriophily (“love of animals”), most notably as exemplified by Michel de Montaigne, and the more stringent Cartesian “beast-machine” theory of animal automatism.