Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century, the species became a population and became subject to political management. Foucault’s claim defines the political stakes of this book, whose point of departure is the loss of a theological ground for the species concept. As species become targets of political power, they become mutable and historically contingent. The book argues that a result is that species come to be identified with aesthetic categories and with symptomatic or unmotivated behaviors.

This chapter addresses a topic – health – that has come to light in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bringing together animal studies and the medical humanities, the chapter examines key texts from Leo Africanus, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, and others to trace close historical and discursive relationships between human and animal health. Focusing largely on diseases thought to be what we would now call zoonotic, or transferable from nonhuman animals to humans, the chapter seeks to make apparent the significance of cross-species infections that, before antibiotics and most vaccines, helped shape literature, trade, health, and imperial order. Although rabies provided the most recognizable model of cross-species infection, the chapter begins with locust swarms, which offered many Christian writers a model for articulating global connections between pests and pestilence, then turns to shipboard rats, which, even before germ theory, were thought by many early moderns to function as harbingers of death and disease. Having demonstrated how deeply cross-species contagion was entangled with theological definitions about what it is be human, the chapter ends by exploring a little known topic – early modern and eighteenth-century cattle plague – and its implications for reimagining a multispecies medical posthumanities.

The introduction charts the ways in which literary studies and animal studies have formed a mutually enriching dialogue. Starting with a selection of contemporary short stories, and exploring questions of exploitation, anthropomorphism, and metaphor, it demonstrates how animals alter the way we think about, write, and read literature. The introduction includes a summary of the chapters contained in the book.

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are psychiatric conditions that express by a wide range of symptoms. Current treatments are effective in controlling so-called positive symptoms (e.g., delusions or hallucinations) but are often less effective for negative symptoms (e.g., blunted affect and passive social withdrawal) as well as for cognitive impairments. Further, current anti-psychotics may induce several side-effects that limit use and patient adherence. Therefore, mechanistically novel anti-psychotics are urgently needed. Cannabidiol, a major cannabinoid of Cannabis sativa, has been investigated in both animal models for aspects of schizophrenia, clinical studies, and controlled trials. Animal studies have raised substantial evidence for cannabidiol’s anti-psychotic effects. While controlled clinical trials have shown mixed results, studies using cannabidiol at higher dosages have demonstrated its ability to ameliorate psychotic symptoms while showing a relatively benign side-effect profile. Although the currently available data is short of any proof justifying the registration of cannabidiol as an anti-psychotic at present, the data from phase II clinical trials justify further study of cannabidiol’s antipsychotic properties in controlled clinical trials to clarify its therapeutic value and safety profile, notably in long-term treatment. In addition, more insight into its mechanisms of action may broaden our understanding of new targets for treatment.

The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.

The interdisciplinary field of animal studies owes much to Darwin’s work, particularly in the Descent of Man, where he claims that mental and emotional capacities ranging from an ability to reason to an aesthetic sense exist in other animals besides humans. This chapter examines the significance of Darwin’s work for animal ethics, the science of animal behavior, theories of companion species, and the age of mass extinction. Activists, scientists, humanists, and environmentalists continue to find new uses for Darwin’s work as they pursue greater knowledge about the animal kingdom and more just ecological communities.

New product development processes need to be compliant to regulatory requirements, and this chapter highlights the salient processes and quality systems to put into place to achieve success. Project management is made simple with specific tools provided here. Customer feedback is channeled into specific product characteristics, and the right tools are shown in this chapter. The biopharma industry has statistics showing less than 10% of starting compounds succeed in reaching market approval, and this chapter explains what causes these failures. The key issues that have repeatedly caused failure during device and diagnostic product development are also pointed out. Ethical decisions have to be made during product development as shown in this chapter. Outsourcing is a real option due to the availability of many contract research and manufacturing organizations, and judicious use of this option is discussed in this chapter. Key milestones that reduce risk and show transition from early stage to preclinical prototype stages are reviewed here. Does the popular concept of minimum viable product in software development apply in biomedicine prototyping? Other similar questions that help the reader understand pitfalls and best practices are answered here.

Chapter two delineates ‘the science of language’ as it developed from the philosophical speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder to the establishment of the ‘New Philology’ in the 1860s. Even as philosophers recognised significant continuities between birdsong, speech and poetry, they also, however, increasingly turned their attention to the internal, mental faculties as the distinguishing marks of an evolved and uniquely human language. This chapter examines the wider implications of a developing equation of language and thought in the long nineteenth century. The apparent absence of language in animals was widely seen to reflect a lack of intelligence, reason or even consciousness. Since language reflected the unique faculties of the human mind, philosophers of all stripes raced to discover an intrinsic set of principles common to all human languages throughout time and across continents. According to this same principle, however, differences between languages were also seen to reflect or even determine differences in the minds of their speakers. As they responded to these larger debates, scientists and poets throughout this period, from William Wordsworth to Charles Darwin, reflected on their personal experiences and the notorious difficulty they habitually encountered in attempting to translate their own thoughts into words.

John Clare’s transcription of the nightingale’s song has been praised as ‘the most accurate rendering in words of any bird’s voice for nearly a century’. But the so-called ‘peasant poet’ was not naïve. Chapter four argues that Clare’s educational background and multifarious interests in poetry, science and natural history made him singly alert to the difficulties inherent within his own attempt to ‘syllable the sounds’ of the nightingale. The chapter places Clare’s writing in a pivotal, though pre-Darwinian, stage of the ‘science of birdsong’: a period in which all kinds of ‘facts’ about birdsong were being collected, compared and vigorously disputed. Watching the bird closely as it inwardly mutters its undersong, or stammers or hurries over ill-remembered passages, Clare witnessed the kind of behaviour which would ultimately challenge the ‘foolish lyes’ uttered by both poets and philosophers regarding how and why birds sing. By exploring the deep connections which Clare draws between the ‘muttering’ of the bird while practising its songs and his own processes of composition, the chapter seeks to challenge and break down some of the binary distinctions which have framed responses to the writings of this so-called ‘peasant-poet’: ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, ‘instinctive’ and ‘learned’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘premeditated’ art.

This chapter places Thomas Hardy’s writings in the context of the heated arguments that arose between Charles Darwin and his most outspoken adversary, the philologist Max Müller, regarding the relationship between language and thought. While Müller insisted on a close, coeval relationship between the ability to frame ideas and the ability to express those ideas in words, Darwin throughout his writing demonstrates a lively fascination with the diverse and dynamic kinds of thinking that human beings and other animals appear able to perform ‘manifestly without the aid of language’ (Descent of Man, 1871). This chapter argues that Hardy’s writing is centrally concerned with the tragi-comic consequences of a world in which there is both language without thought and thought without language. It begins by exploring Hardy’s responses to these larger concerns in his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891-2) and concludes by examining his return to this theme in his poetry. The chapter discusses a wide range of Hardy’s poems, from canonical pieces such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) to lesser-known works, including the series of short poems that Hardy is believed to have contributed to his second wife Florence Emily Dugdale’s volume for children, The Book of Baby Birds (1912).

The introductory chapter outlines the book’s approach to renderings of birdsong in poems. It addresses recent studies which have emphasised the dangers of anthropomorphism and the poet’s consequent propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale | Of his own sorrow’ (‘The Nightingale’, 1796). As the ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has argued, however, this scholarly obsession with anthropomorphism all too frequently slides into a form of what he terms ‘anthropodenial’: ‘the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals’ which ‘denotes wilful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves’ and ‘reflects a pre-Darwinian antipathy to the profound similarities between human and animal behaviour (e.g. maternal care, sexual behaviour, power seeking) noticed by anyone with an open mind’ (‘Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial’, 2009). While de Waal has called for a more open-minded approach to the study of our nearest relatives, the primates, this book sketches out a long history of ‘wilful blindness’ towards birdsong as an everyday example of the agency, skill and artfulness possessed by other creatures.