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1 results

  • Chapter 8 - Religion

  • from Part II - Contexts and Controversies
  • Edited by Derek Ryan, University of Kent, Canterbury
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
    Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 153-169

  • Summary

    In the works of controversy that poured from the presses in the century after the Reformation in England, religious opponents regularly called each other by the names of animals. Biblical animals were favored by both puritans and conformists in the early Tudor era, as controversialists sought to claim for their own words the authority of scripture. The metaphoric animals employed by Elizabethan controversialists were more varied, derived from biblical, classical, and some popular sources. By the mid-seventeenth century, the rhetorical animals evoked by religious controversialists were drawn from a wide range of mostly secular sources and were notable for figuring predatory violence, monstrosity, and grotesqueness. Everyday experience of animals was kept strictly separate from the roles that they were assigned in polemical tracts. Arguably, the extreme animalizing of opponents contributed to the failure of negotiation and compromise as civil war approached.