Erik Fudge
Biographic Data
| ID | 209702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erik Fudge |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erik |
| FAMILY NAME | Fudge |
| SIGNATURE | FUDGE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6903-7205 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Aesop’s vomit: Or, stomach problems in early modern England
This essay tracks ideas about the stomach in early modern England and the perceived dangers that its actions presented to the status of the human.The argument moves from the depiction of the belly in early modern drama with its reflection on the vulnerability of human control; through medical ideas about eating and diet and the transformation of food into matter for use in, or expulsion from, the body; and, finally, it ponders the representation …
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals surveys the role of animals across literary history and opens conversations on what literature can teach us about more-than-human life. Leading international scholars comprehensively explore how engaging with creatures of various kinds alters our understanding of what it means to write and read, and why this is important for thinking about a series of cultural, ethical, political, and scientific d…
The History of Animals in the Present Moment: Rumination 2.0
This ‘Rumination’ updates my original ‘Rumination’ on animal history from 2006 and looks back over the past fifteen years at the ways that the field of animal history has developed. It turns, in the conclusion, to think about the impact that discussions about the Anthropocene have had on historiographical discussions
Joanna Bourke, Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love
Review of Joanna Bourke, Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love (Reaktion Books, 2020) ISBN 978-1-78914-310-2 191pp
The Flourishing and Challenging Field of Animal-Human History
This is a book review of: Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019. 560 pp When I was doing my PhD at the University of Sussex in the early 1990s, I remember being approached by another postgrad in the School of English and American Studies: “Are you the person doing the PhD on bear baiting?” he asked. When I answered in the affirmative, he noted: “It’s nice that …
Thinking with Vinciane Despret (Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions)

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
What Was It Like to Be a Cow: History and Animal Studies
This chapter outlines where the history of animals is now, and suggests where it and the historiographical issues raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The chapter traces shifts in the idea that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recove…
Pets
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' - Michel de Montaigne. Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one…
Milking Other Men's Beasts
This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also-and inseparably-asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so freq…
The Animal Face of Early Modern England
This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure …
Renaissance Animal Things
This article uses thing theory to explore the uses of two animal things common in Renaissane culture: leather and civet. It argues that, even as the animal is dismembered and its parts used in the manufacture of commodities - gloves, perfume - those objects have a power to change the world in which they are used: that animal things are not inert, and are not simply evidence of human dominion, but are themselves active presences in culture
Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Attempting Animal Histories
Review of the six-volume set "A cultural history of animals" by Linda Kalof, Brigitte Resl
The Human Face of Early Modern England
This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningf…
Why it's easy being a vegetarian
If questions about nutritional value are set aside, what purpose does the act of consuming an animal possess? I take this as my central question here because meat-eating is not just an issue of nutrition: as Derrida wrote: 'and who can be made to believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are irreplaceable?'1 There is something else going on when an animal's flesh is consumed
At the Heart of the Home: An Animal Reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog

Pets
Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal. Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion a…
Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge expl…
Can We Differ from, and Live on Equal Terms with, Nonhuman Animals? Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism
The Dog, the Home and the Human, and the Ancestry of Derrida's Cat
There are many stories, told by philosophers, historians, poets, about dogs, those loyal companions of our moments of recreation. In these stories, which are often played out in the most familiar locations, the absence of the dog is a mark of disorder, its presence order, and thus we find ourselves, in these tales we tell, at home, at peace – with dogs. Indeed, the stories told about dogs, we might argue, are never really about dogs at all, they …
Introduction: Viewing Animals
The introduction to this special issue of Worldviews goes back to the first European encounters with the New World as a way of opening up a discussion about the nature of viewing animals. I argue that, just as the Europeans transformed this New World into a recognisable one in the sixteenth century, so too do we constantly transform the natural world that we view. The process of comprehension is offered as classification followed by observation, …
Learning to laugh
This essay explores the construction of the human in early modern English thought, and uses discussions of the nature and use of laughter as a distinguishing feature of humanity from classical arguments as well as early modern ones. Using these classical, reformed English discussions of education and of the nature of children reveals an anxiety about the status of the child. Laughing appropriately - using tile mind and not merely the body - is a …
Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier
2002). Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Anthrozoos: Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 367-369
Pets
Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal. Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion a…
Branching structure within the syllable
Arguments about constituency in syntax can often be settled by such methods as testing whether conjoining is possible, or whether a particular string can be moved as a single constituent by a transformational rule. In view of the isomorphism which has been noted between syntactic structures and phonological structures (cf. Clements & Keyser, 1983:25–26; the notion of ‘structural analogy’ in Anderson & Durand, 1986:3; and most notably the isomorph…
Milking Other Men's Beasts
This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also-and inseparably-asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so freq…
The Animal Face of Early Modern England
This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure …
Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge expl…
Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England
What Was It Like to Be a Cow: History and Animal Studies
This chapter outlines where the history of animals is now, and suggests where it and the historiographical issues raised by the inclusion of animals in a study of the past might go in the future. The chapter traces shifts in the idea that animals recorded in textual documentation are always and only human representations, looks at the potential for animals to be historical agents and at the questions of animal agency and the possibility of recove…
Phonological structure and ‘expressiveness’
Words of certain semantic types which can be subsumed under the label ‘expressive’ (notably onomatopoeias, movement words, and words with pejorative, jocular, or intense connotations) have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with peculiarities of phonological structure – these peculiarities include types of sounds, sound-sequences and syllable-structures which can be regarded as peripheral in the language concerned
At the Heart of the Home: An Animal Reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog

Learning to laugh
This essay explores the construction of the human in early modern English thought, and uses discussions of the nature and use of laughter as a distinguishing feature of humanity from classical arguments as well as early modern ones. Using these classical, reformed English discussions of education and of the nature of children reveals an anxiety about the status of the child. Laughing appropriately - using tile mind and not merely the body - is a …
Long and short [æ] in one Southern British speaker's English
1. Several of the standard works on English pronunciation speak of exceptional cases of lengthening of 'short' vowels, and of [æ] in particular:'In the South of England a fully long æː is generally used in the adjectives ending in -ad (bad bæːd, sad sæːd, etc.), and is quite common in some nouns, e.g. man mæːn or mæn, bag bæːg or bæg, jam dʒæːm or dʒæm. ... the words back, that (meaning 'that thing') at the end of a sentence are often pronounced …
Pets
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' - Michel de Montaigne. Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one…
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier
2002). Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Anthrozoos: Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 367-369
The History of Animals in the Present Moment: Rumination 2.0
This ‘Rumination’ updates my original ‘Rumination’ on animal history from 2006 and looks back over the past fifteen years at the ways that the field of animal history has developed. It turns, in the conclusion, to think about the impact that discussions about the Anthropocene have had on historiographical discussions
The Flourishing and Challenging Field of Animal-Human History
This is a book review of: Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019. 560 pp When I was doing my PhD at the University of Sussex in the early 1990s, I remember being approached by another postgrad in the School of English and American Studies: “Are you the person doing the PhD on bear baiting?” he asked. When I answered in the affirmative, he noted: “It’s nice that …
Thinking with Vinciane Despret (Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions)

Attempting Animal Histories
Review of the six-volume set "A cultural history of animals" by Linda Kalof, Brigitte Resl
The Human Face of Early Modern England
This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningf…
Why it's easy being a vegetarian
If questions about nutritional value are set aside, what purpose does the act of consuming an animal possess? I take this as my central question here because meat-eating is not just an issue of nutrition: as Derrida wrote: 'and who can be made to believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are irreplaceable?'1 There is something else going on when an animal's flesh is consumed
Can We Differ from, and Live on Equal Terms with, Nonhuman Animals? Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism
The Dog, the Home and the Human, and the Ancestry of Derrida's Cat
There are many stories, told by philosophers, historians, poets, about dogs, those loyal companions of our moments of recreation. In these stories, which are often played out in the most familiar locations, the absence of the dog is a mark of disorder, its presence order, and thus we find ourselves, in these tales we tell, at home, at peace – with dogs. Indeed, the stories told about dogs, we might argue, are never really about dogs at all, they …
Words and feet
This article challenges the commonly-held assumption that words, feet and syllables fit into a single phonological hierarchy, and in particular that feet are always sub-units of words. A number of facts of English rhythm are cited which cannot be accounted for unless words and feet are taken to be units of different hierarchies: many of the differences of rhythm between phrases of otherwise similar phonological structure which are noted by Abercr…
Syllable structure: A reply to Davis
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Phonological structure and ‘expressiveness’
Words of certain semantic types which can be subsumed under the label ‘expressive’ (notably onomatopoeias, movement words, and words with pejorative, jocular, or intense connotations) have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with peculiarities of phonological structure – these peculiarities include types of sounds, sound-sequences and syllable-structures which can be regarded as peripheral in the language concerned
Long and short [æ] in one Southern British speaker's English
1. Several of the standard works on English pronunciation speak of exceptional cases of lengthening of 'short' vowels, and of [æ] in particular:'In the South of England a fully long æː is generally used in the adjectives ending in -ad (bad bæːd, sad sæːd, etc.), and is quite common in some nouns, e.g. man mæːn or mæn, bag bæːg or bæg, jam dʒæːm or dʒæm. ... the words back, that (meaning 'that thing') at the end of a sentence are often pronounced …
English Word-Stress
Branching structure within the syllable
Arguments about constituency in syntax can often be settled by such methods as testing whether conjoining is possible, or whether a particular string can be moved as a single constituent by a transformational rule. In view of the isomorphism which has been noted between syntactic structures and phonological structures (cf. Clements & Keyser, 1983:25–26; the notion of ‘structural analogy’ in Anderson & Durand, 1986:3; and most notably the isomorph…
Syllable structure: A reply to Davis
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period
Words and feet
This article challenges the commonly-held assumption that words, feet and syllables fit into a single phonological hierarchy, and in particular that feet are always sub-units of words. A number of facts of English rhythm are cited which cannot be accounted for unless words and feet are taken to be units of different hierarchies: many of the differences of rhythm between phrases of otherwise similar phonological structure which are noted by Abercr…
Introduction to Special Edition: Reading Animals
This article is an introduction to a special issue of Worldviews. It discusses reading animals
Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier
2002). Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West Eric Baratay and Elizabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Anthrozoos: Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 367-369
Learning to laugh
This essay explores the construction of the human in early modern English thought, and uses discussions of the nature and use of laughter as a distinguishing feature of humanity from classical arguments as well as early modern ones. Using these classical, reformed English discussions of education and of the nature of children reveals an anxiety about the status of the child. Laughing appropriately - using tile mind and not merely the body - is a …
Introduction: Viewing Animals
The introduction to this special issue of Worldviews goes back to the first European encounters with the New World as a way of opening up a discussion about the nature of viewing animals. I argue that, just as the Europeans transformed this New World into a recognisable one in the sixteenth century, so too do we constantly transform the natural world that we view. The process of comprehension is offered as classification followed by observation, …
Can We Differ from, and Live on Equal Terms with, Nonhuman Animals? Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism
The Dog, the Home and the Human, and the Ancestry of Derrida's Cat
There are many stories, told by philosophers, historians, poets, about dogs, those loyal companions of our moments of recreation. In these stories, which are often played out in the most familiar locations, the absence of the dog is a mark of disorder, its presence order, and thus we find ourselves, in these tales we tell, at home, at peace – with dogs. Indeed, the stories told about dogs, we might argue, are never really about dogs at all, they …
Pets
Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal. Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion a…
Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England
Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward-or as reflexively anthropocentric-as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge expl…
At the Heart of the Home: An Animal Reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog

Why it's easy being a vegetarian
If questions about nutritional value are set aside, what purpose does the act of consuming an animal possess? I take this as my central question here because meat-eating is not just an issue of nutrition: as Derrida wrote: 'and who can be made to believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are irreplaceable?'1 There is something else going on when an animal's flesh is consumed
Attempting Animal Histories
Review of the six-volume set "A cultural history of animals" by Linda Kalof, Brigitte Resl
The Human Face of Early Modern England
This essay traces out the context that allowed numerous early modern thinkers to deny that animals had faces. Using early- to mid-seventeenth-century writing by, among others, John Milton, John Bulwer and Ben Jonson, it shows that faces were understood to be sites of meaning, and were thus, like gestural language and the capacity to perform a dance, possessed by humans alone. Animals, this discourse argued, have no ability to communicate meaningf…
Renaissance Animal Things
This article uses thing theory to explore the uses of two animal things common in Renaissane culture: leather and civet. It argues that, even as the animal is dismembered and its parts used in the manufacture of commodities - gloves, perfume - those objects have a power to change the world in which they are used: that animal things are not inert, and are not simply evidence of human dominion, but are themselves active presences in culture
Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Milking Other Men's Beasts
This article takes as its point of departure a small piece of evidence: a single-line entry in a seventeenth-century Essex Sessions Roll about the theft of milk. This fragment of the legal archive and the world it offers us a glimpse of are used to explore what it might mean to take seriously the presence of animals as historical actors. The article also-and inseparably-asks us to think about the nature of that being called the human that so freq…
The Animal Face of Early Modern England
This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure …
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Philosophy (19 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Art (13 works) · History (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Environmental ethics (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)