Brutal Reasoning Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England

"Surveying a wide range of texts - religious, philosophical, literary, even comic - Erica Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the human and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being "human" meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look."--BOOK JACKET.