Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

What does it mean that Swift models the rational non-humans of Gulliver’s Travels on horses, instead of other animals? Taking up this question, I argue that part 4 confronts readers with the incongruity between traditional admiration of horses as the noblest animals and their systematic exploitation as beasts of burden. To set Swift’s perspective in relief, I compare his satire with representations of horses in natural histories by Topsell, Jonstonus, and Buffon, as well as an equestrian manual by William Cavendish. While the exploitation of noble horses does not disturb Topsell or Jonstonus, Buffon’s text betrays signs of anxiety, which it nevertheless attempts to suppress. Cavendish, meanwhile, asserts that the human/horse hierarchy must be enforced with continual vigilance precisely because of the horse’s signal nobility. In contrast, Swift exposes attitudes toward horses as intolerably contradictory. Crucially, Gulliver and the Houyhnhnm master’s conversation about the treatment of horses emphasizes the disparity between their admiration and abasement. Swift offers an example of more logically consistent justifications for exploitation in characterizations of the Yahoos, but it is unclear whether the text advocates better treatment for horses (to accord with their status as the noblest animals) or debunks idealizations of horses (to produce a more compelling rationalization for exploitation). Although I distinguish Swift’s perspective on horses from modern arguments for the ethical treatment of animals, I conclude by suggesting that Gulliver’s Travels, in its resistance to modern paradigms, provides a vantage point from which we might undertake a radical re-evaluation of the human/animal relationship.

Rational Elephants or Hominoid Apes:Which is Early Modern? Laura Brown (bio) and Bryan Alkemeyer (bio) This perspective on the term "early modern" as it is used in literary studies is based on two assumptions. The first one is that the term strongly privileges modernity, either by pointing forward toward modernity on behalf of the literary culture of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, or by using key categories associated with modernity to understand those earlier periods. Second, the discussion here assumes that concrete literary cultural phenomena that demonstrate either proximity or distance between modernity and the so-called "early modern period" are strategically useful in gauging the relevance of the phrase that we are seeking to evaluate. What are the key connections that underlie the privileging of modernity from the perspective of the category "early modern"? Most frequently, the literary culture of the earlier periods in question is drawn into the purview of modernity through its imaginative engagement with one or more of the major historical shifts that distinguish the medieval from the modern period—the political, social, and economic changes evident in the rise of enclosure, agricultural innovation, mercantile capitalism, imperialism, slavery, private property, credit, consumption, commodification, and nationalism, to name a few. This historical context, and the argument that these changes lead directly to modernity, have exerted a powerful shaping force on the development of the category of the early modern. Thus Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse characterize this period as an era of "startling and profound" transformations that create a connection between "intellectual and artistic practice" (7) and "the onset of modernity" (23). [End Page 61] The term "early modern," then, reflects an engagement with change on the part of literary studies, and in turn pushes the analysis of the literary culture of this period toward the discovery of revolution or novelty. The human-animal relation offers a focal point for a practical trial of this engagement with revolution. In intellectual history, questions about the definition of the human parallel those political, social, and economic changes that have come to shape the definition of the early modern. These questions emerge pointedly in connection with ideas about and representations of animals in imaginative literature. As historians have recently demonstrated, the so-called "early modern period" can be shown to contain fundamental shifts in the perception of the natural world that are based on new developments in natural history, empirical science, and biological classification, and include, in Keith Thomas's words, a "narrowing gap" (117) between human and animal, which in turn shapes some of the key ontological debates of modernity. Each of the two test cases that follow takes the imaginative representation of animals as an exemplary thesis—a concrete exploration of what is at stake in the use of the concept of early modern to describe the past. I The paradigm for the human-animal relation in the period from 1550 to 1750 differs sharply from the modern paradigm in two major ways. First, it uses narratives of magical transformations in order to compare humans with animals and to challenge common conceptions of human nature. Second, earlier writers view a variety of non-apes, including the elephant, pig, and horse, as crucial figures for defining human nature. To understand the human-animal relation in this period, modern readers must leave behind Darwinian notions about the transformation of species and the special status of the ape as the closest relative of the human. Since the term "early modern" might obscure these differences, "pre-modern" may be a more effective category for the human-animal relation in this period. The pre-modern tradition of transformation narratives adapts a dialogue by Plutarch; this recursion to a classical model attests to the enduring value of concepts such as "Renaissance" and "Neo-Classical," which describe these particular narratives more accurately than "early modern" would. Plutarch's dialogue "Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti" is itself an adaptation of the Circe episode from Homer's Odyssey.1 In Plutarch's innovative re-telling, a character named [End Page 62] Gryllus, who has been transformed from a human into a pig, temporarily regains the capacity for speech. Although Odysseus attempts to persuade Gryllus to accept...