Theorising Biocitizenship, 1550-1660

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"First presented in Petryna's 2002 work on relations between the Ukrainian government and citizens affected by the Chernobyl disaster, the idea of "biological citizenship" has been used by scholars to scrutinise "the relationship between politics, identity, and biology" (Cooter, 2008). While literature on biocitizenship attends exclusively to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some of its foundational ideas have roots in an early modern epistemology: ideas of bodily commonality or exclusivity, of rights and power based on biology, and anxieties over figures which transgress a biological norm. Biocitizenship asks how and where rights are understood to inhere in or be created through biological commonality and difference. This makes it a productive tool for examining a period of flourishing zoological knowledge and anatomical study, when the exceptional position of man was the subject of intense debate, as Fudge, Raber, Boehrer and Thomas have shown. My reading to date has moved outwards from anthropology, drawing together authors including Haraway, Agamben and Foucault to distil a definition of biocitizenship appropriate to early modern material. Taking inspiration from Enenkel's work on early modern taxonomy, the first section of my thesis examines how early moderns identified and discriminated among their fellow biocitizens. The chapter investigates texts which categorise and collect, from natural history encyclopaedias such as Topsell's Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607), to anatomical textbooks and previously unstudied visual compendia where assorted human, animal and plant life mingles chaotically on the page. The second section investigates instances of non-human animals participating in discussions about their existence. Howell's neglected dialogue, Therologia (1660), is a compelling example of the voices brought to imaginative life in debates over sublunary citizenship. Based on classical and humanist precursors, which I will explore in detail, Howell's text is an extended discussion of human exceptionalism. I will examine this text alongside predecessors which invoke talking animals, including Baldwin's Beware the Cat (1553) and Gascoigne's The Noble Arte of Venerie (1575). In each text, techniques of identification and discrimination are transformed through fiction into debates over physical and political kinship. Having examined attempts at taxonomy and mastery, and creative interpellations of animal voices, the final section of my thesis will open out to staged disruptions of the boundary between rational man and the natural world. A contentious point of distinction between man and animal, rationality is a crucial factor in theorising early modern biocitizenship. Informed by Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Rhodes' Elizabethan Grotesque and Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust, I explore that which reason opposes: madness and filth. Shannon & Höfele have written incisive explorations of the natural world in King Lear, but neither acknowledges the role Lear's mental deterioration plays in his relationship to nature. This section's focus on the malfunction of a distinctly human quality picks up on the theme of decay in other key sources, including the work of Marston, which displays a striking interest in the innards, fluids, & filth of human existence. These destabilising encounters with animality generate a darker version of the early modern biocitizen, which works antagonistically to traditional perceptions of Renaissance man, positing a base and infectious humanity: a biocitizenry repulsed by itself. The dynamics of biocitizenship can be felt within a host of early modern literatures; my thesis demonstrates that the concept has applications beyond our contemporary world. My fiercely interdisciplinary project argues for an early modern biocitizenship in which human isolation & exile persist alongside forms of connectedness & an expanded sense of biological commonality which presents both risk & reward.