Posthuman bears: Sight, agency, and baiting in Early Modern England

Lewis, Liam 2023. Posthuman bears: Sight, agency, and baiting in Early Modern England. Grimm, Oliver, ed. Bear and Human: Facets of a Multi-Layered Relationship from Past to Recent Times, with Emphasis on Northern Europe, Vol. 3. The Archaeology of Northern Europe, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, pp. 175-183. (10.1484/M.TANE-EB.5.134333)

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Abstract

In Early Modern England it would have been common to see a bear in major towns. Bears were baited in arenas for entertainment and spectacle in ways that deprived them of agency while simultaneously bolstering human exceptionalism. However, looking closely at bears from cultural, social and biological perspectives, it becomes increasingly clear that there was more to these encounters than first meets the eye. Bears would have been cared for, as well as exploited by, their companion bearwards, and accounts of bear baiting emphasise how some bears were blind for the sport. Reading these encounters with a posthuman lens, attentive to asymmetrical power relations and attuned to shifting categories of the human, this essay demonstrates how bears and bearwards were at once companion species, even as the exploitation of bears brought into question the types of agency and encounter at work in the baiting arena.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Brepols
ISBN:	9782503606118
Funders:	Arts and Humanities Research Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 February 2025
Date of Acceptance:	1 July 2023
Last Modified:	07 Feb 2025 11:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175987

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