“Writing with undeniable meticulousness and care, Shannon undertakes to weave together an incredibly broad range of dense subject matter, from philosophy and ethics to history, literature, myth, and science. . . . Readable and engaging. . . . Highly recommended.”

Choice

“This big, beautiful, growling, howling book is as revelatory about language as it is about the natural history of our animal kinships: the ‘curtailed’ dog, the ‘sovereignties’ of motion, and the ‘race’ of locomotive animals invite us to encounter familiar words on all fours, our phantom tails and impotent noses newly alert to semantic climate changes.”

Julia Reinhard Lupton | Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

 “In forceful, vivid, sometimes playful language, Shannon lays out a conception of community as cosmopolity.”

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

“With striking fluency and originality, Shannon sets out to retrieve from the long sixteenth century an all-inclusive model, lost to modernity, by which the world was consigned to all living creatures. . . . There is exacting precision and strong logic, to be sure, but there is also a happy way with words. It is what makes her Herculean labors look easy.”

Shakespeare Quarterly

“Beautifully written and carefully researched. . . . Offers brilliant readings.”

Renaissance and Reformation

“Brilliant. . . . With inexorable logic and playful wit, Shannon makes the case for animals’ role in defining concepts of justice, tyranny, and sovereignty in early modern Europe. . . . Shannon’s work should be required reading for anyone interested in early modern animals, animal studies, or posthumanist theory; but it will also greatly influence analyses of Shakespeare, and will introduce readers to a number of regrettably overlooked texts like Baldwin’s or Gelli’s. . . . It advances the field significantly.”

Renaissance Quarterly

“An ambitious and piercing study of the status of animals in early modern culture. . . . Situates Shakespeare in a larger . . . discourse that intertwines history, philosophy and literature.”
 

Memoria di Shakespeare

“No other early modernist prosecutes a case with the exactitude of Laurie Shannon, whose ethical attention to the exercise of rights and authority informs every word she writes. With acumen and grace, she reveals the presence of a zootopian constitution, in which humans and other animals were all included within the scope of meaningful justice. Beyond issuing a potent challenge to the common practice of reading animals as metaphors for human behaviors—and thereby radically revising our interpretations of central texts—she opens a capacious window onto the cosmopolity of early modern culture.”

Valerie Traub, University of Michigan

“In this wonderfully written and deeply researched book, Laurie Shannon unearths in early modern culture what teems beneath the generic designation, ‘animal,’ to which we have become accustomed over the past four hundred years: a wild and woolly ‘zoography’ of fish and fowl, ‘beasts’ and ‘brutes,’ nonhuman agents and four-footed actors, all cheek to jowl with human beings as ‘fellow-commoners’ in a trans-species polity, where questions of sovereignty, tyranny, and justice bear directly upon how we treat nonhuman beings. Ranging across legal, literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific texts, The Accommodated Animal finds posthumanism very much alive and well, avant la lettre, in the early modern period’s soul-searching attempts to secure our place among the remarkable variety of life that challenges our most cherished and self-flattering biases about the human animal.”

Cary Wolfe, Rice University

 “Beautifully written, Laurie Shannon’s book explores ways in which questions of sovereignty and rule bear on our treatment of non-human beings, posing a wonderful challenge to our complacent view of what we think it means to be human. A book to set beside Montaigne.”

David Bevington, University of Chicago