Chapter 4 uses chronicles, hagiographies, ekphraseis and polemical treatises to discuss clerical hunting in Romanía. Prohibitions against clerical hunting had existed for Western men since Late Antiquity, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that Romanía followed the same pattern. In the Eastern Roman context, narratives of clerical hunting did not put the emphasis on differences between secular and religious men, and non-participation did not entail the loss of masculine capital. Rather, the focus was on human/animal interactions and the need to avoid overindulgence, and the emphasis was the same whether the person involved was an emperor or a cleric. The animals themselves also had an important role to play: they were not simply seen as prey to be dominated by the manly man but could act as co-creators of the skills necessary for the hunt, leaving their traces on their co-hunters’ subjectivity. At the same time, the malleability of Eastern Roman ideas about which animal lives were worth preserving allowed authors to strategically unify all men against the animal Other or to distinguish between different types of men, creating in the process hierarchies of masculinities.

The conclusion brings together the themes that have emerged throughout the book, provides comparative perspectives, teases out some of the wider implications for the study of gender and suggests directions for future research. It also comes back to the multitude of animals that have appeared sporadically throughout the different chapters, discussing the role they played in gender construction and the potential of human/animal connections to decentre the man in the process of creating male subjectivities.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical framework of the book by defining the two main lenses through which the material is viewed: scholarly masculinity and clerical masculinity. In doing so, it clarifies their relationship to other types of masculinities and highlights the role of animals in gender formation. This chapter also situates the book in its broader historiographical context, within both Byzantine and Western medieval Studies.

Chapter 2 focuses on Ioannes Tzetzes’ letters and his Chiliades to explore the role that animals could play in the construction of the scholar’s gender. It begins with a discussion of Tzetzes’ preference for mules and the role they played in networks of patronage. It continues to show how Tzetzes challenged hegemonic masculinity by expressing solidarity with animals: not only did he not hunt or kill them, but he also often refused to eat them. In his collection of ancient stories, Tzetzes described animals as capable of friendship, affection, loyalty and grief, and praised their understanding of the world as in some ways superior to that of humans. In his letters, he used his affective connections with animals to justify his open expression of emotions and did not hesitate to grieve for humans, animals and plants. Tzetzes’ writings, through their blurring of human/non-human boundaries, invite us to think differently about animals, past and present, spurring us to develop greater empathy with our natural environment.

Lucian’s In Praise of the Fly offers a delightfully wry encomium of the humble house fly. While the speech engages wittily with sophistic traditions by praising this troublesome insect, it also raises important questions about social marginality and the workings of power, and about the mechanisms through which value is conventionally assessed and reinforced. This chapter examines scale, social status, and literary self-consciousness in Lucian’s representation of the fly as a creature of immense cultural importance. The encomium, it is argued, plays with conventional associations between size and value, revelling in comic juxtapositions of scale, and in the mismatch between ambition and achievement. It also exploits traditional modes of discourse that present animals as models for the socially disenfranchised, and draws on the vocabulary of literary criticism and composition in order to evoke and challenge the symbolism traditionally attributed to other insects and to represent the fly provocatively as the new emblem of a refined literary and cultural aesthetic.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

This chapter contains an outline of the book and of its main argument. It concentrates on the deep structure of the Peripatetic science of perishable living beings, which consists in separate but coordinated studies of animals and plants. It provides the reader with an initial idea of the contents of the book with an emphasis on the epistemic requirements that shape the Peripatetic study of perishable life.

The general theory of science outlined in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics mandates that the scientific enterprise proceeds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stages of inquiry, respectively. Aristotle’s study of animals illustrates this methodological insight in an especially clear way. Moreover, the following epistemic principle controls Aristotle’s study of animals: the study of animals must start from the most organized and most determinate form of life and must take that as its starting point to generate results that can be subsequently extended to what is comparatively less organized and less articulate. This means that the study of animals must begin with a discussion of the human body. This methodological insight is at work in Aristotle’s History of Animals. However, its significance goes well beyond the stage of the collection and presentation of the relevant data; this chapter shows that this rule of inquiry also shapes the explanation of the zoological data in Parts of Animals, Progression of Animals, and Generation of Animals. The chapter also discusses the distortions created by the application of this rule of inquiry with a concentration on Aristotle’s explanation of animal locomotion.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.

Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

This chapter plays an important role in the argument of the book. It shows that there is room in Aristotle’s life for a study of what is common to animals and plants in addition to separate studies of animals and plants. At the same time, it shows that what Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is truly limited. By the end of the chapter the reader will see that the Peripatetic study of life is a complex scientific endeavor consisting of at least three components: a study of what is common to animals and plants followed by separate yet coordinated studies of animals and plants. What Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is to be found within the boundaries of project of the Parva naturalia.

This chapter introduces the reader to how Theophrastus approaches the topic of plants by offering a selective discussion of the first book of History of Plants. This book is a prolegomenon to the study of plants. It is also a liminal space where Theophrastus negotiates the transition from the study of animals to the study of plants. From the very way Theophrastus refers to animals, we can infer that Theophrastus builds his whole edifice on the results achieved in the study of animals. This overall approach not only confirms that the Peripatetic study of perishable living beings is approached via separate studies of animals and plants but also suggests that the relevant order of study is first animals, then plants.

This chapter provides information on viral zoonotic infections in humans, transmitted from animals, caused by rabiesvirus, influenzaviruses, HEV, poxviruses, hantavirus, Lassa fever virus, ebola, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, nipahvirus, zikavirus. It details which animal hosts are associated with which viruses, modes of spread and strategies for control.

This chapter provides an account of the agreements that lead to the creation of justice on the Epicurean view. In doing so, the three sections of the chapter complete the argument of Chapter 1 by focusing on the textual evidence in Epicurus and later Epicurean authors. The first section elaborates on the claim that the Epicureans defend a middle position in the nomos-phusis debate. The second section describes in more detail the content and function of agreements in Epicureanism. And the third section deals with the topic of who can make agreements on the Epicurean view, including the question of whether there can be agreements with nonhuman animals.

Chapter 4 tests the theory through a perspectivist approach to the archaeological record of an Andean society of northern Argentina, the Aguada culture (600–1100 CE). The analysis focuses on the relationships of humans with animals, both domestic and wild, and with a particular class of ceramic objects from Aguada society. The evidence points to modes of relationship that bring into play constructions of otherness and an understanding of the world that accords with a perspectivist ontology. The capacity for transformation of animals and people expressed in ambiguous figures of wild felines and humans reinforces the idea of an unstable world where all is subject to movement, change and metamorphosis. In particular, the relationship between humans and domestic animals, especially the llama, is analysed in domestic contexts and cave paintings. An object-centred case study analyses ceramic models of human and animal heads and bodies made analogously; again, they are treated equally and include human attributes as if they were all entities of the same class. The ceramic evidence further supports the possibility that other species may also have been considered endowed with subjectivity, that is, non-human persons.