Noble Brutes

Donna Landry is a professor of English at the University of Kent and author of The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 and The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.

• Introduction: What the Horses Said: An Equine History1. Horsemanship in the British Isles before the Eastern Invasion2. The Making of the English Hunting Seat3. Steal of a Turk: Tracking in Bloodstock4. About a Horse: The Bloody Shouldered Arabian5. The Noble Brute: Contradictions in Equine Ideology, East and WestEpilogue: Her Ladyship's Arabian: AftermathsAcknowledgmentsNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

This is a fascinating thesis, absorbing in its many insights and detours, and lovingly argued. -- Allan Mallinson Country Life 2009 Only someone who is both a cultural historian and a devoted horse person could have written this remarkably engaging, wide-ranging book. Landry... tells in clear, vivid, fascinating detail of developments that will engage cultural and literary historians and animal fanciers. Choice 2009 Donna Landry has produced a book of clean organization and admirable coherence. She writes with telling precision, as well as first-hand acquaintance with all horsey matters. -- Pat Rogers Times Literary Supplement 2010 An important and most welcome contribution to our understanding of the multi-faceted impact of horses on humans and focuses on the significant influence of Eastern imports on English culture... Johns Hopkins University press have published a book with exemplary production values to complement the content. -- Peter Harrigan Arabian Studies 2010 A timely and valuable contribution to the recently burgeoning field of animality and animal studies in the early modern period. -- Richard Nash Eighteenth-Century Studies 2010 It would make a surprising story and support claims that animal studies can make important contributions to the study of history and culture. -- Nicholas Russell American Historical Review 2009 A multi-faceted work that will serve as a landmark in the emerging field of animal and cultural studies. -- Peter Edwards Agricultural History 2010 All historians of the early modern period would benefit from reading this multi-faceted and fascinating book. -- Mike Huggins Journal of Social History 2010