A study of the flourishing market for horses in pre-industrial England.

In spite of the importance of horses to Western society until comparatively recent times, scholars have paid very little attention to them. This volume helps to redress the balance, emphasizing their iconic appeal as well as their utilitarian functions.

Through a study of horses, the book reveals how an important and growing aristocratic estate was managed, where the aristocrat at the centre of it - William Cavendish - travelled and how he spent his time, and how horses were oneof the means by which he asserted his social status.

Kevin De Ornellas argues that in Renaissance England the relationship between horse and rider works as an unambiguous symbol of domination by the strong over the weak. There was little sentimental concern for animal welfare, leading to the routine abuse of the material animal. This unproblematic, practical exploitation of the horse led to the currency of the horse/rider relationship as a trope or symbol of exploitation in the literature of the period. Engaging with fiction, plays, poems, and non-fictional prose works of late Tudor and early Stuart England, De Ornellas demonstrates that the horse—a bridled, unwilling slave—becomes a yardstick against which the oppression of England’s poor, women, increasingly uninfluential clergyman, and deluded gamblers is measured. The status of the bitted, harnessed horse was a low one in early modern England—to be compared to such a beast is a demonstration of inferiority and subjugation. To think anything else is to be naïve about the realities of horse management in the period and is to be naïve about the realities of the exploitation of horses and other mammals in the present-day world.

'A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse' is the first complete text to focus exclusively on the health and illness of the most important animals in early modern England. It also follows on and further develops the subject of early modern veterinary medicine introduced by Louise Hill Curth in 'The Care of Brute Beasts: a social and cultural study of veterinary medicine in early modern England'. This book is divided into three sections which start by providing an overview of the evolution of English hippiatric medicine from ancient and medieval times into the early modern period. The second section moves on to the structures of practice which include the astrological principles between preventative, remedial and surgical medicine for horses, followed by an in-depth discussion of how such knowledge was disseminated through the oral, manuscript and print culture.

This volume fills an important gap in the analysis of early modern history and culture by reintroducing scholars to the significance of the horse. A more complete understanding of the role of horses and horsemanship is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the early modern world. Each essay in the collection provides a snapshot of how horse culture and the broader culture - that tapestry of images, objects, structures, sounds, gestures, texts, and ideas - articulate. Without knowledge of how the horse figured in all these aspects, no version of political, material, or intellectual culture in the period can be entirely accurate.