Constructing the human in the works of William Baldwin: coloniality, race, and animality

ABSTRACT This essay argues that early modern scholarship can gain a better understanding of the period’s construction of the human by bringing the lessons of animal studies together with those of decolonial thought, and critical race studies. Renaissance humanism, drawing on earlier classical and medieval descriptions of humanity, shaped ideas about the human that were inherited by liberal humanism’s ideal of universal humanity. Where animal studies seeks to decentre human exceptionalism, decolonial thought reveals the concept of ‘man’ to be a historically specific construct of racialised power masquerading as universal. These contemporary critiques can be productively combined and brought to bear on Renaissance humanism’s layered construction of the human. To make this case, the essay engages William Baldwin’s A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie Contaynyng the Sayinges of the Wyse (1547), Beware the Cat (c. 1552), and The Canticles or Balades of Solomon (1549).

Plutarch, and Seneca. These philosophers were of great interest to the political thought of Tudor humanists; Sir Thomas More, for example, closely modelled his Utopia (1518) on Plato's Republic (c. 375 BCE), and Sir Thomas Smith's A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (c. 1549) cites approvingly the teachings of Plato and Pythagoras. 4 Baldwin wrote the Treatise in the early flowering of Tudor humanism, and its stated aim is to reconcile moral philosophy derived from ancient wisdom with Reformed Christian belief. Claiming to follow Demosthenes, he describes philosophy as 'an inuencion and gyfte of God.
[…] Wherfore euery christen man ought diligently to applye it, namely, the morall parte: whiche God wrote fyrste in the hartes of men' (A.v. v -A.vi. r ). This notion of an applied philosophy is crucial to the civic humanism promoted also by More and Smith, the latter writing in his Discourse of moral philosophy's capacity to guide the individual and to order the state because it 'shewithe how a Citie or Realme or anie other commonweale should be well ordered and governed, bothe in time of peace and also in warre' (28). Through the textual practices of translation, extraction, and citation of the ancients, and by seeking to apply this revered counsel for the good of the Tudor commonweal in a manner compatible with sixteenth-century Christianity, Baldwin engages with the intellectual currents of his time and place. It is in this mode of textual practice and political application that scholars including Nancy Gutierrez, Clare Kinney, and Thomas Betteridge have analysed Baldwin's (often critical) humanist approach. 5 Here they are in tune with definitions of Renaissance humanism that see it as a predominantly textual and pedagogical phenomenon.
Less studied in Baldwin's work, however, is his contribution to definitions of human ontology that were inherited from classical and medieval thought and, in the sixteenth century, were being remoulded as European nations articulated themselves in the earliest shocks of colonial expansion. 6 In the Treatise, for example, Baldwin recapitulates the ancient belief in the primacy and uniqueness of the reasonable soul. Attributing the sentiment to Hermes Tresmegistus, he writes, 'the most excellent thing yt God hathe created in yearth, is a man: And ye richest thing to hym, is his soule, and reason' (J.vi. v ). Immediately following this statement about human exceptionalism, Baldwin cites Pythagoras on the risk of forsaking reason: 'whan a resonable soule forsaketh his diuine nature, and becommeth beast like, it dyeth: […] lackyng the vse of reason, it is reputed dead' (J.vi. v ). In this thinking, a man's possession of reason demarcates him from a 'beast'. Similarly indispensable to medieval and early modern formulations of human exceptionalism is the capacity for speech. Baldwin threads this through the Treatise not only by following Diogenes in emphasising the nobility of 'fayre speache' (P.viii. r ) but by noting Solon's point that 'to beastes muche hurt hapneth because they be dumme' (P.vi. r ). 7 This last comment might stand as a prompt for the questions that Baldwin goes on to ask in Beware the Cat (c. 1552), where he actively interrogates not only the human viciousness that violently exploits 'dumme' beasts by causing 'muche hurt', but the supposedly uniquely human attributes of speech and reason. In this text he invites readers to put on trial the defining lines of reason and speech that demarcate human ontology from that of other animals. Yet Beware the Cat is not just about the boundaries between humans and animals, but about colonial difference and racial othering. To characterise his feline civilisation, Baldwin leverages colonial Ireland and creates an idea of Irish otherness, both of which are implicitly distinct from English space and an English central character, Gregory Streamer, through whose perspective the narrative is focalised. 8 Baldwin depicts the cats as others to an unstable, but nonetheless implicit, humanist subject through their animality and their close association with colonial Ireland. His writings thus offer a test case for the broader issue with which this article is concerned: Renaissance humanism's construction of the human through human exceptionalism and coloniality.
Recent decolonial, critical race, and posthumanist analyses of modern liberal humanism trace its origins on one hand to the racialising and colonial thinking of Renaissance humanism, and on the other to the human exceptionalism of that period. Both of these phenomenahuman exceptionalism and colonialityare indeed central to the humanist description of humanity in early modernity. However, whilst influential scholars such as Sylvia Wynter and Alexander Weheliye argue that the supposedly universal category of 'Man' has its sub-categories of partially-human and non-human, and other scholars trace the ways that colonial and racialised subjects are figured through bestialising rhetoric, early modernists are yet to explicitly forge the link between early modern human exceptionalism and early modern coloniality. 9 In other words, early modernists have not articulated the ways that the human in Renaissance humanism is co-constructed through race-making, coloniality, and animality. They typically read with race and coloniality in mind or human exceptionalism, but they have barely brought these things together. This essay seeks to bridge these areas of scholarship by asking the anthropocentric question: how do coloniality and animality mutually define the human of Renaissance humanism? Moving from broad theoretical explication to textual analysis, I first outline the insights of decolonial thought, before establishing the critique of human exceptionalism offered by animal studies. I do this at length because the connection between these critiques is not widely discussed in early modern studies. Then, I argue that the connection between coloniality and human exceptionalism in the early modern construction of the human is integral to Beware the Cat.
Critiquing 'Man' Sylvia Wynter provides an archaeology and a trenchant critique of the concept of 'Man' in a groundbreaking essay from 2003, 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation -An Argument'. 10 Wynter argues that 'Man' is an overrepresentation of one 'genre of the human' amongst many, an 'ethnoclass' passed off 'as if it were the human itself'. 11 This figure emerged as humanism and secularism combined to reoccupy an earlier theocentric conception of human existence, realigning 'Man as the political subject of the state'. 12 In Wynter's terms, 'Man' purports to describe everyone on the planet but in fact reflects the historically contingent self-conception of Western, White, bourgeois, heterosexual males. Therefore Wynter's 'Man', with its early modern origins, describes a fake universal, constructed on exclusionary ontological and political lines. 13 Wynter builds her argument on the insights of Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, a work that is also profoundly significant for posthumanist thought. Foucault concludes that 'man is a recent invention', made possible by 'a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge' in 'European culture since the sixteenth century'. 14 This change in the arrangements of knowledge, Wynter parses as the shift from a theological to a political conception of the human. She links that shift to a further core pole of her argument: the decolonial thought of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo. These theorists emphasise the colonial and racialising underpinnings of modernity, locating in the epoch-defining conquest of Latin America 'the constitution of a new world order'. 15 As Quijano writes, 'that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which were later codified as "racial", "ethnic", "anthropological" or "national"'. 16 He explains that in 'the main lines of world power today […] the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are precisely the members of the "races", "ethnies", or "nations" into which the colonized populations were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America and onward'. 17 As Quijano indicates, colonial domination is inseparable from processes of race-making. 18 Leaning on these thinkers Wynter, then, tracks forward the early modern re-arrangements of knowledge as they were deployed in the extended processes of secularisation and, particularly, colonialism to the contemporary arrangement of humanity. An influential driver here is the historical phenomenon of the 'intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentralising religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state'. 19 This is precisely the moment in which Baldwin was writing. For Wynter, instrumental in the operations of early modern colonialism was 'a newly projected human/subhuman' distinction which, for reasons of power, defined indigenous and enslaved peoples as 'the Human Other' to a new category 'of the ostensibly only normal human, Man'. 20 Wynter's analysis offers a frame for reading Renaissance humanism in a long view which reveals the contingent and exclusionary aspect of its claims to represent and define humanity. This human, Man, is European, white, bourgeois, heterosexual and distinctly not a colonial subject. 21 The thought of Wynter, alongside other scholars of race including Imtiaz Habib, Kim Hall, Geraldine Heng, and Cord Whitaker, has influenced a recent reassessment of race-making in the early modern period. 22 This is an overdue but powerful upsurge of interest as testified by recent collections on canonical authors, including The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race and a special edition of Spenser Studies entitled Spenser and Race. 23 Overtly challenging the viewpoint that 'race did not exist' in the 'cultural and creative imagination' of early modern authors, or, when it did register was merely metaphorical, this scholarship underscores the connections between coloniality and race by recognising the centrality of race-making in the 'newly expanding imperial world' of the transatlantic. 24 These period studies begin to fill in the picture offered by Quijano and Wynter's delineation of the 'racial longue durée' and its shaping power for modernity. 25 Taking their lessons to Beware the Cat helps elucidate that its Irish setting is not neutral, but is constructed as part of the text's creation of otherness in response to its particular mid-Tudor moment.
Animal studies offers a comparable critique of humanism, both in its Renaissance textual mode and in the sense of centring the human that not only predates the Renaissance but would later inform liberal humanism. A driving energy of this field is the decentring of human exceptionalism, and the close examination of the postulated 'distinctions between human and animal nature' that 'are central to western cultural organization in a wide range of ways', as Bruce Boehrer writes. 26 Like the ongoing coloniality of power examined in decolonial thought, such distinctions build from classical and medieval ideas, are reiterated in the early modern period, and continue to have a shaping force in modernity. Boehrer specifies that they 'help to license particular forms of material and economic relation to the natural world'. 27 What he refers to as the 'man/beast opposition' is often described as the 'species divide', the belief that 'human beings are radicallyat the root of their naturedifferent from all other life on earth'. 28 For medieval and early modern Europe, this conviction was informed by the core Christian idea that humans are created in the image of God. In Genesis, God says 'let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground'. 29 Genesis describes not only the doctrine of human exceptionalism (that humans are better and different from all other species), but the doctrine of human sovereignty (that humans should rule all other species and the earth itself).
For Renaissance humanists, both of these doctrines were proclaimed in vivid terms by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola in 1486. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man (like Foucault's text, a work which has become a touchstone in this area), Pico explains 'why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration'. 30 Seen by God as distinct from the many 'teeming' forms of animal life, man is uniquely malleable, capable of descending to the 'lower, brutish forms of life' but also of rising 'to the superior orders whose life is divine'. 31 Yet as Pico's words make clear, the species divide is not absolute. If 'man' can descend to a brutish form, he is not entirely different from the 'brutes' themselves. 32 Evident here is a scale of humanity comparable to Wynter's categories of 'normal human' and 'subhuman'. Pico's move of postulation plus troubling of the species divide is entirely characteristic of early modern thought. Closer to Baldwin's time of writing, for example, Smith, in his Discourse on the Commonweal, foregrounds the exceptionalism of human reason by pointing out that 'a reasonable man dothe excel all other creatures by the gyftes of Reason', even as merely pages earlier he has noted humans' inferior agility by comparison to birds. 33 Notwithstanding this instability, as Erica Fudge notes, the predominant early modern view was that the animal should be seen 'as humanity's other; as the organism against which human status was asserted'. 34 Like Wynter's category Man, with its exclusion of racialised and colonial others to the realm of the subhuman, Renaissance humanist categorisations -Pico's most fortunate man, Smith's reasonable manestablish themselves via an othering process in contradistinction to animal life. This is an intwined connection of which early modern scholarship needs to take greater account.
There are, however, some notable exceptions that suture animality with race, or coloniality. Attention to bestialising rhetoric offers the most purchase on the connections between these phenomena so far. This line of thought takes its cue from the anticolonial writings of Frantz Fanon, particularly his influential description of 'the colonial vocabulary': 'the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn'. 35 Scholars including Amanda Bailey and Jonny Thurston identify different forms of bestialising rhetoric in various early modern contexts. 36 Thurston, for instance, delineates the ways in which 'the rhetoric of domesticating exotic animals starts to mirror the rhetoric of domesticating […] other peoples', and argues that 'domestication merges the animal with the colonized subject'. 37 In dialogue with this scholarship on bestialising rhetoric in colonial space is the thought of Virginia DeJohn Anderson and, crucially, Surekha Davies. DeJohn Anderson considers the role of animals shaping the experiences of indigenous people and settlers in early colonial America, not only through uneven forms of power but via phenomenological encounters and mutual proximity. 38 Davies posits that the encounter between Europeans and indigenous people in the Americas posed challenges to 'conceptions of the human' (2016, 11), marking 'an ontological seam' between the ancient discourse of the monstrous races and the medieval climactic theory of race. 39 The monstrous racesvividly present to European imaginations from the encyclopedic tradition of Pliny's Naturalis historia (c. 77 CE)manifested not merely marked physical differences, but markedly animal physical differences; they could be owl-eyed, dog-headed, horse-footed, horned, and so on. 40 These investigations into symbolism, lexis, and encounter are essential to understanding the often naturalised confluence of animality and race in early modern expressive practices.
It is the thought of Steven Swarbrick, however, with which this essay has the greatest affinity. In a discussion of Othello, Swarbrick notes that 'while the racist and racializing discourse' in the play shares 'deep connections with the history of brutalization and domination of animals in the West, such connections have seldom been made in ways that mesh categories of race together with those of "human" and "animal" as ecological interdependents'. 41 Significantly, Swarbrick proceeds to argue that 'dehumanization cannot be countered with a simple return to the "human", since it is precisely the category of the human that the play's animal and racial bodies deconstruct'. 42 Swarbrick's realisation is that the overlap in early modern conceptualisations of race and animality co-constitute the category of the human and, in the textual archive, very often turn back upon that category deconstructively. Yet he notes, like I do, that the lack of scholarly attention to this conjunction 'is especially surprising given that two of the most far-reaching fields of critical inquiry to engage questions of the "human" and the "nonhuman" in recent decades have been critical race studies on the one hand, and animal studies on the other'. 43 In an endeavour to bring these enquiries together, the rest of this essay turns to Baldwin's work as one early modern textual site where the idea of the human is formulated through both coloniality and animality. 44 Beware the Cat: coloniality and animality Beware the Cat is a fiction that takes its reader into a complete feline world, through the eyes of an experimenting scholar, Gregory Streamer. It is comprised of several layered narratives, spoken by different figures, and all surrounded by a marginal gloss in the voice of G.B., the text's fictional editor and persona for the author. Baldwin shapes the cats' otherness not only by dint of their animality and apparently magical powers, but through a strong association with colonial Ireland. Moreover, Baldwin establishes from the outset that the text will overtly enquire into the distinctions between humans and other animals. An opening section called the 'argument' sets up this enquiry, also explaining the occasion of the tale. 45 G.B. reports that 'at Christmas last' (5) he was at court working on the royal entertainments. One evening, he and his roommates fell into 'controversy' over the question of 'whether birds and beasts had reason' (5).
Rejecting several examples of animal behaviour cited by Streamer, G.B. differentiates between reason and 'natural kindly actions' (6), that is, behaviour instinctive to and typical of a certain species. He turns for proof to 'authority of most grave and learned philosophers' (6). As shown above, reason was prized in humanism as an attribute that distinguished humans from other animals. Aristotle, who features prominently in Baldwin's Treatise, writes in On the Soul (c. 350 BCE) that 'although some creatures have imagination, they have no reasoning power', and, as Fudge explains, 'the human possession of reason was cited as the primary source of the difference between humans and animals in the early modern period'. 46 G.B.'s turn to 'most grave and learned philosophers' (6), although non-specific, is a signal to the reader that they are to place the discussion of humanity amongst the wisdom received and venerated by humanists.
In addition to G.B.'s reliance on philosophical reason, Baldwin links the text to current humanist educational practices and models for conductsystems explicitly employed to shape successful humans. The occasion for the dispute is the 'play of Aesop's Crow' (5), which is in preparation as part of the revels. Although 'Aesop's Crow' is unidentified as a precise source for Beware the Cat, the Fables generally were prominent in humanist education. They were used in the classroom as textual models to teach Greek and Latin, and their animal protagonists also supplied moral exempla for learners. But, as Fudge shows, when 'the beasts of the beast fable are the teachers of humanist ideals', the 'human in humanism becomes strangely connected to the beast'. 47 The text registers this dangerous proximity created by the beast fable, something that G.B. finds problematic. Because 'the most part of the actors were birds', he objects that 'it was not comical to make either speechless things to speak or brutish things to common reasonably […] it was uncomely […] to bring them in lively personages to speak, do, reason' (5). 48 Here G.B. hits that other prime target in arguments for human sovereignty: the exceptional capacity of humans for rational speech. Turning to Aristotle again, the philosopher writes in Politics (c. 350 BCE) that although 'the mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure' man 'alone of the animals possesses speech'. 49 Should readers miss the significance of this debate, Streamer clearly tells G.B. and the collected company that he has heard beasts and fowls 'both speak and reason as well as I hear and understand you' (6). He then embarks on his story, claiming it will not only make the hearers 'wonder' but put them 'out of doubt concerning this matter' (6). Baldwin thus establishes at this early stage that the central facets of the Renaissance humanist idea of the human are under scrutiny.
The interrogation of humanity's ostensibly unique attributes is the fundamental premise of the text. Streamer's unreliability as a narrator and the text's suspicion of gossip, superstition, and 'unwritten verities' (19) have the effect of comically undermining his account, but this does not preclude Baldwin's serious interrogation of relations between humans and other animals. 50 This is emblematised in the third and final part of the oration when Streamer, having consumed his magical concoction, witnesses a cat court in session on the roof of his lodging. In this setting, the reader is presented with evidence in favour of the reason of cats. Baldwin displays their social customs, legal deliberation, and the highly fluent and witty defence made by this section's central character, a female cat named Mouse-slayer. The reader is being emblematically invited, albeit in ludicrous fashion, to test the philosophical and ontological boundaries that ringfence human exceptionalism. Yet Baldwin uses colonial logic to establish the grounds for that test. Where certain details of Mouse-slayer's account, such as a merchant's dinner of 'potage and a piece of beef' (50), reflect the mundane and quotidian, to a large extent Baldwin characterises the cats by a marking sense of strangeness significantly linked to colonial Ireland. He constructs a layered series of associations whose meaning has not yet been fully understood: the cats' otherness to the humans comes from a combination of their animality, and their connection with colonial space subjected to English domination. Together these qualities set them at an ontological distance from the leading humans in the tale, even as Baldwin distributes rationality and speech between both species as a testing ground.
Surprisingly, the only discussion to pay sustained analytical attention to the Irish setting of Beware the Cat is a short essay by Andrew Hadfield, which offers an important point of departure. Hadfield establishes that the text 'starts as a travel narrative to another world, one which involves both a voyage across the sea to England's first overseas colony and a fantastic journey into the parallel universe of the cats'. 51 He also considers that this parallel universe offers a 'direct warning of what is taking place within the king's own dominions'; this is because, after 18 June 1541, 'when Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland in the Irish Parliament, England was committed to asserting its control over the whole island of Ireland, uniting the kingdoms and establishing a homogeneous rule of law'. 52 Ireland's status as a space over which the crown sought to extend its powers was thus under discussion in Tudor England. Hadfield finds that whilst the first section of the oration (which has the entirety of the Irish content) contributes to the satire of 'the excesses and blindness of Catholics within and outside the realm', it is not easy to tell Irish from English, Protestant from Catholic. 53 He therefore concludes that the text succeeds in 'breaking down a number of binary oppositions, most importantly any attempt to distinguish confidently between self and other'. 54 My reading goes beyond Hadfield's assessment of the significance of Irishness for Beware the Cat. For Baldwin, animal otherness and colonial otherness combine in the cats, making a composite subaltern to, as will soon become clear, the unstable figure of the humanist self at the centre of the text.
Streamer's adventures with cats begin in grisly fashion. Close to the roof of his lodging are displayed 'quarters of men, which is a loathly and abhominable sight' (10). Not only emblematically signalling the text's interest in laying bare the components of humanity, this inauspicious location is a key stage for the fiction. Streamer reports that 'every night many cats assembled' (10) on the cadaver-covered roof, keeping him awake with their noise. Complaining to the household of this racket, Streamer falls into discussion with his companions about cats, and their capabilities of 'understanding' (11). At this point, a 'fellow […] born in Staffordshire' (11) tells the first of the inset tales about cats, a narrative that intensifies the associations between the cats and that which is both uncanny (like the quartered corpses) and marginal (like the roof). The gathered listeners hear that a man from Staffordshire (a Northern county some distance from London) was riding 'through Kankwood', when he was suddenly addressed by name by a cat that leapt from a bush bearing the news that 'Grimalkin is dead' (11). This startling report of an unknown entity's demise, delivered in the isolated woodland setting, is the first mention of 'Grimalkin', a figure that the fireside company in Streamer's lodging proceeds to debate in some detail through a sequence of interrelated stories which are set in Ireland. These stories emphasise the strangeness, wildness, and cultural difference of that locale and, by association, of the cats.
Among the gathered listeners and narrators, a key figure is Thomas, 'which had been in Ireland'; Thomas gives an account of an event that 'happened in Ireland' (11) around forty years earlier. This account is at third hand, having been told by 'a kern of John Butler's dwelling in the fassock of Bantry called Patrick Apore' to 'one of Fitz Harris' churls' (12), and finally to Thomas. Baldwin inserts several layers of narrative distance, complementary to the temporal and geographical distance, but also to incite suspicion about hearsay and tall tales. All of this positioning constitutes the narrative and conceptual preamble to the 'strange adventures' (12) of Patrick Apore that Thomas describes. While Apore hides in a church preparing some food, a cat enters and says 'in Irish, "Shane foel", which is, "give me some meat"' (13). Stunned into compliance, he gives her quarter of a roasted sheep, 'which immediately she did eat up, and […] like a cormorant not satisfied therewith, asked still for more' (13). The cat, whom the fireside company conjectures is Grimalkin, eats the whole sheep and nearly a whole cow. Supposing 'it were the Devil' (13), Apore and his companion ride away as fast as they can, for Patrick only to find (in an eerie moonlit scene) the cat seated on the saddle behind him. He kills the cat by flinging a 'dart' (15) at her, 'but immediately there came to her such a sight of cats that, after a long fight with them, his boy was killed and eaten up, and he himself […] had much to do to scape' (14). When Apore arrives home and describes 'his adventure' to his wife, their kitten reacts dramatically: 'up she started and said "Hast thou killed Grimalkin!" And therwith she plunged in his face, and with her teeth took him by the throat, and ere that she could be plucked away, she had strangled him' (14). During the court scene, Mouseslayer alludes to this sequence of Irish events when she refers to the 'traitorously-murdered […] goddess Grimolochin' (37). The episode, and Ireland itself, thus assume the status of legend within feline lore.
The account of Grimalkin's death makes many important associations for Baldwin's text. It establishes the cats' otherworldly qualities: Grimalkin appears mysteriously in the church, then again by moonlight on the road. The cats are notable for their outré physical feats: Grimalkin's digestive powers; the fact that the cats 'after a long fight' (14) kill and entirely consume the boy; the ability of the kitten to strangle a man. They have supernatural associations too, not only because Grimalkin is figured as a cat goddess but via her appearance in the sacred space of the church, and the men's comparison of her to the devil. Subsequent inset narratives in Streamer's first oration then cement the close link that Baldwin has forged between Irish otherness, animality, and the supernatural. Speculation turns to whether Grimalkin was a witch, Thomas pointing out that 'in Ireland, as they have been ere this in England, witches are for fear had in high reverence' (17); his statement implies that the Irish retain an antiquated belief from which the English have moved on. Thomas even details the magic of Irish witches, who are capable of disguising 'wisps of hay, straw, old rotten boards' as 'red swine, fair and fat' (18). Comparably to the cats, Irishness, animality, and magic are here layered onto each other. This chain of association continues in the anecdote of 'St Patrick's Plague' which, Thomas explains, is a curse on Irish communities 'whereof some one man and woman are at every seven years' end turned into wolves' (18), transforming back into people after another seven years. Contrary to what readers might expect, the response from Thomas' auditors is not one of disbelief. Within the logic of these narratives, such transformations are characteristic of the overlapping, mutable forms of human, animal, and material existence.
For the purposes of the current argument, the point to note is that neither the cats' animality nor their association with colonial space alone comprises their difference from the humans. These things are inseparable, and Baldwin has chosen to fold subject colonial space and Irish difference into his depiction of the cats. He in fact goes to great lengths to impress an idea of subordinate Irishness upon his readers. When Thomas is introducing his first story about the church, he not only names the characters in the account but sets out the colonial political context in some detail: 'what time also mortal war was between the Fitz Harrises and the Prior and Convent of the Abbey of Tintern, who counted them the King's friends and subjects, whose neighbour was Cahir Mac Art' (12). This depicts local warfare between Old English families (that is, families of Anglo-Norman descent) and the native Irish. 55 There are, additionally, several local details, in the voices of the narrator and in G.B.'s marginal gloss, that establish a reported sense of cultural difference. For example, when Thomas describes that the cooking in the church took place 'after the Irish fashion' (13), G.B. comments from the margin that 'the old Irish diet was to dine at night' (13). And when Thomas details Patrick Apore's striking armour with its 'skull covered over with gilt leather and crested with otter skin' (14), the glossator dryly remarks 'the kern's armour' (14). At this point in the text, G.B.'s marginal comments become anthropological. Sometimes he merely fills in details that the narrative omits, for example noting that cattle theft was 'the fashion of the Irish wars' (12). However, many of his remarks have a disparaging tone either by an implied comparison to Englishness, with details such as 'Irish curs bark sore' (12), or by insinuating Irish inferiority: 'kerns for lack of meat eat their shoes roasted' (13). The text's association with Irishness is not neutral but subordinates Ireland, and effects a cultural and geographical othering crucial to Baldwin's characterisation of the cats.
Given the instabilities of reason and speech, it would be problematic of course to assume that the text unquestioningly posits a fixed humanist self against which colonial and animal others can be firmly set. Here I would agree with Hadfield's assessment that the text destabilises the option to 'distinguish confidently between self and other'. 56 To proffer one of many possible examples, if (reprising G.B.'s adjective from the argument) the cats are 'brutish' (5), so are those humans who 'roast a cat alive' (16), poison Mouse-slayer with mustard powder, and 'mangle' (10) each other's bodies into bloody deterrent displays. There is, though, a central notion of the human behind this text against which the cats are implicitly contrasted: rational, articulate, learned, English (so by implication, associated with a colonial power). That figure as depicted by Baldwin is Streamer, the garrulous London scholar, fluent in tongues, who consults his books to advance human knowledge and has a set of 'Greek alphabets' (9) in press. Yet Streamer is a figure of fun. His verbosity makes him intoleranthe threatens to quit his story if anyone 'curiously interrupteth' (7) him. His polylingualism makes him boastfulhe claims to be more skilled in 'tongues' than Mithridates (55), the king who spoke twenty-two languages. And the knowledge he produces is unverifiable. As the main narrator, the central character, and the fictional representative of humanist textual practice, Streamer is the implied subject at the heart of this work, and its core model of humanity. That subject is created in dialogue with an otherness that is shaped by animality and coloniality, although these areas of the text are deployed to different effect. Baldwin's approach to the Renaissance humanist definition of the human explicitly interrogates its key defining factorsrationality and speech. He does this by asking readers to entertain the proposition that these things might not, after all, be unique to humans. Yet his depiction of animal life is reliant on the colonial logic which on one hand others, and on the other hand dominates, the Irishness which traverses the cats' characterisation as a species.

Conclusion
Baldwin's novel thus defines its version of the human not only bounded against the animal, but bounded against colonial and racial difference. I contend, moreover, that this case study indicates a broader pattern in Renaissance humanisma pattern that deserves further enquiry. Taking these questions to other areas of Baldwin's oeuvre reveals a similar tendency playing out in a different way. His second major work is an extensive poetic paraphrase of the biblical Song of Songs, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, Phraselyke Declared in Englysh Metres (1549). 57 Central to Canticles is the relationship between Christ and his Spouse, an allegorical representation of the church. Following the biblical tradition, the Spouse is a woman of colour; she states 'I am blacke and welfauored with al […] lyke the Chedarenes tentes, and lyke the hangynges of Salomon' (a.iii. v ). But, during the course of her spiritual development and closely under the influence of Christ, her blackness is established as a deviation that needs to be fixed. She is spiritually whitened in a process of symbolic purification and assimilation that enables her to formulate an improved version of herself. 58 Again following the biblical text closely, Baldwin's poems teem with animal imagery, especially when voiced by Christ describing his Spouse, but here he engages the animal to postulate an ideal. Christ details, for instance, his Spouse's 'doues iyes', her hair 'lyke a flocke of Goates moste quicke and pure' (f.i. r-v ), her breasts like baby kids. In Canticles, the animal is leveraged into the poetic construction of the human. This book operates in an entirely different genre, register, and tone from Beware the Cat. However, it similarly co-creates the human through race and animality.
Reading forward from Baldwin, this co-creation is evident in key sites of Tudor discourse about the formation of the English nation, and projections of colonial anxiety. In Book I of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590), the Redcrosse Knight must defeat Errour, a dragonlike creature who lives in a 'darksom hole', is 'most lothsom, filthie, foule' (I.i.14), and is associated with Egypt through the imagery of the Nile. 59 As Ayanna Thompson has recently described her, Errour is a 'weaponized vision' of the 'horrific trope' of the 'monstrous, mad, and foreign woman'. 60 But with her serpentine body, her coiling 'huge long taile', 'poisonous dugs', and 'swarming' flock of offspring (I.i.15), she is also a hybrid of human and animal. Though Redcrosse defeats this creature in combat, her status in the allegory as a sign of his inner state means that she returns symbolically and iconographically throughout Book I. Hence in his typological role as St George, the patron saint of England, Redcrosse must finally defeat a monstrous dragon whose 'huge long tayle wownd up in hundred foldes' (I.xi.11) is just one of several resemblances to the earlier monster. Combined with her persistence, most terrifying about Errour is her overwhelming fecundity: her 'thousand yong ones […] all ill fauored' (I.i.15). Described as 'deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke', these 'cursed spawne of serpents small' (I.i.22) are strongly evocative of Genesis, both its serpent in the garden, and, pointedly, the descendants of Ham (Genesis 9:22). According to widespread medieval and early modern racialising rhetoric, these tribes were cursed into slavery and 'for a stamp of their fathers sinne, the colour of hell set upon their faces'. 61 Bestial through their serpentine deformity, and racialised through their blackness, the children of Errour represent an aberration from both human corporeality and White Englishness. Running through Redcrosse's quest is a programme to ontologically and racially purify the Eden that is Spenser's fantasised England. 62 Between Baldwin and Spenser (who wrote in the 1580s and 1590s from colonial Ireland), Elizabeth I supported and validated John Hawkins' slaving voyages, marking England's official entry to the transatlantic slave trade. In this context, the imbrication of animality and race would work horrific consequences at a global scale. Baldwin is by no means the originator of this deadly pairing, but his writings offer a vantage point on the layered early modern analysis of the human as a raced species (or a species with race). His humanism thus needs to be understood not only through his textual practices, but through his philosophical thought. By bringing together the critiques articulated by, on one hand, animal studies and, on the other, critical race and decolonial theory, scholarship stands to gain a more extensive understanding of the human in Renaissance humanism.