Horse Breeds and Human Society

Kristen Guest is Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia where she teaches Victorian literature. She has edited Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (Broadview Press, 2015) and, in collaboration with Monica Mattfeld, is co-editor of Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and a special issue of Humanimalia focusing on breed. Monica Mattfeld is Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is author of Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017), and she is co-editor with Karen Raber of Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater (Penn State University Press, 2017) and Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity with Kristen Guest. Monica is currently interested in questions of breed, type, and purity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with questions relating to equine performance and nineteenth-century hippodrama.

Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, Introduction; Part I: Before Breed: Historical Contexts for an Emerging Discourse 1. Kathryn Renton, "Defining ‘Race’ in the Spanish Horse: the breeding program of King Philip II"; 2. Donna Landry, "Habsburg Lipizzaners, English Thoroughbreds and the Paradoxes of Purity"; 3. Katrin Boniface, "Manufacturing the Horse: Understandings of Inheritance in the Long Eighteenth Century"; Part II: Breed and National/Regional Identity 4. Miriam Bibby, "‘How Northern was Pistol? The Galloway nag as self-identity and satire in an age of supra-national horse trading"; 5. Jorieke Savelkouls, "‘Horse breeding is not a state affair!’ State stallions, regulation and the Friesian horse"; 6. Miriam Adelman and Ana Camphora "Crioulos e crioulistas: Southern Brazilian equestrian culture in a changing world"; 7. Samantha Hurn, "Bois y cobs: The place of autochthonous horses in rural Welsh cultural identity"; Part III: Wild Horses and the Politics of Breed 8. Susanna Forrest "Inventing the Wild Horse: The Manmade History of the Takhi and Tarpan from 1828–2018"; 9. Karen Dalke, "Mustang, Wild Horse or Breed? Reflections of American Culture"; 10. Kristen Guest ,"Wild at Heart: The Chincoteague Pony and the Paradox of Feral ‘Breed’"; Part IV: Purity and Evolution: Breed Standards and Breed Organizations 11. Margaret Derry "The Transition from Type to Breed: Draft Horses and Purebred Breeding in the International American Market, 1870-1920"; 12. Irina Wenk, "The Ideal Horse: Politics and Practices of Knabstrupper Breeding"; 13. Christophe Lange, "The Making and Remaking of the Arabian Horse – From the Arab Bedouin Horse to the Modern Straight Egyptian™"; Index