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Today @LockdownBestia1 #LockdownBestiary, S is for SHEEP. (Is the whole bestiary an excuse for me to do this? maybe.)
We all know what sheep can signify in early modern Europe! Behold the lamb of God, ecce Agnus Dei as I once trained a class of art historians to bleat every time they saw one: behold a lovely detail from Hans Memling's John the Baptist in the National Gallery.
my love of sheep has always drawn me to pastoral, a mode indebted to their presence even as it often fails to figure much of the labour involved in keeping them - though here's a Flanders tapestry c 1500 in the Louvre, showing the work of the after product, le travail de la laine
but in literary or political studies we're often drawn to the figure of the shepherd, the pastor as figure for Christ or for the leader, following Michel Foucault who in Sécurité Territoire Population describes politics as "une affaire de la bergerie," a story of the sheepfold.
what would Foucault make of this 1550 French tapestry showing sheep without their shepherd? at least this leaderless lot seem to be nicely self isolating?
The pastoral mode doesn't only displace sheep, but often displaces certain kinds of shepherds: see Javier Irigoyen-Garcia's book The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain (Toronto 2014)
He argues that from Cervantes on, Muslims have been excluded from historical or literary accounts of pastoralism, even though pastoral figuration is not exclusively Christian. It's a fascinating read on racial purity and sheep, too, and arguments over origins of the merino
here's a Spanish sheep doing a whole load of cultural work: this is Jusepe de Ribera's Jacob among the sheep, 1632, in San Lorenzo de El Escorial
I'm really interested in sheep + materiality - one way, of course, is in relation to the sheepy materiality of the book itself - a great reading of this in Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (Minnesota 2017)
most of what follows is drawn from a recent slightly bonkers article I published on a mobile and migratory reading of pastoral’s politics, stepping out from our familiar sheepfolds - to look at what I called sheepships, stories of sheep on ships https://academic.oup.com/fs/article-abstract/74/2/189/5731325?redirectedFrom=fulltext
I am the grand daughter of a sheep farmer, from a long line of them, back to a convict who worked for Macarthur in NSW; so I'm interested in the pecuniary interest of all this from ‘pecus’, ‘pecorus’, the term for a flock of domestic animals, not necessarily sheep
historically the development of a language of stock stemming from the breeding of animals suggests how central the language of lineage is to the cold hard cash of the economic register. See Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Duke 2007)
in early modern texts, sheep are often used as a basic measurement of animal size, against which all other creatures must be measured. Marc Lescarbot’s 1609 Histoire de la Nouvelle France notes that a Canadian beaver is ‘à peu près de la grosseur d’un mouton tondu’
and early moderns prized sheep so highly in part because of their ability to be moved around, making them a useful tool in the apportioning of estates
