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

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).