Abstract/Summary

This MPhil will examine whether the extinction of wolves in Early Modern England had any effect on cultural and discursive representation. The inclusion of wolves in historical and religious texts, and in natural histories and hunting manuals will enable the examination of the cultural discourse surrounding the wolf and an analysis of whether this discourse altered significantly after the wolf’s local extinction. In the 16th century the wolf was over-hunted to extinction in England and throughout most of Scotland and Ireland, but the language used to describe the wolf in text and imagery did not change in the following centuries, and indeed it could be argued that much of the language remains the same in modernity. Why did the extinction of the wolf not change anything about how this predator was coded into the language and literature of Early Modern England? The inclusion of wolves in historical and religious texts and in natural histories and hunting manuals has allowed this historian to examine the cultural discourse surrounding the wolf and decide whether it altered significantly after the extinction of the animal; and try to understand why attitudes, language, and representations of wolves remained unceasingly negative after extinction. Relying on printed texts and the rapid rise in literacy and the availability of those texts, I attempted to map the characterisation of the wolf in Early Modern England and to understand why even after all threat of wolf attacks had been removed from the English countryside the animal continued to occupy a negative space.