Beastly lessons : natural Utopias and animals as teachers in seventeenth-century England

The present study investigates the motif of virtuous animal instructors in three selected English texts from the second half of the seventeenth century: James Howell’s The Parly of Beasts (1660), Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health (1683). These authors proposed solutions to the challenges facing early modern England, most notably the Civil War, the emerging empirical science, and the incipient colonization of the Americas. By contrast to those con