Animal Skins

This chapter discusses how humans dealt with animals through the sense of touch. After all, intimate contact with animals was part of daily life in the premodern world. They were everywhere; and although zoological symbolism associated the sense of touch with the tortoise and the spider, all animals had a general association with touch. This was due to touch being considered the primary sense of the body and animals being considered virtually all body. Furthermore, many familiar animals were eminently touchable (furry, sleek and warm)—and their speechlessness made touch an essential medium for human–animal interaction. Thus, the chapter looks at the ways in which humans interacted with and perceived animals—through companionship, through distinctions between the human and the bestial, through the capacity for reason, and through suffering.