NOBLE BRUTES How the Eastern Horse Transformed English Culture by Donna Landry

Description

NOBLE BRUTE

How the Eastern Horse Transformed English Culture
by Donna Landry

“His lordship’s Arabian,” a phrase often heard in eighteenth-century England, described a new kind of horse imported into the British Isles from the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary States of North Africa. Noble Brutes traces how the introduction of these Eastern blood horses transformed early modern culture and revolutionized England’s racing and equestrian tradition. More than two hundred Oriental horses were imported into the British Isles between 1650 and 1750. With the horses came Eastern ideas about horsemanship and the relationship between horses and humans. Landry’s groundbreaking archival research reveals how these Eastern imports profoundly influenced riding and racing styles, as well as literature and sporting art. After only a generation of crossbreeding on British soil, the English Thoroughbred was born, and with it the gentlemanly ideal of free forward movement over a country as an enactment of English liberties. This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and George Stubbs’s portrait of Whistlejacket .

Contents:
Introduction: What the Horses Said: An Equine History
1. Horsemanship in the British Isles before the Eastern Invasion
2. The Making of the English Hunting Seat
3. Steal of a Turk: Tracking in Bloodstock
4. About a Horse: The Bloody Shouldered Arabian
5.The Noble Brute: Contradictions in Equine Ideology, East and West
Epilogue: Her Ladyship’s Arabian: Aftermaths
Acknowledgments
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Interesting and Informative  Reading!

Hard cover book with dust jacket new condition, copyright 2009