Shakespeare mentions cats over 30 times in his plays, including to talk about a gib cat, a musk-cat, cats chasing mice and even making perfume. It’s obvious that cats were present for Shakespeare’s lifetime, but what do these references in the plays show us about their place in society and perhaps in people’s homes for Shakespeare’s England? Did Shakespeare keep a pet cat, would they have been useful for fighting against plague, and what exactly did a 16th century cat look like?
Here today to help answer these questions and take us through the artifacts, primary documents, and paintings that reveal the feline world of Shakespeare’s England is our guest, Helen Parish.
Helen Parish is a Professor of History at the University of Reading and author of, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”: Witches, Familiars, and Human-Animal Interactions in the English Witch Trials”
Helen’s work focuses on cats as a witch’s familiar, but her research looks further into the details about how cats lived in the 16th cenutry and today she’s here to help us explore cats for Shakespeare’s England.
About Helen Parish
Helen Parish is a Visiting Professor in History at the University of Reading, and Senior Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of St Andrews (1993) and completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1996. After three years as a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College Oxford, she moved to the University of Reading where she has spent most of her academic career. Her research and teaching explore the history of belief in the late medieval and early modern period, particularly the history of the European Reformations, church and clergy, as well as magic, witchcraft and the supernatural, and the connections between religion and natural history. Her published work includes book-length studies of clerical celibacy and marriage, debates over miracle and magic during the English Reformation, and a recent textbook on the history of the Reformation in Europe. More recent work has focused on the intersection of science and the supernatural in late medieval and early modern Europe, including an article on witches and familiars which explores some of the key themes in today’s discussion. Current projects include an essay on witchcraft and weather magic. She has delivered keynote lectures at numerous academic conferences and learned societies, has written several short articles for The Conversation and makes regular guest appearances on BBC radio, BBC Future and in podcasts.
What We Talk About
- For the 16th cenutry, how were cats viewed in relationship to plague? Were they carriers of disease and considered pests or were they viewed as useful for chasing off the mice and rats?
- Were cats kept as pets in Shakespeare’s lifetime?
- Was there such a thing as cat food during Shakespeare’s lifetime?
- …and more!
Recommended Resources:
Helen’s own publications:
“Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”: Witches, Familiars, and Human-Animal Interactions in the English Witch Trials. Religions. 2019; 10(2):134. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020134 (Open Access to free to read; part of an online special issue Witchcraft, Demonology and Magic edited by Marina Montesano, which might also be of interest to your listeners)
“Every Living Beast Being a Word, Every Kind Being a Sentence”: Animals and Religion in Reformation Europe. Religions. 2019; 10(7):421. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070421 (Open Access so free to read)
Other relevant resources:
Katharine M. Rogers, Cat (Reaktion Books 2013 / 2019)
Katharine M. Rogers, The cat and the human imagination (1997 and available online via Internet Archive.)
E.F. Torrey, The Rise of Cats and Madness: I. The Renaissance. In: Parasites, Pussycats and Psychosis. Springer, Cham. 2022 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86811-6_3 (open access) AND The Rise of Cats and Madness: II. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In: Parasites, Pussycats and Psychosis. Springer, Cham. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86811-6_4 (open access)
Keith Thomas, Man and the natural world (New York, Oxford; 1983) – one of the first studies of its kind, and (as one might expect from the author) one that created a new area of research and established a trajectory that is still evident in more recent scholarship
Witch trials were often described in detail in printed pamphlets – here is a good example, narrating a trial that involved witches and animals, including a cat called Satan, in Essex in 1566: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Examination_and_Confession_of_certain_Witches_at_Chelmsford_in_the_County_of_Essex
