Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire -- 2. "Bitches and Queens": Pets and Perversion at the Court of France's Henri III -- 3. Hairy on the Inside: Metamorphosis and Civility in English Werewolf Texts -- 4. Saying Nothing Concerning the Same: On Dominion, Purity, and Meat in Early Modern England -- 5. "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?" Shakespeare's Animations -- 6. Government by Beagel: The Impersonal Rule of James VI and I -- 7. Reading, Writing, and Riding Horses in Early Modern England: James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) and Gervase Markham's Cavelarice (1607) -- 8. "Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?" Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage -- 9. Pliny's Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought -- 10. Reading Vital Signs: Animals and the Experimental Philosophy -- 11. The Menagerie and the Labyrinthe: Animals at Versailles, 1662-1792 -- Contributors -- Index.