Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture

"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.

Author: Donna Landry
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 12/23/2008
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780801890284

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/20/2009 pg. 20
Choice 08/01/2009
Scitech Book News 03/01/2009 pg. 135

About the Author

Donna Landry is a professor of English at the University of Kent and author of The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 and The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.