Changing Attitudes Toward Animals in Early Modern Dutch Literature

Abstract

Historical scholarship characterizes the early modern period as a time of profound change in Western attitudes toward animals. Supposedly, the change was brought about by humans positioning themselves differently – less superiorly – in relation to animals, resulting in a growing scientific interest in animals and greater hesitance to exploit animals. We test these claims quantitatively by applying a framework from Environmental Psychology that categorizes human attitudes toward nature to a historical Dutch literature corpus. We first identify textual representations of animals using a fine-tuned language model, and then classify these representations into the categories of the Environmental Psychology framework. To assess trends over time, we apply the Mann-Kendall test for monotonic change. We report an increase in attitudes relating to Reason and Exploitation, no change in Moralistic attitudes, and a decrease in Spiritual and Symbolic attitudes. Our findings are partly in accordance with existing scholarship, but challenge the assumptions of Moralistic attitudes toward animals, and also detect a hitherto unnoticed change in the attitude system: the decrease of Symbolic and Spiritual attitudes. This suggests a transformation not only in how animals were treated, but also in the cultural and representational roles they played.