Bibliographic Essay

Many early modern texts dealing with animals and sport are now available via open-access or subscription websites. English works such as the Book of Saint Albans (Saint Albans, i486), George Gascoigne's The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (London, 1575), Gervase Markham's Country Contentments (London, 1611; revised 1615) and Cavelarice, or the English Horseman (London, 1607), and Richard Blome's The Gentlemans Recreation (London, 1686) - together with continental works such as Jacques du Fouilloux's La venerie (Poitiers, 1561), Erasmo di Valvasone's Della Caccia (Padua [1593]), and volume I of Hans Friedrich von Fleming's Der vollkommene teutsche Jäger (Leipzig, 1719) - may now be accessed via websites such as Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com) and Deutsches Textarchiv (www.deutschestextarchiv.de), which provide digital editions of early literary works, often in facsimile.

Secondary works on early modern hunting, both lawful and unlawful, include, for England, E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975) and Roger Manning's Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); for Germany, Werner Rosener's Geschichte der Jagd. Kultur, Gesellschaft und Jagdwesen im Wandel der Zeit (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2004) and Karl Roth's Geschichte des Jagd- und Forstwesens in Deutschland (Berlin, 1879); and for France, the essay collection Chasses princieres dans l'Europe de la Renaissance (Paris: Actes Sud, 2007), edited by Claude d'Anthenaise. The development of firearms for hunting is traced separately in Howard L. Blackmore, Hunting Weapons from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (London: Barry & Jenkins, 1971).

Blood sports other than hunting have also received extensive scholarly attention.

Additional secondary literature on the training and breeding of horses - literature offering much information on their use for sport - includes Peter Edward's Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007) and Donna Landry's Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Keith Thomas's classic Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) offers a fine account of the growth in England of humanitarian sentiments and an emerging culture of compassion for non-human animals.