Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning, the discussions were not as straightforward--or as reflexively anthropocentric--as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge...