This book demonstrates how horse breeding is entwined with human societies and identities. It explores issues of lineage, purity, and status by exploring interconnections between animals and humans.

The quest for purity in equine breed reflects and evolves alongside human subjectivity shaped by categories of race, gender, class, region, and nation. Focusing on various horse breeds, from the Chincoteague Pony to Brazilian Crioulo and the Arabian horse, each chapter in this collection considers how human and animal identities are shaped by practices of breeding and categorizing domesticated animals.

Bringing together different historical, geographical, and disciplinary perspectives, this book will appeal to academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students, in the fields of human-animal studies, sociology, environmental studies, cultural studies, history, and literature.

Kristen Guest is Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia where she teaches Victorian literature. She has edited Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (Broadview Press, 2015) and, in collaboration with Monica Mattfeld, is co-editor of Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and a special issue of Humanimalia focusing on breed.

Monica Mattfeld is Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is author of Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017), and she is co-editor with Karen Raber of Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater (Penn State University Press, 2017) and Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society and the Discourse of Modernity with Kristen Guest. Monica is currently interested in questions of breed, type, and purity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with questions relating to equine performance and nineteenth-century hippodrama.