In the final weeks up to #EqHist2018, we are running a series of posts to highlight our fabulous sponsors. Today we’re looking at SmartPak, who has generously donated items for our doorprize and silent auction. And yes, they are running a sale right now!
All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
European State Studs: Values, Significance, Potential
Alexandra Lotz
The European State Studs derive from a time when horses played a vital role in transport, agriculture, military support and the representation by monarchs and members of important families. Thinking about the wide‐ranging relevance of horses in the past, it becomes evident why farseeing rulers founded not only royal studs for their own representative purposes, but also state studs to improve the quality of horses in their kingdoms. The quality of horses was a decisive factor for the
productivity and military successes of a state.
After the motorization of transport, agriculture and war the amount of horses and with them the number of breeding institutions declined. Many have been dissolved, some are still under the authority of the state, some have been turned into foundations or run as private enterprises. The surviving state studs are not only places of animal production, they are living heritage sites preserving different forms of tangible and intangible heritage.
At present, the European state studs are changing under the pressure either of the horse sector or of their political authorities. They are in a period of new orientation and re-structuring. When carefully managed, the studs can provide useful reference for challenges relating to sustainable development in rural areas. Their cultural landscapes can retain clear evidence of their historical origin, while maintaining an active role in society and economy. They can help understanding the quality of rural space for the preservation of cultural heritage, the protection of biodiversity and the quality of life of
the population.
Find Alexandra Lotz here.
In the final weeks up to #EqHist2018, we are running a series of posts to highlight our fabulous sponsors. Today we highlight the Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies at UCLA. They sponsor fellowships, workshops, and conferences (like ours), and also now offer a certificate in Early Modern Studies for UCLA graduate students across disciplines. They are currently running an international project, including exhibits and research, on empire, colonization, and the development of the modern transnational world. Check out “Making Worlds” here.
All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
Quarter Horses, Cloning, and the Moral Definition of a Breed Standard
Jeannette Vaught, Cal State-Los Angeles
Quarter Horses are considered one of the earliest breeds of horse that is “native” to the United States, and certain horses have been called Quarter Horses by Americans since the late seventeenth century. However, when the American Quarter Horse Association formed as a breed registry and studbook in 1940, it strategically defined this breed through bloodlines rather than use, and it set strict rules governing sexual encounters between horses in order to accurately define biological parentage.
This parentage standard was debated and upheld when new reproductive technologies such as Artificial Insemination (AI) and Embryo Transfer (ET) became desirable for breeders in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the technology of cloning in the early 2000s threatened to disrupt the fundamental definition of registrable Quarter Horses based on male-female parentage.
My presentation unpacks the role of an association like the AQHA in defining what a “breed” is in the context of cloning specifically. To the AQHA, the procedure seemed to push beyond the acceptable boundaries of assisted reproduction techniques into a deviant sexual territory. Cloning endangered two-parent breed standards, threatening to dismantle its entrenched structure of selective breeding. However, while other carefully tended European studbooks made adjustments for cloned horses, the AQHA redoubled its efforts to exclude cloning from its registry. While its interests were described as economic, the AQHA most effectively deployed the moral rhetoric of “unnatural reproduction” that surrounded debates over cloning (and non-heteronormative human sexual relations) taking place in the broader media landscape.
Read our Member Monday profile of Jeannette Vaught here.
In the final weeks up to #EqHist2018, we are running a series of posts to highlight our fabulous sponsors. Today we are spotlighting the Western History Association. The history of the American West, no matter where one draws those borders, is largely an equestrian history. The deadline for proposals for the 2019 WHA meeting in Las Vegas is December 5– just enough time to write your abstract after an inspiring weekend at Equine History 2018!
All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
Lotnik: A Narrative History of an American Prize of War and Polish Lost Treasure
Andra Kowalczyk Martens, Independent Scholar
“A man without a horse is like a body without a soul.”
-Old Polish proverb
Only a people deeply familiar with the fracture of body-soul wholeness could conceive this poignant intuition. In the collective spirit of Poland, horses are intrinsic to the human experience. The insight invites an exploration of significant historical events and their effects through the profound horse-human kinship of Polish tradition. Specifically, what happens when the bond is broken, when a horse loses all association to his human and homeland?
The proposed narrative follows the story of an individual Arabian horse of pre-World War II Poland that became separated from his historical and cultural connections. Named Lotnik, this stallion’s story traverses continents and decades. Lotnik’s unique tale threads together an incredible collection of owners, keepers, takers, seekers, finders, admirers, and persons of interest. In his twenty-five years, Lotnik was anticipated as a promising racehorse by his breeder, looted by the Russian aggressor, commandeered and assimilated by Nazi eugenicists, cherry-picked as a prize of war by the U.S. Army Remount Service, extolled by esteemed horsemen in Europe and America, maligned by xenophobic American horse breeders, auctioned as surplus Army goods, cherished by his new owner, entangled by divorce paper verbiage, forgotten as a workhorse, and finally re-discovered as a lost treasure. Yet even then, Lotnik’s reality never synched with his birthright. As a splintered half of the Polish proverb, Lotnik instead provides an eclectic series of snapshot moments of mid-20th century history through ever-changing settings, environments, and cultures.
In the final weeks up to #EqHist2018, we are running a series of posts to highlight our fabulous sponsors. Today we are thankful for the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies:
“The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies promotes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the years c. 600-1600 C.E. in order to understand cultural, social, religious, and political issues rooted in the past that continue to resonate in our contemporary world. UCLA-CMRS supports faculty research and teaching. We provide fellowships, research assistantships, travel grants, and other support for students. We host visiting scholars and other researchers in numerous programs. We publish: Viator, one of the most-respected scholarly journals in the field; Comitatus, one of the oldest graduate-student journals, and Cursor Mundi, a series of single-authored books and multi-authored collections. We were founded in 1963 as an Organized Research Unit of the University of California.”
Along with research, the UCLA-CMRS organizers and sponsors a variety of conferences and symposia. Check here for their upcoming events. “Beastly Imagery in the Medieval World” next May is likely of particular interest to our readers and members.
All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
Counting [on] Gaited Horses: Late Medieval Urban Account Books as Sources for Equine History
Fabienne Meiers, University of Luxembourg
As primary means of transportation, horses played a constitutive role in official journeys and interurban communication during the late Middle Ages. Municipal authorities and their functionaries (messengers, bailiffs, foresters, and clerks) needed to be very mobile to meet their daily responsibilities; because the poor road conditions in many places throughout the medieval period impeded vehicular traffic, they depended on fast, sure-footed and comfortable mounts.
Based on more than 3.000 records in late medieval account books from cities which were part of the Holy Roman Empire (Aachen, Cologne, Duisburg, Luxembourg, Metz, Trier), it could be demonstrated that for long-distance journeys, ambling horses (palfreys, zelder) were mostly used. Their smooth lateral gaits allowed travelers to move easily at intermediate speed over long periods of time and permitted even elder members of the urban ruling class to journey regularly. What is very intriguing on the other hand is that for administrative trips to the peri-urban areas, rentable gaited horses (hacks, hurepert) were widely used by city officials, even though they had their own horses.
The paper not only aims to present the reasons for using gaited horses in official urban travels during the late Middle Ages. It also intends to display how frequently and under which circumstances they could or could not be employed, how their use affected horse tack, and how much was spent on purchasing and accommodating them. In this way, the importance of urban equestrian traffic for performing administrative tasks and maintaining communication with the outside world will be illuminated.
In the final weeks up to #EqHist2018, we are running a series of posts to highlight our fabulous sponsors. Today, we celebrate the historic W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center, part of the Don B. Huntley College of Agriculture at CalPoly Pomona. The Horse Center has continued the Kellogg Arabian breeding program, which has produced warhorses, move stars, show champions, and countless family companions. Equine History 2018 will conclude with a visit to the Horse Center’s famous Sunday Show. It is a rare opportunity to have living horses alongside the archival!
EHC President Kat Boniface and CP Cardiff at the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center.
All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
The Symbolic Equine in the Early Medieval Gallic-Germanic Borderland
Julia F. Crisler, UC Santa Barbara
In the late-seventh century, Dado, bishop of Rouen, penned a biography of his close friend, the recently deceased Bishop Eligius of Noyon-Tournai. This vita aided in propelling Eligius to sainthood, known as Éloi in France and Flanders, where he became inextricably linked with several miracles involving horses. Roughly a century-and-a-half before Eligius performed these equine-centric miracles, the pagan Childeric I was buried, surrounded by three pits containing the bodies of twenty-one horses in the same site where Eligius would later be revered. Meanwhile, the Late Roman Empire was importing a great deal of their stock horses from this region of Northern France. This paper explores this turbulent migration period and the role that horses played in the
formation of medieval identities, particularly in the border region between Germania and Gaul. The study will utilize not only written sources but will make extensive use of archaeology and art history to elucidate the importance of the horse and its symbolism to Romans, Gauls, Geramanics, and Steppe immigrants, as well as the many hybrid cultures that remained rooted in an equestrian base in Early Medieval/Late Antique Northern Gaul.