The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance - Joint session with the Iberian History Seminar.
This seminar discusses a new book — The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) — which offers a history of how Renaissance Italy and the Spanish empire were shaped by a lingering fascination with breeding. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. Combining population genetic and bioarcheological findings with research in Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl, this history follows domesticated animals – including horses, dogs, turkeys, and llamas–to show parallel cultures of animal breeding in Europe and the Americas. Over the course of their collision in the sixteenth century, the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, and a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born. The Perfection of Nature excavates historical moments of ambiguity between humanity and animality to reveal that early modern personhood was often culturally conditional rather than legally, biologically, or theologically fated.
Date: 22 November 2022, 16:30 (Tuesday, 7th week, Michaelmas 2022)
Venue: St Edmund Hall, Queen's Lane OX1 4AR
Venue Details: Old Dining Hall
Speaker: Mackenzie Cooley (Hamilton College)
Organiser contact email address: earlymodernitaly@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Early Modern Italian World Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editors: Laura Spence, Belinda Clark