The Perfection of Nature

Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance

Mackenzie Cooley (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

352 Seiten

2022 | 1
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-82228-0 (ISBN)

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A deep history of how Renaissance Italy and the Spanish empire were shaped by a lingering fascination with breeding.

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.

Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. 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. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.

Adding nuance and historical context to discussions of race and human and animal relations, The Perfection of Nature provides a close reading of undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world.

Mackenzie Cooley is assistant professor of history and director of the Latin American Studies program at Hamilton College in New York.

List of Illustrations
A Note on Terms and Orthography
Introduction

Part I
Knowing and Controlling Animal Generation
Chapter 1
Breeders as Philosophers
Chapter 2
Razza-Making and Branding

Part II
A Divergence in Breeding
Chapter 3
Razza-Making at a European Court
Chapter 4
Corn, Seed, Blood in Mesoamerica

Part III
A Brave New Natural World
Chapter 5
Canine Mestizaje
Chapter 6
Camelids and Christian Nature

Part IV
Difference in European Thought
Chapter 7
Thinking Through Conversion, Lineage, and Population: José de Acosta
Chapter 8
Seeing Inside from the Outside: Giovanni Battista della Porta
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	03.10.2022
Zusatzinfo	30 halftones
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	513 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
ISBN-10	0-226-82228-1 / 0226822281
ISBN-13	978-0-226-82228-0 / 9780226822280
Zustand	Neuware