The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance

Mackenzie Cooley

ISBN 10: 0226822281 / ISBN 13: 9780226822280

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2022

About this Item

2022. 1st Edition. Paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780226822280

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226822281
• ISBN 13: 9780226822280
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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