Microsoft Word - Introduction.docx


 

 

 
 

 

Edinburgh Research Explorer 
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Citation for published version:
Bowd, S & Cockram, S 2017, 'Introduction: The animal in Renaissance Italy', Renaissance Studies, vol. 31,
no. 2, pp. 183-200. https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12299

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):
10.1111/rest.12299

Link:
Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer

Document Version:
Peer reviewed version

Published In:
Renaissance Studies

Publisher Rights Statement:
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Bowd, S. and Cockram, S. (2017), The animal in
Renaissance Italy. Ren. Stud., 31: 183–200.  which has been published in final form at
http://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12299. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with
Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

General rights
Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)
and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and
abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.

Take down policy
The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer
content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please
contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and
investigate your claim.

Download date: 06. Apr. 2021

https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12299
https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12299
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/introduction(51313b21-c922-4ebb-95da-f9f3819f11d3).html


1	
  
	
  

 1 

Introduction: The Animal in Renaissance Italy 

 

STEPHEN BOWD AND SARAH COCKRAM 

 

Until the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of 

Natural Selection (1859) the belief that human beings were created in the image and 

likeness of God and that all animal life was the result of divine creation ex nihilo 

shaped the general understanding of the relationship between humans and animals. In 

particular, humans were separated from other animals on the basis of their capacity 

for a high level of reason, and during the Renaissance it was even argued that humans 

could grasp something of the divine intellect by means of contact with angelic 

intelligences.1 The question of how humans could rise above the level of other 

animals, even that of the ape despite their shared characteristics, strongly marked 

discussions in history, philosophy, natural philosophy and other fields of human 

culture.2 Indeed, the question, ‘what does it mean to be human?’ was probably one of 

the most urgently and productively explored matters for scholars, writers, and artists 

throughout the premodern era. The men and women who engaged in this question 

generally employed a common language drawing on religion, philosophy, and history 

that only began to fragment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a 

complex process of specialization of knowledge about humans and animals. 

Recent developments in medicine and technology, from brain imaging to 

biotechnology, have again thrown up the problem of what it is to be human and have 

helped to decentre humanity. An era during which humanity was defined in relation to 

non-human animals may now be giving way to one in which it is defined in relation to 



2	
  
	
  

artificial intelligence.3 It is therefore no coincidence that an increasing number of 

researchers have been looking at the question of ‘being human’ from a variety of 

perspectives, not least historical. The history of animals is attracting increased 

attention and some scholars now speak of an ‘animal turn’ reflected in numerous 

specialized publications including  book series such as Animalibus: Of Animals and 

Cultures (edited by Nigel Rothfels and Garry Marvin, and published by Pennsylvania 

State University Press). This turn was most precocious, and has been especially 

notable in medieval studies.4 However, since the publication of Keith Thomas’s 

seminal Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 

(1983), there have appeared a number of valuable edited collections addressing the 

early modern period,5 along with work in English literature,6 and studies on the 

history of ideas and science.7 Surprisingly, the production of literature on the animal 

turn in the context of the Italian Renaissance has so far remained relatively limited 

with the publication of studies on animals in art history,8 on beasts from specific 

continents or cities,9 and on animals in the domestic sphere.10  

The best work on animals in the Renaissance draws from, and speaks to, both 

the fields of Renaissance studies and animal studies, and the endeavour to write 

animals back into historical experience has been accompanied by a number of 

important debates with broader historical and cultural resonances.11 First, should 

historians focus on animals as symbols, and as mirrors for humanity, or should the 

lived experience of animals be a priority in our research?12 The former approach is 

clearly anthropocentric but the latter produces an even thornier problem: do we need 

to accept that a gulf exists between ourselves and non-human animals that means that 

we cannot write the history of animals in and of themselves, and are forced by our 

sources and perception solely to write the history of human-animal relations?13 How 



3	
  
	
  

much of a problem is our species-bias (and, it might be asked, how different is this to 

the trap of subjectivity that all historians must face when trying to understand the 

interior life of another human being)?14 In turn, these problems raise questions about 

methodologies and approaches; the animal in our sources may be plain to see, or 

hiding in the margins. Some scholars have been methodical and imaginative in their 

pursuit of animal lives through documentary evidence (for example, wills, account 

books, diaries), others through literature or art, and many apply fruitful theoretical 

perspectives or collaborate with zooarchaeologists, scientists, ethologists.15    

Consequent to the issue of finding the real animal in our evidence is that of 

agency. While compelling monographs have demonstrated how animals have shaped 

environments and human historical experience in profound ways,16 questions of 

animal agency remain prominent. As the recognition and growth of historical animal 

studies is compared with efforts to give a historical voice to other dominated or 

silenced groups, scholars may consider the extent to which animals were able to resist 

their orders (through recalcitrance, running away, biting) or to control humans in turn 

(through fear or indeed through affection). Alongside animals fighting back, we 

should also recognise the immense contribution of animal co-operation in farming and 

other human enterprises including warfare. We must continue to think about how 

animals experienced the past and the significance of this to animal lives and to the 

lives of the humans with whom they lived. Questioning the human-animal past, as it 

might be expressed, also adds to how we understand our relationship with the natural 

world today, for instance in terms of the boundaries discussed above, as well as in 

relation to current concerns about exploitation or companionship, which turn out to 

have been matters for lively debate in Renaissance Italy.17 

 



4	
  
	
  

The aim of this special issue on the animal in Renaissance Italy is to bring the fields 

of animal and Renaissance studies into closer dialogue and to consider ways in which 

human and non-human categories and relationships were constructed and redefined in 

relation to the question, posed recently by Benjamin Arbel: ‘Did animals have a 

Renaissance?’.18 It is especially appropriate for a collection of essays addressing this 

topic to appear in Renaissance Studies since it was Italian humanists who considered 

early, extensively and with considerable European influence the nature of humanity, 

especially the ‘dignity of man’, and the human relationship with animals. Renaissance 

humanists recovered ancient texts (such as Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things; 

Plutarch’s works on vegetarianism, and on the intelligence of animals; and Porphyry 

of Tyre’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals) and with them discovered a range of 

ethical stances towards animals that may have aided the eventual emergence and 

spread of new sensibilities and sensitivities towards animals. These discussions were 

influenced by colonization or contact with other peoples around the world, and they 

have significantly contributed to many modern concerns with, and categorizations of, 

humans and animals.  

Renaissance Italians were heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Biblical 

traditions that differentiated humans from other animals and assumed an unequal 

relationship. Unlike other animals man was created in God’s image and likeness 

(Genesis 1: 27) and possessed a rational soul. Man and woman’s possession of an 

immortal soul and religious instinct, as well as a reasoning capacity, erect posture, 

hands, and the ability to laugh or express themselves through spoken language were 

all presented as proof of human difference to, and superiority over, other animals. The 

brute beast lacked a mind or soul and in the view of René Descartes, men were the 

‘lords and possessors of nature’.19 This hierarchical view of the human relationship 



5	
  
	
  

with nature, and the belief that animals were simply lacking souls or a religious 

instinct, often followed the medieval bestiary tradition in a projection of the bestial 

onto censured aspects of human behaviour such as lust or gluttony.20 As Alamanno 

Rinuccini wrote of the corruption of Florence in c. 1480, taxes were spent not on the 

common good but on ‘horses, dogs, birds, actors, sycophants, and parasites.’21 

Nakedness or long hair were also considered bestial traits while clothing was 

presented as an essentially human attribute. The close proximity of peasants to farm 

animals also reinforced social prejudices about rustic backwardness and as Cecilia 

Muratori points out in her essay it was facetiously noted that hunters became savage 

and bestial as a result of prolonged periods in the woods with the animals. 

The association of evil and irreligiosity with the bestial also helps to explain 

the horror with which monstrous births were often viewed, as well as the presentation 

of the devil as half-man and half-beast and his succubi and incubi as animals.22 In a 

similar fashion Jews were frequently characterized by Christian writers as ‘swine’, 

pigs, or dogs and associated with the devil.23 Humanists concerned with the behaviour 

and virtues proper to man drew on such traditional Christian views of Jews and they 

sought to sustain their universalizing claims about humans in relation to the animal 

and the Jewish exception. As Andrew E. Benjamin has argued, both Jews and animals 

could represent external threats to the human since they were quite different in nature, 

imperfect, unnatural, and requiring subjugation.24 They were also indispensable to the 

process of definition of what was properly human, a definition based on 

differentiation according to both incorporeal and bodily characteristics. The medieval 

idea of the ‘perfidious’ or faithless Jew stubbornly impervious to conversion was 

therefore reinforced by natural philosophical presumptions about Jewish physiology. 

The menstruating male Jew and the ‘blood libel’, by which it was thought that Jews 



6	
  
	
  

murdered Christians and consumed their blood in order to remedy bodily stench, both 

conferred bestial traits on Jews and cast them more forcefully outside of the scope of 

humanity, effectively unassimilable by the love of Christ. 

Given the way the debate about humanity relied on animals and bestial traits it 

is no coincidence that the sixteenth century saw the birth of natural history as a 

discipline, and a veritable explosion of books dedicated to the description and 

cataloguing of all species of animals and plants. Firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, 

the emergence of natural history demanded knowledge of a broad range of classical 

authors and the mastery of observation and description.25 These skills constituted the 

methodological foundations of the discipline, and yet the examination of some of the 

most remarkable works of natural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 

reveals the existence of a considerable number of ‘unreal’ or unusual animals. The 

analysis of how these liminal or hybrid animals were studied—either through 

observation and dissection, or through verbal and visual description when they were 

not physically ‘accessible’—allows us to investigate how early-modern humans 

advanced knowledge of their environment and discussed species that did not quite fit 

into familiar narratives. Once again, the key to this discipline was the process of 

‘ensoulment’ and the perfection of God’s creation, two aspects at the core of what it 

meant to be human in the Renaissance. However, the ‘tentative’ and ‘contested’ 

nature (to quote Monica Azzolini in her contribution to this volume) of many 

observations, enquiries, and debates in this field is a useful reminder of the contested 

and incomplete state of knowledge about humans and non-human animals in this 

period. 

 

**** 



7	
  
	
  

 

In addressing the evidence of human-animal interaction and the place of the animal in 

Renaissance Italy, the contributors to this special issue consider a range of key 

questions about the ways in which Renaissance men and women understood 

themselves in relation to the animal kingdom.26 They offer striking and original 

conclusions which provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of the human and the 

animal in the Italian Renaissance and will stimulate and guide future research. The 

coherence of the areas of investigation covered in this volume and their congruity 

with each other lies not only in their relationship to the question of human-animal 

relations but also in their Italian and Renaissance foci. As so often in Italian 

Renaissance history, a single well-focused area of investigation can uncover a wealth 

of religious, political, intellectual, social, and economic themes. This diversity reflects 

the tremendously rich nature of Italian archival material but also the complex and 

interconnected reality of Italian society, as well as the well-developed relationship of 

Italy with the rest of the world. Contributions cover the period c. 1350-c. 1700 in 

order to aid comparison of long-term trends in Italian animal history and to allow for 

the possible revision of traditional chronologies of the Renaissance. 

The focus of the first four contributors is human-animal boundaries. Benjamin 

Arbel’s essay, which is the fruit of a larger research project on Renaissance attitudes 

to animals, addresses the ways in which comparative anatomy influenced Renaissance 

discussions concerning the nature and capacities of animals compared to those of 

humans. Arbel’s essay concentrates on the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea 

Vesalius, Girolamo Fabrici di Acquapendente, and Pierre Belon du Mans, all of 

whom can be considered as pioneers in the field of comparative anatomy and it raises 

questions of perodization by suggesting how empathy for non-human animals grew 



8	
  
	
  

during the Renaissance. The insights that his chosen figures derived from their 

experience in dissections of animal bodies are examined against the background of 

changing sensitivities with regard to animals, which have already been observed in 

other writings of the same period, particularly literary works. Rather than going into a 

detailed comparison of anatomical findings, Arbel’s paper focuses on perceptions that 

transcended strictly anatomical knowledge, particularly on reflections concerning the 

possibilities of an animal soul, animal intelligence and animal language. 

The men studied by Arbel sometimes broke the barrier of skin or fur in their 

practical investigations or scholarly deliberation in order to cross the divide that 

traditionally separated human and non-human animals. In doing so they had to 

challenge deeply-held assumptions. Leonardo da Vinci questioned the idea that the 

possession of hands elevated humans above other animals and he recorded with 

fascinated horror the bestial in cannibals who might stoop to consuming the genitalia 

of their fellow creatures. Four decades later in Padua, Andrea Vesalius’ studies of the 

brain produced no physical evidence for the immortal ‘rational soul’ thought to 

distinguish humans from animals, while Girolamo Fabrici, who held the chair of 

anatomy and surgery at Padua from 1565 claimed that non-human animals possessed 

a form of language. The rudimentary natural language of animals may have been 

restricted to voiced expressions of passionate feeling but, he argued, it might be 

understood by those humans with a sufficiently developed sense of empathy.  

The following article, by Cecilia Muratori, also shows some apparently 

unconventional attitudes to animals from Renaissance thinkers. In her study of the 

place of animals in Italian utopian literature Muratori shows how animals populate a 

range of texts, including works dealing with ideal cities and imagined parallel worlds. 

She investigates the ways in which the narratological device of displacing the human-



9	
  
	
  

animal relationship into an imaginary world enabled an approach to the theoretical 

question about the difference between humans and animals, as well as to the ethical 

one regarding human attitudes towards, and use of, animals. The presence of animals 

is a neglected aspect of such texts despite the extensive body of scholarship on 

utopian literature. Muratori argues that it is this specific combination of ontological 

issues and very practical remarks which makes these texts a particularly important 

case study for reconstructing Renaissance philosophical discussions on the status of 

animals. The problem of the human-animal divide and the question about human 

uniqueness thus appear alongside the discussion of topics such as how to preserve 

health in an ideal city or suggestions about the best diet for its citizens (and how this 

might be based on animals as food, for instance). Such concerns directly involve the 

assessment of human relations to the world of animals, included in these imaginary 

cities or worlds as co-inhabitants, as sources of calories, as living beings which share 

in various ways the same space as humans, and also as mirrors onto which the 

definition of humanity as a special animal is projected. 

This Renaissance ‘thinking with animals’ (to paraphrase the anthropologist 

Claude Lévi-Strauss)27 brings the real into sharper focus by considering the ideal or 

utopian. Muratori’s article moves from the ironic comments of Ortensio Lando in a 

volume of funeral sermons for animals, in which beloved companion animals become 

material for human medicine, to reflections on the division between human and non-

human. The broader implications for Renaissance Italian history may be noted here. 

For example, the violent or cruel treatment of animals deplored in Thomas More’s 

Utopia (translated into Italian by Lando in 1548) raises questions about the 

debilitating effects on humans of this behaviour and calls to mind the horrified 

reactions of Italians to the atrocities of the Italian Wars. For example, the historian 



10	
  
	
  

Francesco Guicciardini suggested that the year 1508, in which the League of Cambrai 

against Venice was formed, marked a new phase of the Italian Wars as the violence 

spread more widely among the people and reached its apex in 1527, when Rome was 

sacked by imperial troops:  

 

But now the door opening to new discords in the future, there followed throughout 

Italy, and against the Italians themselves, the cruelest accidents, endless murders, 

sackings and destruction of many cities and towns, military licentiousness no less 

pernicious to their friends than to their enemies, religion violated, and holy things 

trampled under foot with less reverence and respect than for profane things.28  

 

The alleged cannibalism exhibited by soldiers during these wars demonstrated a 

failure of human reason and a descent into the bestial.29 In turn, soldiers could be 

regarded as the lowest of earthly creatures; at the siege of Metz in 1552 the Emperor 

Charles V compared them to ‘caterpillars, insects and grubs which eat buds and other 

fruits of the earth.’30 

In Anton Francesco Doni’s utopian I mondi [The Worlds] (1552-3) the bestial 

nature of men is further highlighted and the conventional hierarchy of rational human 

animal and irrational non-human animal reversed with reference to recovered 

classical ideas of the transmigration of souls. The passage of a soul through 

incarnation as a frog, a horse, and the philosopher Pythagoras might encourage an 

ethical abstinence from meat eating in humans while the ensouled horse, described by 

Doni, could overturn traditional hierarchies by virtuously committing suicide like an 

equine Lucrezia following its mistreatment by a human rider. In Francesco Patrizi’s 

La città felice [The Happy City] (1553) beasts and their labours are offered up for 

appreciation – they contribute sustenance and sweat to support the basic needs and 



11	
  
	
  

happiness of human society. However, the service they supply is secondary to the 

civilized association of humans in cities. As Patricia Lurati observes of the ‘wild men’ 

evident in Renaissance art and literature: ‘[A] wild nature was ascribed to his living 

outside humanity’s civilized order and to his hairy body, the latter being the most 

evident mark of his untamed temperament.’ Conversely, the human pursuit of 

happiness, which is the exercise of virtue in the ideal city, reveals the divine origins of 

humans. As Muratori concludes: ‘As food, animals project onto the utopian society 

the violence of exploitation that they suffer in this world; as backdrop for the 

conception of happiness, they prompt a re-assessment of human uniqueness.’ 

The dynamics of this unequal but polar relationship offer new insights into 

Renaissance cultural production.31 For example, in what may constitute a commentary 

on this animal/human split between body and spirit, Titian’s Young Woman with a 

Fur (Fig. 1) juxtaposes soft fur with smooth flesh, white skin with dark sable. Like 

the possession of live exotic animals, the ownership of wild animal furs in 

Renaissance Italy was a sign of prosperity and status. In addition to great expense, 

these furs signified the owner’s station in exemption from sumptuary restrictions on 

luxurious items of clothing. Though the wearing of fur was standard for Renaissance 

elites (and was often proudly displayed in portraits) there has been very little work on 

its relationship to the international trade in animals and their skins; on the cultural 

meanings of different types of fur; or, indeed, on what donning the fur of an animal in 

the first place may indicate about the wearer.  

 

INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE 

 



12	
  
	
  

In her essay Patricia Lurati reveals that the messages projected by the wearing of fur 

are ambiguous, potentially combining status with sexuality and vice. Lurati tells us 

why valuable skins were often used as linings for clothing with the fur on the inside 

rather than on prominent show, as might be natural to a modern sensibility attuned to 

‘bling’ or conspicuous display. Lurati suggests that visible fur on the outside of the 

garment could raise an alarming series of moral questions concerned with the animal 

origin of fur and the wearer’s relationship to the animal world. She demonstrates the 

contemporary connections between fur, hairiness, eroticism and sin, and the 

concomitant links between base sexual appetites and the bestial.  

In a culture that portrayed sinister, carnal creatures such as satyrs, centaurs, 

wild men, and devils with hairy bodies, fur-covered clothing was therefore a 

suggestive addition to the body. Giving evidence from an array of sources including 

images and literature such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) and Lorenzo 

de’ Medici’s Canti carnascialeschi [Carnival Songs] (c. 1470-90), Lurati’s essay 

delves into the complex meanings attributed to fur beyond its magnificence and 

practical significance. In particular, she explores the visual and symbolic associations 

with animality and sex that inhibited its open display, and draws attention to the 

equations of fur with male and female genitalia (as in the pelisse of the essay’s title) 

in the hints of fur provocatively revealed by slits in clothes described by a preacher as 

‘finestrelle dell’inferno’, or ‘windows of hell’. It is little wonder that respectable 

people would wear fur on the inside of their attire (as they might also have a 

companion animal, such as a cat or lapdog carried within their sleeve or clothes),32 

and that the sensuality of the proximity of that fur – live or dead – to their skin might 

arouse a range of feelings from moral discomfort to tactile pleasure and warmth to 

pride in magnificence. 



13	
  
	
  

While in the Middle Ages viewing or experiencing such displays of 

magnificence was often considered decidedly sinful, the Renaissance revival of neo-

Platonism valorized beauty as perceived through the eye. Renaissance medical and 

humanistic texts considering the anatomy, appearance and functionality of the eye 

therefore represent a productive site for examining contemporary conceptions of the 

relationship between humans and animals. Many of these texts repeat the dictum that 

the eyes are the windows of the soul. Eyes thus make visible humankind’s 

immortality and connection to God, and debates concerning the eye permitted writers 

to frame the human as a liminal zone between the celestial realm and the animal 

world. Human eyes might also be distinguished from those of animals in aesthetic 

terms. The Pisan humanist Simone Porzio, for instance, following Aristotle’s 

discussion of eyes in the Generation of Animals, argued that humans, unlike animals, 

possessed a variety of eye colours. This trait could only be found in one other species, 

according to Porzio, and this, unsurprisingly, was the noble horse. Nonetheless, when 

Porzio and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers set out to classify distinct 

eye colours and to define their associated characteristics, they relied upon the 

anatomical and natural historical treatises of Galen and Aristotle, developing these 

categories with reference to various animal species, including sheep, goats and lions. 

In fact, the latter two species lent their names to distinct hues of eyes, caprino and 

lionato. The significance of this linkage between eye colour and animal species gave 

rise to considerable debate, as physiognomists argued, for example, about whether or 

not those with goat-coloured eyes, occhi caprini, appropriated goat-like behaviour 

(either intelligence or stupidity). At the same time, humanist writers and physicians 

examined the question from the perspective of humoral medicine and human 

difference. The Sienese physician, Giulio Mancini, departing from the 



14	
  
	
  

physiognomical theories of writers such as Giambattista della Porta, loosened the 

association between a specific eye colour and the animal it resembled to provide a 

more subtle account of the relationship between eye type and character. He argued 

that in humans goat-coloured eyes constituted a sign of a universal aesthetic and 

biological superiority, yielding greater powers of vision and longevity of eyesight. At 

the same time he believed that this hue revealed that the brain possessed a 

qualitatively better temperament.  

If examination of human eyes offered insights into the nature of their owners, 

what of the eyes of the other animal whose eye colour varied? In her essay Frances 

Gage considers the 1692 treatise by the Venetian Marino Garzoni, L’arte di ben 

conoscere e distinguere le qualità de’ cavalli, d’introdurre, e conservare una razza 

nobile, e di resanare il cavallo da mali . . . [The Art of Knowing and Distinguishing 

the Qualities of Horses Well, and Introducing and Conserving a Noble Race, and of 

Healing the Horse of Sicknesses . . .]. In this work Garzoni suggests that an owner 

should seek a horse with eyes that are ‘black, large, clear, jovial, placid and human’. 

Gage demonstrates that the aesthetics of the perfect horse eye reflected perceived 

desirable national and ethnic identities in the human realm. Like several other 

contributions to this volume, Gage’s essay also shows the porosity of the human-

animal boundary, revealing of intimate and practical real-life relationships with 

horses. The buyer might use the horse’s eye as a channel by which to rate a 

prospective purchase and find the right steed for war or peacetime. The horse was a 

subordinate who was able to be understood and to understand what was required of 

him or her. This quasi-humanity was also recognized in the individuality of horses 

and in their temperaments and feelings, while the potential for human-animal 



15	
  
	
  

understanding was contained in the equine eye, which was able to show ‘the quality 

of its heart’. 

The two final contributors to this special issue develop Gage’s questions about 

the human-animal divide and attempts to understand or explain the natural world and 

apply its secrets to human society. The communication of knowledge about animals 

and its application is central to Sarah Cockram’s essay about the historiographically-

neglected role of handlers of exotic animals in Renaissance Italy. The expertise of the 

animal handler was highly valued by Italian rulers such as the Gonzaga of Mantua 

whom Cockram has studied in previous work.33 Exotic animal handlers, like the 

servants sent to make notes on whales discussed by Monica Azzolini in her essay, 

were part of a ‘plurality of oral sources’ (as Azzolini puts it) and international 

‘brokers of knowledge’ (as Cockram prefers) travelling across great distances with 

cheetahs, lions, giraffes, elephants, and other charismatic megafauna. The globalized 

nature of the Renaissance world revealed by this trade is especially clear in the 

celebrated example of Hanno the elephant who arrived in Rome in 1514 with Moorish 

mahout and Saracen guide. In this way, Cockram’s essay contributes to the work of 

microhistorians and historians of trading diasporas, including Francesca Trivellato, 

who have recently sought to bring local and global scales of historical interpretation 

together.34   

The market in Italy for such demanding and expensive beasts from around the 

world is not hard to explain: they were symbols of power, evidence of wealth, and 

tokens of prestige for rulers jockeying to establish or to extend their shaky authority. 

At the highest level these animals acted as tools for international diplomacy along 

lucrative east-west trading routes. Here the animal handler may be compared to 

another neglected figure, the ambassador’s secretary who was a repository of vital 



16	
  
	
  

information and subtle power. Ocem, who accompanied a rhinoceros from Goa to 

Portugal in 1514, was a richly rewarded royal servant, while the cheetah keeper 

(pardero) Battista da Bataino travelled from Ferrara to the French court in 1479 with 

a beast requested by the king and furnished with the expectation of political rewards 

for Ercole d’Este. On important diplomatic occasions animals like the cheetah could 

be set running or hunting and the pardero was responsible for ensuring no diplomatic 

incident arose as a result of a lack of bestial cooperation.  

The handler’s ability to communicate with his exotic charges, and theirs with 

him, was indispensable to the success of this relationship. It is worth speculating 

about the extent to which their example might have contributed to discussions about 

human-animal communication, which had a venerable pedigree.35 For example, Pliny 

the Elder stated of the elephant in his Natural History: ‘It understands the language of 

its country and obeys orders, remembers duties that it has been taught … They are 

also believed to understand the obligations of another’s religion in so far as to refuse 

to embark on board ships when going overseas before they are lured by the mahout’s 

sworn promise in regard to their return.’36 The claim that elephants understood human 

speech was also made about Hanno the elephant in 1514 on the basis of observation 

of his interaction with his mahout, and further research may reveal other examples of 

the way in which such interspecific relationships informed and shaped debates about 

human-animal understanding, empathy, or communication during the Renaissance.37 

Like the skin of the Medici giraffe kept for its wondrousness, exotic 

specimens might posthumously make their way into collections of naturalia and drive 

natural historical investigations. In the past two decades a rich historiography of 

science has flourished around works such as Conrad Gessner’s monumental Historiae 

animalium [The Histories of Animals] (first published in 1551-8), Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 



17	
  
	
  

encyclopedic studies of animals, and the Academy of the Lynxes’s Thesaurus 

Mexicanus [Mexican Treasure] (published only in part in 1628, and then in a 

complete but revised edition in 1651).38 Each of these works took as its point of 

departure the exploration of the animal kingdom and is notable for the number of its 

illustrations. Yet, what makes these printed sources remarkable and, to a degree, 

surprising, is that this scientific enterprise—seemingly based on the accurate and 

detailed study of an unprecedented number of animals—includes a series of ‘unreal’ 

animals in the midst of the real. Gessner’s monocerote (or unicorn), Aldrovandi’s 

chimera or gallus monstrificus (four-footed cock), Cassiano del Pozzo’s fearful lamia 

(an anthropophagous fish) or two-headed amphisbaena (a type of snake) are only 

some of the animal oddities that populate late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-

century books. Freak animals and hybrids are also reported in the work of the 

seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, while the bones of a giant feature 

prominently in the Roman collection of Cavaliere Francesco Gualdi, and a seaman 

skin (likely to be a mermaid-like male specimen) appears in descriptions of Francesco 

Angeloni’s Roman museum.  

The European encounter with new, exotic, and remote cultures generated a 

vast amount of literature, mostly penned by travellers, naturalists, and missionaries 

reporting back to Europe. This experience encompassed people, animals, plants and 

landscapes that had not been previously seen. New animals opened the possibility that 

others that had been discussed in the classical sources like Pliny the Elder’s Natural 

History, but never seen before, might actually exist and they revitalized the field of 

natural history in unprecedented ways. At the same time exploration introduced a 

whole new range of ‘unlikely’ animals that most Europeans had not seen with their 

own eyes. With their liminal status, ‘unlikely’ animals represented a challenge to 



18	
  
	
  

early modern ways of knowing; these may not have been treated by classical authors, 

and yet appear in the accounts of newly discovered lands. They may have been 

rendered visually and verbally, through drawings or first- and second-hand accounts, 

and yet remain ambiguous and mysterious. When visible, like the dracunculus 

monoceros, a supposed dragon owned by Maffeo Barberini (later Pope Urban VIII), 

they may have appeared as unique specimens or jokes of nature, and presented 

challenges of comprehension and classification. To this group one should add further 

animals that represented a puzzle to natural philosophers and anatomists:  

hermaphrodite rats, hyenas (also believed to be hermaphroditic), two-headed calves, 

and animals like the armadillo that were believed to be hybrids (according to Kircher 

this was the result of a porcupine and a turtle mating). In short, the ontological status 

of a considerable body of Renaissance animals was problematic. But why, exactly? 

Was it because of their rarity? Was it because of the lack of direct experience? Or was 

it because they did not fit into what was known already from classical sources? More 

importantly, did the study of these animals have an important heuristic function, did it 

‘produce knowledge’, or should we consider it one of those dead alleys that punctuate 

the history of science? In short, the study of these animals provides a privileged point 

of entry into the proto-scientific mentality of the time and allows us to map early 

modern ways of knowing onto the natural world, helping us to understand why some 

forms of authentication and scientific ‘proof’ were considered more significant than 

others. 

In her essay Monica Azzolini demonstrates how local context and information 

exchanged orally came together with networks and written authorities to drive natural 

investigation and Renaissance knowledge about animals. Azzolini highlights the case 

of a whale discovered in 1624 dead in the sea near Santa Severa, north of Rome. This 



19	
  
	
  

whale, heaved onto land, examined and dissected, was discussed by Giovanni Bricci 

in his Relatione della Balena ritrovata morta vicino a Santa Severa … [Account of the 

Whale Found Dead Near Santa Severa …]. Bricci’s Relatione was a patchwork of 

information – derived from diverse sources, written and spoken, as well as 

examination of parts of the whale – and continued with a broader discorso on the 

topic of cetaceans. The Santa Severa whale is also discussed by the Lyncean Giovanni 

Faber in a section of his Novae Hispaniae Animalium Expositio in Rerum Medicarum 

Novæ Hispianiæ Thesaurus [Exposition of the Animals of New Spain in the Treasury 

of Medical Matters of New Spain], and Azzolini again draws out the importance of 

orality and a range of informants in the composition of this source in ways which 

contribute to current research in the field of oral communication in Renaissance 

Italy.39   

The investigation of natural historians into cetaceans gives evidence of 

interaction between whales of the same species, for instance with their young, and 

with other species, such as the dangerous orcas. Above all, it shows the relationship of 

people with living and dead whales: sailors repelling whales with castor oil or 

encouraging whales to play; teams of men strenuously cutting up whales for blubber 

and oil; as well as the activities of the scientists themselves, studying whale behaviour, 

investigating news of beached whales (or having their servants do so), and receiving 

for analysis specimen whale parts, including the fins and baleen of the Santa Severa 

whale sent to the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome. Azzolini also shows us the ways 

in which natural historians speculated about the origins of ambergris (was this whale 

sperm, vomit, excrement? Or an external product brought by whales from the 

depths?). This is another reminder of how animal products that human culture deemed 

valuable – such as ambergris, civet musk (see Cockram) or fur (Lurati), that could be 



20	
  
	
  

obtained either from a live animal or only from a dead one – dictated the interests and 

behaviours of humans towards certain species. 

 

In conclusion, these essays offer new ways of looking at the Italian Renaissance and 

point towards paths for future research. They provide insights into perceptions of 

human-animal boundaries and their permeability, for good or ill, opportunity or 

danger. Arbel suggests an empathetic crossing into the animal world. Cockram shows 

that proximity and understanding across the species boundary did not necessarily 

render humans bestial but could be valued, while by contrast Lurati highlights the 

moral perils of slipping over into the hairy animal state. Gage invites us to consider 

qualities of human and animal, and how such characteristics can be the same (ox eyes, 

submissiveness) or different between and among species (eye colour, temperament). 

The theoretical animal is here, as in Muratori’s utopian examples, but across this 

volume so is the animal as an identifiable individual: Frate Cipolla’s donkey; Hanno 

the elephant; or the Santa Severa whale. The essays seek to remind the reader of the 

relationship of Renaissance Italians to the animals all around them, of the significance 

of inter-dependence and of living alongside and among animals. Human attitudes to 

animals here range from the sympathetic, affectionate, interested, or awe-struck, to 

the patronizing, exploitative and dominating. Animal feelings towards humans are 

naturally harder for us to fathom, but also range from displays of affection to 

collaboration to rejection to aggression. Communication is a key theme: human to 

human communication about animals (through the spoken or written word or through 

images) as well as human communication with animals, and it will be fruitful to 

reflect further on how these animals communicated with humans as well as on 

communication between animals. 



21	
  
	
  

Sowing the seeds for other future work, the essays also strongly suggest how 

human violence might have been understood by Italians in relation to the non-human 

world during the Renaissance. Human cruelty was compared to the behaviour of 

animals and produced a range of texts and images which pessimistically bestialized 

humans and optimistically empathized with beasts. For example, in the light of his 

apparent empathy for animals it may be possible to understand why Leonardo da 

Vinci could write of the ‘most bestial madness’ of battles and elsewhere outline the 

way in which an artist should depict the corpses, blood, and death agonies of battle, 

concluding: ‘And see to it that you paint no level spot of ground that is not trampled 

with blood.’40 As Benjamin Arbel has observed: ‘The criticism against Man’s cruelty 

to animals often came from the same scholars who also criticized other aspects of 

their societies, such as war, slavery, and the attitude to other human races.’41 More 

research on the relationship between conflict and culture, and the social history of war 

may provide more nuanced insights by an examination of the role of animals in 

warfare, as symbols or mirrors of humanity and inhumanity, as active participants and 

as victims of violence.42 

Future research will also increasingly find fertile ground where the animal turn 

meets the ‘global turn’ in historical studies (as suggested by Cockram’s essay in this 

volume) since both animals and knowledge of animals could cross large distances 

during the Renaissance. Such cultural exchange provides further evidence for the 

study of the ways in which the local and global met in Renaissance courts and cities 

and may also form the basis for comparative studies of European and non-European 

attitudes towards animals.43 As Benjamin Arbel has pointed out, European travel 

writers during the Renaissance sometimes remarked admiringly on the favourable 

treatment of animals in the East and cited these examples as a way of encouraging 



22	
  
	
  

improved attitudes in Europe.44 Knowledge and expertise about animals have 

emerged in these essays as important commodities, in courtly and scholarly contexts 

and beyond, and as drivers of the intellectual movements that underpin much work on 

Renaissance Italy. 

The study of the animal in Renaissance Italy can contribute to debates about 

the continuity between Renaissance and early modern concerns in natural philosophy 

and developing sciences. As Cecilia Muratori and Gianni Paganini have stated in a 

forthcoming volume of essays on this topic, it may be valuable to 

 

[…] shift the weight from the problem of assessing the ‘modernity’ of Renaissance 

philosophers to the creation of a space of interaction between Renaissance and early 

modern thinkers in the spirit of ‘conversation’ […] By adopting this particular 

perspective it will be possible to cast light on the profound continuities that still 

remain between the two ‘periods’ despite the various elements of discontinuity that 

are also manifest.45  

 

It is evident from the essays here that the study of the animal in historical terms can 

reveal striking continuities and discontinuities in human attitudes and non-human 

experiences and the debate about the chronology – or indeed existence – of a growth 

in human empathy for animals, to mention one key area, is far from settled.  

Finally, the problem of periodization unavoidably raises the question of 

definitions in any consideration of the Italian Renaissance.46 In this respect it is 

interesting to note that Pierre Belon, the sixteenth-century French naturalist whose 

work Arbel (as well as Cockram and Gage, in passing) considers in his essay is 

sometimes quoted by modern historians for his use of the term ‘renaissance’. In the 

dedicatory epistle for Les Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez et Choses 



23	
  
	
  

Memorables … [Observations on Many Singularities and Memorable Matters …] 

(first published in Paris in 1553) Belon wrote of the reawakening of the spirits of men 

after a ‘deep sleep of ancient ignorance’ and the ‘happy and desirable rebirth 

[renaissance]’ of ‘all sorts of good disciplines’ following the establishment of a seat 

of learning at Tournon.47 Belon’s grandiose claims were intended to flatter his 

powerful dedicatee, the Cardinal of Tournon, but natural historical ideas of the birth 

and rebirth of knowledge about human and animal have contributed to our modern 

understanding of the flux of time and they have shaped the origins and meaning of the 

term ‘Renaissance’ itself. The dialogue between animal and Renaissance studies, to 

which this volume contributes, may therefore lead to a new way of looking at that 

powerful and contested idea.48 

University of Edinburgh 

University of Glasgow 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1 Lorraine Daston, ‘Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human’, in Lorraine Daston and 

Gregg Mitman (eds.), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on 

Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 37-58. 

2 For an overview, which focuses on the ape-human comparison and provides a list of 

further reading, see Kenneth Gouwens, ‘Human Exceptionalism’, in John Jeffries 

Martin (ed.), The Renaissance World (New York: Routledge, 2007), 415-34. 

3 Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (eds.), Renaissance Posthumanism (New York: 

Fordham University Press, 2016); Carey Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 

4 Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 

1994); Aleksander Pluskowski (ed.), Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals 

as Material Culture in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007); László Bartosiewicz, 



24	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
with contributions by Zsuzsa Miklós and Ferenc Gyulai, Animals in the Urban 

Landscape in the Wake of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Tempus, 1995). 

5 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-

1800 (1983; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984); Bruce Boehrer (ed.), A 

Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Matthew 

Senior (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of the Enlightenment (Oxford: 

Berg, 2007); Erica Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other 

Wonderful Creatures (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Erica 

Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (eds.), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, 

Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 

2002); Pia F. Cuneo (ed.), Animals and Early Modern Identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 

2014). 

6 Bruce Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature 

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); idem, Shakespeare Among the 

Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (Basingstoke: 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 

7 Fudge, Gilbert and Wiseman, At the Borders of the Human; Anita Guerrini, 

Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Karl A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (eds.), 

Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the 

Visual Arts, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Karl A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (eds.), 

Zoology in Early Modern Culture: Intersections of Science, Theology, Philology and 

Religious Education (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 



25	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
8 Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 

2008); Mirella Levi D’Ancona, Lo zoo del Rinascimento: il significato degli animali 

nella pittura italiana nei secoli XIV-XVI (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2001). 

9 A selection of this literature would include Joan E. Barclay Lloyd, African Animals 

in Renaissance Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); 

Giancarlo Malacarne, Il mito dei cavalli gonzagheschi: alle origini del purosangue 

(Verona: Promoprint, 1995); and Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant (Carcanet in 

association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Discoveries 

Commission, Lisbon: Manchester, 1997). 

10 Juliana Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the 

Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 

11 Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Nigel 

Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 

3-18; eadem, ‘What Was it Like to be a Cow? History and Animal Studies’, in Linda 

Kalof (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. 

DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199927142.013.28 (accessed May 2015); eadem, 

‘Renaissance Animal Things’, in Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul 

Youngquist (eds.), Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective 

(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 41-56 (also in New 

Formations, 76 [2012], 86-100); Dorothee Brantz (ed.), Beastly Natures: Animals, 

Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 

2010); and Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London: Reaktion, 

2007). 

12 On this issue, and for insightful perspective on other debates in historical animal 

studies, see Sandra Swart’s review of Brantz, Beastly Natures, on H-Environment 



26	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
(November 2011): https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/20598/swart-

brantz-beastly-natures-animals-humans-and-study-history (accessed June 2016). 

13 For this question see, for instance, Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and 

Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 

Press, 2002), 2-3. 

14 See Daston, ‘Intelligences’; Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, The 

Philosophical Review, 83/4 (1974), 435-50; Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je 

suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006).  

15 See, for instance, Erica Fudge, ‘The Animal Face of Early Modern England’, 

Theory, Culture and Society, 30 (2013), 177-98 and ‘Milking Other Men’s Beasts’, 

History and Theory, 52/4 (2013), 23-5; Hilda Kean, ‘Challenges for Historians 

Writing Animal-Human History: What is Really Enough?’, Anthrozoös, 25 (2012), 

61. 

16 See for instance Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic 

Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); 

Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa 

(Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010). 

17 On exploitation see Muratori’s contribution to this volume. On companionship see 

Sarah Cockram, ‘A Cat in a Sleeve: Affection, Aesthetics and Proximity to 

Companion Animals in Renaissance Mantua’, in Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells 

(eds.), Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and 

Modernity (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 

18 Benjamin Arbel, ‘The Renaissance Transformation of Animal Meaning: From 

Petrarch to Montaigne’, in Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (eds.), Making 

Animal Meaning (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 76. 



27	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
19 René Descartes, Discours de la Methode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher 

la verité dans les sciences (Leiden: Jan Maire, 1637), Ch. 6. 

20 Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols, Chs. 1, 2.  

21 Quoted in Alison Brown, ‘Rethinking the Renaissance in the Aftermath of Italy’s 

Crisis’, in John M. Najemy (ed.), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance 1300-1550 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 252. 

22 On the monstrous see, for example, Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (eds.), 

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Aldershot: 

Ashgate, 2012); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of 

Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and 

People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1990), 30-60; Stephen D. Bowd, ‘Pietro Bembo and the “Monster” 

of Bologna (1514)’, Renaissance Studies, 13/1 (1999), 40-54. 

23 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew 

and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943); 

Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and its Interpreters. Continuity in the 

Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Claudine 

Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1997). 

24 Andrew E. Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 

Press, 2010). 

25 B. W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 



28	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
26 For a summary of work on this ontological problem see Derek Ryan, Animal 

Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Ch. 

2. 

27 ‘Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à 

penser.’ Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). See also Daston 

and Mitman, Thinking with Animals. 

28 Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, trans. and ed. Sidney Alexander 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 376.  

29 William Eamon, ‘Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-

Reformation Italy’, Early Science and Medicine, 3/1 (1998), 1-31. 

30 Quoted in Richard Mackenney, Sixteenth Century Europe: Expansion and Conflict 

(Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1993), 77-8. 

31 Jill Burke, ‘Nakedness and Other Peoples: Rethinking the Italian Renaissance 

Nude’, Art History, 36 (2013), 714-39.  

32 Cockram, ‘A Cat in a Sleeve’. 

33 Sarah Cockram, Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga: Power Sharing at the 

Italian Renaissance Court (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 

34 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Is there a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of 

Global History?’, California Italian Studies, 2 (2011) at 

<http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq#page-1> (accessed May 2015); eadem, 

The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural 

Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). See 

also Leor Halevi, ‘Religion and Cross-Cultural Trade: A Framework for 

Interdisciplinary Inquiry’, in Francesca Trivellato and Leor Halevi, Catia Antunes 



29	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
(eds.), Religion and Trade: Cross-cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24-61. 

35 Brian Cummings, ‘Pliny’s Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in 

Renaissance Thought’, in Fudge, Renaissance Beasts, Ch. 9. 

36 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Volume III: Books 8-11, trans. H. Rackham 

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 3 (8.1). DOI: 

10.4159/DLCL.pliny_elder-natural_history.1938 

37 Cummings, ‘Pliny’s Literate Elephant’, 169. On understanding of the equine mind 

see Gage’s contribution to this volume. 

38 For example, see Laurent Pinon, ‘Conrad Gessner and the Historical Depth of 

Renaissance Natural History’, in Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (eds.), Historia: 

Empiricism and Eruditio in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 

2005), 241-67; David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the 

Beginning of Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).  

39 For example, Stefano Dall’Aglio, Brian Richardson and Massimo Rospocher (eds.), 

Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society (London: Routledge, 2017). 

40 Leonardo da Vinci, Libro di Pittura. Edizione in facsimile del codice urbinate lat. 

1270 nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ed. Carlo Pedretti, transcr. Carlo Vecce, 2 

vols. (Florence: Giunti, 1995), 1: 218; 2: fol. 59v; idem, Selections from the 

Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma A. Richter (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 1952), 185. 

41 Arbel, ‘Renaissance Transformation’, 75 

42 Stephen Bowd shall address these questions in more detail as part of a Leverhulme 

Trust-funded project on mass murder during the Italian Wars. 



30	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
43 Marcy Norton, ‘Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early 

Modernity’, in Paula Findlen (ed.), Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 

1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53-83. 

44 Benjamin Arbel, ‘The Attitude of Muslims to Animals: Renaissance Perceptions 

and Beyond’, in Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire 

(Istanbul: Eren, 2010), 57-74. 

45 Cecilia Muratori and Gianni Paganini (eds.), Early Modern Philosophers and the 

Renaissance Legacy (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2016). 

46 For example, the challenge to conventional periodizations and conceptualizations of 

the Renaissance lies at the heart of Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A 

Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 2015). 

47 ‘De là est ensuivy que les esprits des hommes, qui auparavant estoyent comme 

endormis & detenus assopiz en un profound sommeil d’ancienne ignorance, ont 

commencé à s’eveiller, & sortir des tenebres, ou si long temps estoyent demeurez 

enseveliz: et en sortant, ont iecté hors & tiré en evidence toutes especes de bonnes 

disciplines: lesquelles à leur tant heureuse & desirable renaissance, tout ainsi que les 

nouvelles plantes apres l’aspre saison de l’hyver reprennent leur vigeur à la chaleur du 

Soleil, & sont consolées de la douceur du printemps’. Pierre Belon, Les Observations 

de Plusieurs Singularitez et Choses Memorables … (Paris: Marnef and Cavellat, 

1588), sig. aijv. For use of this passage see, for example, Lynn Thorndike, 

‘Renaissance or Prerenaissance?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4 (1943), 68; B. L. 

Ullman, Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 

1973), 25; and Amy Wygant, Medea, Magic and Modernity in France: Stages and 

Histories, 1553-1797 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 36. 



31	
  
	
  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
48 Suggestive in this respect is Kenneth Gouwens, ‘What Posthumanism Isn’t: On 

Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance’, in Campano and 

Maisano, Renaissance Posthumanism, 37-63.