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

by Mackenzie Cooley

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226822273
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/26/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	369
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"In this important contribution to the prehistory of modern race thinking, Cooley traces ideas and practices relating to the breeding of animals in early modern Italy, Spain, and pre-Spanish and Spanish America. Using archival, manuscript, and visual sources, she untangles changing understandings of inheritance, lineage, and difference as they related to the dogs, horses, camelids, and, occasionally, humans of the Old and New Worlds."

Katharine Park

A tremendously rich and intellectually stimulating study that is of interest to the history of knowledge as well as to environmental history and animal history.” 

Sehepunkte

This is a terrific book on an important and timely topic: as humans study the reproduction of characteristics in animals and plants, how do they apply what they learn to the reproduction of characteristics in humans? Cooley’s fascinating exploration maps breeding knowledge and practices in sixteenth century Europe and the Americas onto a new discourse of race. Her travels take us across boundaries of geography and species, from Italy to Mexico, from maize to camelids, horses, and humans, in order to teach us how agriculture has informed (in)humanity.”

David Nirenberg

"How can one breed animals to create a better nature? The Perfection of Nature offers a prodigiously rich narrative of the sixteenth-century infatuation with this deceptively simple question. In a stunningly insightful volume, Cooley offers a comprehensive overview of how farmers, breeders and natural philosophers across the Atlantic attempted to improve upon the natural world that surrounded them, with varying degrees of success and often unintended results. The Perfection of Nature is a major accomplishment that offers an inspiring, thought-provoking, and refreshingly original account of how the European encounter with the America reshaped the animal world and the way humans think both about animals and themselves. This is history of science, animal studies, environmental history and Atlantic history of the best kind."

Dániel Margócsy

In Mackenzie Cooley’s erudite new history, The Perfection of Nature, the story of animal breeding provides the basis for a . . . reconsideration of human-animal relations in sixteenth-century Europe and America.

London Review of Books

In The Perfection of Nature, Cooley opens a rich archive of sources that speak to topical questions around animal difference, race, colonial history, and indigenous knowledge. She delivers a carefully researched study that provides fascinating new insights into the history of breeding and human intervention, inviting us to think about human-nature relationships and the genealogy of current discussions. Highly recommended!

Isis

The Perfection of Nature was a pleasure to read. It is an impressive contribution to our understanding of premodern science and the roots of race thinking, rigorous and well-written. The chapters could all easily be assigned to undergraduates who will be delighted with [Cooley’s] descriptions of everything from ceremonial llamas to Chinese crested dogs; the entire volume should find a place on graduate reading lists as it is a model of how to make the past resonate with the present.

Sixteenth Century Journal

An important contribution to our understanding of the ways philosophies of selective breeding emerged, converged, and changed over the course of the long sixteenth century. . . . Cooley’s wide-ranging case studies offer a new and valuable demonstration of the ways that a desire to ‘improve’ nature figured in belief systems and interspecies encounters over the long sixteenth century. Her exploration of how specific instances of selective breeding were represented, thought, and practiced sheds light on the complex, uneven evolution of breed and race as categories of identity, and suggestively connects Renaissance thought to concepts such as eugenics or branding that are typically associated with the post-Enlightenment era. Beyond its clear relevance for transatlantic scholarship on Renaissance Spain, then, this book will also be an invaluable resource for animal studies scholars interested in questions about the entangled histories of breed and race that we continue to grapple with today.”  

Humanimalia

This is a thoughtful book that all scholars of early modern history should read. Cooley reveals a world where ideas about race and the implications of breeding were complex and fluid, when applied to animals, and rarely developed, when applied to people. Certainly, animals could serve as metaphors for human experience, but later horrific ideas about eugenics and even blood-based ideas about race remained largely in the future. Each chapter of this book presents a thoughtful and interdisciplinary analysis based on an impressive range of often disparate sources. Like the best recent studies from the history of science, it convincingly shows the contributions of artisans as well as theoreticians to how people understood and sought to control different kinds of animals. The book’s loose structure, with each chapter almost seeming like an essay on a theme, adds to the emphasis of the argument about fluidity and dialogue rather than linearity and stability. The Perfection of Nature is an important study with which a wide range of subfields will grapple for years to come.

H-Sci-Med-Tech

The Perfection of Nature is a meticulously researched and engagingly written book that offers new insights into Renaissance cultures of animal breeding. Cooley makes innovative use of an eclectic range of source material—including Mexican codices, Jesuit natural histories, and Italian horse-training manuals—and weaves these diverse elements together to make a nuanced but persuasive argument. Her book will be of interest to scholars working on the history of animals, the history of science, the history of race, and the history of Spanish empire.

Hispanic American Historical Review

As beautifully written as it is conceptually and theoretically ambitious, Cooley’s The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance is a true renaissance book. This stunning work of scholarship addresses materials from multiple languages and national contexts to reveal the conceptual limitations imposed by the divisions between theoretical schools and methods, on the one hand, and modern divisions among literature, science, political theory, philosophy, and history, on the other. Uncovering how the subject of animal breeding was not ancillary to early modern scholarship and notions of the human, The Perfection of Nature brings together critical race studies, animal studies, and posthumanist studies—and reaches beyond these areas through the depth and breadth of its synthesis of classical philosophy, medieval scholasticism, and early modern political theory, philosophy, and medicine and science.

MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Committee Citation (Honorable M

Cooley’s work explores an admirable range of topics, draws on a formidable array of sources and deploys diverse methods to produce its arguments. It also displays an admirable commitment to drawing on research from disciplines that rarely feature in historical studies, such as palaeozoology. The resulting book provides a valuable, readable and thought-provoking contribution to discussions of the origins of modern conceptions of heredity and race.

British Journal for the History of Science