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

byMackenzie Cooley

Mackenzie Cooley investigates animal breeding in Renaissance Italy and shows how efforts to perfect horses, dogs, livestock, and other creatures shaped emerging ideas about heredity and human difference. Courts, breeders, naturalists, and physicians treated lineage, climate, mixture, and disciplined reproduction as sources of desirable traits. The book connects practical husbandry with political hierarchy, colonial expansion, and the development of racial thinking. Cooley demonstrates that concepts later applied to human populations grew partly from attempts to control animal bodies, complicating histories that locate race only in modern science or Atlantic slavery.

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Publication date

2022

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9780226822266