ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Conceptions of Atlantic Animals I

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores Iberian cultural conceptions of both land and sea animals in the Atlantic Ocean and on Atlantic islands in medicinal practice, naming, religious, and social attributes in the early modern period. Its central focus is on the translation of endemic animals in colonized spaces into objects of natural curiosity within Iberian natural histories in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. A variety of animal and human influences informed this process of translation from linguistic mechanisms to decipher animal appearences in the Florentine Codex to accounts of musical dolphins in the rivers of Peru.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Seán Thomas Kane, Binghamton University

Individual Presentations

• Music and the Manatee: Knowledge Interaction in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires - Tasio Rodrigo, Institute of History of Science, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona

• Animating the Atlantic: The Marine Creature as Prodigy and Artificial Spectacle in Early Modern Italy - Phoebe Price, Stanford University

• Coatis: From the Americas the Europe, From the Familiar to the Exotic - Deniz Martinez, University of Delaware