ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Local Practices, Contested Knowledge: Making Animal Sciences in Rural Europe (17th-19th Centuries)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Recent historiography has examined how knowledge about animals was scientifically and politically institutionalized in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this period, emerging fields including comparative anatomy, veterinary medicine, agronomy, zootechnics, evolutionary biology, and zoology asserted their scientific authority, marginalizing traditional ways of knowing animals. This panel explores these tensions by focusing on how a variety of actors from different social strata produced and contested separations between empirical and scientific animal knowledge in rural Europe. In particular, it explores the intersections between history of science and environmental history through the relations between human and non-human animals. Examining different local contexts between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and different practices such as hunting, managing woods, veterinary medicine and animal husbandry, it highlights how different forms of knowledge about animals were produced, contested and legitimized across different social groups. In particular, the panel argues that the rationalisation of animal husbandry and wildlife management involved both the devaluing and the appropriation of peasant knowledge. Archival records of poaching, hunting and veterinary treatises, woodland regulations and sources of agricultural societies reveal competing epistemologies regarding the classification, care and management of both wild and domesticated animals, and offer new perspectives on human-animal relations within the history of science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jens Amborg, University of Uppsala

Individual Presentations

• Chasing Wild Animals: Hunting, Knowledge and Social Hierarchies in the State of Milan (17th-18th Centuries) - Matilde Cassano, University of Verona

• Caring for Animals: Farmers, Farriers and Veterinarians in the Making of Scientific Animal Husbandry in Bologna (18th-19th Centuries) - Miriam Borgia, University of Bologna/EHESS-CRH

• Development of Animal Breeding Techniques in Duchy of Carniola - Tadej Pavković, University of Ljubljana

Session Organizer

• Miriam Borgia, University of Bologna/EHESS-CRH