ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

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

English Abstract

In the Lettres sur les animaux (1762–1781), the philosopher and hunter keeper of Versailles Charles-Georges Le Roy wrote: «Vous savez, Madame, que je soutiens qu'il n’appartient qu’aux chasseurs d’apprécier l’intelligence des bêtes». With this remark, he emphasised the importance of observing and knowing animals in their natural environment for scientific understanding, as hunters always did. It is not new, in the European context, that hunting practices contributed to specific views of the animal world: hunting manuals were a popular literary genre from the Middle Ages, and hunting was considered one of the most important activities throughout the Modern Era. At the same time, hunting has been studied as a ground for reinforcing social hierarchies and invigorating sovereign power over subjects.
This paper aims to look at hunting as a practice where different cultures and views of wild animals compete. On one side, archival sources allow us to reconstruct common people’s hunting practices and their pursuit of wild animals—activities often deemed poaching due to legal restrictions directed mainly at rustic populations. On the other side, hunting manuals will be analyzed as cultural tools that reveal how wild animals were described, classified, and understood within higher social circuits. The focus of this research will be Northern Italy during the XVII and XVIII centuries not only because of the centrality of hunting in this region, but also due to the noticeable proliferation of hunting manuals published there in this period.

Author

• Matilde Cassano, University of Verona