Between the Human and the Nonhuman: An Interview with Mackenzie Cooley

Republics of Letters features an occasional series of interviews with scholars who have recently been in conversation with the medieval and early modern community at Stanford University. These interviews seek to capture ideas in motion: how current and recent work came to be conceived, how projects develop and change, and how new knowledge emerges into public view. In keeping with the journal’s aim of reflecting on the present moment in our disciplines, these dialogues invite self-awareness, retrospection, and analysis of the relevant fields.

In the following interview, Mackenzie Cooley (Associate Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies, Hamilton College) discusses her book The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance with Amanda Coate (PhD Candidate, Department of History, Stanford University). The book traces the earliest uses of the term “race,” animal breeding projects, and the history of eugenics in the Renaissance period. Cooley teaches the history of science and intellectual history in Hamilton College. She earned her doctorate from Stanford University, where she founded the Natural Things research group in global natural history. She subsequently joined Cornell University as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. Her edited volume, Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (co-edited with Anna Toledano and Duygu Yildirim), was recently published with Routledge.

Image

Amanda Coate: Your book offers an important intervention in how we understand human and nonhuman relations through a somewhat unexpected lens: animal breeding practices in the Renaissance. Can you share a bit about how and why you came to write this book?

Mackenzie Cooley: As with all books, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance has been a long time coming and gone through many iterations and many goals. It started as a dissertation at Stanford called “Animal Empires: The Perfection of Nature between Europe and the Americas.” From that, it evolved into a project that focused on the subtitle of the dissertation. My goal for the dissertation was to access an early modern world that relied extensively on animal labor, animals to think with (animal metaphor-making), and animal intimacies (the presence of nonhumans in the household). For me, one of the most astonishing differences between early modern lives and ours is that there was much less alienation between nonhuman animals and humans. That would mean not being so fussed about seeing the chicken you’d be eating for dinner plucked in the kitchen, whether you were the servant doing the plucking or the one dining on its flesh. But likewise, many early moderns first experienced awareness of sex through nonhuman animals, through growing up in a barnyard space. That is so profoundly different than the alienation that we have from the eggs that we buy in the supermarket, the chicken breast that’s available there, the milk that requires calves to be fertilized, born, and then removed from their mothers, and certainly the way we as moderns come to learn about sex.

AC: In the way that you attend to the question of human and nonhuman relations in the book, it is evident that feminist theory plays a critical role. This isn’t necessarily self-­evident in the title or the topic of the book. Could you say more on how this came about?

MC: At its core, this is a book that talks a lot about race but comes from a series of inquiries at the intersection of history and feminist theory. My dissertation emerged from the combination of the History Department at Stanford and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) that was just being launched as I entered the second and third years of my graduate coursework. The FGSS program had a major impact on me and many others in my cohort. It meant that we were reading a lot of critical feminist theory as we were also doing our history coursework. It also meant that feminist pedagogy and an extensive workshop culture shaped a lot of our grant applications. Because of these influences, I sought to draw a connection between feminist research, a feminist worldview, and a feminist means of accessing history and some of the work of animal studies. The way I sought to do that was through looking not at the performance of gender, which the field was increasingly moving away from, but at embodied reproduction. Embodied reproduction was a way that you could see the distinct likenesses between humans and other mammals, and I was really excited about that.

AC: Like many readers, I was very struck by the way you relate race with animal breeding in the Renaissance. What in your research led you to see the connection between the two?

MC: When I began my archival work in Mantua, Italy, the first thing that I found that surprised me was that when there was any discussion about animal breeding, there was immediate evocation of the term razza — which, of course, is connected to the history of early modern race. And so, very quickly, an interest in breeding led to some of the terms that are evoked in the book’s subtitle. One of the concerns I had when allowing the monograph to focus on the term razza was that, ultimately, it perpetuates a narrative about race that is fundamentally bestializing, in which humans are labeled according to this term in a way that does have a valence associated with animal breeding. I do not want this book to be used as a simplified means of saying that the human race boiled down to animal breeding projects in the Renaissance. That’s one strand of the many stories that have made modern race what it is and its discriminatory power so great. But that doesn’t undermine the work that many others have done to reclaim the term as a marker of identity.

AC: You draw on a variety of sources from different regions and languages, stretching across early modern Europe and Mexico. Can you expand on the research process and how your project developed during and after your dissertation?

MC: I came into graduate school thinking I was going to focus on the Hispanic world, and to a large extent I do. But working with Stanford professor Paula Findlen opened my eyes to the extent to which Italy really helps to understand much of Spain’s politics. Spain sought to reuse or co-opt the spoils of and the cultural prestige of Italy. I’ve come to think that Italy was to Spain as ancient Greece was to ancient Rome. So, I became particularly interested in regions of Italy that had become somehow embroiled in Spanish or Habsburg imperial politics, such as Naples and Milan.

I won a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) fellowship through the Library of Congress, which was an incredible opportunity. On the CLIR fellowship, I did much of my research in Italy and spent time in Peru, which is where I started thinking through why the Spanish called llamas and alpacas “sheep.” What is sheep-ish about them? Of course, they have hair that can be used to make fluffy garments, but why wouldn’t you presume that they were related to camels? The answer to that is quite obvious in the historical sources. The Spanish did not want to see a Muslim nature in the New World and used taxonomy to expressly complicate the matter. So, the Peruvian trip was very formative for me, and it launched my work in Mexico. The following year I was on a Fulbright research fellowship in Spain, which made it possible to start writing and do work in a series of Madrid-based archives, in Seville, and in Simancas. I learned a great deal while writing from Barcelona, where I worked with the faculty of the Institución Milá y Fontanals de Investigación en Humanidades (IMF), the center for the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Cataluña.

From there, I returned to Stanford and wrote up the project. At that point, I knew I was unsatisfied with the balance between Europe and the Americas. Most of my training concentrated on early modern European history, and I was not comfortable with the extent to which I was able to engage with the Mexican sources. Upon finishing the graduate program, I started to take up Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, more extensively. The opportunity to engage with the Instituto de Docencia Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) program of Nahua scholars opened my eyes, and I am so honored to have had the opportunity to learn from them. The program is a tight-knit community of impressive linguists, both native speakers and foreign language-learners, whose study of the classical language uses the tools of philology to make documents written in indigenous languages comparable and legible to a tradition of early modern history that relies on these types of texts. Ultimately, only half of the book comes directly from the dissertation. Four of the chapters were written subsequently in order to respond to what I was learning about indigenous studies, through the study of Nahuatl, and what I came to learn about bio-­archeology and the study of animal remains while a postdoc at Cornell University.

AC: What do you think your book teaches us about humans’ relationships with other animals and the natural world?

MC: I tried to have this be a book that is about both real and metaphorical animals. Animal studies, and animal history in particular, have tended to fall into one of those categories. There are a number of incredible pieces that follow the presence of cart horses and where they would be stabled, how they’d be housed, bred, branded, how they would fit into a city, where they could pull their carts, the span of their movement. There are a whole other number of also rich studies that focus on questions of agency and the bestiaries that lingered behind the metaphors that humans used to understand their world, so humans thinking through animals. When I’m speaking about animals in a bestiary, what I tend to imagine is not a description of a “lion” with a lowercase l, which could be many lions or a specific lion. But it is a transcendent feature of the Lion, an entity that is the emblem of courage. And that’s the kind of emblem that would be used in physiognomy, for example, to link traits that seem visually leonine to human character traits.

In this book, I have tried to maintain a level of complexity that relies on the idea of Renaissance history as a counterpoint. Rather than reducing the whole story to one or the other of these lines, I have sought to tease out the metaphors when it’s relevant — to allow for that emblematic animal — and maintain a real interest in the logistics of animal life in the early modern period, especially as a European world interacted with an American world and those two worlds in many ways became one. The way I have tried to do this is this counterpoint method, which insists on these multiplicities.

AC: Could you expand on the counterpoint method? How does it inform your approach to studying the early modern period?

MC: In music, the way counterpoint works is that there are a number of lines played by different instruments or vocalized by different singers. Each alone can be taken as their own melody but together they move to create a very complex melodic structure in which one line doesn’t dominate the others. They all exist together with sometimes fraught harmonies. This counterpoint method means that there are a number of new contributions of the project in relation to human-animal studies, and they are often parallel and mutually enforcing and overlapping without boiling down to one through-line. This is one of the first extensive studies of animal breeding culture in the early modern period, which is one of its major contributions. The first two chapters in the section on knowing and controlling animal generation look at the ways in which breeders thought through their work as quasi-philosophers, and then also follow the rise of this rhetoric of razza-making or race-making (which was common in breeders’ language within the Romance vernaculars), and its immediate links to cultures of branding. From there, the project continues to look at some of these other overlapping strands. As we geographically move from early modern Europe to early modern Mexico, I follow the ideas of corn, seeds, and blood in Mesoamerica that developed around something not exactly equivalent to razza. But Mesoamericans did certainly breed their animals and sometimes spoke of them using the term xinachtli, which was linked to the cultivation of maize and the selection of different seeds in order to promote the best animals, plants, or, indeed, people.

What I try to ward against with the Renaissance counterpoint methodology is the idea that razza and xinachtli are the same thing. They follow very different trajectories. But, in some cases, they are doing parallel work. This suggests a flexibility within our interpretations of the early modern world and its multiple viewpoints, especially when early moderns are reckoning with diversity in the creation of overseas empires. It also insists that some early moderns — especially on the philosophical side of things — were able and willing to see their world as a confluence of signs and surprising coherences of nature that were left by God and at the very least interpretable by man. Those signs are sometimes deeply implicated in their interpretations of nature. But for others, they are not; for others, nature is a much simpler, more material place.

AC: In your view, how have human and animal relations changed since the Renaissance? Do you see any connections between the Renaissance and our present moment?

MC: I think that, in a lot of ways, we are living in a new eugenic moment. What we are able to do with CRISPR and all the discussion of designer babies and designer dogs indicates a pendulum swing toward an interest in cultivating what is perceived as the biological best from our imperfect bodies. This swing between a fear of the extent to which nature can be controlled and a hubristic confidence in the possibilities of controlling nature is as old as the hills. I think this pendulum swing is inevitable — we’ve seen it throughout history, certainly throughout the nineteenth century with the formal eugenics movement. This Renaissance story is a pointed rebuke to the presumption that this fascination is only in our present. The decision to modify or control nature through selective reproduction and breeding is not solely an impulse that we have now. We certainly have different tools, but it will be a recurring discussion that is inescapable as our technology continues to develop. Thinking through these issues with the arm’s length of a couple centuries can be helpful as we reflect on our own motivations in a fraught present.

AC: What influence did the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford University have on the development of your book?

MC: CMEMS is an amazing community. We’ve just started an early modern connected histories seminar here in Central New York and the format comes from that model! CMEMS brings together scholars in a formal and informal capacity, whether to workshop papers or to give talks. My opportunity to be part of the organizational team as a graduate student taught me very basic professional skills about how to create a lecture series but also made it possible for me to reach out to scholars very early in my career and bring them to campus in a way that made their work accessible to me. Beyond that, as an early graduate student I had the opportunity to do a joint presentation with historian Ali Karamustafa on different horse cultures between Egypt and North Africa and the northern limits of the Mediterranean. That project allowed us to explore the limits of connected and comparative histories in order to tell parallel stories of horsemanship and the making of knighthood and the warrior masculinity associated with a lot of horsemanship. The book and much of my work combine comparative and connected histories in a way that refuses to adopt solely one or the other. As CMEMS became more interested in engaging with questions of the global and multiple geographies and language groups, it was an excellent ground in which to play with those ideas before putting something out in print.

AC: Can you tell us what you are working on now?

MC: I’m deep in the weeds of a new book, something like “When Nature Became Medicine: The Quest for Cures in the Early Modern World.” There are lots of animals in this history, too — bezoar anti-poisons from ruminants, wet markets filled with critters, aphrodisiac insects — but really it’s a history of bioprospecting and natural product extraction. I’m particularly interested in the threat that the extinction of indigenous languages poses to medical knowledge and the ways in which the rise of a textual pharmacopeia tradition erases while also standardizing and creating over the Renaissance period. Next summer, I’ll be taking up the fellowship with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers — National Endowment for the Humanities (CAORC-NEH) in Mexico to continue research on the 16th century travels of Dr. Francisco Hernández to learn about Mexican materia medica from local experts, which will doubtless be a combination of archival, ethnographic, and new material research. All of this has led to a collaboration with Dan Smail at Harvard into a platform to collect, compare, and analyze historical pharmacopeias. What is included on these lists of substances with bodily effect, and what has been left out, or hidden away? And how can we understand the history of chemistry not as the definition of the inorganic but the reckoning with potency made from life itself?