The Perfection of Nature

Were there alpacas on Noah's ark? How did the dogs of Hispaniola lose their bark? Could the environment in which a horse was conceived affect its color or temperament? These are just some of the questions that preoccupied animal breeders, naturalists, and philosophers in early modern Spain and its empire, and just a few of the topics explored by Mackenzie Cooley in her thought-provoking new study.The Perfection of Nature comprises a range of carefully selected case studies, each of which addresses a different aspect of Renaissance animal breeding. Part 1 focuses on horse breeding in Italy and the complex philosophical issues this raised about the heritability of traits. Part 2 examines breeding in the context of two very different early modern courts: the court of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, and the court of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II in Tenochtitlán. Part 3 explores questions of translocation and hybridity, using the contrasting case studies of dogs, which migrated and interbred across continents, and Old and New World species of camelids, which did not. It shows how perceptions of interbreeding between animals helped to inform contemporary understandings of racial mixing between humans in the Americas. Part 4 takes a step back to consider the wider philosophical issues associated with questions of heredity and difference. How did New World animals like the manatee, the sloth, or the armadillo fit into classical and biblical systems of classification? How could their presence on the American continent be explained? What did the emerging “science” of physiognomy (the reading of human and animal character through facial features) mean for the existence of free will?The Perfection of Nature contributes to several interconnected scholarly debates. First, by focusing on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Cooley pushes back the traditional chronology of selective breeding. Most scholarship on this topic begins with the eighteenth-century English farmer Robert Bakewell, who selectively bred cows, sheep, and horses to produce animals with fleshier bodies and (in the case of sheep) longer wool. Cooley demonstrates, however, that selective breeding had precedents during the Renaissance, when Neapolitan horse breeders sought to influence the color, strength, or speed of their animals through selection of mating partners, importation of superior stock, and natural magic. Through a process of careful comparison, she also extends her analysis of selective breeding practices to Mexico and Peru, where Nahua and Inca breeders selected dogs for attractiveness and edibility and alpacas for the softness of their wool (achieving levels of fineness unequaled in the modern world).The book also emphasizes the circulation of knowledge across space. Drawing on sources from Central and South America, Cooley shows how the introduction of Old World species into the New World changed the native fauna, whether through hybridization, in the case of dogs, or population decline, in the case of Peruvian camelids, which succumbed to overexploitation, disease, and competition from introduced livestock. Importantly, she also shows how ideas about animals (and people) moved between continents, often influencing how fauna was appraised, named, and categorized; Spanish colonists in the Andes, for example, described llamas and alpacas as “sheep of Peru,” emphasizing their role as producers of wool, while the Nahua classified horses as “deer” (mamazah)—the Mesoamerican mammal that most closely resembled a mare or a stallion (pp. 162, 119). By including the Italian peninsula in her analysis, Cooley adds a further dimension to this transatlantic story, highlighting the crucial role of Rome as a center for knowledge exchange about the Americas—something that Atlantic-centered studies of the Spanish empire tend to overlook.Finally, and perhaps most significantly, The Perfection of Nature explores the ways in which ideas about animal breeding influenced evolving theories about heredity and difference in humans. Cooley notes parallels between notions of breed purity within animals and limpieza de sangre among humans and describes how branding was used to make breed legible in animals and status as property legible in slaves. She also broaches the topic of mestizaje in the Americas, highlighting the animal origin of many terms subsequently applied to the different castas; criollo, for instance, translates as “little bred thing” and was applied to dogs before it came to refer to Africans and Europeans born in the New World (p. 130). While sensitive to the challenges of linking selective breeding in animals to racial engineering in humans, Cooley makes a convincing case for seeing the two phenomena as interlinked. Notions of lineage and pedigree forged in the stables could, without too much difficulty, be extrapolated to the court or the plantation, shaping how contemporaries perceived and classified different groups of people.The Perfection of Nature is a meticulously researched and engagingly written book that offers new insights into Renaissance cultures of animal breeding. Cooley makes innovative use of an eclectic range of source material—including Mexican codices, Jesuit natural histories, and Italian horse-training manuals—and weaves these diverse elements together to make a nuanced but persuasive argument. Her book will be of interest to scholars working on the history of animals, the history of science, the history of race, and the history of Spanish empire

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