Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds

Mackenzie Cooley is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern history. She is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. Anna Toledano is a historian of science and a museum professional. Her academic research focuses on natural history collecting in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of knowledge working on the comparative and connected histories of science and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Introduction: Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds

Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım

On the Design

Zoë Sadokierski and Katie Dean

Part I: Manipulated

1. Pollen: The Sexual Life of Plants in Mesoamerica

Helen Burgos-Ellis

2. Bezoar: Medicine in the Belly of the Beast

Mackenzie Cooley

3. Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Control of Water

Alexander Statman

4. Ambergris: From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy

Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann

Part II: Felt

5. Squid: Natural History as Food History

Whitney Barlow Robles

6. Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences

Duygu Yıldırım

7. Manchineel: Power, Pain, and Knowledge in the Lesser Antilles

Thomas C. Anderson

8. Pitcher Plant: Drowning in her Sweet Nectar

Elaine Ayers

Part III: Preserved

9. Leaf: The Materiality of Early Modern Herbals

Julia Heideklang

10. Armadillo: An Animal in Search of a Place

Florencia Pierri

11. Bird: Living Names of Félix de Azara’s Lost Collection

Anna Toledano

12. Brain: Objecthood, Subjecthood, and the Genius of Gauss

Nicolaas Rupke

Epilogue: Nature’s Narratives

Paula Findlen

Afterword: The Disorder of Things

Alan Mikhail

Index