A Different Species of Renaissance

There has been, if not an explosion, the beginnings of an interest in animal history in medieval and early modern Europe. But that interest has yet to make much of an impression within the precincts where the Renaissance remains a meaningful analytical category. To the degree that Renaissance scholarship has engaged with animals and animal lives it has typically been through the way that writers like Machiavelli employed them as metaphors, or via their importance as ambulatory commodities. But what about the relationship of individual animals to one another and to the humans who shared spaces and lives with them? In this paper I will examine the very different lives of horses and cows in the Renaissance city and countryside. In so doing I will reflect on the difficult theoretical and methodological challenges involved in writing about animals as historical subjects and not simply objects of cultural and physical consumption. I will also reflect on what we might hope to gain by thinking about animals this way, and how doing so might cast the Renaissance in a different light.