Articles

A Patchwork Columbian Exchange

Ecological Imperialism, Anmals, and the Relaciones Geográficas of New Spain
Renaissance Quarterly

This article reconsiders Alfred Crosby’s Columbian exchange by turning from sweeping generalizations to the granular realities of New Spain. Drawing on the sixteenth-century relaciones geográficas, it argues that colonial environments were patchworks: mosaics of local ecologies, animal assemblages, and human choices. Cross-referencing the animals mentioned by local survey respondents with their environments illustrates how practitioners observed and sought to shape a new combination of American and European nature. The essay reframes ecological imperialism as contingent and uneven, foregrounding variation, resistance, and the dynamism of early modern nature and the actors who shaped it.

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Visual Pharmacy

An Introduction to Historical Pharmacopeias

The Historical Pharmacopeias project digitally compiles and analyzes medicinal lists across historical societies, highlighting connections between material culture, medical practice, and pharmaceutical knowledge. Using innovative digital methodologies, it examines the variability, regionality, and cross-cultural exchange in medicinal substances, redefining traditional understandings of pharmacopeias as evolving social and medicinal archives. In this "Visual Pharmacy" article, Cooley and Smail lay out the project's fundamentals. By cataloging medicinal substances and visual records, Historical Pharmacopeias highlights diverse medicinal vocabularies, shifting authorities, and evolving relationships between objects, healing, and knowledge production.

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A is for Artemisia 

Historical Pharmacoepias Research in a Liberal Arts Setting

This article traces HP’s development from 2022 to 2024, emphasizing the contributions of undergraduate and graduate researchers in building the baseline corpus. Adopting a laboratory model within a liberal arts environment, the process of building HP has immersed students in archival research, provided basic paleographic training, allowed them to exercise their language skills, and fostered outcomes like essays, posters, and symposia. By integrating health-related histories into undergraduate instruction, HP not only enhances student learning but also advances research in the history of science. Pharmacopeias—rich records of material culture—offer unique insights into past embodiments, bridging natural history, human ingenuity, and archival exploration.

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To Read Between the Lines

Substances with Bodily Effects

and Indigenous Pharmacopeias

To what extent can we read between the lines of pharmacopeias that standardized global knowledge in order to access the knowledge displaced or erased in the process? How might an attention to “substances” over “medicaments” call attention to how pharmacopeias have incorporated, appropriated, and universalized local medicinal knowledge and the knowledge they have obscured as a result? Using a series of historical vignettes from the fields of ethnobotany in the 1980s and 1990s, this essay navigates historiography related to Indigenous pharmacopeias and bioprospecting. We note two dueling impulses in research around Indigenous medical plant services and knowledge systems—a tendency for universalization and local cosmologization—and attempt to move forward toward substantive bioprosperities.

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Likeness Across Nature

The Anatomical Eye of Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente (1533-1619)

Over the course of a long career, Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente sought to train students and readers to think across nature. This article suggests that we read his program as inculcating an “anatomical eye”: a visual language of the body’s logic and nature’s intention that encoded knowledge, which expert anatomists derived from touch and sight combined. Fabricius both taught and learned haptically, observing organs’ divisions through variations in texture and measuring the differences in reproductive anatomy across animals with his fingers. Through dissections of sheep, cattle, horses, sharks, guinea pigs, dogs, and humans, he gathered details about how nature had produced both startling likenesses and particularities across the animal kingdom. While artists sometimes struggled to capture his experience, Fabricius’s longstanding commitment to working with them revealed that, whatever the challenges, the potential for expanding the “anatomical eye,” and the reputation that came with it, was worth the risk.

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Bezoar

Medicine in the Belly of the Beast

In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Edited by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. 53-84.

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Bezoar Visualization, Natural Things

Ambergris

From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy

With Kate Biedermann. In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Edited by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. 111-135.

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Ambergris Visualization, Natural Things

Introduction

by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Edited by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. 1-13.

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The Giant Remains

Mesoamerican Medicine, Extinction, and Cycles of Empire

Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Volume 112, number 1, (2021), 45-67.

★ Honorable Mention in the 2022 Kimberly Hanger Article Prize

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Quinametli

The Tira of Don Martin

A Living Nahua Chronicle

With Alanna Radlo-Dzur, Emily Kaplan, Leah Bright, E. Keats Webb, Mary Elizabeth Haude, Tana Villafana, Amanda K. Satorius, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Volume 3, Number 3, (2021), 7-37.

★ Winner of the 2022 Joseph T. Criscenti Best Article Award from New England Council of Latin American Studies

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Conquistador and Aztec Warrior

Diamond in the Rough

Nobility and Spanish Naples in Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Volume 19, Number 3, (2019): 71-97.

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Vesuvius over Naples

Teaching Tepahtia

A Pedagogical Reflection on Knowledge and Medicine in Mexico, 1400-1600

Journal of Medieval Worlds, 2019, Volume 1, Number 3, (2019), 85-104.

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Marketing Nobility

Horsemanship in Renaissance Italy

Animals at Court, Europe, c. 1200-1800, Mark Hengerer and Nadir Weber, eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 109-126.

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Book of Horse Brands

Southern Italy and the New World in the Age of Encounters

In Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey, eds. The Discovery of the New World in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 169-189.

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Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus Cover

Beasts and Books

Catalogue of an Exhibition of Rare Books and Manuscripts in Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections

Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2015. Preface by Paula Findlen.

Beasts and Books Cover