Articles

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.

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.

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.

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.

Natural Things Cover Draft

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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