In early seventeenth-century Rome, the per capita consumption of meat rose to nearly a pound per day. This enormous consumption was not just about luxury, but also spoke to the ways in which the papacy sought to remake its city and the bodies of its citizens in the wake of the Reformation. For a brief few decades, to eat like a Roman meant either tacit or explicit acceptance on a range of ideas related to digestion, spirituality, the authority of medicine, and what it meant to live a "healthy" lifestyle. Through a survey of dietary advice, medical manuals, cook books, and autopsies performed on people considered to be both poor and healthy eaters, this paper will seek to explore the range of ideas related to this new dietary regime. Recent scholarship, including in particular work by Emma Spary and Karl Appuhn, has demonstrated that discourses on food reveal a great deal about how contemporary societies understood medical expertise, the body, digestion, and man's interaction with his environment. This paper will seek to uncover such discourses and will demonstrate that the biggest battles in religion, politics, and even in medicine where waged with the most quotidian of objects: food.

This paper focuses on “hermaphrodites” -- that is, individuals who were considered neither simply male nor female -- and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. This era constituted a critical period for the profession of surgery and, as I argue, for long-lived ideas about anatomy’s role in establishing sex. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically “correcting” the errant anatomies of hermaphrodites. Surgeons’ theories about sex drew upon cultural ideas about gender and anatomy, as well as upon particular notions of what made something “natural.” As this paper shows, technologies of measurement were also finding new prominence within Italian communes just as certain surgeons – who hailed from the same region – were embracing dimensional standards with respect to the human body. I argue that this focus on standardization, which regulated the size and shape of all kinds of materials, mirrored efforts by surgeons to police the body’s proportions and to return it to a “natural” form.

As a self-described magus, Giovanni Battista della Porta (1535 – 1615) was convinced of his power to manipulate nature. Given proper conditions, the Neapolitan scholar believed that dogs could be made to degenerate from four-footed creatures to two-footed ones. Porta wrote that by amputating dogs across successive generations and compelling the amputees to reproduce, one could compel “nature to produce bipedal canines.” Surgery combined with controlled breeding yielded an entirely new so-called race (razza) of animals in a few short years, he alleged. 

While Porta’s bipedal canine experiment would not have been as effective as he reported, highly bureaucratized animal breeding projects across Europe and its territories around the world generated vast numbers of animals. Theories of inheritance reciprocally influenced breeding practices that took place on stud farms and courts to fashion horses, dogs, and other creatures. Using genealogical trees and multi-generational charts, experts selected livestock and companion animals and paired them in carefully orchestrated unions with the hopes of shaping their offspring as much as possible through the combined effects of imagination, environment, and parentage.  

By combining archival and bio-archeological evidence, this paper evaluates both how effective Renaissance husbandmen believed themselves to be when it came to influencing bodies through breeding, and how effective their methods actually were in producing new variations of animals. This paper uses a “quotient of malleability” to compare case studies from breeding experiments in sixteenth-century Italy, Spain, and New Spain, reading beyond the experts’ self-validating rhetoric—like that employed by Porta.

In 1584, a short and remarkable book appeared in print: Letters on Natural Philosophy, written by a Paduan apothecary named Camilla Erculiani. Recently-rediscovered after centuries of obscurity, this book is the only work of natural philosophy published by a woman in sixteenth- century Italy that we currently know of. It may also be the first work published in Europe by an author of any gender to offer a systematic account of the human capacity to cause catastrophic harm to the global environment. Erculiani placed the blame for such a planetary catastrophe squarely on the human body. Citing Galen and the Book of Genesis while also drawing on her own expertise as a medical professional, Erculiani argued that mankind’s divinely-created physical embodiment had destroyed the natural equilibrium of elements and triggered the global disaster of Noah’s Flood – a process which she feared might be repeated in the near future as the human population of the earth again grew too large for the planet to bear. This paper situates Erculiani’s unique contribution to Renaissance science and medicine at the confluence of several powerful forces in 16th-century Europe, including the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, the Scientific Revolution, and Renaissance feminism. In its emphasis on embodied sin as a world-changing force, Erculiani’s Letters on Natural Philosophy illuminates the crucial role of religious belief in the emergence of an environmental consciousness which linked the imperfection of the human body to the degradation of the global environment.