Uncovering the Animal: Skin, Fur, Feathers 1450-1700

This half-day workshop will reflect on the multiple ways in which animal skin, fur, feathers, hair, scales and shells were conceptualised and used between 1450 and 1700. Combining different historiographical approaches and sources (textual, material, and visual), the workshop aims to open the field up to a wider audience, strengthen the need to consider animals compared to similar work on human skin and hair, and facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation, from natural history to material culture, on animal skin in a globalised world.

Programme

1.00pm Welcome and introductions

1.15pm Natalie Lawrence (Independent Scholar)
Scaly devils and armoured innocents: the pangolin in Early Modern Europe

1.45pm Tom Rusbridge (University of Birmingham)
'Smooth places, a great blemish': Reconciling material and visual representations of shagreen in early modern England

2.15pm Maria Cristina Bastante (Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza')
'Nautilus ab Indis': the curious successful story of a mysterious beast and its shell, between Mannerism and Baroque, visual culture and scientific representation

2.45pm Coffee break

3.00pm Stefan Hanß (University of Cambridge)
'Plumas para gorras y sombreros': Feathers and Hats in the Early Modern Spanish World

3.30pm Lianming Wang (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
Kingfisher Feather and Qing Material Culture, 1660-1790

4.00pm Coffee break

4.15pm Patricia Lurati (Universität Zürich)
Fur, animality and erotism in Italian Renaissance art

4.45pm Sara Ayres (Independent Scholar)
Fur against Fur: Animal Bodies as Agents of Transformation in the Ritual of the Courtly Hunt

5.15pm Roundtable discussion

6.00pm Workshop close

To register for the Workshop please visit:
https://www.renaissanceskin.ac.uk/events/workshop-uncovering-animal/