Scholars, Animals, Images, Geographies, and the Arts: De-exoticizing Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Period

Building on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s oft-cited claim that “animals are good to think with,” SAIGA sets out to forge a zoological trail in the understanding of Eastern Europe between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries.

Focusing on animal representations, the project will shed new light on the role of images in the production and transfer of knowledge.The project will highlight the region’s underrated contributions to the development of natural history by examining the overlooked Eastern European nodes in networks of scholars.

By investigating various patterns of transmission of knowledge from East to West, this study will consider the vital role of Eastern informants, both trusted experts and unreliable amateurs.

With animals as the primary object of investigation, the project will direct attention to the arduous processes of discovering Eastern European fauna.

While some species had already been recorded by ancient authors (though seldom if ever seen), other species were only documented in the early modern period, turning Eastern Europe into a rewarding research opportunity for naturalists.

Tracing the replication of images of Eastern European fauna, the project seeks to understand how early modern naturalists accounted for the discrepancies among ancient, medieval, and contemporaneous sources, and how their strategies of verification varied between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Mapping this knowledge transfer onto the articulation of early modern geographies—which also attempted to make sense of the regions situated between Europe and Asia—the project promises to move the study of Eastern Europe beyond the paradigm of “demi-Orientalism,” which all too often imposes a modern othering lens onto the earlier past of the region.

Finally, the project will foreground the role of the arts, above all various printmaking techniques, in projecting the image of the region as an environmental and cultural landscape defined and distinguished by its animals.