This learned and elegant book is a history of the science of animal breeding in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries across the Spanish Habsburg world, from Italy to Mexico. With meticulous scholarship, Cooley surveys materials touching on the lineage of animals (razza in Italian, raza in Spanish, race in English) while at the same time remaining alert to those early modern European discourses of human diversity and hierarchy that eventually became modern racialism and racism. Cooley is very cautious in her approach. She does not assume that razza or raza are the same as modern race, but she is also reluctant to label race a solely modern invention. Nevertheless, on the basis of a wide survey of very disparate primary sources (breeder's studbooks and reports to their patrons, dictionaries, ethnographic studies, natural histories, ethnographies, and physiognomic studies), Cooley does take up a position in relation to the existing historiography. This book is very skeptical of any direct transition between animal raza or lineage and human race. Ana Gómez-Bravo and David Nirenberg have argued that there was a transition between raza and race. But examining the reports of breeders to patrons and records of stables at Mantua and Naples, Cooley finds a lack of theoretical introspection on breeding (Aristotelian or Galenic university sciences rarely if ever appear in these sources) and the practical acceptance of the fact that family resemblances held sometimes but not always in breeding interactions. The book of palio victories that belonged to Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, focused on the characteristics and virtues of champion horses but not on the purity of their descent. This does not look much like a strong doctrine of heredity that could generate a modern racism.
The structure of Cooley's book is wide-ranging and complex. Part 1 emphasizes the importance of artisans (horse breeders in this case) to the production of knowledge, and attends to branding as part of their practice. Part 2 deals with collections of human and animal beings at the courts of Mantua and the Emperor Monteuczoma Xocoyotzin's court at Mexico-Tenochtitlan, as well as Mexican notions of breeding. Part 3 charts the emergence of mestizo (mixed) dog populations in New Spain, as well as the surprisingly tense Spanish encounter with the llama. Part 4 turns to the world of the papal court and the Roman Inquisition, taking in José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias of 1590, as well as the studies in physiognomy that Giovanni Battista della Porta pursued in southern Italy in the 1580s and 1590s.
Cooley's argument does not generally touch on theology, except briefly when treating Della Porta's encounters with the Inquisition. It is certainly unlikely that the horse breeders whom she introduces to the reader, or the marchioness of Mantua who chatted to a cousin about the dwarves that she employed at her court, ever gave a thought to what the church would think of their notes and letters. And yet theologians belonged to Habsburg society just as much as stable masters and noblewomen, and theologians often dominated the universities of Europe and the New World. The Dominicans and Jesuits who followed Thomas Aquinas, Franciscans who followed John Duns Scotus, and Protestants who improvised from both those traditions all saw heredity as part of the problem of the origin of the human essence, the human soul. Strong doctrines of heredity (which raised troubling theological problems about original sin as well as free will) were thus difficult to transform into an ideology of hierarchy and abuse that could be taught in universities. However, when in 1758 Carl Linnaeus published a strong and recognizably modern division of humanity into races that included allegations of African inferiority, it was framed by a science that denied the human ability to perceive essences, both in animals and in humans. Humans could thus be characterized by external characteristics allegedly gathered by empirical observation, but in fact tendentiously selected. This racist science was adopted quite quickly in European universities. Europeans could invent a strong race doctrine only when they succeeded in isolating that doctrine from questions about heredity and the human soul.
