Research
This project is dedicated to the iconography and early scholarly history of the aurochs. The wild ancestor to all modern cattle, aurochs went extinct in 1627. Ever since that time, humans have attempted to know, describe, and possess aurochs, and finally to bring them back to life. Basing itself on important parts of the collections of the Artis Library and Allard Pierson – especially the Gessner-Platter albums and the Iconographia Zoologica but also works by influential naturalists like George Cuvier and Linnaeus – this project will map how scholars from the 16th to the 19th centuries thought about this vanishing animal. Special attention is paid to the iconography of the aurochs. How were aurochs depicted and what knowledge (life observation, analysis of bone material, skins or horns, textual descriptions by other authors) were these representations based on? What was the relationship between humans and an extinct animal?
Fellow
Daniel Knegt is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) in 2015 with a thesis on French fascist intellectuals. His second book, a Dutch-language contribution on fascism, was published in 2022. The current project is part of the preparation for a new book, a modern history of the aurochs which will combine culture, ideology, extinction, history of science and human-animal interactions.