The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance is a 2022 monograph by American historian Mackenzie Cooley. Cooley traces how the concept of race developed from animal breeding practices in Renaissance Italy and the Spanish Empire during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. The author argues that the term razza, originally used to describe selectively bred animal lineages, gradually extended to human populations through the convergence of breeding knowledge, colonial encounters, and religious debates about human difference. Based on archival research in breeding records, natural histories, and court documents from Europe and the Americas, the work examines how Renaissance breeders, courts, and naturalists created categories of difference that would shape modern racial thinking. The author was awarded the 2025 Dan David Prize, received an honorable mention for the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize, among other awards.
Author and background Mackenzie Cooley is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Hamilton College. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University and Masters and Doctorate from Stanford University. As an intellectual historian, her work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world—and how this relationship informs and mediates early modern developments in natural history, scientific inquiry, and colonial expansion. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. For The Perfection of Nature, her first monograph, Cooley traced the use and evolution of the term razza. In a 2022 interview on the New Books Network, she explained that the word appeared in multiple European languages by the sixteenth century—razza in Italian, raza in Spanish, and eventually race in English—but was not exclusively used for animals or humans. Rather, it "slips from describing animals to describing humans" while carrying additional connotations, including metallurgical meanings where razza referred to imperfections. For Cooley, razza registers coeval concerns with inheritance, the boundary between human and animal, and the desire to control nature. As Cooley explained in the interview, the book emerged from her attempt to understand why animal breeders adopted this particular term and "what their use of this word did for the modern history of race." Part of her research focused on Renaissance horse breeding, which she noted experienced "a real crescendo in interest" as early modern culture maintained medieval chivalric ideals of masculinity centered on "a knight on a great steed." However, Cooley does not limit her scope of study to Europe; instead, she puts early modern European theories of species difference in conversation with Indigenous American breeding practices. Through these parallels, The Perfection of Nature reveals the fluid deployment of razza across the Spanish Empire, and implicates early modern breeding practices and their attendant theories of perfection in the development of modern notions of racial difference and purity. The Perfection of Nature contributes to and complicates prevailing theories about the history of race and the ways to best characterize the relationship between European colonial empires and Indigenous peoples. Cooley argues that modern conceptions of race derive significantly from early modern discussions surrounding species difference, reproduction, and inheritance. She also draws attention to the similarities between European and Indigenous breeding practices, understanding both parties as co-producers and practitioners of "racialized" thinking. The work thus recognizes the compatibility between European and Indigenous peoples in how they related to and attempted to control nature.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
