Event Details
Tue, February 02, 2016
18:00 – 19:30
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence - Italy
The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an increased interest in animal health (primarily equine health) and a corresponding explosion of printed texts such as farriery manuals. As with so many other Renaissance scientific texts, these manuals stood at the boundary between high culture and artisanal knowledge, classical learning and new forms of empiricism. For later proponents of Veterinary medicine as a proper medical discipline—especially the first chair of Veterinary medicine at the University of Padua, Giuseppe Orus—these Renaissance texts became an uncomfortable legacy that threatened their ambitions. This talk will examine the ways in which Orus dealt with the legacy of Renaissance farriery manuals as he sought to legitimize Veterinary practice as part of the medical curriculum at the University of Padua.
Featured Biographies

Karl Appuhn
Associate Professor of History, Italian Studies, Department of History, New York University
Karl Appuhn is Associate Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. He is the author of A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins, 2009), which won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, the Weyerhauser Prize, and the Delmas Prize. His current project is a history of veterinary medicine in eighteenth-century Italy.