Real animals in ideal cities : the place and use of animals in renaissance utopian literature

Abstract

Animals populate literature dealing with ideal cities and imagined parallel worlds. In this essay Cecilia Muratori explores the place of animals in works sharing utopian traits by the Italian writers Ortensio Lando (c. 1512?53?), Francesco Patrizi (1529?97), and Anton Francesco Doni (1513?74). In particular, she investigates the ways in which the narratological device of displacing the human/animal relationship into an imaginary world enables an approach to the theoretical question about the difference between humans and animals as well as to the ethical one regarding the use of the animals. The presence of animals is a neglected aspect of such texts despite the extensive body of scholarship on utopian literature. Muratori argues that it is this specific combination of ontological issues and very practical remarks which makes these texts a particularly important case study for reconstructing Renaissance philosophical discussions on the status of animals. The problem of the human/animal divide and the question about human uniqueness thus appear alongside the discussion of topics such as how to preserve health in an ideal city or suggestions about the best diet for its citizens (a diet based on animals as food, for instance). Such concerns directly involve the assessment of the relation of humans to the world of animals, included in these imaginary cities or worlds as co-inhabitants, as sources of food, as living beings which share in various ways the same space as humans, and also as mirrors on which the definition of man as a special animal is projected.