Copied Singularities: Tracking Animals in Early Modern Print

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the departments of Romance Languages and Literatures, History, and Art History and Archeology, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, the Early Modern Reading Group, and the Latin American Studies Program at WashU; and is undertaken in collaboration with the Center for Iberian Historical Studies at St. Louis University.

In the sixteenth century, knowledge of exotic animals was spread, shaped, and transformed through the global circulation of not just travelers and the animals themselves, but also of printed illustrations, all of which moved in multiple directions around the world. In this talk, I track the surprising routes of singular animals and their illustrations (in particular crocodiles, armadillos, sloths, and “flying serpents”), while drawing connections between the purpose and practice of copying in the early modern period and the ways that today’s generative AI can “hallucinate” images based on the existing textual and visual corpus.


 Lisa Voigt is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is the author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (2009) and Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (2016), and is currently working on a book with Prof. Stephanie Leitch (Florida State University) about copied illustrations in sixteenth-century travel accounts. She is the Special Issues Editor of Colonial Latin American Review.

Refreshments to follow.