Animals are everywhere in the archives, you just have to know where to look. They slip into early modern account books. Consider all the documented horse trades in this era before fossil fuels. But animals also appear in court cases (occasionally even as defendants). In fact, they quite literally hold the archival record together. Think of sheep and cows whose skins became parchment, or the gall of insects that was made into ink.

The Animal Archive is about more than dust and documents, though. It stretches into the stories we have kept about animals both real and imagined. From a polyglot tame parrot in Rome, to the trickster mantis god |kaggen whose central role in the cosmology of the South-African San people astounded European observers. Whether on paper, in pixels, or in memory, early modern animals have long left their mark.

This academic year’s first ACSEM seminar (in collaboration with the Huygens Institute) offers a series of rapid-fire talks (7 minutes max) that open up these surprising trails. Together, we will explore how animals sneak into history, literature, and even the materials of archives themselves. We thus pose the question: what happens when we start treating animals not just as subjects in archives, but as archives in their own right?

Organizers: Djoeke van Netten (UvA, ACSEM) & Jim van der Meulen. (KNAW Huygens Institute)
Guest speakers: Gianamar Giovannetti Singh, Arjan van Dalfsen, Leendert van der Miessen, Yara de Lange, Charlotte Wagenaar.

Thanks to: Myriam van der Hoek (Artis Library); Feike Dietz, Tibbe Schreurs, Bente Tas, Kirsten van Tunen (ACSEM team)