The Courtiers' Anatomists

Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris

Anita Guerrini

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226248332
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Courtiers' Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris--and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian scientists, with the support of the king, dissected hundreds of animals from the royal menageries and the streets of Paris. Guerrini is the first to tell the story of Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who performed violent, riot-inducing dissections of both animal and human bodies before the king at Versailles and in front of hundreds of spectators at the King's Garden in Paris. At the Paris Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, Claude Perrault, with the help of Duverney's dissections, edited two folios in the 1670s filled with lavish illustrations by court artists of exotic royal animals.Through the stories of Duverney and Perrault, as well as those of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Jean Pecquet, and Louis Gayant, The Courtiers' Anatomists explores the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, as well as the origins of the natural history museum and the relationship between science and other cultural activities, including art, music, and literature.

INDEX

Page numbers followed by the letter f indicate a figure.

Abul-Abbas (elephant), 202

Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (petite Académie), 88–91, 95, 148, 230

Académie des sciences de Paris. See Paris Academy of Sciences

L’Académie des sciences et des beaux-arts (Leclerc), 88–89

Académie française, 32–33, 42–43, 61; charter members of, 43, 80–81; Dictionnaire of, 112–13; reforms of rhetoric of, 219

Academy of Sciences. See Paris Academy of Sciences

Accademia dei Lincei, 40, 52, 53f, 131, 133–34, 136

Accademia del Cimento, 136, 183

Aelian, 58, 145, 155

Aesop, 174–75

aesthetic taste, 3, 32, 188, 194–200, 223

air pump experiments, 110–12, 171

Albinus, Bernhard Siegfried, 247

Alceste (Lully), 198, 290n135

Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 59, 61–62, 267n40; cabinet of specimens of, 61, 150; encyclopedic tradition of, 130–31, 244

Alexander the Great, 145, 147, 151, 159, 177, 200, 290n11

Amphitheatrum zootomicum (Valentin), 241, 248

Anatomia del cavallo (Ruini), 62

L’anatomie de l’homme (Dionis), 209–10

Anatomie universelle du corps humain (Paré), 33

anatomists, 2–3, 8, 10–14. See also names of specific individuals, e.g., Perrault, Claude

anatomy: animal models in, 4–5, 19, 34, 36–37, 56–57, 64; comparative experimental practice in, 9–10, 14–15, 50–63; disentangling of structure and function in, 5; emergence of as a science, 56; English practice of, 101–2; as metaphor for natural philosophy, 50; as moral practice, 4–5, 34; patrons of, 31–33, 39–49; practitioners of,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Names, Dates, and Other Matters
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• ONE / Anatomists and Courtiers
• TWO / The Anatomical Origins of the Paris Academy of Sciences
• THREE / The Animal Projects of the Paris Academy of Sciences
• FOUR / The Histoire des animaux
• FIVE / Perrault, Duverney, and Animal Mechanism
• SIX / The Courtiers’ Anatomist: Duverney at the Jardin du roi
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Histoire des animaux
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index