2020/01/01 by Holly Dugan · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Anthropology #Archaeology #Art history #Classics #Colonialism #Construct (python library) #Ethnology #Genealogy #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Gorilla #History #Sociology #Suspect #The Renaissance
paper · doi:10.13110/criticism.62.3.0387
openalex publication_date 2020/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/07
Although Renaissance naturalists inherited a wealth of information about simians from classical and medieval sources, gorillas are oblique within these histories. The Renaissance, however, looms large within scientific histories of gorillas; two accounts specifically were cited extensively in nineteenth-century scientific treatises about the origins of the species. The first source, Hanno of Carthage's Periplus, reports of a fifth-century BCE navigation of the Western coast of Africa and culminates in an encounter with a fearsome foe, described as gorillai (γορíλλας). The second source is Andrew Battell's seventeenth-century account of his captivity by Portuguese slave traders and his travel through Senegambia, including descriptions of a "man-like" monster known as the pongo. Both are highly suspect as primary sources; both are narratives about attempts to colonize Africa; and both raise larger questions about how the Renaissance figures within scientific histories are connected to colonial violence. In this article, I explore why these two sources in particular allowed Wyman and Savage to construct the gorilla as both an unknowable, fearsome foe and as a killable animal and specimen of science. The sheer volume of gorilla material in natural history museums that is now unusable (because these specimens are linked to outmoded taxonomies) is overwhelming; returning to these sources and to Renaissance literary history, I argue, may provide a way to reckon with this overwhelming evidence created through violence (if we are willing to expand our definition of the Renaissance to include animals that we now term gorillas).