Animal Poetics: Silk, Gender, and Nonhuman Creativity Across the Early Modern Transatlantic World

This project investigates nonhuman intelligence in art through the case of silk, a material long studied as a luxury commodity but rarely recognised as a site of more-than-human creativity. Decentring the human has become a pressing concern across disciplines grounded in anthropocentric frameworks, such as the humanities. Yet, these questions have deep historical roots. In the seventeenth century, heliocentrism, new optical technologies, and a growing fascination with animals displaced humanity from the centre of the cosmos. Focusing on this moment of epistemic shift, the study examines silk artifacts produced across Italy and New Spain to explore how nonhuman animals shape and disrupt human culture through their inscription into artistic practices.

Unlike leather or ivory, silk was not merely extracted from animals but spun by tiny insects whose labour remains embedded in the fabric itself. In early modern Italy, a major centre of sericulture, silkworms emerged as figures of authorship and ingenuity, troubling the assumption that creativity is exclusively human. Concurrently, the category of the ‘animal’ helped structure hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, and species. Representations of sericulture sexualised the interspecies care provided by female workers to insects, using tropes of pregnancy and motherhood that naturalised women’s reproductive roles. Meanwhile, as Europeans attempted to transplant sericulture to the Americas, encountering Indigenous resistance to environmental transformation, insect colonies were mobilised as political models in narratives of conquest.

By foregrounding the creative gestures of humanism’s ‘Others’ – animals, women, and racialised groups – this project rethinks silk as a symbiotic material through which animalisation and humanisation have been historically negotiated. In questioning the human exceptionalism that has long informed the history of art, it traces the contribution of nonhuman intelligence to early modern culture, opening new pathways toward multiple posthuman histories.