Iberia's Imagined Elephant: Animal Behavior Through a Human Prism in the Sixteenth Century

Marginalized by the religious, cultural and gender constructions of early modern Iberia, some individuals like Garcia de Orta, Cristóbal Acosta and Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera turned to nonhuman animals like elephants to establish a sense of normative behavior. While expansively promoting curiosity and compassion as cross-species and natural traits, these authors still had to contend with hierarchical desires to dominate humans and the natural world. Nonhuman animals became a means to reflecting on the standards of human behavior, good and bad. As noted by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the twentieth century, "les animaux sont bons à penser".