Abstract:Between the Scientific Revolution and the First World War, the preserved animal body became one of the most prominent media of the European encounter with other global regions and the natural world. Animal objects mattered in a wide range of contexts and to men and women of widely differing social rank. Before long-distance travel and television documentaries acquainted European audiences with the fauna of their own countryside and far-away global regions, preserved animals familiarized Europeans with the look—and feel—of reclusive animals, those which did not survive the journey to Europe alive or ones that had already died out. Yet "preservation," in fact, represents a fundamental misnomer. As a result of advances in preservation techniques in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, animal bodies became malleable almost at will. The articles in this special issue focus on this malleability of these animal objects and their openness to reinterpretation to explain why preservation equally suited the culture of gentlemanly anatomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it did the museums, shop-windows, boudoirs, and public spaces of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The combination of archival methods in conjunction with the description of surviving specimens can illuminate much about their meaning and the changes these meanings underwent over time. Therefore, the serious assessment of the preserved animal body—as a medium; as a focus of collections; and as a material link to non-European cultures, natural environments, and animal aesthetics—adds considerably to the social and cultural history of European expansion, science, and popular culture.

中文翻译：

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介绍：保护动物身体——学术和展示文化，1660-1914

摘要：在科学革命和第一次世界大战之间，保存下来的动物尸体成为欧洲与其他全球地区和自然世界相遇的最突出的媒体之一。动物物品在广泛的背景下以及对不同社会等级的男性和女性都很重要。在长途旅行和电视纪录片让欧洲观众熟悉他们自己乡村和遥远的全球地区的动物群之前，保存下来的动物让欧洲人熟悉了隐居动物的外观和感觉，那些在欧洲旅行中没有幸存下来的动物或者那些已经灭绝的。然而，“保存”实际上代表了一个根本的用词不当。由于十七和十八世纪保存技术的进步，动物的身体几乎可以随意变得可塑。本期特刊中的文章重点关注这些动物物品的这种可塑性及其对重新解释的开放性，以解释为什么保存同样适合 17 和 18 世纪的绅士解剖文化，就像博物馆、商店橱窗、闺房和十九世纪和二十世纪初的公共空间。档案方法与幸存标本的描述相结合，可以阐明它们的意义以及这些意义随着时间的推移而发生的变化。因此，对保存的动物尸体的认真评估——作为一种媒介；作为收藏的重点；作为与非欧洲文化、自然环境的物质联系，