Natural History

Continuing our History and the Environment series, Harriet Ritvo looks at the role of big-game hunting in spreading awareness of the need for conservation

Erica Fudge explores a shift in attitudes towards bestiality in the sixteenth century and how this impinged on wider issues concerning human status.

Peter Cotgreave explains how modern scientists can use their predecessors' data.

Phillip Drennon Thomas on how Henry III's elephant started the ball rolling for one of London's earliest visitor attractions. 

Beasts behind bars - Katharine MacDonogh tells the tale of the animals forced to share their owners' fall from grace after 1789.

Andrew Allen looks at one of the bizarre fairground attractions of Georgian England and the fate of its practitioners.

In Paris in the 1730s, a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find. What does this macabre story tell us about the culture and society of eighteenth-century France?

‘Kill not Moth nor Butterfly, For the Last Judgement draweth nigh’ wrote William Blake in Auguries of Innocence, reflecting the changing perception of man’s relation to the natural world.