The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction

Early Slavic Studies Association

Join us online for the lecture given by Professor Tomasz Grusiecki, as part of the Early Slavic Studies Association Lecture Series!

From the 16th century onward, Jaktorów Forest in Mazovia, Poland, became the last refuge of the aurochs, a now-extinct species of long-horned wild cattle. Despite the Polish kings’ best efforts at conservation, the species perished in 1627 under the watchful eye of King Sigismund III. In the wake of this dying out, objects made from aurochs horn sought to reanimate—or at least memorialise—the endangered and ultimately vanished animal. The most evocative among them is a hunting horn, now at Stockholm’s Livrustkammaren, fashioned from the horn of “the last aurochs,” as its inscription attests. An artistic eulogy for a lost species, the object stands at the intersection of art and environmental crisis. This and other aurochs-themed artefacts not only mediate the ecological transformations of the early Anthropocene but also invite an ecocritical reassessment of early modern art history. But what did it mean for the Polish court to lose the very species it was charged with protecting as one of the kingdom’s chief natural treasures? This lecture explores early modern ideas of scarcity, finitude, and extinction, asking how the condition of being “the last” was understood in early modern Poland—and why, despite the king’s anguish, no one else in Europe seemed to notice the loss. Speaker: Dr. Tomasz Grusiecki is Associate Professor of Art History and Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art at Queen's University (Canada). He studies the intersections of ecocriticism, animal studies, resource extraction, material literacy, and the environmental humanities with early modern art history, focusing on Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, c. 1550–1750. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania (Manchester, 2023) and the co-editor of two forthcoming collections: Connected Central European Worlds: Material Entanglements, 1500–1700 and Ukraine Matters: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern History and Art. Host: Dr. Václav Algirdas Zheng (Johns Hopkins University)

The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction

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The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction

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