ABSTRACT
European naturalists were entranced by armadillos, and in the early modern period, they came to symbolize both the American continent and the complicated and confounding character of its animals. As they moved through global trade networks, armadillos simultaneously lost indigenous meanings and classifications and acquired new and sometimes conflicting ones from Europeans who sought to make sense of them. In the era when armadillos arrived in Europe, animals were classified into three broad categories: land animals, fish, and birds—the armadillo’s affinity for land, mixed with its physical particularities which made it suitable to aquatic environments as well, necessarily challenged these classical taxonomic categories. This chapter examines these shifting understandings and conversations about living natural things through published natural histories and cabinet classification schemes to show how, even as these animals could be folded into an emblematic or bestiary tradition, they enormously complicated encyclopedic enterprises of classifying in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
