Elizabeth Burns-Dans

In the early modern era, shaped by expanding systems of scientific, theological and colonial order, the polypus (octopus) proved remarkably resistant to imaginative and epistemological capture. This paper examines how these cephalopods were represented in early modern manuscript and print illustrations and their classical and medieval inheritances. Whether rendered as marginal ornamentation, monstrous enigmas or zoological specimens, the octopus's material and cognitive unruliness animated complex visual and conceptual negotiations. We explore how these images, including a folio from Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, a medieval Latin manuscript, a fifteenth-century copy of Oppian's Halieutica and Ulisse Aldrovandi's engraved polypus in De Mollibus (1606), among others, stage encounters that are as affective as they are epistemological. While previous scholarship has often foregrounded the mythic or proto-scientific aspects of marine imagery, few studies attend to their ecological and emotional dimensions. Drawing on the eco-aesthetic and eco-cognitive framework of affective ecology, we argue that the liminal octopus'; fluid morphology and ambiguous agency blur the boundaries between knowing and feeling. In eluding visual and conceptual fixity, it performs a poetics of disturbance where fear and fascination coalesce. Amidst early modern anxieties about the sea's unknowability, the octopus becomes a figure of entangled perception, one that gestures toward enchantment even as it foreshadows extractive and classificatory violence. In an era of accelerating biodiversity loss and marine collapse, such unruly objects offer not only historical insight but a vital reminder of artistic enchantment as a mode of attention and wonder. Written and presented by Dr Alys Daroy and Dr Elizabeth Burns-Dans. Panel: Early Modern Unruliness. Convenor: Dr Susanne Meurer.