Datum
20. März 2026
Seminar in the ANU Sociology Seminar Series
Dallas Rogers (University of Sydney): „Venomous Property: therapeutic snakes, physician-naturalists, and the Oviperaio”
Date: Monday 20 March, 2026
Time: 12 – 1pm, AEST
Location: RSSS Room 4.69, and Zoom
Register to receive zoom link: https://events.humanitix.com/anu-school-of-sociology-seminar-series-prof-dallas-rogers
This talk considers the seventeenth-century scholar and poet Francesco Redi’s (1626–1697) scientific experimentation with snakes in Italy. Snakes continually appear in the scholarly debates about the utility and value of flora and fauna from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to materia medica (i.e., simple and compound medicines). The power and politics of animal possession, property, trade, and use, and how individual and/or collectives of people battled over access to, and use of, valued flora and fauna was changing in Europe from the fifteenth century. Animals were important resource objects within this changing possession, property, trade, and use politics, which eventually globalized with the colonization of the so-called New World.
Located within a more expansive analysis of venomous property for a book project, I use this specific case to point to an emerging dual economy in snakes in the seventeenth century in what is now Italy. The first market in snakes was organized around the long running market in viperine materia medica, such as theriac. The oviperaio (i.e., intergenerational snake-catchers) played a critical role in the snake trade that made this viperine therapeutic trade possible. The second market in snakes was still emergent in the mid-seventeenth century and was developing around a new experimentalism in the natural sciences, with the Accademia del Cimento, of which Redi was a member, being a critical proponent of this new epistemological approach. These early experiments with vipers were extraordinary for the time, and I suggest snakes and the oviperaio played a surprising role in the development of the scientific method as we know it today.
Snakes had long been a valuable therapeutic resource that needed to be collected from ‘nature’, but as snakes became an important part of this new therapeutic and scholarly inquiry from the fifteenth century their value changed. The oviperaio were becoming more entrepreneurial over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as the various Italian provinces increasingly relied on oviperaio serpentine expertise; including their local knowledge of snakes and their detailed knowledge of the hinterlands they supplied vipers from to make theriac and to conduct scientific experiments. I suggest snake-catching and snake bodies played an important role in the rise of the experimental science of nature within Redi’s seventeenth century experiments for the Accademia del Cimento, which took place at a time of Medici family rule. Through his experiments with snakes Redi was one of many experimental scientists who helped to diversify the viper catchers’ trade by creating new commercial-scientific uses for vipers while driving a new approach to scientific inquiry.
Bio
Dallas is Professor of Urbanism in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning (ADP) at The University of Sydney. He was the Head of Urbanism in ADP from 2022 to 2025. His research spans urban and historical geography with a focus on the intersections of property, race, class, nature, and technology. He leads and contributes to major studies of property and urbanization funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), Henry Halloran Research Trust, local and state government, and other government and non-government funders. He has held five Australian Research Council grants across the Discovery (DP), Linkage (LP), and Special Research Initiative (SRI) funding schemes. He has written over 50 opinion pieces for The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald and The Conversation. Dallas served as Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Housing Policy, was a series editor of the Explorations in Housing Studies book series, and is currently a handling editor of Environment and Planning F.