This collection of essays is the first book published in English to provide a thorough survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, the book consists of fifteen original essays, as well as an introduction and an afterword by renowned scholars in the field. The topics discussed include navigation, exploration, cartography, natural sciences, technology, and medicine. This volume is aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, and is designed to be useful for teaching. It will be a major resource for anyone interested in colonial Latin America.
This collection of essays is the first book published in English to provide a thorough survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, the book consists of fifteen original essays, as well as an introduction and an afterword by renowned scholars in the field. The topics discussed include navigation, exploration, cartography, natural sciences, technology, and medicine. This volume is aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, and is designed to be useful for teaching. It will be a major resource for anyone interested in colonial Latin America.
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This collection of essays is the first book published in English to provide a thorough survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, the book consists of fifteen original essays, as well as an introduction and an afterword by renowned scholars in the field. The topics discussed include navigation, exploration, cartography, natural sciences, technology, and medicine. This volume is aimed at both specialists and non-specialists, and is designed to be useful for teaching. It will be a major resource for anyone interested in colonial Latin America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804776332 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/18/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800
By Daniela Bleichmar Paula De Vos Kristin Huffine Kevin Sheehan
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5358-6
Chapter One
Science, Medicine, and Technology in Colonial Spanish America New Interpretations, New Approaches DAVID GOODMAN
* * *
"The history of Spain is one of the most attractive fields that lie open to the historical student. Its variety is infinite and the possibilities of new and important discoveries are unexhausted." So began the stirring preface to that pioneering and still-admired work of the early twentieth century, The Rise of the Spanish Empire by Roger Bigelow Merriman, professor of history at Harvard. And addressing himself to fellow American readers, he continued: "The principal interest of the subject will inevitably center around Spain's activities as a great conquering and colonizing power," a focus that demanded viewing "the history of Spain herself, which forms the background for the entire picture .... from the standpoint of the great Empire which sprang from her."
How different the portrayal of the same subject, three-quarters of a century later, in Henry Kamen's Spain's Road to Empire! Here, the very idea of a Spanish conquest of the New World is rejected because the vastness of America rules it out. Rejected also is the traditional belief that Spain created an empire unaided. Instead, Kamen insists that Spain's empire existed only by collaboration with Italian, German, and Flemish military and technical experts, and through commercial connivance of English and Dutch competitors. Other foreigners, Chinese, sustained Spain's Far Eastern entrepôt of the Philippines by running Manila's economy, shipbuilding, and directing the trade primed by the annual arrival of the silver galleon from Mexico, across the Pacific. And Kamen highlights the importance of native Indians and African blacks for the retention of Spain's Caribbean possessions: they provided the labor for plantations and, as soldiers, played a key role in securing the strategic centers of Havana and Portobello.
Kamen's emphasis reflects the great alteration in approach in recent historical writing on all empires-Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French. There is a new sensitivity to the perils of Eurocentrism and to unjustifiable relative neglect of the victims of colonization, sentiments encouraged by the now prevailing antipathy to imperialism. Avoidance of Eurocentrism and heightened interest in the contributions of Amerindians and Creoles (those born in Spanish America and descended from immigrants from peninsular Spain) are also conspicuous trends in recent research on science, medicine, and technology in Spain's American empire.
THE QUICKENING PACE OF RESEARCH
Over the last two decades there has been a surge of publication on science, medicine, and technology in colonial Spanish America. In this considerable output, two quite distinct types of research are discernible. First, new interpretations have formed based on traditional empirical study of printed and-this noticeably increasing-archival sources. Second, new interpretations derived from radically new approaches to Ibero-American history are on the increase, inspired by disciplines outside of conventional history. My survey attempts to illustrate and assess these trends by critical discussion of a selection of the more important publications. Many of these carry the logo of an institution sponsoring the quincentenary commemoration of the discovery of America.
Of all the stimuli to recent research and publication in the field, nothing matched the motivating force of the quincentenary. In the United States, an academic could recall "the great wave of the quincentennial, from the time it began to swell in the late 1980s until it finally rolled to shore in 1992," bringing a multitude of "events, exhibitions, speeches, films, and writings." In France in 1985, Tomás Gómez, professor at the University of Paris, could already detect a strong "revival of interest in the discovery of the New World" among French researchers, as the quincentenary approached. As a French Hispanicist doing research in Madrid, Gómez was ideally positioned to initiate collaboration between scholars mobilizing around similar research programs on both sides of the Pyrenees, programs in which he identified the common ground as "the stimulus to intellectual activity given by the discovery of America, especially to science." In Spain, a new and ambitious research venture, with which Gómez sought to connect French scholars, was begun in 1984 by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Research. Here, the aim was to fund research on "the history of culture and science with reference to relations between the Old and New Worlds." Six of the Consejo's research institutes were primed for this program and joined by academics from as many Spanish universities. José Luis Peset, appointed to direct the project, vividly recalled the hectic activity generated: "We could not lose sight of the celebration of 1992-it was almost obsessive at the time.... We wanted some good monographs to record the revival of interest amongst Spaniards and Spanish Americans in our common past." Around one hundred researchers, engaged in ten projects, began work in 1985-87. Money was released for the urgent purchase of periodical sets, filling gaps in Spain's libraries. Professors, Spanish and non-Spanish, were hired to deliver courses on themes connected to the research and colloquia organized. And as soon as one project was completed (published as three volumes of eighty-one essays in well over 1,500 pages, ranging from life sciences to technology and society in colonial Spanish America), so another began, also to mark the quincentenary: "España y América: Ciencia y cultura entre dos mundos" (Spain and America: Science and Culture between Two Worlds).
Any historian of science from the United Kingdom sampling those eighty-one essays is bound to be astonished by the inclusion of a contribution on political conflicts in Trinidad and another on urban violence in present-day Brazil-this one written by a member of the CSIC's Department of History of Science in Madrid. The explanation, of course, is that in the Hispanic world "science" (ciencia) has a much broader meaning, comparable in scope to usage in France and Germany. Of the various sections of the CSIC, one covered theological science, philosophical science, juridical science, and economic science; another covered historical science and philological science; others were devoted to natural and technological sciences. The CSIC's original religious drive may now have weakened, but the umbrella of meanings of "science" persists, in keeping with current usage in both peninsular Spain and Latin America. Awareness that this has potential for confusion provoked Mariano Peset, historian at the University of Valencia, to bring clarity from the outset to the proceedings of the Second International Congress on the History of Hispanic Universities, held in Valencia in 1995. In his prologue surveying developments in recent research on the history of universities, Peset remarked that historians of science had made important contributions, a comment that forced him to elaborate, because the history of science had "diverse senses": one sense signified the history of all university disciplines; the other sense, much more restricted, signified natural science. He needed to "establish this duality" because he wanted to identify the advances in understanding of the history of Hispanic universities made by scholars studying curricula as a whole and by historians of science (in the narrower sense) who had focused on the development of the precocious medical faculty of early modern Valencia.
EMPIRICAL STUDIES
The first wave of scientific and technological excitement generated in peninsular Spain by the discovery of America had already appeared in the 1500s. The demands of transatlantic navigation had by then become acute: reliable charts, precise astronomical instruments to measure latitude and longitude, and the training of pilots. All of this began to be organized from 1508 at the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade), recently founded by the Catholic monarchs in Seville, the official center monopolizing all trade and communication with the Indies. (See Portuondo's arguments in Chapter 3.) There is nothing outstanding in the way of recent research on Seville's Casa. But important work has appeared on later sixteenth-century efforts to achieve the same navigational goals.
Amid dissatisfaction with the quality of charts, instruments, and pilots produced in Seville, Philip II decided that urgent action was needed. In 1582 he appointed the Valencian cosmographer Jaime Juan to undertake a variety of tasks in voyages to New Spain and the Philippines. The duties included supervision of pilots to see how their practices could be improved, teaching them to use navigational instruments, making maps in the Indies, and determining the latitude and longitude (from lunar eclipses) of localities in New Spain. New light on Juan's observation of a lunar eclipse in New Spain in November 1584 to establish the longitude of Mexico City has come from archival research in Seville and Mexico by María Luisa Rodríguez Sala of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM). She discovered not only the manuscript in which Juan recorded his astronomical observations and calculations, along with astrological predictions, but other new documents as well that show how the operation was performed. The technical skills of Cristóbal Gudiel, royal armorer and gunpowder manufacturer, were central. Gudiel made and installed the instrument used to observe the eclipse.
At the same time that he employed Jaime Juan, Philip II created his mathematical academy in Madrid, sending experts from his newly conquered kingdom of Portugal to teach the mathematics that was indispensable for navigation and cosmography. (On the relationship between science and navigation, see the chapters by Almeida and Sheehan in this volume.) Philip's academy has long been a shadowy institution, but now less so as a result of the study by María Isabel Vicente Maroto and Mariano Esteban Piñeiro, who publish documents providing more information on the teaching personnel and the functioning of the institution which continued into the seventeenth century.
The ambitious centralizing policy to achieve comprehensive information on every part of Spain's vast American possessions is a well-known feature of Philip II's administrative drive. Yet, as Jesús Bustamante shows, the origins of this inquiry are traceable to the previous reign, to Charles V's officials of the Council of the Indies in the later 1520s. But the peak of this systematic inventorying that included much scientific data on natural resources was reached in the later sixteenth century with the fully developed Relaciones (geographical accounts). (For a study of the Relaciones, see Barrera-Osorio in Chapter 11.) These were responses to formal questionnaires devised by officials of the Council of the Indies, questionnaires seeking precise information on the population of a locality, the status of Indians (free or unfree), climate, disease, churches, fortresses, ports, plants, mines, and other matters of strategic and economic importance. By 1730 the questionnaire, sent to all parts of Spanish America, had grown to 435 questions. The replies depended on the knowledge of local Creoles and mestizos (persons of mixed Spanish-Indian parentage). It is now acknowledged that when this mass of information arrived in Madrid from across the Atlantic, it was immediately put in the state archives and so failed to become the basis for government action. Today, many of the Relaciones have been either lost or buried in archives, but many others have been conserved and some published in the nineteenth century, though in imperfect editions-hence the long-term project of Mexico City's University Institute of Anthropology to produce purer, critical editions.
Historians have recently become increasingly aware of the richness of this source material for the colonial period, and analysis of the Relaciones has become a research project of CSIC's Department of the History of America in its Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid. How much can be gleaned from these sources on sixteenth-century natural history of colonial Spanish America is apparent from the careful and detailed study by Raquel Álvarez Peláez, historian of science at the CSIC. Particularly impressive is the study on the questionnaires themselves. A CSIC edition now not only publishes for the first time the variety of questionnaires but also becomes the indispensable guide for reading this type of document. An introductory essay in the same volume suggests that analysis of the questionnaires reveals changing ideas on health and disease in the colonial period and points to the recurrence of questions seeking information on medicines used by Indian healers, questions not readily answered due to the secrecy of Indian tradition. (For a further examination of indigenous colonial medicine, see Few in Chapter 7.) Frustration over that lack of forthcoming information provoked this comment by an official drafting a Relación from replies to the questionnaire of 1604: "It is certain that the Spanish have not striven to discover them [the Indians' medicinal remedies] as much as they have to find gold." The author of this and the rest of a hitherto anonymous Relación has now been identified. Scholarly linguistic analysis of the manuscript, conserved at Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, convincingly demonstrates that it was written by Pedro de Valencia, humanist and chronicler of the Indies. Valencia never crossed the Atlantic, but he was fired with intense curiosity about the natural history of the New World. Indeed, as this new study shows, his interest led him to undermine the questionnaire that had been devised by the Count of Lemos, president of the Council of Indies. Valencia's Relación did not follow the order of that questionnaire, demoting the priority of questions on silver mines by relegating the responses to a brief appendage. That reflected his belief that precious metals were a curse for Castile and misery for Indian mine workers. Instead, his Relación emphasized medicinal plants and geographical features.
Pedro de Valencia had misrepresented Spanish endeavors to discover the secrets of Indian medicines. For Philip II had sent his court physician, Francisco de Hernández, to New Spain for that very purpose (see Barrera-Osorio in Chapter 11). The resulting monumental survey of the 1570s described some three thousand plants, almost the totality of the flora of New Spain, including descriptions of their medicinal virtues, revealed by Hernández's successful collaboration with Indian herbalist-healers. Much important new light on this climactic botanical expedition and previous accounts of New World flora has come from the highly productive team of historians of medicine and science at Valencia University. In one publication, José Pardo Tomás and María Luz López Terrada undertake a close textual study of the earliest reports by Europeans of the New World's exotic flora, a task intended to further understanding of how the Old World assimilated this astonishing extension of botanical knowledge. There is judicious critical analysis of familiar and lesser-known texts, including the penetrating observations of Roman Paré, the Catalan friar who sailed on Columbus's second voyage to evangelize the Indians of Hispaniola and was soon describing some of the herbs they used in rituals and in healing. As for Columbus himself, from the journal of his first voyage to communications on his fourth and final voyage, his news included scattered details on American flora. But Columbus was no naturalist. As the authors show, his descriptions of species were imprecise and marred by false identification through his conviction that he was in the Far East. By contrast, the authors praise the quality of botanical descriptions in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (Summary of the Natural History of the Indies; Toledo, 1526) and Historia general y natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies; Seville, 1535). These works are rightly seen as transcending mere chronicle by their concentrated focus on nature, the first true treatises of the natural history of the New World that include the earliest descriptions of guaiacum, macagua, and other medicinal plants. Fernández de Oviedo's insistence on the superiority of direct observation over accepting what the Ancients had written has long been recognized, but here Pardo Tomás and López Terrada reinforce that insistence by highlighting Oviedo's ability to overcome his own strong attachment to Pliny. Another fine point made is precocious recognition in the Crónica del Perú (Chronicle of Peru; Seville, 1553) of Pedro Cieza de León, soldier and chronicler, of an Andean zone of vegetation. In a valuable concluding section, historians Pardo Tomás and López Terrada present a catalogue that testifies to their progress in tackling the notorious difficulty of identifying American plants from their sixteenth-century descriptions.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Illustrations....................ixTables....................xi
Contributors....................xiii
Preface....................xix
Acknowledgments....................xxiii
Introduction Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra....................1
1. Science, Medicine, and Technology in Colonial Spanish America: New Interpretations, New Approaches David Goodman....................9
2. Portuguese Imperial Science, 1450-1800: A Historiographical Review Palmira Fontes da Costa and Henrique Leitão....................35
3. Cosmography at the Casa, Consejo, and Corte During the Century of Discovery María M. Portuondo....................57
4. Science During the Portuguese Maritime Discoveries: A Telling Case of Interaction Between Experimenters and Theoreticians Onésimo T. Almeida....................78
5. Baroque Natures: Juan E. Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History Juan Pimentel....................93
6. Cosmopolitanism and Scientific Reason in New Spain: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Dispute over the 1680 Comet Anna More....................115
7. Medical Mestizaje and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala, 1660-1730 Martha Few....................132
8. "Read All About It": Science, Translation, Adaptation, and Confrontation in the Gazeta de Literatura de México, 1788-1795 Fiona Clark....................147
11. Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World Antonio Barrera-Osorio....................219
1605-1606 Kevin Sheehan....................233
13. Acquisition and Circulation of Medical Knowledge within the Early Modern Portuguese Colonial Empire Timothy Walker....................247
14. The Rare, the Singular, and the Extraordinary: Natural History and the Collection of Curiosities in the Spanish Empire Paula De Vos....................271
15. A Visible and Useful Empire: Visual Culture and Colonial Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World Daniela Bleichmar....................290
Afterword Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook....................311
Notes....................325
Index....................419