Black Legend Eamon

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The Historiographyof Spanish Science


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The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies | Vol. 7, Fall 2009 | pages 1330

Nuestros males no son constitucionales,sino circunstanciales: The Black Legendand the History of Early ModernSpanish Science

William Eamon,New Mexico State University*

In 1792, the French polymath Nicolas Masson de Morvillers, writ-ing in the Encyclopdie Mthodique, posed a question that, for better or forworse, framed the historiography of Spanish science for nearly two centu-ries. What do we owe to Spain? Masson asked in a voice brimming withsarcasm and contempt. In two centuries, in four, or even in six, what has

Spain done for Europe? (556).1Ostensibly, Massons subject was not thehistory of science but the geography and population of Spain, themes thatgave his polemic a pronounced racist character. For, according to Masson,the source of Spains deficiency was the character of its people, who, in spiteof their admirable virtues of patience and resolve, were ignorant, lazy, andsuperstitious. Moreover, according to Masson, Spains futile government,bigoted clergy, and tyrannical Inquisition all conspired to condemn thecountry to hopeless backwardness. Particularly with regard to science,

he concluded, Spain had become the most ignorant nation in Europe.After all, Masson asked dismissively, What can we expect of a countrythat needs to ask priests for permission to read and think? To Masson,Spain was the country that typified everything against which the philos-opheswere struggling.

Masson framed his question in a manner that was typical of the FrenchEnlightenment: polemical, secular, and anticlerical, it was, fundamen-tally, a question about modernity. Why should the question of Spains de-

cline have been so central to northern Europes conception of modernity?Part of the answer lies in the fact that the history of modernity that theEnlightenment philosophes were writing was a kind of melodrama, with

* ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Some of the ideas in this paper first appeared in an article

co-authored with Victor Navarro Brotns and published in the volumeMs al l de la

Leyenda Negra: Espaa y la Revolucin Cientfica .


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science and reason leading the way, inexorably, toward truth and utopia. Amelodrama requires high emotion and heroes and villains drawn in pat-terns of bold relief; and this one does not disappoint. In the history of mo-

dernity that was then being written increasingly by English, French, andGerman historians, Spain was the quintessentially anti-modern villain.Its supposedly inexorable decline contrasted sharply with the rise of thenorthern European industrial powers. In the eighteenth-century melo-drama of modernity, Spain was, in a sense, a necessary character.

From Spain, responses to Massons question were swift and indig-nant. One by one, Spanish scholars, all with deeply wounded pride, re-sponded to the insult, penning pamphlets and apologies defending Spainshonor and glory. King Carlos III demanded an official apology and, justto be safe, banned the importation of the Encyclopdieuntil corrected.The Academia Espaola offered a prize for the best apology or defense ofthe nation and its progress in the arts and sciences. The Masson affairequickly spread from pamphlets to the periodical press. By the end of thedecade, one could scarcely pick up a Spanish newspaper without finding areference to Masson or to one of the apologists for Spain (Herr 22030).

Thus opened la polmica de la ciencia espaolathe polemic ofSpanish sciencea polemic that, until quite recently, framed scholar-

ship on Iberias role in the development of modern science (Nieto-Galn;Garca Camarero and Garca Camarero). For the next century-and-a-halfor more, the debate over Spanish science was dominated by polarized andsterile polemics, one side condemning Spain for its backwardness and theother side patriotically defending the Spanish character (Lpez Piero 1527). Because the Scientific Revolution occupies such a central place in thenarrative of modernity, Massons question has become, in modern histo-riography, a question centrally about Spains contribution to the Scientific

Revolution. The result of that reformulation has not been encouraging.Remarkably, as far as concerns the historiography of science outside ofSpain, the situation is not very different today than it was when, in 1914,Julin Juderas coined the term leyenda negra to describe the stereotypeof early modern Spain as inquisitorial, ignorante, fantica, incapaz de fig-urar entre los pueblos cultos lo mismo ahora que antes, dispuesta siempre alas represiones violentas; enemiga del progreso y de las innovaciones (24 ;Garca Crcel). As Jorge Caizares recently pointed out in a survey of the

historiography of early modern Iberian science, the remarkably enduringnarratives of the Spanish Black Legend . . . are still with us, blinding histo-rians every day (117).

Examples are not difficult to find. Recently, the British historianAnthony Pagden asserted, Spain never experienced a scientific revolu-tion or . . . anything that could plausibly be accommodated under sucha description (Reception 139) Similarly, in an essay dedicated to the


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Scientific Revolution in Spain and Portugal, David Goodman, one of themost knowledgeable scholars of the subject, concluded, So completewas the collapse that it is difficult to find a single Iberian contributor to

the European Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century (171).According to conventional wisdom, again echoing traits of the BlackLegend, the cause of Spains comparative stagnation was religious fa-naticism. Thus Allen Debus, one of the leading American historians ofRenaissance science, recently asserted that the supposed lack of scientificinnovation in early modern Spain was a result of Philip IIs effort to main-tain Spain as a Roman Catholic country (160).2

Probably everyone would agree that it was unfortunate that so muchenergy should have been wasted on such a puerile question as that posedby Nicolas Masson. As Jos Mara Lpez Piero correctly observed, Lapolmica que provoc este artculo fue un mero debate ideolgico que nocontribuy, ni siquiera indirectamente, al estudio histrico de la cienciaen Espaa (21). Over the course of almost two centuries, the polemicof Spanish science divided Spanish historiography of science into twocamps. The first, which we might call the nationalist tradition, was touchedoff by indignant apologies such as Juan Pablo Forners Oracin apolog-tica por la Espaa y su mrito literario(1786). Lpez Piero, who describes

the work as Spains official response to Massons charge, characterizedit as una pieza de pomposa retrica al servicio de un extremado tradi-cionalismo no exento de xenophobia (21). Forner took Massons articleas representative of French libertinism and used his reply as a pretext forattacking thephilosophesin general (Gies; Herr 1234). He denounced thearticle as typically French, whose fondness for grand philosophical systemslike those of Descartes made them susceptible to making outlandish andsweeping generalizations. Essentially rejecting the last century and a half of

European thought, Forner pronounced, We have not had famous dream-ers like Descartes and Newton, but we have had the most just legislatorsand excellent practical philosophers (Herr 224). Forners anger at thephi-losophesscorn of Spain led him to condemn virtually all of what modernhistorians characterize as the Scientific Revolution. More serious, perhaps,but certainly no less apologetic were the earnest and ultimately highly use-ful efforts of the great literary scholar Marcelino Menndez Pelayo, whocatalogued and chronicled Spanish contributions to science in a manner

that can only be described as indefatigable (Garca Camarero and GarcaCamarero 20930; Garca Crcel 15866).On the other side, the liberal tradition of scholarship, best exemplified

by the philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset, appropriated the Black Legendto condemn Spanish anti-modernism. That tradition, too, can be tracedback to some extent to the polemic touched off by the French philosophes.One of the early responses to Forners Oracin apologtica por la Espaa was


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a rather wicked article by Luis Cauelo, the editor of the weekly journal, ElCensor. Satirically, Cauelo wrote that true science is that which assureseternal life and produces subjection, weakness, hunger, and poverty, the

condition that most assures one of going to heaven (Herr 2245). His read-ers got the point. Despite the insistence of the eminent scientist SantiagoRamn y Cajal that Nuestros males no son constitucionales, sino circun-stanciales, adventicios [Our bad characteristics are not constitutional, butcircumstantial and accidental] (Garca Camarero and Garca Camarero376), explanations of Spanish decline based on national character contin-ued to be employed by such eminent historians as Claudio Snchez and,more recently, Amrico Castro, who pronounced that there was never anyauthentic scientific thought in Spain because that was alien to the Spanishway of life (183). So entrenched was the idea of the Black Legend, even inSpanish historiography, that Pierre Chaunu observed: The Black Legendis a reflection of a reflection, an image twice distorted, the external imageof Spain as Spain sees itself (196). In other words, the real force of the leg-end lies not in the external image of Spain but in the negative features thatthe Spanish conscience discovers in its own self-image.

I think that Lpez Piero was right in arguing that the polemic of Spanishscience had a destructive influence upon Spanish scholarship. As he pointed

out, all of those who took part in the polemic limited themselves to mak-ing arguments defending ideological positions. However, I also believe thatnot only did the polemic have a negative impact upon Spanish scholarship,but also it has greatly inhibited our general understanding of the ScientificRevolution. While the polemic of Spanish science raged on, the history ofthe Scientific Revolution was written in total disregard (or apparent igno-rance) of Iberian developments. Indeed, the situation today is not much dif-ferent than it was more than two decades ago, when Lpez Piero lamented

la escasa o nula presencia de la Espaa de los siglos XVI y XVII en las exposi-ciones generales de los historiadores de la ciencia de otros pases y en sus estudiosacerca de la evolucin de una disciplina o un tema determinados(34).

Yet, when one considers that Spain in the early modern era possessedthe worlds greatest empire and that its monarchy was the most power-ful in Europe, it is at least counter-intuitive that it should have played norole at all in the periods greatest cultural movement. The principal rea-son for the neglect of Spain, it seems, is that the narrative of the Scientific

Revolution has been written, for the most part, by Anglo-American andnorthern European historians. Neither Herbert Butterfield nor A. R. Hall,nor Alexandre Koyr nor any of the recent American or British historiansof the Scientific Revolution have much to say about Spanish science, if theymention it at all. It is almost as if historians of the Scientific Revolutionhave been living in a dream world in which only Latin, English, French,Italian, and occasionally German are spoken.


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A world without Spain is certainly not the world that early modernEuropeans thought they were living in. The Spanish Empire under theHapsburgs reached from Madrid to Potos and from Naples to Antwerp,

not to mention the distant Philippines. It even included in its orbit Rome,where tens of thousands of Spaniards settled, colonizers for a kind of in-formal Spanish imperialism that until recently has received little attention(Dandelet). Nor were contemporaries unaware of Spains political powerand cultural accomplishments. As Jorge Caizares-Esguerra points out,the Spanish and Portuguese confidently saw themselves as the first mod-erns surpassing the ancients [and] the English were the first to recognizethis fact and . . . to imitate the institutions of knowledge-gathering createdby the Iberians (Iberian Science 86). Spain was a rising giant that wouldbecome the worlds first modern global empire and would produce the firstworld-wide scientific network, a fact that in the current, predominant in-terpretation of the history of science is met with stubborn ignorance ormute puzzlement.

An instructive parallel might be drawn, I think, between Massons ques-tion about Spain and another famous question in the historiography ofscience, that is, Joseph Needhams question about China. Why did Chinanot experience a Scientific Revolution? Needham asked (16). Nathan Sivin

compares Needhams counterfactual question to the question, why did yourname not appear in todays newspaper? Why, Sivin asks, does the ScientificRevolution question assume such urgency when the latter does not? Thereason seems to be that we usually assume that the Scientific Revolution iswhat everybody oughtto have hadas opposed to your name appearing intodays newspaper (533). In addition, the question implies the further as-sumption that civilizations that had the potential for a scientific revolutionought to have had the kind that took place in the West, an assumption usu-

ally linked to the belief that European civilization was somehow in touchwith reality in a way that no other civilization could be.

Nowadays, hardly anyone ever asks the kind of historical question thatNeedham labored over: questions such as, why the Scientific Revolutiondidnt happen in location X or location Y (Findlen, Two Cultures 233).Nevertheless, it seems as if Massons questionof which Needhams wasa kind of parallel versionstill holds force, at least outside of Spain. Howelse can we explain the virtual silence from the historical community in

the rest of the world on this subject?The marginalization of Spain from the narrative of modernityandhence from the history of the Scientific Revolutionbegan long before thedispute touched off by Massons famous question. In fact, it can be tracedto the sixteenth century, when the northern European image of Spainsintellectual history began to take shape (Hillgarth). Anti-Hispanism inthe Anglo-American intellectual tradition has a very long historya his-


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tory, in fact, that takes us all the way back to the sixteenth century, whenEngland saw Spainand rightly soas its most feared enemy and a gravethreat to its shores and to its way of life. Anti-Hispanism in England

drew its breath from stories of Spains treatment of the Indians of the NewWorld, principally those of the Dominican friar Bartolom de las Casas,the Bishop of Chiapas. Las Casass picture of the cruelties inflicted uponthe Native Americans by the conquistadores in his Brevsima relacin dela destruicin de las Indias fueled the fires of anti-Spanish sentiment inEngland, as well as in the Low Countries during the Dutch War for in-dependence. Dutch propagandaresulting in a barrage of anti-Spanishpamphletswas crucial in creating the Black Legend of Spain (Hillgarth30927). The sheer quantity of anti-Spanish material that issued from thepresses of Protestant Europe during this period is astonishing, and it wasamply supplemented by those who, while sympathetic to the Counter-Reformation, resented Spains power and its tendency to interfere in theaffairs of France and Italy (Maltby 4).

A similar construction of Spanish history was crafted by Italian po-litical writers of the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century Italian observerstook a very different stance on the Hispanization of southern Italy thanhad taken place during the previous centuries of Spanish rule. The seven-

teenth-century philosopher Tommaso Campanella, for example, regardedthe Spanish monarchy as the linchpin of an impending world monarchythat he advocated for Europe (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism3763; Eamon,Natural Magic; Headley). Looking back on the Hispanization of southernItaly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eighteenth-centuryNeapolitan political writersincluding Paolo Doria, Pietro Giannone,and Giambattista Vicohad a radically different view of Spanish rule,regarding Spains dominance as destructive to Italian ways. Doria saw

Spanish rule in Naples as having meant the replacement of a society of trustby a society of honor (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism70). By destroying theNeapolitans ability to trust each other, he wrote, the Spaniards had ef-fectively reduced the kingdom to a state of semi-impoverishment and di-vided against itself. The transformation of the Italian image of Spain froma relatively benevolent world empire to a barbaric despotism embraceda particular view of the history of Spanish philosophy. The Spaniards,Doria complained, by resisting the New Philosophyi.e., Cartesianism

and Newtonianismand by obliging the university to continue teachingAristotelianism (which, in Dorias words, never explained anything),had effectively denied the citizen access to the knowledge he needed tofulfill his role as a citizen (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism79).

The image of Spain as a barbaric despotism also took hold in France.Few authors have done more to create the Spanish stereotype than theFrenchphilosopheMontesquieu (Iglesias). In his Esprit des lois, he helped to


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set the fashion of depicting Spain as the land of fanaticism and ignorance.Like Doria, Montesquieu attributed Spains stagnation to the exaggeratedSpanish tradition of honor that valued idleness over labor. Thus in the

eighteenth century, the perception of the Spanish state gradually shiftedfrom that of a benevolent universal Christian monarchy to an oriental andbarbarian despotism (Padgen, Spanish Imperialism; Lords of All the World).

These images were reinforced by travelers accounts, narratives that es-sentially ruled Spain out as a member of Enlightened Europe (Hontanilla;Bolufer Peruga). Spaniards religious practices, for example, were tied withancient paganism and its population as a whole was perceived as pagan andprimitive. John Armstrong, an English engineer who was stationed in theisland of Minorca in the 1730s and 40s, reported that there is no degree ofsuperstition into which these people have not been led (Hontanilla 9). Inthe stern Protestant perspective of the eighteenth century English travelers,Catholic beliefs and practices were the very essence of paganism.

Lurid and often exaggerated reports of encounters with the SpanishInquisition reinforced these stereotypes. In 1756, John Marchant publishedhis polemic, Bloody Tribunal: Or, an Antidote Against Popery,a review ofthe most dreadful and exquisite tortures inflicted upon several unfor-tunate souls who had unhappily fallen into the hands of those tyrants

(Hontanilla 12). To Montesquieu, the supposed grip of the Inquisitiondemonstrated that Spain is incapable of any degree of light or instruc-tion. He lamented, a nation must be very unhappy that gives authorityto such men (Spirit2:56). It seems that the dreaded Spanish Inquisitionis always trotted out to illustrate the repression that supposedly charac-terized the Spanish mentality, setting Spain apart from the rest of Europe(Garca Crcel 18993). Of course, the stereotype of the Inquisition ig-nores the more vicious persecution of witches in northern European na-

tions, including England, Holland, and Germany. Compared to thoseincidents, in which hundreds of thousands of witches were executed, theSpanish Inquisition seems comparatively mild. Moreover, denunciationsof Protestant heretics to the Spanish Inquisition were no different from de-nunciations elsewhere, including Italy. As Henry Kamen writes, The im-age of a nation sunk in inertia and superstition because of the Inquisitionwas part of the mythology created around the tribunal (135).

Whether exaggerated or not, the stereotypes that resulted had a pro-

found and lasting effect. As Ana Hontanilla observes, the degradationof Catholicism excluded Spain from enlightened notions of Christianity,while it confirmed the cultural distance of Protestant societies and estab-lished their moral superiority (11). In fact, all sorts of thingsincludingCatholicismwere blamed for Spains supposed degradation: sloth, cli-mate, bad government, the stars (MacKay). According to the constructionof Spain that emerged in the eighteenth century, the Spanish people were


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governed by barbaric institutions, engaged in pagan religious practices,and submitted to bloody tyrants. The contrast with other European na-tions seemed stark and absolute.

Much of the rhetoric about Spain that was generated in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries was the result of Spanish and European intellec-tuals who were grappling with the reality of Spanish decline (Caizares,Nature, Empire, and Nation 97; Kagan). But this concern, too, as JorgeCaizares has observed, was the reflection of a kind of master narrativethat was constructed to explain how, supposedly, the Spanish characterresulted in the rejection of the new sciences and technologies developed inthe rest of Europe during the Scientific Revolution, and the building of anirresponsible empire had condemned Spain to a chronic state of depopu-lation, vagrancy, and economic decline (Nature, Empire, and Nation97).Interestingly, these debates actually started in Spain. In the early seven-teenth century, the country witnessed an explosion of arbitristaliteraturecontaining proposals about how to solve various fiscal and socio-economicproblems and explaining how Spain had lost ground to other Europeanpowers (Elliott 243261). To the arbitristas, something had gone seriouslywrong with Spanish society. Spanish intellectuals clearly felt a need to ex-plain to themselves what was happening. Unfortunately, the causes they

advanced for Spains decline and the remedies they proposed to addressit were not very enlightening. Some argued that the root cause of Spainsbackwardness was sexual immorality and religious hypocrisy; othersblamed the idleness and insubordination of youth, luxuriant living, over-indulgence in food and drink, and the effeminate fashion among men forwearing their hair long. The cure: moral reform, of course. Others soughtmore scientific explanations. Was Spains decline an irreversible part ofsome cosmic cyclical process, they wondered? Or, applying the model of as-

trological determinism, was it somehow the result of the movement of theplanets? Medical metaphors were abundant: Spain was just sick. Diseases,of course, can be diagnosed, but the cures proposed by the arbitristaswere,frankly, not very helpful.

The history of science has traditionally been written in the heroic mode:as an epic struggle of truth to free itself from the bondage of ignoranceand superstition. The epic history of science has included tragic heroeswho struggled against insuperable odds to get the truth out, and who were

martyred for their convictions. Bruno at the stake and Galileo before theInquisition have provided two of the most powerful images of the tragic inscience. The epic history of science also has its villains, supreme amongstwhich were those scheming Aristotelians who hid behind priestly robes,secretly plotting to bring Galileo to his knees. And it has included comiccharacters, such as the Aristotelian professor who steadfastly refused tolook through Galileos telescope to behold the truth before his eyes.


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That characterization may be slightly exaggerated, but it helps us un-derstand one of the reasons why Spain has been left out of the narra-tive of the rise of modern science. It is that the history of the Scientific

Revolution has long been viewed as the history of the exploits of heroiccultural figures: those heroes like Galileo, Newton, and so on. As Juderasobserved a century ago, while other nations were acknowledged to havetheir Shakespeares, Michelangelos, and Descartes, Spain was allowed fewheroic cultural figures: Montesquieu admitted Don Quijote as the onlyworthy Spanish literary effort, and so on. When you construct a history ofculture that is founded upon heroism, cultures that are not allowed heroicfigures are left out (26).

With regard to the question of Spains role in the development ofearly modern sciencethe problem, that is, of Spain and the ScientificRevolutionit seems that it is time to take stock. Perhaps we have beenasking the wrong questions. Perhaps it is time to refocus and reassess thequestions that we are asking about early modern Iberian science and, inparticular, about Iberias role in the Scientific Revolution. Above all, weneed to pose the more fundamental question of whether or not an accountof the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modernity that omits Iberiacan have any meaning at all.

As a thought experiment, suppose we shift our perspective. Suppose weimagine a history of the Scientific Revolution in which the Black Legendand images of Spains barbarism are not part of the picture. What, forexample, would the Scientific Revolution look like if viewed, not from thestandpoint of the history of ideas and of individual scientific genius, but ofthe rhythms of everyday life?3

Framing the question of the Scientific Revolution in this way neces-sarily causes us to refocus our vision. It requires us to look at topics not

usually included in discussions of the Scientific Revolution and, at thesame time, to set aside certain topics that seem essential to the currentlyaccepted narrative. For example, it does not seem that the CopernicanRevolution would be a very promising subject to explore when looking atthe Scientific Revolution from the perspective of everyday culture. Untilthe trial of Galileo made Copernicanism the focus of a public spectacle,debates over the new cosmology were confined to small circles of math-ematicians and astronomers. Nor did the new cosmology seem to offer

any significant advantages to those who brought the science of astronomydown to earth in the form of astrological forecasts and nativities. As longas people could buy their almanacs, what did they care whether it wasPtolemys or Copernicuss mathematics that astrologers employed in mak-ing them? Contrary to the claim often made in traditional narratives ofthe Scientific Revolution, the decline of astrology in the late-seventeenthcentury probably had little to do with the rise of the New Philosophy.4In


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England at least, the struggle against astrology was carried out primarily ina religious context and was waged largely by ministers. As Michael Hunterhas pointed out, science was institutionally too weak to seriously challenge

astrology in the late-seventeenth century. Similarly, according to OttaviaNiccoli, the decline of popular prognostication in sixteenth-century Italyhad nothing to do with the rise of the new cosmology, but was instead aresult of internal political and religious changes (18993).

On the other hand, front and center in our view of the ScientificRevolution from the perspective of everyday culture would be the geo-graphical expansion of Europe. To most people living in the sixteenthcentury, the real scientific revolution was not the revelation of a new ar-rangement of the heavens, but the discovery of new worlds on earth. Dailylife was changed by the geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century.With the introduction of new foodstuffs, diets changed; new fashions, likesmoking tobacco, took off. Many of the modern worlds most importantfood plants, like maize, potatoes, squashes, and tomatoes, originated in theNew World and were completely new to early modern Europeans. It is hardto imagine Mediterranean cuisine without tomatoes and chiles, or almostany northern European cuisine without the potato.

People could see these changes all around them. A visitor to the port of

Lisbon or Seville in the mid-sixteenth century would have been immedi-ately awareby sight, sound, and smellof a strange new world of goods.Strolling along the wharf, a visitor would have encountered a diverse ar-ray of goods being unloaded from cargo ships arriving from all pointsof the known world: parrots, monkeys, and hummingbirds from Brazil,gum arabic, ivory, ebony, and malaguetta pepper from West Africa, ginger,tamarind, and elephant tusks from Malabar. Aromatic woods and fragrantgums like benzoin came from Borneo and Sumatra; cardamom and cinna-

mon from Ceylon; porcelains and silks from Macao; beeswax from Timor;shark skins and deerskins from Siam; camphor from Sumatra; musk fromTibet; cloves from the Moluccas; China root from China. One might evenencounter an occasional elephant being unloaded on the dock (Russell-Wood 12347).

In addition, a phenomenal number of new drugs were introduced fromthe New World, transforming the European pharmacopoeia.5In terms ofthe sheer quantity of new drugs introduced into the marketplace, the early

modern period was probably not surpassed until the twentieth century,with the growth of the chemical pharmaceutical industry. Well stockedwith dried specimens of exotic plants and animals from all over the world,the early modern apothecary shops were like public museums, putting ondisplay strange objects from distant lands for a curious and admiring pub-lic (Bleichmar). From the pharmacies, you could purchase everything fromguaiac wood to exotic dried fish to bezoars.6In 1683, the London apothecary


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Thomas Johnson turned his shop into an exhibition site when he displayedthe first bananas ever seen in England (Arnold 137). Many pharmacistsamassed natural history collections of sizeable proportions, and collectors

relied heavily on the apothecary shops for natural curiosities. Inevitably,the demand for exotic objects produced frauds: the sixteenth-century nat-uralist Conrad Gesner complained about apothecaries who tried to takeadvantage of the growing market for curiosities by selling fake dragons andhydras to gullible collectors (Findlen, Inventing Nature 310).

The question of fraud was central to everyday life in a culture andeconomy that was becoming increasing commercialized. In this arena, thegeographical discoveries played a central role by flooding the marketplacewith strange and exotic commodities, often from places people had neverheard of before. The marketplace, increasingly populated by itinerant mer-chants and healers who where here today and gone tomorrow, symbolizedconcerns about the city as a moral and economic environment. The issueof fraud and knowing whom to trust in the marketplace became criticallyimportant (Park). These everyday concerns are mirrored in popular writ-ings about mountebanks and in the widespread concerns about alchemi-cal frauds that scholars such as Tara Nummedal have written about. Whatis camphor root from Borneo used for? How to you judge its quality and

how do you prepare it? How do you choose the best lignum aloes? Is bal-sam of Peru a good substitute for ancient balsam? These urgent concernsmay account, in part, for the proliferation of printed books of secrets,those widely popular how-to books that explained, in the simplest terms,the secrets of trades such as dyeing, perfumery, and metallurgy (Eamon,Science and the Secrets). Laying bare the mysteries of the trades could en-able readers to answer some of these questions, and enabled readers to bet-ter understand how craftsmen made the things they bought. Even if one

did not necessarily have any interest in replicating the recipes they encoun-tered in a how-to book, they still might find the secrets useful in daily life.

Many of the new drugs sold in the pharmacies were for new diseases, likesyphilis, which also came from the New World. The French Pox, as syphi-lis was called, was a horrifying scourge whose impact upon everyday cul-ture went far beyond its victims. The pox made profits for merchants anddoctors, ruined lives, and sharpened medical debates. The sudden appear-ance of a virulent illness that did not seem to fit the Galenic framework of

disease raised profound challenges to traditional medicine (Arrizabalaga,Henderson, French). The fact that syphilis was a new disease tested thelimits of classical and medieval knowledge, and provided a concrete dem-onstration that the ancients could not have had all the answers. More thanany other event in early modern Europe, the syphilis epidemic challengedthe traditional paradigm about the nature and causation of disease.


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New diseases such as syphilis also opened up new opportunities for em-pirics and other irregular healers, changing the landscape of the medicalmarketplace. The challenge to traditional medicine was not confined to the

lecture halls, but was carried into the piazzas and marketplaces. Empiricsand charlatans made a laughing stock of the regular doctors and con-trasted the complex and dubious cures of the physicians with their ownpanaceas, supposedly proved by personal experience rather than the au-thority of the book (Gentilcore).

These new realities were, of course, introduced into Europe by theIberian discovery of the New World. Thanks to the printing press, the NewWorld discoveries became widely known and part of public discourse. Tocite just one example among many books published about the discoveries,Nicolas MonardessNatural History of the New World, was first publishedin 1567, played an instrumental role in disseminating knowledge in Europeof the American plants.7The book, which was translated into English in1577with the captivating title,Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde,was a phenomenal success: twenty-five editions of the work were pub-lished in the sixteenth century and another fourteen in the seventeenthcentury. The intense interest in the geography and natural history of theNew World, which pulsated in the scientific community of early modern

Europe, contributed to the emergence of an entirely new conception of theaims and methods of science: the idea of science as a hunt for secrets ofnature. The search for secrets in unknown regions of nature is a themethat appears in Renaissance scientific literature with monotonous regular-ity. The image of science as a hunt would take center stage in a history ofthe Scientific Revolution written from the perspective of everyday culture(Eamon, Science as a venatio).

So, too, would the idea of discovery, whether of new lands, new peoples,

or new objects of trade and commerce. Much of what was most interestingto natural philosophers of the period was equally important to merchantsand consumers. Of course, the new philosophy was not all about buyingand selling; yet, as Harold Cook suggests, the ways of life associated withcommerce that increasingly dominated Europe focused attention on theobjects of nature (41011). Merchants and scientists shared a number ofimportant values, including the importance of travel, objectivity, exchange,and seeing things afresh. Above all, science and commerce had in common

a certain kind of interested engagement with objective knowledge andan attentive appreciation for collective generalizations based on exactinginformation about the object with which they dealt (57). Understandingthe idea of scientific discovery will necessarily lead us to considering therhythms of everyday life in the marketplaces where goods were barteredand exchanged.


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Of course, everyday life was not completely cut off from intellectuallife. Humanists and natural philosophers were also consumers, and wereas attentive to commercial exchange and geographical discovery as mer-

chants and ordinary peoplea fact that, until recently, has been little no-ticed by historians of science. Take, for example, the Renaissance receptionof Ptolemy. Were we to judge from the attention given by historians of sci-ence, Ptolemys influence on the Renaissance was exercised chiefly throughthe Almagest. Yet that conclusion is largely an artifact of our prioritizingof mathematics and cosmology as the drivers of the Scientific Revolution.If we look at the priorities of the time, however, a very different pictureemerges. In the Renaissance, Ptolemy was seen more as a geographer thanas an astronomer, and the publication of his Geographia far outstrippedthat of theAlmagest(Bennett 201). This fact is rather sobering. It suggeststhat somehow weve gotten the whole picture of the Scientific Revolutionwrong. Measured by its impact on everyday life, the discovery of the NewWorld far surpassed the design of a new cosmos.

Another consequence of the debates and discussions coming out of thediscovery of the New World was the emergence of a new conception of hu-man nature; and, as well, a new science, the science of comparative ethnol-ogy. As collectors of massive amounts of data about the people and soci-

eties of the New World, the Spaniards were among the first Europeans toface questions of ethnology, uniformity and diversity of races, and so on.As Anthony Pagden has pointed out, the result was a far-reaching changein the understanding of human societies, a change from a description ofcultures in terms of a human nature thought to be constant over time andspace to a wider anthropological and historical relativism. (Pagden, Fall1).Historians of the Scientific Revolution usually regard Spainif they men-tion Spain at allas marginal to the Scientific Revolution, at best a pas-

sive recipient of the scientific advances of the day, at worst hostile to them.Spanish preoccupation with ethnology and natural historyissues of vi-tal concern to its imperial projectmay at least partially explain Spainsapparent lack of interest in the subjects that dominate the canonical nar-rative of the Scientific Revolution, such as astronomy and cosmology. Yetwe need to ask, which of the two concerns, in the long run, was the mostimportant: the nature of the heavens or the nature of humanity? A strongargument could be made for the latter. Indeed, we might imagine a history

of the Scientific Revolution in which ethnology, anthropology, navigation,and natural history, not mathematics and cosmology, took center stage.What would such a history look like? It might begin with the sentence: TheScientific Revolution began in Spain.

Only a few years ago, such a striking statement would have seemed un-thinkable. Yet that, indeed, is the assertion of Antonio Barrera in his recentbook, Experiencing Nature. Barrera convincingly argues that, through their


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William Eamon26

experience in the New World, Spaniards validated experience as a source ofknowledge and created institutions that established rules and methodolo-gies for gathering and organizing empirical information. Ancient sources

were of little use to the Spaniards in their attempt to understand the NewWorld. Moreover, the scientific and practices that emerged out of Spainsimperial experience became models that the rest of Europe followed. TheScientific Revolution did not start with Copernicus and his heliocentricideas, Barrera asserts. It started in the 1520s, in Spain, when merchants,artisans, and royal officials confronted new entities coming from the NewWorld and had to devise their own methods to collect information aboutthose lands (2). Whether or not Barreras radical realignment of the ori-gins of the Scientific Revolution will stand up to scrutiny remains to beseen; but I do think that Spains role in the Scientific Revolutionespe-cially when seen from the perspective of everyday lifeis yet to be fullyunderstood and needs to be rethought.

I am not suggesting that we abandon the idea of the ScientificRevolutionat least not yet. As historians of science, we have an obliga-tion to address the big questions about origins, identity, and meaning: thatis, about the origins of science and the role of science in the identity of theWest and in the making of the modern world. Yet, as Betty Jo Dobbs re-

minded us, when we use the term revolution to refer to scientific thought,we are in fact using a metaphor. She went on to write, We are still encum-bered with some of the baggage of the metaphor of revolution that obscuresso much continuity in the midst of change and produces such improbableinterpretations of historical actors, for in many ways we are still most in-tent upon explicating the changes that led to us (25). Clearly, we can nolonger afford to repeat stories that do not make sense of the early mod-ern world as early modern Europeansunderstood that world. That means,

among other things, thatif we are going to retain the idea of the ScientificRevolutionwe can no longer afford to leave Iberia, which loomed solarge in the collective consciousness of early modern Europeans, out ofthe picture. Tired questions of national characterquestions like Wasthe Spanish temperament compatible with modernity?which have longbeen banished from the historiography of other nations, still seem to holdsway among historians of science. Re-attaching Spain to Europe will gofar toward creating a more balanced interpretation of the rise of science

and the origins of modernity. On the other hand, treating Spain as a worldapart, as if its history had occurred in a vacuum, does little service either tothe history of Spain or the history of the Scientific Revolution.

Masson posed his questionWhat does Europe owe Spain?just asnorthern European intellectuals were crafting a new paradigm for moder-nity. The new modernist paradigm that was developed in the late eigh-teenth century was premised on the assumption that only we, the northern


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Europeans, got it right. Once again, I find interesting parallels betweenMassons question and Needhams famous query about Chinese science.For in the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosophes traded

their fascination with the Orient for an ideology of Orientalism. Duringthe first half of the century, the image of the virtuous Chinese reined su-preme. Thus Leibniz, who carried out an extensive correspondence withJesuit missionaries in China, had an extremely positive view of Chineseculture. He even wrote a defense of Chinese religion in order to show itsagreement with Christian natural religion (Perkins). Yet in the last decadesof the century, the northern European perspective on East Asia changedprofoundly, so much so that in 1774, the French ethnographer CorneliusDe Pauw described China as a land of ignorant, intolerant monks andof courtiers utterly dependent on Europe for its scientific expertise.8Thereversal of Chinas image in the West was complete.

The Black Legend projected upon Spain a similar kind of Orientalism.Perhaps, by looking at the origins of modern science from new perspec-tives, we can arrive at a history of the Scientific Revolution that avoids theothering of Spain.

Endnotes1 A Spanish translation of the article is contained in Garca Camarero and Garca Camarero 4753.

Massons article was written for the section, Geographie moderne.

2 Ironically, Debus chose a particularly poor example to illustrate his caseParacelsianismwhich,

recent research has shown, actually enjoyed a rather remarkable flowering in early modern Spain.

See, in particular, Rey Bueno, Los seores del Fuego ; Los paracelsistas espaoles. On Spanish

alchemy, see also the articles by Rey Bueno, Rodrguez Guerrero, Lpez Prez, and Slater in this

volume.

3 By the term everyday lifeor everyday cultureI refer to the variety of discourses and

practices that were widely shared in daily life in early modern Europe. By everyday culture, I do

not mean popular culture specif ically, although the two overlap Everyday ways of knowing and

strategies for dealing with world were often shared by high and low cultures alike. For twodifferent perspectives, see Ruggiero; Burke.

4 On seventeenth-century astrology, see Lanuza in this volume.

5 On the diffusion of knowledge of American medicinal plants, see Chabrns article in this volume.

6 A bezoar (or bezoar stone) is a calculus found the gastrointestinal organs of ruminant animals and

believed in the early modern period to be a universal antidote against any poison.

7 On Monardes, see also Lpez Prez in this volume.

8 Recherches philosophique sur le Egyptiens et les Chinois, quoted in Caizares-Esguerra, How to

Write34.

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