Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500 – 1800

Abstract

“Let others do the inventing!” said Miguel de Unamuno and launched the notion, much affected by historians for most of the twentieth century, that Spaniards were uninterested in participating in modern science. Portuguese historians, by contrast, in the same period, tended to insist that science was their compatriots’ invention, at least in the fields of cartography and navigation, and that their nation contributed enormously to the scientific aspects of the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. On both counts, revision is well under way. Portugal and Spain both now seem unexceptional cases, consistent with the history of western European science in general.It is no longer possible to assert, with any confidence, that Portuguese navigation was peculiarly scientific at an exceptionally early date. Historians do not now represent the Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator as an organizer of scientific seminars or even as a navigator. Scholarship has exploded the belief that anyone, in Portugal or elsewhere, navigated by means of scientific instruments in the fifteenth century. Portuguese explorers seem rarely to have made or used charts. In any case, breakthroughs in realistic cartography now appear to owe at least as much to war, statecraft, and changing tastes as to the needs of seafaring. Spain, meanwhile, appears from recent and current research to have been the homeland of a great deal of formerly overlooked practical technological innovation under the Habsburg dynasty, especially in civil and military engineering. The country was a beacon of state investment in science under the Bourbons and an arena of geographical and ethnographical inquiry and debate throughout the early modern period. Spain and Portugal, in consequence, have been restored to the scientific mainstream. The former no longer seems especially laggard or nonparticipatory, the latter no longer a herald or pioneer.Part of the initiative underlying these shifts has come from historians of early modern science, who have concentrated on the influence of hermetic intellectual traditions and social and cultural change. Part has come from revisionism in Iberian historiography, with practitioners striving to reject old orthodoxies. Study of Spanish and Portuguese overseas expansion adds a further dimension, showing how much the New World and other frontiers of settlement and trade contributed to the development of early modern European science: the accumulation of scientific specimens for European Wunderkammer; the stimulus exploration provided for cartography and navigation, with implicit effects on astronomy and geodesy; the opportunities of cultural exchange with oriental and other indigenous scientific traditions; the way colonies functioned as forums of discussion about geographic and ethnographic subjects; and above all, perhaps, the sheer challenge to existing mentalities posed by the discovery and observation of previously unexperienced environments.The studies collected by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan include some useful contributions to the field. David Goodman (Spanish America) and Palmira Fontes and Henrique Leitão (Portugal) launch the volume with well-informed summaries of the historiography, though Goodman spends a surprising amount of time on what he represents as the influence of postmodernism. His charge that J. B. Harley warped the history of cartography in a postmodern direction seems ill conceived, for while Harley severed many constraints traditional in the study of the subject, he did not share any of the defining tics of postmodernism or sacrifice commitment to a search for objectively verifiable accounts of the past. The introductory essays stress themes repeated at intervals throughout the volume: the imperfections of current research and the paramount influence of the technical needs of imperial exploration, agronomy, health, and defense. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, for instance, takes us on a trip among bilge pumps and ethnobotanical enquiries in the sixteenth century, and Timothy Walker provides a fascinating study of Portuguese enquirers’ search for remedies for unfamiliar diseases. Outstanding contributions include that on Nieremberg by Juan Pimentel, who shows the compatibility of his subject’s religious and scientific thinking; Paula De Vos’s entertaining account of an eighteenth-century bishop’s cabinet of curiosities; and Anna More’s demonstration of how personal circumstances affected the scientific vision of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Fiona Clark and Júnia Ferreira Furtado provide interesting instances of how creole political and economic agendas influenced scientific projects in the eighteenth century.The book’s big deficiencies are in coherence — always a problem for collections of this kind, in which broad-brush impasto and speckly pointillism combine, without evoking an overall shape or covering the canvas — and a frustrating lack of global and comparative reference. If the authors or editors had taken into account the huge amount of parallel work available on the British, Dutch, French, Russian, Swedish, and Danish empires, they might have been able to transcend the rather parochial conclusion (expressed in the afterword by Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook) that “probings . . . moving most markedly in the Iberian peninsula” contributed alongside those of northern Europeans to “the rise of European science” (p. 310). A more interesting hypothesis might then arise: that without feedback from European powers’ imperial outreach a “scientific revolution” would have been impossible.

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