The Historiography

of Spanish Science
13
The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies | Vol. 7, Fall 2009 | pages 1330
Nuestros males no son constitucionales,
sino circunstanciales: The Black Legend
and the History of Early Modern
Spanish 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 for
worse, framed the historiography of Spanish science for nearly two centu-
ries. What do we owe to Spain? Masson asked in a voice brimming with
sarcasm and contempt. In two centuries, in four, or even in six, what has
Spain done for Europe? (556).
1
Ostensibly, Massons subject was not the
history of science but the geography and population of Spain, themes that
gave his polemic a pronounced racist character. For, according to Masson,
the source of Spains deciency was the character of its people, who, in spite
of their admirable virtues of patience and resolve, were ignorant, lazy, and
superstitious. Moreover, according to Masson, Spains futile government,
bigoted clergy, and tyrannical Inquisition all conspired to condemn the
country 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 country
that needs to ask priests for permission to read and think? To Masson,
Spain was the country that typied everything against which the philos-
ophes were struggling.
Masson framed his question in a manner that was typical of the French
Enlightenment: 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 the
Enlightenment 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 volume Ms all de la
Leyenda Negra: Espaa y la Revolucin Cientfica.
Willi am Eamon 14
science and reason leading the way, inexorably, toward truth and utopia. A
melodrama 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, and
German historians, Spain was the quintessentially anti-modern villain.
Its supposedly inexorable decline contrasted sharply with the rise of the
northern 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 Spains
honor and glory. King Carlos III demanded an ofcial apology and, just
to be safe, banned the importation of the Encyclopdie until corrected.
The Academia Espaola offered a prize for the best apology or defense of
the nation and its progress in the arts and sciences. The Masson affaire
quickly spread from pamphlets to the periodical press. By the end of the
decade, one could scarcely pick up a Spanish newspaper without nding a
reference to Masson or to one of the apologists for Spain (Herr 22030).
Thus opened la polmica de la ciencia espaolathe polemic of
Spanish 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-half
or more, the debate over Spanish science was dominated by polarized and
sterile polemics, one side condemning Spain for its backwardness and the
other side patriotically defending the Spanish character (Lpez Piero 15
27). Because the Scientic Revolution occupies such a central place in the
narrative of modernity, Massons question has become, in modern histo-
riography, a question centrally about Spains contribution to the Scientic
Revolution. The result of that reformulation has not been encouraging.
Remarkably, as far as concerns the historiography of science outside of
Spain, the situation is not very different today than it was when, in 1914,
Julin Juderas coined the term leyenda negra to describe the stereotype
of early modern Spain as inquisitorial, ignorante, fantica, incapaz de g-
urar entre los pueblos cultos lo mismo ahora que antes, dispuesta siempre a
las 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 enduring
narratives of the Spanish Black Legend . . . are still with us, blinding histo-
rians every day (117).
Examples are not difcult to nd. Recently, the British historian
Anthony Pagden asserted, Spain never experienced a scientic revolu-
tion or . . . anything that could plausibly be accommodated under such
a description (Reception 139) Similarly, in an essay dedicated to the
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 15
Scientic Revolution in Spain and Portugal, David Goodman, one of the
most knowledgeable scholars of the subject, concluded, So complete
was the collapse that it is difcult to nd a single Iberian contributor to
the European Scientic Revolution of the seventeenth century (171).
According to conventional wisdom, again echoing traits of the Black
Legend, the cause of Spains comparative stagnation was religious fa-
naticism. Thus Allen Debus, one of the leading American historians of
Renaissance science, recently asserted that the supposed lack of scientic
innovation 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 much
energy should have been wasted on such a puerile question as that posed
by Nicolas Masson. As Jos Mara Lpez Piero correctly observed, La
polmica que provoc este artculo fue un mero debate ideolgico que no
contribuy, ni siquiera indirectamente, al estudio histrico de la ciencia
en Espaa (21). Over the course of almost two centuries, the polemic
of Spanish science divided Spanish historiography of science into two
camps. The rst, which we might call the nationalist tradition, was touched
off 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 ofcial response to Massons charge, characterized
it as una pieza de pomposa retrica al servicio de un extremado tradi-
cionalismo no exento de xenophobia (21). Forner took Massons article
as representative of French libertinism and used his reply as a pretext for
attacking the philosophes in general (Gies; Herr 1234). He denounced the
article as typically French, whose fondness for grand philosophical systems
like those of Descartes made them susceptible to making outlandish and
sweeping 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 legislators
and excellent practical philosophers (Herr 224). Forners anger at the phi-
losophes scorn of Spain led him to condemn virtually all of what modern
historians characterize as the Scientic 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, who
catalogued and chronicled Spanish contributions to science in a manner
that can only be described as indefatigable (Garca Camarero and Garca
Camarero 20930; Garca Crcel 15866).
On the other side, the liberal tradition of scholarship, best exemplied
by the philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset, appropriated the Black Legend
to condemn Spanish anti-modernism. That tradition, too, can be traced
back 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
Willi am Eamon 16
a rather wicked article by Luis Cauelo, the editor of the weekly journal, El
Censor. Satirically, Cauelo wrote that true science is that which assures
eternal 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 Santiago
Ramn y Cajal that Nuestros males no son constitucionales, sino circun-
stanciales, adventicios [Our bad characteristics are not constitutional, but
circumstantial and accidental] (Garca Camarero and Garca Camarero
376), 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 any
authentic scientic thought in Spain because that was alien to the Spanish
way of life (183). So entrenched was the idea of the Black Legend, even in
Spanish historiography, that Pierre Chaunu observed: The Black Legend
is a reection of a reection, an image twice distorted, the external image
of 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 that
the Spanish conscience discovers in its own self-image.
I think that Lpez Piero was right in arguing that the polemic of Spanish
science had a destructive inuence 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 that
not only did the polemic have a negative impact upon Spanish scholarship,
but also it has greatly inhibited our general understanding of the Scientic
Revolution. While the polemic of Spanish science raged on, the history of
the Scientic 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 estudios
acerca de la evolucin de una disciplina o un tema determinados (34).
Yet, when one considers that Spain in the early modern era possessed
the 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 no
role 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 Scientic
Revolution has been written, for the most part, by Anglo-American and
northern European historians. Neither Herbert Buttereld nor A. R. Hall,
nor Alexandre Koyr nor any of the recent American or British historians
of the Scientic Revolution have much to say about Spanish science, if they
mention it at all. It is almost as if historians of the Scientic Revolution
have been living in a dream world in which only Latin, English, French,
Italian, and occasionally German are spoken.
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 17
A world without Spain is certainly not the world that early modern
Europeans thought they were living in. The Spanish Empire under the
Hapsburgs 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 power
and cultural accomplishments. As Jorge Caizares-Esguerra points out,
the Spanish and Portuguese condently saw themselves as the rst mod-
erns surpassing the ancients [and] the English were the rst to recognize
this fact and . . . to imitate the institutions of knowledge-gathering created
by the Iberians (Iberian Science 86). Spain was a rising giant that would
become the worlds rst modern global empire and would produce the rst
world-wide scientic network, a fact that in the current, predominant in-
terpretation of the history of science is met with stubborn ignorance or
mute puzzlement.
An instructive parallel might be drawn, I think, between Massons ques-
tion about Spain and another famous question in the historiography of
science, that is, Joseph Needhams question about China. Why did China
not experience a Scientic Revolution? Needham asked (16). Nathan Sivin
compares Needhams counterfactual question to the question, why did your
name not appear in todays newspaper? Why, Sivin asks, does the Scientic
Revolution question assume such urgency when the latter does not? The
reason seems to be that we usually assume that the Scientic Revolution is
what everybody ought to have hadas opposed to your name appearing in
todays newspaper (533). In addition, the question implies the further as-
sumption that civilizations that had the potential for a scientic revolution
ought 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 touch
with reality in a way that no other civilization could be.
Nowadays, hardly anyone ever asks the kind of historical question that
Needham labored over: questions such as, why the Scientic Revolution
didnt happen in location X or location Y (Findlen, Two Cultures 233).
Nevertheless, it seems as if Massons questionof which Needhams was
a kind of parallel versionstill holds force, at least outside of Spain. How
else 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 modernityand
hence from the history of the Scientic Revolutionbegan long before the
dispute touched off by Massons famous question. In fact, it can be traced
to the sixteenth century, when the northern European image of Spains
intellectual history began to take shape (Hillgarth). Anti-Hispanism in
the Anglo-American intellectual tradition has a very long historya his-
Willi am Eamon 18
tory, in fact, that takes us all the way back to the sixteenth century, when
England saw Spainand rightly soas its most feared enemy and a grave
threat 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 New
World, principally those of the Dominican friar Bartolom de las Casas,
the Bishop of Chiapas. Las Casass picture of the cruelties inicted upon
the Native Americans by the conquistadores in his Brevsima relacin de
la destruicin de las Indias fueled the res of anti-Spanish sentiment in
England, as well as in the Low Countries during the Dutch War for in-
dependence. Dutch propagandaresulting in a barrage of anti-Spanish
pamphletswas crucial in creating the Black Legend of Spain (Hillgarth
30927). The sheer quantity of anti-Spanish material that issued from the
presses of Protestant Europe during this period is astonishing, and it was
amply supplemented by those who, while sympathetic to the Counter-
Reformation, resented Spains power and its tendency to interfere in the
affairs 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 observers
took a very different stance on the Hispanization of southern Italy than
had taken place during the previous centuries of Spanish rule. The seven-
teenth-century philosopher Tommaso Campanella, for example, regarded
the Spanish monarchy as the linchpin of an impending world monarchy
that he advocated for Europe (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism 3763; Eamon,
Natural Magic; Headley). Looking back on the Hispanization of southern
Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eighteenth-century
Neapolitan 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 trust
by a society of honor (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism 70). By destroying the
Neapolitans 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 from
a relatively benevolent world empire to a barbaric despotism embraced
a 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 teaching
Aristotelianism (which, in Dorias words, never explained anything),
had effectively denied the citizen access to the knowledge he needed to
fulll his role as a citizen (Pagden, Spanish Imperialism 79).
The image of Spain as a barbaric despotism also took hold in France.
Few authors have done more to create the Spanish stereotype than the
French philosophe Montesquieu (Iglesias). In his Esprit des lois, he helped to
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 19
set the fashion of depicting Spain as the land of fanaticism and ignorance.
Like Doria, Montesquieu attributed Spains stagnation to the exaggerated
Spanish tradition of honor that valued idleness over labor. Thus in the
eighteenth century, the perception of the Spanish state gradually shifted
from that of a benevolent universal Christian monarchy to an oriental and
barbarian 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 with
ancient paganism and its population as a whole was perceived as pagan and
primitive. John Armstrong, an English engineer who was stationed in the
island of Minorca in the 1730s and 40s, reported that there is no degree of
superstition into which these people have not been led (Hontanilla 9). In
the 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 Spanish
Inquisition reinforced these stereotypes. In 1756, John Marchant published
his polemic, Bloody Tribunal: Or, an Antidote Against Popery, a review of
the most dreadful and exquisite tortures inicted upon several unfor-
tunate souls who had unhappily fallen into the hands of those tyrants
(Hontanilla 12). To Montesquieu, the supposed grip of the Inquisition
demonstrated that Spain is incapable of any degree of light or instruc-
tion. He lamented, a nation must be very unhappy that gives authority
to such men (Spirit 2:56). It seems that the dreaded Spanish Inquisition
is 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 those
incidents, in which hundreds of thousands of witches were executed, the
Spanish Inquisition seems comparatively mild. Moreover, denunciations
of 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 Inquisition
was 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 degradation
of Catholicism excluded Spain from enlightened notions of Christianity,
while it conrmed the cultural distance of Protestant societies and estab-
lished their moral superiority (11). In fact, all sorts of thingsincluding
Catholicismwere blamed for Spains supposed degradation: sloth, cli-
mate, bad government, the stars (MacKay). According to the construction
of Spain that emerged in the eighteenth century, the Spanish people were
Willi am Eamon 20
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 eighteenth
and 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 Jorge
Caizares has observed, was the reection of a kind of master narrative
that was constructed to explain how, supposedly, the Spanish character
resulted in the rejection of the new sciences and technologies developed in
the rest of Europe during the Scientic Revolution, and the building of an
irresponsible empire had condemned Spain to a chronic state of depopu-
lation, vagrancy, and economic decline (Nature, Empire, and Nation 97).
Interestingly, these debates actually started in Spain. In the early seven-
teenth century, the country witnessed an explosion of arbitrista literature
containing proposals about how to solve various scal and socio-economic
problems and explaining how Spain had lost ground to other European
powers (Elliott 243261). To the arbitristas, something had gone seriously
wrong 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 address
it were not very enlightening. Some argued that the root cause of Spains
backwardness was sexual immorality and religious hypocrisy; others
blamed the idleness and insubordination of youth, luxuriant living, over-
indulgence in food and drink, and the effeminate fashion among men for
wearing their hair long. The cure: moral reform, of course. Others sought
more scientic explanations. Was Spains decline an irreversible part of
some cosmic cyclical process, they wondered? Or, applying the model of as-
trological determinism, was it somehow the result of the movement of the
planets? Medical metaphors were abundant: Spain was just sick. Diseases,
of course, can be diagnosed, but the cures proposed by the arbitristas were,
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 ignorance
and superstition. The epic history of science has included tragic heroes
who struggled against insuperable odds to get the truth out, and who were
martyred for their convictions. Bruno at the stake and Galileo before the
Inquisition have provided two of the most powerful images of the tragic in
science. The epic history of science also has its villains, supreme amongst
which were those scheming Aristotelians who hid behind priestly robes,
secretly plotting to bring Galileo to his knees. And it has included comic
characters, such as the Aristotelian professor who steadfastly refused to
look through Galileos telescope to behold the truth before his eyes.
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 21
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 Scientic
Revolution has long been viewed as the history of the exploits of heroic
cultural gures: those heroes like Galileo, Newton, and so on. As Juderas
observed a century ago, while other nations were acknowledged to have
their Shakespeares, Michelangelos, and Descartes, Spain was allowed few
heroic cultural gures: Montesquieu admitted Don Quijote as the only
worthy Spanish literary effort, and so on. When you construct a history of
culture that is founded upon heroism, cultures that are not allowed heroic
gures are left out (26).
With regard to the question of Spains role in the development of
early modern sciencethe problem, that is, of Spain and the Scientic
Revolutionit seems that it is time to take stock. Perhaps we have been
asking the wrong questions. Perhaps it is time to refocus and reassess the
questions that we are asking about early modern Iberian science and, in
particular, about Iberias role in the Scientic Revolution. Above all, we
need to pose the more fundamental question of whether or not an account
of the Scientic Revolution and the origins of modernity that omits Iberia
can have any meaning at all.
As a thought experiment, suppose we shift our perspective. Suppose we
imagine a history of the Scientic Revolution in which the Black Legend
and images of Spains barbarism are not part of the picture. What, for
example, would the Scientic Revolution look like if viewed, not from the
standpoint of the history of ideas and of individual scientic genius, but of
the rhythms of everyday life?
3

Framing the question of the Scientic 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 Scientic Revolution and, at the
same time, to set aside certain topics that seem essential to the currently
accepted narrative. For example, it does not seem that the Copernican
Revolution would be a very promising subject to explore when looking at
the Scientic Revolution from the perspective of everyday culture. Until
the trial of Galileo made Copernicanism the focus of a public spectacle,
debates over the new cosmology were conned to small circles of math-
ematicians and astronomers. Nor did the new cosmology seem to offer
any signicant advantages to those who brought the science of astronomy
down to earth in the form of astrological forecasts and nativities. As long
as people could buy their almanacs, what did they care whether it was
Ptolemys or Copernicuss mathematics that astrologers employed in mak-
ing them? Contrary to the claim often made in traditional narratives of
the Scientic Revolution, the decline of astrology in the late-seventeenth
century probably had little to do with the rise of the New Philosophy.
4
In
Willi am Eamon 22
England at least, the struggle against astrology was carried out primarily in
a religious context and was waged largely by ministers. As Michael Hunter
has pointed out, science was institutionally too weak to seriously challenge
astrology in the late-seventeenth century. Similarly, according to Ottavia
Niccoli, the decline of popular prognostication in sixteenth-century Italy
had nothing to do with the rise of the new cosmology, but was instead a
result of internal political and religious changes (18993).
On the other hand, front and center in our view of the Scientic
Revolution from the perspective of everyday culture would be the geo-
graphical expansion of Europe. To most people living in the sixteenth
century, the real scientic revolution was not the revelation of a new ar-
rangement of the heavens, but the discovery of new worlds on earth. Daily
life was changed by the geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century.
With the introduction of new foodstuffs, diets changed; new fashions, like
smoking tobacco, took off. Many of the modern worlds most important
food plants, like maize, potatoes, squashes, and tomatoes, originated in the
New World and were completely new to early modern Europeans. It is hard
to imagine Mediterranean cuisine without tomatoes and chiles, or almost
any 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 points
of 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 fragrant
gums 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 from
Tibet; cloves from the Moluccas; China root from China. One might even
encounter an occasional elephant being unloaded on the dock (Russell-
Wood 12347).
In addition, a phenomenal number of new drugs were introduced from
the New World, transforming the European pharmacopoeia.
5
In terms of
the 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 stocked
with dried specimens of exotic plants and animals from all over the world,
the early modern apothecary shops were like public museums, putting on
display strange objects from distant lands for a curious and admiring pub-
lic (Bleichmar). From the pharmacies, you could purchase everything from
guaiac wood to exotic dried sh to bezoars.
6
In 1683, the London apothecary
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 23
Thomas Johnson turned his shop into an exhibition site when he displayed
the rst bananas ever seen in England (Arnold 137). Many pharmacists
amassed 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 take
advantage of the growing market for curiosities by selling fake dragons and
hydras to gullible collectors (Findlen, Inventing Nature 310).
The question of fraud was central to everyday life in a culture and
economy that was becoming increasing commercialized. In this arena, the
geographical discoveries played a central role by ooding the marketplace
with strange and exotic commodities, often from places people had never
heard of before. The marketplace, increasingly populated by itinerant mer-
chants and healers who where here today and gone tomorrow, symbolized
concerns about the city as a moral and economic environment. The issue
of fraud and knowing whom to trust in the marketplace became critically
important (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. What
is 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 concerns
may 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 nd the secrets useful in daily life.
Many of the new drugs sold in the pharmacies were for new diseases, like
syphilis, 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 prots for merchants and
doctors, ruined lives, and sharpened medical debates. The sudden appear-
ance of a virulent illness that did not seem to t the Galenic framework of
disease raised profound challenges to traditional medicine (Arrizabalaga,
Henderson, French). The fact that syphilis was a new disease tested the
limits of classical and medieval knowledge, and provided a concrete dem-
onstration that the ancients could not have had all the answers. More than
any other event in early modern Europe, the syphilis epidemic challenged
the traditional paradigm about the nature and causation of disease.
Willi am Eamon 24
New diseases such as syphilis also opened up new opportunities for em-
pirics and other irregular healers, changing the landscape of the medical
marketplace. The challenge to traditional medicine was not conned to the
lecture halls, but was carried into the piazzas and marketplaces. Empirics
and charlatans made a laughing stock of the regular doctors and con-
trasted the complex and dubious cures of the physicians with their own
panaceas, supposedly proved by personal experience rather than the au-
thority of the book (Gentilcore).
These new realities were, of course, introduced into Europe by the
Iberian discovery of the New World. Thanks to the printing press, the New
World discoveries became widely known and part of public discourse. To
cite just one example among many books published about the discoveries,
Nicolas Monardess Natural History of the New World, was rst published
in 1567, played an instrumental role in disseminating knowledge in Europe
of the American plants.
7
The book, which was translated into English in
1577 with the captivating title, Joyfull Newes out of the New Founde Worlde,
was a phenomenal success: twenty-ve editions of the work were pub-
lished in the sixteenth century and another fourteen in the seventeenth
century. The intense interest in the geography and natural history of the
New World, which pulsated in the scientic community of early modern
Europe, contributed to the emergence of an entirely new conception of the
aims and methods of science: the idea of science as a hunt for secrets of
nature. The search for secrets in unknown regions of nature is a theme
that appears in Renaissance scientic literature with monotonous regular-
ity. The image of science as a hunt would take center stage in a history of
the Scientic 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 interesting
to natural philosophers of the period was equally important to merchants
and consumers. Of course, the new philosophy was not all about buying
and selling; yet, as Harold Cook suggests, the ways of life associated with
commerce that increasingly dominated Europe focused attention on the
objects of nature (41011). Merchants and scientists shared a number of
important 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 and
an attentive appreciation for collective generalizations based on exacting
information about the object with which they dealt (57). Understanding
the idea of scientic discovery will necessarily lead us to considering the
rhythms of everyday life in the marketplaces where goods were bartered
and exchanged.
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 25
Of course, everyday life was not completely cut off from intellectual
life. Humanists and natural philosophers were also consumers, and were
as 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 reception
of Ptolemy. Were we to judge from the attention given by historians of sci-
ence, Ptolemys inuence on the Renaissance was exercised chiey through
the Almagest. Yet that conclusion is largely an artifact of our prioritizing
of mathematics and cosmology as the drivers of the Scientic Revolution.
If we look at the priorities of the time, however, a very different picture
emerges. In the Renaissance, Ptolemy was seen more as a geographer than
as an astronomer, and the publication of his Geographia far outstripped
that of the Almagest (Bennett 201). This fact is rather sobering. It suggests
that somehow weve gotten the whole picture of the Scientic Revolution
wrong. Measured by its impact on everyday life, the discovery of the New
World far surpassed the design of a new cosmos.
Another consequence of the debates and discussions coming out of the
discovery 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 rst Europeans to
face questions of ethnology, uniformity and diversity of races, and so on.
As Anthony Pagden has pointed out, the result was a far-reaching change
in the understanding of human societies, a change from a description of
cultures in terms of a human nature thought to be constant over time and
space to a wider anthropological and historical relativism. (Pagden, Fall 1).
Historians of the Scientic Revolution usually regard Spainif they men-
tion Spain at allas marginal to the Scientic Revolution, at best a pas-
sive recipient of the scientic 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 Spains
apparent lack of interest in the subjects that dominate the canonical nar-
rative of the Scientic Revolution, such as astronomy and cosmology. Yet
we need to ask, which of the two concerns, in the long run, was the most
important: the nature of the heavens or the nature of humanity? A strong
argument could be made for the latter. Indeed, we might imagine a history
of the Scientic 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: The
Scientic 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 recent
book, Experiencing Nature. Barrera convincingly argues that, through their
Willi am Eamon 26
experience in the New World, Spaniards validated experience as a source of
knowledge 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 New
World. Moreover, the scientic and practices that emerged out of Spains
imperial experience became models that the rest of Europe followed. The
Scientic Revolution did not start with Copernicus and his heliocentric
ideas, Barrera asserts. It started in the 1520s, in Spain, when merchants,
artisans, and royal ofcials confronted new entities coming from the New
World and had to devise their own methods to collect information about
those lands (2). Whether or not Barreras radical realignment of the ori-
gins of the Scientic Revolution will stand up to scrutiny remains to be
seen; but I do think that Spains role in the Scientic Revolutionespe-
cially when seen from the perspective of everyday lifeis yet to be fully
understood and needs to be rethought.
I am not suggesting that we abandon the idea of the Scientic
Revolutionat least not yet. As historians of science, we have an obliga-
tion to address the big questions about origins, identity, and meaning: that
is, about the origins of science and the role of science in the identity of the
West 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 scientic 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 obscures
so much continuity in the midst of change and produces such improbable
interpretations 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 no
longer afford to repeat stories that do not make sense of the early mod-
ern world as early modern Europeans understood that world. That means,
among other things, thatif we are going to retain the idea of the Scientic
Revolutionwe can no longer afford to leave Iberia, which loomed so
large in the collective consciousness of early modern Europeans, out of
the picture. Tired questions of national characterquestions like Was
the Spanish temperament compatible with modernity?which have long
been banished from the historiography of other nations, still seem to hold
sway among historians of science. Re-attaching Spain to Europe will go
far toward creating a more balanced interpretation of the rise of science
and the origins of modernity. On the other hand, treating Spain as a world
apart, as if its history had occurred in a vacuum, does little service either to
the history of Spain or the history of the Scientic Revolution.
Masson posed his questionWhat does Europe owe Spain?just as
northern 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
Nuestros males no son constitucionales 27
Europeans, got it right. Once again, I nd interesting parallels between
Massons 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. During
the rst half of the century, the image of the virtuous Chinese reined su-
preme. Thus Leibniz, who carried out an extensive correspondence with
Jesuit missionaries in China, had an extremely positive view of Chinese
culture. He even wrote a defense of Chinese religion in order to show its
agreement with Christian natural religion (Perkins). Yet in the last decades
of the century, the northern European perspective on East Asia changed
profoundly, so much so that in 1774, the French ethnographer Cornelius
De Pauw described China as a land of ignorant, intolerant monks and
of courtiers utterly dependent on Europe for its scientic expertise.
8
The
reversal 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 Scientic Revolution that avoids the
othering of Spain.
Endnotes
1 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 specifically, although the two overlap Everyday ways of knowing and
strategies for dealing with world were often shared by high and low cultures alike. For two
different 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
Write 34.
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