A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (review)

In their erudite account of how Europeans came to know the animals of Iberian America, Miguel de Asúa and the late Roger French have masterfully synthesized early modern printed sources, scholarly overviews, and the monographic literature on their subject. The authors carefully avoid the anachronistic term zoology. Instead, they organize their account according to their subjects' background, resources, and goals in depicting and discussing the new animals of Iberian America. The first chapter addresses the initial encounters, when Columbus, Vespucci, and others attempted to describe the novelty, abundance, and splendor of American animal life. The second chapter discusses how soldiers described American animals with varying degrees of accuracy in works whose focus was not natural history, and how some Amerindian cultural lore was preserved and transmitted in the works of Bernardino de Sahagún and Garsilaso "the Inca" de Vega. Chapter 3 is devoted to writers in the Americas who devoted themselves more systematically to describing its nature: above all, Francisco Fernández de Oviedo, who modeled his work after Pliny, and the Jesuit José de Acosta, who adopted an Aristotelian approach in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Chapter 4 addresses writers in the service of imperial expansion, like Francisco Hernández and Georg Markgraf, who emphasized the practical and commercial value of animals. Chapter 5 focuses on religious writers who produced works that addressed animals, from the Huguenot Jean de Léry to the Jesuits Juan Eusebio Nieremberg and Athanasius Kircher. The sixth and final chapter addresses the impact of Iberian American animals on natural history in Europe, over the long century from the Renaissance tomes of Girolamo Cardano and Conrad Gessner to the Royal Society of London and the French Académie des Sciences.

The earliest writers on American animals were explorers and conquistadors with little training in natural history. Faced with the need to use familiar words to describe the strange, they created "jigsaw puzzle" descriptions —of the opossum, for instance, whose forequarters resemble a fox and the hindquarters an ape. Taken too literally by European readers who had never seen the original, such descriptions could result in "textual animals" that never walked the earth (13–14). These philological phantoms continued to haunt European natural history books even after more accurate reports and specimens arrived to succeed them —so did similar textual animals from classical sources.

Textual animals are related to the larger problems of observation, experience, and authority. Both Oviedo and Acosta emphasized that they were eyewitnesses of the truths they related in their works and could vouch for their accuracy. Hernández, too, emphasized his own experience, which he supplemented with extensive information from indigenous sources. But De Asúa and French show that early modern writers thought of autopsia (personal observation) in a nuanced way. Carolus Clusius, in the Dutch Republic, described exotic animals on the basis of reports and specimens brought to him: though recognizing the limits of this approach, he still thought it added something to natural history. And the Jesuit Gaspar Schott suggested in 1662 a distinction "between autopsia on the part of the author as a warrant for truth and autopsia on the part of the reader as a mind-narrowing demand for veracity" (179).

Schott offered this distinction in defense of improbable but edifying wonders. As de Asúa and French show, he failed. They agree with Michel Foucault and William B. Ashworth, Jr., that natural history underwent a radical transformation in the middle of the seventeenth century. The emblematic and philological approach of Renaissance compilers was succeeded by a new focus on careful observation and dissection, seen in the works of John Ray and Francis Willughby, Edward Tyson, and the Académie des Sciences. This is the least satisfying argument in the book. It is undeniable that some such shift did occur...