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Spain  Knowledge  Fernando Bouza Translated by Kenneth Mills I n 1545 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo concluded two things about the peoples he called “Indians.” First, they showed the capacity to react against abuse, for they knew how to complain about how they were treated and about Spaniards’ demands on them. And second, they could understand anything at all as well as the peopleof “anyother nation.” In the opinion of the Duke of Alba, then, the Indian “nation” was able to complain and to understand.1 For contemporary thinkers in the wake of the Renaissance , both capacities were taken as evident proof of humanity. From the first came the ability to transform a feeling of loss or affront into individual or communal action, and from the second derived the ability to learn, another defining capacity of humans—the only beings who studied, apprehended, and naturally wished to know more.2 But what was it that humans would learn? The Baroque in the Spanish world saw ample debate in response to this apparently simple question and to a series of related queries: Who decides what is to be learned? What are the ways of doing it, and which is the best of these? When and what does one forget? How is knowledge corrected when it has been found inadequate, and how is correct knowledge spread? These issues were taken up within the great Italian “knowledge laboratory” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just as they framed the confessional nature of thought across the wider realms of Tridentine and post-­ Tridentine Catholic Christendom. To a certain extent, the individual character of knowledge was reaffirmed, along with its reception and creation, granting humans unequivocal control over the production and circulation of what was written, seen, and heard. The principal responsibility for establishing and maintaining this control fell to the Spanish monarchy itself, through, for example, the (a priori) censorship of texts and (a posteriori) inquisitorial control. The globalizing dimensions of the monarchy, as well as the particularities of its centralized structure, endowed the Hispanic experience of knowledge between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment with a relatively singular character within European Catholic Christendom. This distinctiveness makes it possible also todiscern a politics of knowledge during the Hispanic Baroque that, as it adapted to the communicative realities of a metropolis and an empire , confronted the changing reality of its media, not least the increasing impacts of the printing press and engraving as mechanical forms of reproducing texts and images. Even so, in all cases, the first thing to establish was what it meant to learn. In his De las diferencias de libros que hay en el universo (1540), Alejo Vanegas presented in detail what we may consider a representative theory of knowledge worked out within Hispanic culture between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.3 Playing with metaphors of legibility,4 he proposed that the universe contained various kinds of books. Only one of these—that of God himself—was original, while the other three were its copies: the books of nature, reason, and revelation. Whereas the original in itself is not accessible to human intellect, its copies offer themselves up as propitious readings which allow humans to surmount their state of ignorance. Through them, they can draw nearer to their principal motivation and highest objective: the knowledge of God. All of the human faculties are summoned to this exercise: memory preserves recollections ; judgment allows for understanding; will fires the appetite to know; ingenuity enlivens research; free will allows one to choose; and reason distinguishes what it is right to know from what it is not. Posed thus, human knowledge is an action in and of itself; knowledge happens, and not as a simple means or instrument. Moreover, aspects of this knowledge participate quite unpredictably. Sometimes, for instance, free will fails to choose what it knows, or one yearns to know evil, or one’s wits wander in curiosity—in short, human reason is not always wise in its judgments. Thus learning is not something to leave completely in the hands of individuals. Learning is more difficult than working miracles. Esteban de Aguilar y Zúñiga’s categorical affirmation establishes that anyone can be transformed into a worker of miracles if God wishes but that not everyone possesses the necessary humility to learn what matters. It would be better to give oneself up to a state of natural ignorance— aspiring to learn nothing—than to set out on the path of knowledge out of mere curiosity or...

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