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Spain  Science  Thomas F. Glick The notion of “baroque”science in Spain inevitably raises the issue of Spanish “decadence” and the social and economic factors that conditioned it. Robert K. Merton supposed that population growth in early modern England spurred economic expansion , which in turn set up a demand for technology. Inventiveness , moreover, is predicated to some extent on access to pure science.1 The opposite occurred in Spain: sharp population decline and economic retrenchment in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, which resulted in the flat technology and scientific decadence of the early seventeenth. Some of these trends were exaggerated by government policy: Phillip II was on balance favorable to technological innovation; Phillip III had no interest in either science or technology. Thus while Philip II had encouraged pharmacological distillation experiments in a Crown-­ financed laboratory, Philip III took no interest, for example, in Jerónimo de Ayanz’s surprisingly precocious patent of 1606 for a Savery-­ style steam engine, designed to drain mines— surely the first European steam engine design, which in itself illustrates the technological insensitivity of the ambient society.2 In general seventeenth-­ century writers favorable to modern science typically hedged their support by casting new ideas as simple touch-­ ups to scholastic views. Three touchstones of the fate of modern science in baroque Spain are heliocentrism, telescopy, and the circulation of the blood. Although heliocentrism was condemned, the statutes of the University of Salamanca as late as 1625 still permitted useof Nikolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus for guidance in purely technical matters and reference to its parameters and tables.3 The chair-­ holder in the Academy of Mathematics from 1611 to 1625, Juan Cedillo Díaz, charged with making important scientific texts available to students in Castilian, produced a partial translation of De revolutionibus titled “Astronomical Idea of the Structure of the World and Movement of Celestial Bodies” (Idea astronómica de la fábrica del mundo y movimientos de los cuerpos celestiales), but he omitted both his own name and that of Copernicus from the title page. Moreover, as Víctor Navarro has observed , Cedillo changed the text in a few places: while he places the sun at the center of the cosmos, he states that the planets move through the cosmic “air” like fish through water. He also states that retrograde motion is eliminated by doing away with epicycles, even though there is no retrograde motion in Copernicus’s system. The first references in Spanish scientific literature on the telescope and Galileo Galilei’s observations of the moon are found in Uso de los antojos (Use of Eyeglasses, Seville, 1623) by Benito Daza Valdés, a pioneering treatise on correction of vision with lenses. Without mentioning Galileo by name, two characters in a dialogue discuss the instrument: Albert: The other night I observed the moon with a telescope that was three palms in length, and though it was not one of the best instruments, I could still make out the valleys that you mention. . . . Doctor: In myopinion what seem to be theeyes and mouth of the moon are its heights and depths. . . . Generally [we see the moon] as very rough and sponge-­like and pock-­ marked, with some points of greater light in the loftiest places, for which reasons a good painter will know better than I did if those are really heights and depths.4 The quality of the moon’s surface was a problem for artists . The convention had been to paint the moon as white and translucent because it was associated with the Virgin Mary and hence had to present a “pure” and pristine presence . Seemingly Daza’s mention of a “good painter” references paintings that he had actually seen, a likely prospect beingVelázquez’s Inmaculada of 1619, which shows theVirgin standing on a moon whose dark side depicts peaks and craters (assuming that Daza accepted Galileo’s evidence). The moderate Galenist Gaspar Bravo de Sobremonte in a 1662 treatise De sanguinis circulatione reveals both his familiarity with and support of William Harvey’s doctrine, but only as “a mere rectification of details within the immutable Galenic system.”5 Toward the century’s end Juan de Cabriada was more forthright: “Now that the circulation of the blood in the human body is known, thedoctrine of the pulses becomes patently clear, freed of the obscure veils with which it was taught in Ancient Times by means of the pulsating faculty, which was unintelligible.”6 Renewal in the medical sciences...

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