Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century Orinoco (review)

In Peripheral Wonders, Margaret Ewalt provides an in-depth study of El Orinoco ilustrado: Historia natural, civil y geográfica de esta gran río y de sus caudalosas vertientes (1741-45), written by the Jesuit father Joseph Gumilla (d. 1750). As Ewalt explains, El Orinoco ilustrado has long been neglected unjustly by historians of science, even though it was quite popular and influential in its own day, being widely read, used, and quoted by (now better-known) eighteenth-century men of science such as Charles Marie de Condamine and Alexander von Humboldt. The relative neglect in modern times is due largely to the anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jesuit bias that has long blinded influential modern Anglo-American historians of science to the important contributions that Spain and Spanish America made to the emergence of Enlightenment science. This neglect has only recently begun to be corrected in the English-speaking world by such historians of science as Jorge Cañizares Esguerra - although Spanish historians of science, such as José María López Piñero, have, of course, known better for a long time. Peripheral Wonders compliments this recent effort to reclaim the Spanish Jesuits' contribution to scientific modernity, especially during the period before their general expulsion from the Spanish empire in the 1760s (a period particularly understudied because it predated the movement towards nationalism that exiled Jesuit patriots supposedly helped to foster). The most important element that characterizes scientific works of Spanish Jesuits from Acosta to Gumilla, Ewalt argues, is that they do not separate the theological and the scientific, but rather, by employing an eclectic epistemology that she calls 'evangelical economics' (23), synthesize commercial, scientific and religious interests.

Chapter One provides a detailed rhetorical analysis of Orinoco in terms of its appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos. The chapter focuses particularly on how Gumilla employs the trope of the curiosity cabinet by showing that the very 'arrangement of Orinoco ilustrado reinforces Gumilla's textual cabinet of history as a rhetorical construct' (41). Chapter Two investigates the connections between economics and evangelism in Orinoco by providing a close analysis of a fold-out 'treasure map' that was included in Orinoco and which can be read, Ewalt suggests, as a metonymy for the book's rhetorical design at large in fashioning a 'plea tying commerce to colonization and evangelism' (79). Chapter Three places Gumilla's scientific epistemology in the context of the Jesuits' 'pious eclecticism' that attempted to synthesize Christian heuristic traditions with the 'new philosophies' emerging during the seventeenth century (100). Like other eighteenth-century Spanish intellectuals, Ewalt shows, Gumilla resists following a single philosophical system and instead eclectically employs ideas as diverse as those of Bacon, Gassendi, Descartes and Newton, many of them (but especially Bacon's notion of the 'hunt' for the secrets of nature) mediated in Spain by the enormously important Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. Chapter Four provides a discussion of Gumilla's reports on his own field experiments and of his scientific explanations. While he demonizes some aspects of Amerindian medical knowledge, particularly with regard to the Amazonian poison curare, he corrects, Christianizes and even validates others in his investigations of war drum acoustics, beliefs about the boa constrictor's alleged magnetic breath, as well as crocodile stones and fangs. The book's conclusion, finally, discusses the legacy of Gumilla's work by tracing its influences on and uses by such novelists as Alejo Carpentier (in Los pasos perdidos [1953]), José Eustasio Rivera (in La vorágine [1924], and Jorge Isaac (in María [1867])), as well as by such men of science as Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Marie de la Condamine, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa.

While some, especially literary historians, will appreciate Ewalt's close rhetorical and literary analyses of Gumilla's important work of eighteenth-century science, others may also wish for more intellectual and theological context on how Jesuits such as Gumilla (as...