Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (review)

A quiet revolution has been taking place in recent years in the historiography of early modern science. In a field long dominated by a historiography centered on astronomy and cosmology and by a narrative of modernity that privileges the North Atlantic cultures, a growing number of historians have been attempting to shift the terms of the debate from a grand narrative about the triumph of modern cosmology to one in which global commerce and fields such as natural history take a prominent place. One of the most encouraging aspects of this revolution is the attention, after many decades of neglect, to the history of science in the Spanish Empire.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has been one of the leading figures in this quiet revolution. Cañizares's project, which he first formulated in his acclaimed book, How to Write the History of the New World (2001), has been to rescue an "other" cultural tradition, that of Iberia and Latin America, from a North Atlantic narrative of modernity that has marginalized the Spanish Empire, effectively relegating it to a backward, third-world status. This volume brings together six previously published essays, along with one new piece, on the themes introduced in his first book. Readers of Cañizares's earlier book will find much that is familiar in this one; but for those who do not know his work, these essays will provide a convenient introduction to his highly original approach.

Although the essays range broadly, from the historiography of science to the history of landscape painting in colonial America, Cañizares's identification of two "styles of science" that governed the organization and pursuit of knowledge in the Spanish Empire provides a unifying theme that links them together. One style was imperial, in the form of what Cañizares calls "chivalric epistemology," which depicted the cosmographer as a knight — and lest one think that chivalric science is a peculiarly Hispanic or Iberian style, Canizares lays that notion to rest in his most recent book, Puritan Conquistadors (2007) — the other was a style that Cañizares calls "patriotic science," which sought to defend the Spanish colonial territories and newly emerging nations from European accusations of backwardness.

The question of Iberia's absence from the traditional narrative of the history of early modern science is the subject of one of the volume's most important essays, "The Colonial Iberian Roots of the Scientific Revolution." The marginalization of Iberia is ironic, Cañizares observes, in light of Iberia's importance to contemporaries such as Francis Bacon. Cañizares thinks that Iberia's marginalization from the history of scientific modernity occurred for two reasons. The first is that the kinds of sciences that were sponsored by the Spanish-Portuguese state — cartography, natural history, and cosmography — were considered peripheral to the "real" Scientific Revolution advanced by those who constructed the traditional narrative. The second reason is that the narrative of modernity to which the Scientific Revolution is central was first constructed under the influence of Protestantism and, later, the Enlightenment, both profoundly hostile to Catholic Iberia. In other words, "the well-established narratives of the Black Legend of Spanish backwardness . . . are still with us, blinding historians every day" (45). This is an essay that every historian of early modern science ought to read.

Having been stigmatized by the Black Legend, Spaniards created a sort of Black Legend of their own. In order to assert their Europeanness, Spanish intellectuals contrasted themselves to the primitive colonials and branded Creole culture as superstitious and backward, thus accounting for the emergence of the patriotic style of science that Cañizares sees as characteristic of Creole culture. Cañizares illustrates this phenomenon in a variety of contexts, from astrology in colonial Spain to Creole investigations of biodistribution, which, Cañizares speculates, "could not have...