The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700 ed. by Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal (review)

THE QUESTS FOR CERTAINTY DOCUMENTED in this wonderful collection of essays largely fail, though this is no cause for lament. It is true that certitude about this or that significant matter—the trustworthiness of an interlocutor's claims or the plague-free status of an indispensable trading partner, to mention just two examples culled from these essays—might have offered some measure of respite from the uncertainties that characterized life in the early modern period and continue to challenge us today. Should certitude exist, the self-serving deceptions enabled by incertitude do not simply vanish, however. They migrate to the less secure realms nearby. Or they occupy those new regions of doubt that incipient consensus in one area of knowledge seems always to produce in another. Those are the sorts of places from which the skeptics and cynics of the past wielded uncertainty to advance their careers, defend local interests, track students, craft history, and shape theological doctrine. In The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700, editors Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal and their collaborators do not aim to shine the harsh light of certainty into these shadowy locales. They rather interpret the gradations and fictions of certainty that lurk there.

In her introduction, García-Arenal explains that the inhabitants of sixteenth-century Iberia experienced a series of overlapping epistemological crises of confidence that rendered acute the longing for certainty. Knowledge about the plants, animals, and especially the peoples of the Americas forced a recalibration of the natural and political histories inherited from the ancient world. The discord and violence occasioned by the rupture of Christianity into Protestant and Catholic factions destabilized the authority of religious institutions to establish the limits of orthodoxy and, in turn, to shape the conditions for truth in a range of disciplines. The late medieval and early modern Iberian history of the mass forced conversion of Jews and Muslims, eventually accompanied by the so-called blood purity statutes and the activities of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, among other tools for the enforcement of confessional homogeneity, blurred the previously more conspicuous boundaries among religious communities. The forced conversions and inquisitorial policing together produced new forms of heterodoxy, dissimulation, and skepticism. Longstanding techniques for crafting one's religious faith and commitments grew insufficient. Similarly, the faith and commitments of one's neighbors became all but inscrutable. From this perspective, uncertainty was omnipresent, and alarming.

Yet acceptance of Pliny's incompleteness and Ptolemy's errors or acknowledgment of the illegibility of another's private life and thoughts produced in early modern Iberia a renewed focus on those aspects of the social and natural world that were observable, and thus susceptible to cultivation or direction. Think broadly of domains of applied knowledge: botany, engineering, medicine, and cosmography, to be sure, but also the operations of institutional bureaucracy or the physical routines of piety. Some of those who subscribed to this empiricist response to equivocality and ambiguity sought to redesign their interior existence, as the emergence of the Jesuit spiritual exercises and casuistic directors of consciousness underscore. Accompanying these methods of religious self-fashioning, first-person claims to witness in experimental science or travel and picaresque narratives also suggest genre-specific expressions of a carefully elaborated subject. In García-Arenal's persuasive account, to overlook this mutual definition of Iberian skepticism and empiricism is to misunderstand early modern Europe, if not also modernity writ large. From this second perspective, uncertainty enabled scholarly innovation and religious renewal. It was—in a word—useful.

The essays comprising this collection all trouble any simple dichotomy between certainty and uncertainty in the early modern period. Out of the middle ground between these two poles grew a new "culture of proof," as A. Katie Stirling-Harris puts it in her fascinating and...