Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

Nine: Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Early Scientific Thought in Sixteenth-Century China

234 David Freedberg’s study of the early seventeenth-century Academy of Linceans and the circle of Federico Cesi, a social network of scholars who wrote to each other and exchanged visits to share the results of their studies, raises a number of points which are of interest to historians concerned with the intellectual life of early modern China as well.1 Cesi and his circle were profoundly engaged in the investigation of natural phenomena at a critical moment in the development of European scientific thinking. Their use of careful empirical observation, their critical attitude toward the received opinions of antiquity, and their desire to test their ideas in practical activity all marked them as travelers on the path toward what we have come to regard as modernity. But as Freedberg notes, the Linceans and other early modern thinkers did not represent a complete rupture with established intellectual traditions and practices, nor were they in pursuit of a kind of knowledge which was rigorously delineated or segregated from larger fields of inquiry and reflection. Freedberg asks, “How are we to reconcile their study of antiquity and their engagement in more purely literary activity with their empirical researches into physics and natural history?”2 He follows this question with his own suggested response, In order to answer such questions we must take every aspect of their work as seriously as they did. We shall have to free ourselves from modern presuppositions about the nature of science and of scientific activity, and to remain attentive to different and shifting paradigms. Nine Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Early Scientific Thought in Sixteenth-Century China Kenneth J. Hammond Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen 235 We cannot dismiss as mere antiquarianism their interest in archaeology or in ancient texts, and we must respect the ideological pressures on the ways in which they published—or suppressed—their discoveries . Above all we must acknowledge that science for them covered a much larger field than it does now. It ranged from what we call the humanities to fundamental physical phenomena and to mathematics . It included the occult sciences too, and it should not surprise us to find in them, as in Kepler, a faith in astrology that often seems as strong as the commitment to the new astronomy.3 The emergence of early modern scientific thought in Europe, then, was to a significant extent a matter of the sharing of ideas among individuals who were often involved in disparate intellectual activities, covering a wide range of fields, but who shared a common interest in seeking to understand the world around them not only on the basis of the wisdom of the past, but on a fruitful dialectic between past and present, between the ways of thinking and seeing which had been passed down via literary texts and the evidence of their eyes which presented itself to them in their own daily studies. China in the later years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was not a dissimilar intellectual environment. Indeed, recent studies of Ming China have built up a portrait of a society which in many ways bore certain structural resemblances to early modern Europe. The work of cultural historians such as Craig Clunas or Timothy Brook has shown how the rapidly developing commercial economy of the sixteenth century, particularly in the Jiangnan region of southeastern China, gave rise to intellectual and cultural developments which were shaped by the context of a market economy.4 William Theodore deBary’s work on humanist thought in the Ming has suggested the emergence of a Chinese individualism in a time of growing economic agency for producers and consumers .5 Other phenomena of the Ming intellectual world have not been as fully investigated, but the emergence of portraiture and self-portraits, along with the writing of autobiography and rise of topical theater in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are all suggestive of some common cultural responses in Europe and China to the stimuli of a developing capitalist economy.6 It is in this setting of a cultural world in a state of dynamic transformation that one can consider the relationship of two of the most prominent figures in Ming intellectual history, Li Shizhen (1518–93) and Wang Shizhen (1526–90). Li Shizhen is known most widely for his 236 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China compilation of the great pharmacopeia Bencao gangmu, which has long been...