Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernandez, and: The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernandez (review)

In 1570 Philip II sent Dr. Francisco Hernández (1515–1587), his court physician, to Mexico and Peru to "gather information generally about herbs, trees, and medicinal plants" (Treasury, p. 46). By March 1571, Hernández was already working in Mexico, and by May he had hired a geographer and painters to help him. In 1576, Hernández sent Philip II sixteen books. When he finally returned to Spain in 1577, he brought with him twenty-two more (Searching, p. 7). His natural history alone comprised sixteen books, 893 pages, and 2,071 pages of paintings of plants (Searching, p. 123). Hernández identified more than 3,000 new plants for Europeans (Searching, p. 3). Perhaps more surprisingly, he used terms from the native language of the Aztecs as "a principle of nomenclature for his work" (Searching, p. 124; see also Treasury, p. 78). Though his health prevented him from ever reaching Peru, Hernández made his expedition into a significant event for the development of natural history, and he knew it. His expedition problematizes the traditional view about the "obscurantism and intolerance" of Spain, and in particular of Philip II, in the sixteenth century (Searching, p. 11).

Hernández's expedition belonged to a larger program for searching the secrets of nature in sixteenth-century Spain. This program began, informally, in the 1530s and was institutionalized by the 1570s. In the early 1530s, the humanist and royal official Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557) proposed that the Council of Indies organize an expedition to gather information for a natural history of the New World. It did not happen; yet Oviedo was appointed Chronicler of the Indies with the mission of writing a natural history based on his own experiences and on the reports of others. In parallel with Oviedo, the royal pilot at the Casa de la Contratación was responsible for collecting information about navigational routes and geographical information concerning the New World. Through the years, both the Council of Indies and the Casa de la Contratación requested more, increasingly specific, information about the New World. The activities to gather this information culminated in a series of events, including Hernández's expedition of 1571–1577; the Council of Indies's statutes of 1571, to create the post of cosmographer-chronicler of the Indies; the fifty-five item questionnaire of 1577 sent throughout the New World; the foundation in 1582 of the Academy of Mathematics; and the expedition of the cosmographer Jaime Juan, in 1583. By the standards of the sixteenth century, the Spaniards were in the forefront of developments in natural history. These developments need to be studied together with sixteenth-century endeavors in medicine (Vesalius and Paracelsus) and astronomy (Copernicus and Brahe). If we use the criteria of the seventeenth century to judge the accomplishments of the sixteenth century, we will find not only Spain but all of Europe to be backward.

The two books under review help to put sixteenth-century Spain in perspective, while discussing the work of Dr. Hernández. Searching for the Secrets of Nature is divided into two parts. The first part discusses Hernández's life, education, and activities, and the intellectual, social, and cultural environment in which he worked. The second part discusses the dissemination of Hernández's work in Spain and Europe. Taken together, they provide us with an excellent overview of Philips II's Spain, Renaissance Spain...