GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE, 1450-1700
Abstracts of Papers
Plenary session: Oceans, Empires and Knowledg e
Prof. Nicolás Wey-Gómez (California Institute of Technology)
Passage to India: Europe’s quest for the tropics in the age of exploration
Prof. Ricardo Padrón (University of Virginia)
The Pacific Ocean: The missing link in Hispanic globalization
Dr Michiel van Groesen (University of Amsterdam)
An ocean of rumours: the Atlantic world and the quest for reliable information in early modern
Europe
Session overview
National and linguistic boundaries have traditionally formed boundaries of scholarly expertise. This
session showcases innovative approaches to working across these divides. The papers signal ways
of understanding knowledge c. 1450-1700 in terms of its global connections. They take the ocean as
a point of departure for exploring the impact on European knowledge of information circulation,
imperial desires and cosmographical theories. Wey-Gómez examines Europe’s attempts to find a
passage to India in Atlantic Africa, the Americas and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Usually seen
as overlapping but discrete activities, he construes them as an integrated process that entailed
Europe’s gradual, and problematic, reawakening to the natural and human resources of an
unexpectedly huge, vastly productive and inhabited expanse within the so-called torrid zone.
Padrón’s paper explores the role of local perspective and political power in the construction and
circulation of knowledge of the Pacific Rim. He sees the Pacific as something that is only brought
into focus when particular interests require it. Van Groesen’s paper examines problems of evidence
and testimony in the circulation of colonial news, rumours and (mis)information across different
regions of the Atlantic world. Focussing on Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa, it excavates the
paths of information from these regions to the Low Countries – either directly, or indirectly via
Madrid, Lisbon and England – and the consequences for the nature of knowledge of the chains of
transmission.
Paper abstracts for parallel sessions (alphabetically by present er)
Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City)
From rustics to savants: the uses of indigenous materia medica in colonial New
Spain
This talk explores the ways indigenous knowledge about plant and animal remedies was gathered,
classified, ‘translated’, tested, and circulated across wide networks of exchange for natural
knowledge between Europe and the Americas. There has been much recent interest in the
“bioprospecting” of local natural resources – medical and otherwise – by Europeans in the early
modern world. However, some opacity continues to surround the description of how knowledge
traveled. While the strategies employed by European travelers, missionaries, or naturalists have
been well-documented, there has been less written on the role played by indigenous and creole
intermediaries in this process. And yet, the transmission of knowledge between indigenous
communities and the European cabinet was neither transparent nor natural, and often involved
epistemological, linguistic, and religious obstacles. Drawing on a number of printed and manuscript
sources, collections of indigenous remedies, written in places as diverse as Guatemala, the Yucatán,
Chiapas, and Mexico City, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, I am interested in
exploring how local intermediaries, like creole scholars, sought to overcome such obstacles by
observing indigenous uses of remedies, by studying indigenous languages and by producing natural
histories and pharmacopeias in indigenous languages (Nahuatl and Maya Quiché, for instance).
Ultimately, behind the creole participation in the transmission of indigenous remedies, one can
point to more inclusive definitions of knowledge, which cut across oppositions between science and
superstition, cabinet and field, center and periphery.
Ralph Bauer (University of Maryland)
Prophecy, Discovery, and the Secrets of the Indies
Recent scholarship has focused on how the “New World” was not so much found as it was made, or
invented, during the early modern period in correspondence to shifts in socio- and geo-political
organization – be it with regard to changing geographical conceptions of the world or to the
epistemological ground rules according to which the world may be known. Indeed, historians and
literary critics have investigated how the modern notion of “discovery” was itself made, or
invented, during the early modern period, in the process of which the very meaning of the word “to
discover” underwent, in all Western European languages, a semantic shift – from a sense of
‘unveiling’ something (already known) to the sense of finding (something new). This talk
investigates the role that prophecy played as a literary form and narrative strategy in this semantic
shift in some of the key texts of the early modern European encounter with the New World – texts
such as Columbus’s travel journals and Book of Prophecies, Pietro Martire’s Décadas, and Richard
Eden’s translation of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia and Ferdinando Gorges’s America Painted
to Life. I read their prophecies in the context of the Renaissance cosmographical debates about
what’s been called the ‘uncertain impact’ of the European encounter with the Americas upon the
history of Western knowledge and suggest that prophecy frequently functions rhetorically in these
accounts to sidestep and ultimately resolve the apparent tensions between the weighty textual
traditions constituting Renaissance cosmography and the increasing importance placed on empirical
information. In the interstices between the known and new, the “Indies” were presented in these
accounts essentially as an occult fact, whose ‘secrets’ had been providentially guarded by an arcane
tradition of prophets now ‘discovered’ by the Renaissance magus. Thus, in the sixteenth-century
debates between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns,” prophecy provided an important rhetorical
vehicle for the emergence of a progressivist understanding of the history of human knowledge.
Alexan der Bick (Princeton University)
‘We Dare Not Stick Our Noses Outside the Fort’:
Commercial Intelligence, State Policy, and the 1645 Revolt in Dutch Brazil
In late August 1645 a batch of secret letters from Recife informed the directors of the Dutch West
India Company that a revolt had broken out among Portuguese planters in their prized colony in
northeastern Brazil. This news, together with the Company's ongoing financial troubles, fascinated
the Dutch elite and inaugurated a series of negotiations over whether, and how, to save the
embattled company and its colony. This paper examines the news from Brazil and its immediate
ramifications for the formulation of colonial policy within the Dutch Republic. It explores the
diversity of sources of information about Brazil that were available to decision makers in the
Netherlands; the circuits — manuscript, printed, and oral — along which information travelled; and
the ways in which information was manipulated by company officials to influence policy within the
States of Holland, the States of Zeeland, and the States General. Particular attention is paid to the
Leiden scholar Johannes de Laet, and to the relationship between his more familiar work as an
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historian and geographer and his less well-known role as an advocate and strategist for the West
India Company.
The paper draws on company correspondence, witness testimonials, meeting minutes,
petitions, pamphlets, and other documents to provide a detailed portrait of the inner workings of a
17th century mercantile company and the ways it used information to forge political concensus
around its imperial ambitions.
Josiah Blackmore (University of Toronto)
Materia Africana: Vehi cles of knowledge exchange bet ween Portugal and Africa
This paper presents a synthesis of the textual manners and means of importing knowledge about
Africa into Portugal during the late medieval and early modern periods. In those years, especially
prior to the seventeenth century, a variety of historical circumstances generated an almost endless
proliferation of documents whose objectives were the transmission of numerous sorts of
information to the Portuguese metropole. The paper will survey the several forms and types of
knowledge transmission based in documents – letters, reports, and longer accounts that respond to
various circumstances – and will also analyze the kinds of knowledge present in these documents
during the initial centuries of empire. Political, religious, cartographic, geographic, and ‘cultural’
information all constitute a vast knowledge-gathering enterprise. The paper includes documents
written both by Europeans and by Africans writing in Portuguese. Some documents pertain to
religious matters such as conversion, while others detail a wide range of practical exigencies,
including political ones, faced by those who were, to some degree, in official communication with
the Portuguese court and the administrators of empire. Other documents relate to trade, travel, and
the information to be obtained from native inhabitants or by Europeans living in African territories.
Pablo Ariel Blitstein (Institut National de Langues et Civilisations [INALCO], Paris)
See under Ana Carolina Hosne
Hugh Glenn Cagle (Rutgers University)
A Science out of Place: Text, Context, and the Translation of Garcia de Ort a’s
Colóquios
Perhaps no figure from Portugal’s empire is better known than the physician Garcia de Orta. His
Colóquios dos simples e drogas . . . da Índia was printed in Goa in 1563 and then famously
translated into Latin by Dutch naturalist Carolus Clusius in time for the Frankfurt book fair of 1567.
Less well known are the changes that Clusius made in the act of translation. He did not simply
convert Orta’s Portuguese into Latin; he edited the content, added woodcut illustrations (there were
none in the original), changed the order of chapters, created new divisions within the text, and
eliminated the original dialogue form in favor of a purely expository one. Through circulation,
Orta’s work was transformed. Clusius and Orta were engaged in projects that were similar but not
the same. Both men sought to accumulate and organize information about the natural world beyond
Europe. But each of them came to rather different conclusions about what kind of text that effort
demanded, about what sorts of details were necessary to make sense of their collections, and how
best to render their work legible to their respective audiences.
We know a great deal about Clusius and the influences that shaped his editorial vision. In
this paper, I attempt to reconstruct the making of the Colóquios. My primary concern is for Orta’s
own authorial decisions, which I interpret in light of the network of apothecaries, merchants, slaves,
and statesmen who constituted his discursive community in Goa. At stake are a number of basic
questions: What might Orta have intended his book to do? If his aim were (as is so often claimed) to
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introduce his readers to the exotic materia medica of South Asia then why did he organize it
alphabetically – an order that obscured rather than highlighted the few plants that were actually
novel to readers in the West? Why did he write in Portuguese instead of Latin? Was his intended
readership a community of humanist scholars and physicians back home? Rather than assume
(again, as is so often the case) that Orta could not include illustrations in the text, why might he
have actually chosen not to? Instead of probing his work for traces of an emerging “modern”
empirical sensibility, how might Orta have understood such concepts as ‘experiment’ and
“experience” (esprimentar and experiência) – terms he often used? What did they mean in the
Colóquios? What was their function – for Orta – in the production and verification of truth claims
about the natural world?
Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway)
Locke and Sati
The subject of sati – the name for widows burned in Hindu ritual – became a standard component of
European ethnography of India in the early modern period, discussed in an array of sources and
depicted in numerous illustrations. This paper considers John Locke’s philosophical reflection on
sati. Locke’s exceptionally wide reading of contemporary travel account describing the nonEuropean world filtered into his work in a number of ways, notably in the critique of innateness in
the first book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). The origins of this critique
appear in Locke’s (unpublished) Essays on the Law of Nature, delivered in Oxford in the early
1660s, where he considered different foundations for natural law, including innateness and common
consent. In order to disprove common consent, he cited sati in a passage from the German traveller
J.A. von Mandelslo. His purpose was to show that even the fundamental impulse of selfpreservation was routinely overcome in the customs of other countries.
Locke’s discussion of this practice was reworked in early drafts of the Essay as part of the
formal critique of innateness, but then abandoned in the published version. The question I want to
pursue is why Locke chose not to include sati as an example of social difference in the Essay. I
suggest that this instance points to a conflict in Locke’s anthropology: one aspect of his theory
preserved diversity in order to disprove common consent and therefore innateness; but in the years
following his Oxford lectures he had also developed developed his commitments to natural law – in
the context of the Two Treatises of Government, where, I suggest, ‘non-confirming’ instances were
far from welcome.
Susanne Friedrich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich)
Le Maire contra VOC. How a Conflict bet ween Two Trading Compani es
Affected th e Dissemination of Knowledge
The paper examines how rivalries between trading companies affected the interpretation, use and
the dissemination of geographical knowledge. This will be done by means of a closer analysis of the
informational aspects of the struggle between the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde
Ostindische Compagnie/ VOC) and the Australische Compagnie of Isaac Le Maire.
The conflict originated in two decisions of the States-General. The one assigned the monopoly in
the Asian trade to the VOC (1602), the other allowed some merchants to search for new routes
(1614). On behalf of the Australische Compagnie Jacob Le Maire and Willem Jansz. Schouten
discovered a new way to the Pacific round Cape Horn. But their circumnavigation of the world
(1615–1617) ended abruptly in Java, where the VOC confiscated ship and papers because of
infringement of its monopoly. This caused not only legal proceedings, but also a quarrel over the
official interpretation of actions and the right to decide on the information collected by the
expedition. The latter two aspects become evident in the travel accounts and maps published in the
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course of the conflict. Contrary to his wishes, Le Maire did not succeed in his attempts to suppress
the dissemination of knowledge regarding Cape Horn, which he claimed to be exclusive for his
Company. But his interventions resulted in retardation of publications, and alternations in the
subsequently published texts.
Exclusive knowledge over the area of operation seemed suddenly vital for a trading
company. Against this background, it is no surprise that at the same time within the VOC there
developed a debate over secrecy. As a culmination of that, in 1619 the company acquired the
privilege that no one may publish information on its area of operation without its consent.
Andrea Frisch (University of Maryland, College Park)
Experience and Cosmography in André Th evet
This talk examines the encounter between the cosmographic impulse of André Thevet (1516-1590)
and the ‘singularities’ – as Thevet called them – of Antarctic France, or Brazil. In Mapping the
Renaissance World, Frank Lestringant interpreted Thevet’s writings as unwitting evidence of the
decline of the cosmographic tradition, arguing that the future would belong to the “topographers”
called for by Montaigne. Highlighting the tension between the profusion of local and particular
details, on the one hand, and the drive towards a grand synthesis, on the other, this view does not
take adequate account of the ways in which Thevet’s notion of “experience” mediates between
these two apparently opposed points of reference.
I propose to examine Thevet’s integration of experience into cosmography in the context
both of Montaigne’s Essais and of the writings of Thevet’s nemesis Jean de Léry, who explicitly
contested the cosmographer’s use of the term. Much more than a bare empirical encounter with
reality, “experience” as conceived of by all three of these writers has the capacity to function as a
principle of coherence with a potentially cosmographic scope. Far from marking the decline of the
cosmographic impulse, then, Thevet’s works ultimately help us understand how such an inclination
could be maintained in the face of new and proliferating particularities.
Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick)
European Knowledge about Chinese an d Japanese Porcelain Manuf actures in the
Seventeenth Century
This paper proposes to explore European knowledge of Asian manufactures of porcelain in the
seventeenth century. I am interested in what seventeenth-century travellers knew about the sites and
processes of ceramics manufacture in China (Jingdezhen) and Japan (Arita). What will transpire is a
marked contrast in the perceptions of these two sites: an increasing understanding in terms of
production and quality in the case of Jingdezhen’s ceramics, and an ongoing lack of insight and
appreciation of Japanese ceramics. Johan Nieuhof’s (1618-1672?) descriptions of Jingdezhen
enhanced the perception in Europe that China produced an unrivalled quality of ceramics, and that
Chinese ceramics all originated from one place only. Olfert Dapper’s (1639-1689) account and the
writings by Louis le Comte (1655-1728) develop and expand Nieuhof’s account, adding new
knowledge and more a refined appreciation of the aesthetics of Chinese ceramics. Arnoldus
Montanus’ (1625-1683) Atlas Japannensis of 1670, the descriptions of Japan by Engelbert
Kaempfer (1651-1716), and the daghregisters by Andreas Cleyer (1634-1697) form my main
sources for European perceptions of Japan’s porcelain manufactures. Annual Dutch shipments of
porcelain from Japan to Batavia, Suratte, Malacca and the Netherlands were vast. European
knowledge of Japanese porcelain, however, never became widespread in Europe. Where Jingdezhen
provided ceramics of – to their mind – unquestioned superiority, visitors and merchants remained
unsure of how to assess the quality of Japanese ceramics, despite the purchase of vast quantities of
items for shipments. In both the case of China and Japan, however, this paper will argue that
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increasing knowledge of the manufacturing processes of porcelain gradually eroded the sense of
wonder and amazement of the material, a process that gained speed after 1710, when porcelain
began to be produced in Meissen.
Thomás A. S. Haddad (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
‘Where the Portingales inhabit e and gov er n’: A reading of Van Linschoten’s
Itinerario (1596)
After working as a merchant in Seville and in Lisbon for a few years, the Dutch Calvinist Jan
Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611) was named a book-keeper and secretary to the newly
appointed archbishop of Goa, the Dominican Vicente da Fonseca, in 1583. Upon his return to
Europe almost a decade later, having lived in Goa for six years, Linschoten started publishing travel
accounts and sailing instructions that met with extraordinary success. His foremost publication, the
Itinerario, published in Dutch in 1596 by Cornelis Claesz (an advance copy being given one year
earlier to the first Dutch fleet sailing to the East Indies), was promptly translated into English
(1598) at the counsel of Richard Hakluyt, who recommended the book to the British East India
Company, and Latin, German and French editions followed suit. Its wide circulation and invaluable
sailing advices prompted a modern commentator to call it the ‘book that launched a thousand
ships’, having had direct impact on Dutch, British, French and Danish ventures into Asia. The
Itinerario is also, however, a long meditation with moral overtones on Portuguese manners and
attitudes toward Goans and toward indigenous systems of knowledge. It is this last aspect that we
highlight in this work: How to face the complex chain of mediations present in the book and read it
with an eye to the way it represents, to its European public, the interaction between different
systems of knowledge in contact and exchange, in the moment of inception of a hybrid, ‘colonial
knowledge’ system.
Heidi Hausse (Princeton University)
Cholera, Botany and Authorial Authority i n the East Indies
This paper investigates the process of theorization and expression of cholera in the published
accounts of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Botanical descriptions of the East Indies detailed by
four authors – Ludovico di Varthema, Garcia da Orta, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and Jacobus
Bontius – created the first systematic descriptions of cholera written by Europeans. The manner in
which these authors cite one another’s works and the structural style of dialogue of the works
themselves reveal the dynamism involved in the formation of contemporary authority – the
authority the authors built from one another rather than sole reliance on figures from antiquity. The
paper follows the chain of transmission concerning botany and cholera from Ludovico di Varthema
to Jacobus Bontius that was held in place following Garcia da Orta’s incidental inclusion of
Varthema in his botanical observations. Three important findings arise: the first is the role of plague
in the process of envisioning cholera, initially put forward by Garcia da Orta. The second is the
discovery that the object which connects the works, fleshy green fruit, was in fact a key component
in the process of developing theories of causation and thus prevention of cholera. Last is the
proposal that the authors considered indigenous healthcare to constitute a bodily experience
tangibly different than the traditional methods of European physicians.
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Ana Carolina Hosne (European University Institute, Florence) and Pablo Ariel Blitstein
(Institut National de Langues et Civilisations [INALCO], Paris)
Letterati , letrados or shi ( 士) : what´s in a name? Reflectio ns on the concept of
letterati and its circulation throughout the Early Modern World
In the 16th century, the expanding modern world certainly did not lack cultural mediators who in
turn reinforced its expansiveness. Among them, the Society of Jesus and its members, cultural
mediators and savants, contributed to linking different modernities. Jesuit missions were not
isolated from broader frameworks as, inevitably, they were a by-product of the relationship the
Society of Jesus established with the Spanish Patronato and the Portuguese Padroado. In turn, this
entailed a close connection with political power, in many different ways. In late Ming China Matteo
Ricci (1552-1610) dealt with the scholar-officials throughout the provinces, whom he identified
with the Confucian literati ru 儒, his main interlocutors, readers, potential converts as well as
friends. Ricci would call them letterati, always stressing that political power throughout the empire
was in their hands, with the Emperor on top. But in China they would call themselves shi 士, a
definition always subject to an ongoing process of classification and identification since the Han
period. The arrival of Ricci, a man of the Italian Renaissance and Humanist tradition, would enrich
that category as now he himself was a scholar from the West, a xi shi 西士. This category of
letterati fitting the Confucian scholar-officials circulated and reached other missions, such as New
Spain, where José de Acosta heard of the Chinese letrados, the ones who ruled China. In colonial
Latin America, Spaniards would keep that category for themselves, be they colonial administrators
or missionaries, but not for the potential converts, as they even lacked a writing system.
Through a methodological approach of both comparative and connected histories, we aim to
analyze the category of literati itself in Early Modern Europe, then exported to and recreated in late
Ming China and colonial Latin America.
Florence C. Hsia (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Missionary, mathematician, Jesuit, spy: the limits of going native
In 1696, two chunky octavos appeared from the renowned Parisian printshop of Jean Anisson,
director of the Imprimerie royale. Penned by the Jesuit royal mathematician and erstwhile
missionary to China Louis Le Comte, the volumes’ charming and urbane letters boasted the freshest
and most reliable news concerning the ‘present state’ of that far-off Asian realm. They also
exemplified a form of what Ogborn and Withers (2004) have called ‘world writing’, here
understood as the power to represent the world asserted by a Catholic religious order as it expanded
across the face of the early modern globe. Part of a standing Jesuit collaboration with the Académie
royale des sciences, addressed to the elite of court, church, and state, and reprinted in nine other
editions at Paris, Amsterdam, and London within a few years, Le Comte’s ‘topographical, physical,
mathematical, mechanical, natural, civil, and ecclesiastical’ observations of the Celestial Empire
displayed Jesuit world-making at its most ambitious. Yet they also revealed the epistemological
ambiguities of an evangelical enterprise accommodated – many thought overly so – to the pagan
culture it sought to convert. This paper explores the limits of such global knowledge-making by
examining Jesuit observational, rhetorical, and publication practices surrounding the Middle
Kingdom in light of the 1704 History and geographical description of Formosa by the Formosan
(and later admitted imposter) George Psalmanazar, which countered Le Comte's letters and other
Jesuit impositions on the reading public with an inverted form of going native.
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Henrique Leit ão (University of Lisbon)
Travelling at sea and changi ng knowl edge: Long-range sea voyages and the
shaping of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century
Every sixteenth century traveler (soldier, sailor, merchant, missionary, officer of the Crown, or just
the plain adventurer) entering a ship in Lisbon (or Seville) ready to set sail to ‘the Indies’ entered
not only an extremely harsh and even brutal world but also a place where, from an intellectual point
of view, a very peculiar type of technical and scientific culture prevailed. During the long months
(sometimes over one year) it took to reach final destination this traveler would be exposed to a type
of ‘maritime culture’ whose content, justification, accepted authorities, modes of transmission, etc.
differed drastically from any training or education he could possibly have had before. A peculiar
blend of practical skills coupled with rough theoretical notions, a mistrust of bookish authorities
based on the direct experience of new facts, a predisposition to accept the novel in nature, an
intense sense of utility attached to all technical procedures, a serious attention to precision and the
elimination of errors in observations, a perhaps vague but unmistakable idea that mathematics
provides certainty in geographical matters and even in the description of natural phenomena, etc.
This was a highly syncretic body of expertise and mental attitudes that had grown in Iberia via a
process of accumulation of knowledge along several decades. Its influence in the shaping of early
modern contacts between Europe and Asia should not be underestimated and is worth examining in
more detail.
Dániel Margócsy (Hunter College – City University of New York)
Climates, Race And Migration In the Early Modern World: The Case Of The Horse
In recent years, historians have devoted a substantial amount of research to studying how early
modern scholars theorized about the interaction of the latitudinal variation of climates and human
migration, focusing especially on the question of how the constitution and health of European
settlers might have deteriorated in the colonies. A focus on the global circulation of horses reveals a
less well-known facet of theories of climate and of scientific racism. Horses were the global
migrant par excellence of the early modern colonial world. Extinct in America, the species was reintroduced to America by the Spanish conquistadors. Soon after their arrival at the Cape of Good
Hope in the 1650s, the Dutch turned to importing horses from Java to cater for their needs. Spanish
jennets and Neapolitan and Barb stallions were sought after by the nobility all over Europe. During
his stay in Prague, even the alchemist John Dee found time to send and sell Hungarian horses to
aristocrats in England. As in the case of humans, natural historians, hippological authors and
colonizers argued that the temperament and constitution of horses were determined by latitude. Yet
these authors suggested a new, pragmatic solution towards the adaptation of migrants to new
climes. While early modern tracts on human colonization aimed at preserving a pure, age-old
European identity in a new environment, hippological authors aimed at creating new breeds that
could outperform their ancestors in a new environment. The English thoroughbred, the race so
crucial to the sporting identity of the British Empire, was based on the mating of English mares
with imported Arabian stallions. A focus on horses thus reveals that the concept of race was not
necessarily static in the early modern period: theorists and practitioners both advocated and
contributed to the forging of new equine identities by miscegenation.
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Lia Markey (University of Pennsylvania)
Non-Naturalistic Nature and Natives in Aldrovandi’s Albums
Michel Foucault’s assertion that Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) acquired knowledge of the New
World through the study of textual sources ignores the fact that his method of processing novelty
focused as much on images as on words. Over a thirty-year period Aldrovandi compiled hundreds
of albums of drawings that hover between nature and convention. Many of these
drawings/paintings, produced by hired artists who recorded new plants and people from around the
world in gouache on paper, were then reproduced in woodcuts for publication in Aldrovandi’s
books. While some of these representations of plants, animals, and natives are incredibly detailed
and naturalistic, many others are crude representations that convey little sense of depth or
dimension. Many of them were painted not from life but were reproduced from other images found
in books or in other printed material. Even some drawings that were likely painted from a live or
dead specimen, reveal a propensity for two-dimensionality. This paper examines some of these
drawings and albums in Aldrovandi’s collection in comparison with similar works in other
collections throughout Europe and questions both the role of naturalism and the function of albums
for documenting and coming to terms with foreignness.
Stephen McDowall (University of Warwick)
Two English Visions of Late-Ming China, 1598-1614
Europeans first established a maritime connection with Ming China early in the sixteenth century,
and by the end of that century several accounts existed in European languages to add substance to
the earlier amazing tales of Marco Polo and the fictions of Sir John Mandeville. Many of these
accounts were brought together and made available to English readers of the early-seventeenth
century in the second and enlarged edition of Richard Hakluyt’s (?1552-1616) The Principall
Navigations, published in three volumes between 1598 and 1600, and later in Samuel Purchas’
(?1575-1626) Purchas his Pilgrimage of 1614.
This paper examines the portrayal of China by these two near-contemporaries, arguing that
their circulation of ostensibly-similar anthologies of travel accounts in fact created two radically
distinct visions of late-Ming China for early-seventeenth century English readers. Where Hakluyt
sought to place China within an emerging discourse of engagement and trade relations, it was
Purchas’ consciously exotic depiction that found a wider audience, and ultimately ensured his
immortality as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) poem ‘Kubla Khan’
(1797). The paper will focus on the issues of when, and by whom, European knowledge of the
world was created.
Dr Simon Mills (Council for British Research in the Levant)
The Chaplains to the English Levant Company at Aleppo: Mapping the Geography
and Antiquiti es of Syria in Seventeenth-Century England
The English Levant Company was chartered in 1581 following the granting of ‘capitulations’, or
trade-agreements, by Sultan Murad III to Queen Elizabeth I. It soon set up trading centres, or
‘factories’, at Aleppo in northern-Syria and Izmir in Turkey, and by the early seventeenth century
employed an ambassador at Istanbul, locally-based consuls to maintain relations with the Ottoman
authorities, and chaplains to minister to the expatriate communities of merchants. Focusing on the
careers of the chaplains at Aleppo, this paper will examine how information about the geography
and antiquities of Syria was channelled through the lines of communication established by the
Levant Company to the learned institutions of early modern England: the Royal Society and the
English universities. After surveying some of the correspondence and artefacts sent back by the
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chaplain Robert Huntington, I shall examine a number of early expeditions to Roman and
Phoenician sites in Syria, culminating with the chaplain William Halifax’s 1691 visit to the ruins of
the ancient city of Palmyra. A brief survey of the ways in which the accounts of these expeditions
were circulated and discussed by scholars will begin to uncover the important contribution which
the Aleppo factory made to the development of early modern antiquarianism.
Limor Mintz-Manor (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Knowled ge, Identity an d the Jewish Discourse on the New World
The paper will examine various representations of America in Jewish literature of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and its contribution to the construction of knowledge and identity of Jewish
societies of western Europe, mainly in Italy and the Netherlands. As part of the larger European
society, Jewish scholars participated in the discourse about the new scientific discoveries during the
early modern period and studied astronomy, natural history, geography as well as ethnography.
These scholars composed, mainly in Hebrew, original writings and adaptations of European works
for the Jewish audience that sought to bring together the medieval and early modern scientific
knowledge with traditional Jewish learning.
Another intriguing feature of the Jewish discourse concerning the New World is the
incorporation of the Jews into the Christians-Amerindians power structure. Most of the European
accounts described, in general, a bipolar relationship of ‘civilized’ Christians versus the ‘barbarian’
Amerindians but in some Jewish accounts these relations became triangular, consisting of Jews,
Christians and Amerindians. In this new setting, the traditional Otherness of the Jews corresponded
to the new Others of Europe, the Amerindians. I will argue, accordingly, that some Jewish scholars
situated their own group in-between the Christians and the Amerindians and could thus identify as
‘whites’ and ‘civilized’ and at the same time alien and subaltern. This also enabled them, for
example, to criticize the colonial forces, to respect the indigenous cultures and at times to identify
with the suffering of the indigenous people.
All in all, the paper will seek to integrate Jewish perspectives into the general discourse
about the European explorations and travels. By focusing on various manuscripts and printed books
it will present the ways in which Jewish society adapted and modified emerging knowledge about
America and its indigenous people and will highlight the unique ‘mental lenses’ through which
Jews perceived the new discoveries and integrated them into their worldview.
Iris Montero Sobrevilla (University of Cambridge)
Of fever, syphilis and epilepsy: exploring the medici nal hummingbird
This paper focuses on three hummingbird-based remedies recorded between 1552 and 1577 in
colonial Mexico. The first one is a recipe to cure extreme heat (nimius calor) in the herbal Libellus
de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (1552) by the indigenous doctor Martín de la Cruz; the second, a
remedy for syphilis in the Florentine Codex compiled by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún (ca. 1576);
and the third, a remedy for epilepsy in the Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (157177) by Spanish physician Francisco Hernández. The first section of the paper analyses the
particularities of the recording of these remedies in the Libellus, the Codex and the Thesaurus, three
distinctly different knowledge-gathering projects. The second section explores the possible preColumbian and Renaissance European notions of the body behind these hummingbird-based
remedies. The final section focuses on the trajectories these remedies followed after they left
Mexico. A copy of the Libellus, for instance, was made by Cassiano dal Pozzo in the seventeenthcentury, and after passing from hand to hand it ended up at the Royal Library at Windsor. Similarly,
the manuscript for the Thesaurus was abridged, commented upon and fragmentally published in
works by other authors in Europe and Mexico before its most famous edition in Rome in 1651.
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Following the stories of these three remedies, it is possible to glimpse the production of medical
knowledge through the interactions between indigenous doctors, herbalists, translators and
draughtsmen, and European missionaries and physicians, working in three languages (Náhuatl,
Spanish and Latin), and in sites as diverse as local hospitals, convents, and language schools in
sixteenth-century Mexico.
Juan Pimentel (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid)
See under Isabel Soler
Ayesha Ramach andran (Stony Brook University)
Prophecy an d Cosmic Translation in Montaigne’s Essais
This talk explores the challenge of cross-cultural cosmographic understanding in the early modern
world through a consideration of two intertwined tropes: translation and prophecy. As successful
interpretation and integration of prophecies from other worlds – whether newly discovered lands,
classical antiquity or scriptural apocrypha – became increasingly important for early modern
Europe’s renovation of its own knowledge of the world, access to this prophetic information was
contingent on acts of translation. Translatio, that quintessential humanist activity and trope, now
extended well beyond linguistic and philological competence, and became an integral aspect of
cosmographic and metaphysical comprehension.
I focus on Montaigne’s interest in cosmographic translation, beginning with the Theologia
naturalis and extending to the New World essays and the ‘Apologie de Raymond Sebond’. Though
Montaigne does not comment at any length about his early translation in his own text, describing it
as an act of civilizing his predecessor, ‘of divest[ing] him as much as [he] could of this fierce
bearing and barbarian demeanor’, my essay will explore this characterization, connecting
Montaigne’s translation of the savage Sebond to the problems of translation and prophecy in ‘Des
cannibals’ and ‘Des coches’. I argue that the trope and act of translation for Montaigne, goes
beyond textual transmission to include entire worlds, world-systems and world-views. Indeed, this
translation becomes particularly significant as it seems to hold the key to prophetic knowledge of
the world’s origins and future. It is this expanded sense of translation as a cosmographic enterprise
that structures the Essais’ central concerns. If the Essais repeatedly return to images of cosmic
decay and apocalyptic dissolution, these losses, I suggest are often paired with problems of
translation and translatability, as early modern Europe tested the global dimensions of its new
knowledge.
Diogo Ramada Curto (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
A composite typology of imperial knowledge
How did European empires use different forms of knowledge to impose their own power and
authority? An answer to this question should distinguish between forms of knowledge associated
with the dynamic of intellectual disciplines in Europe, and others with a more direct impact in the
organization of empires. An inventory of the former should start with political theology and legal
discourses, followed by different types of history (religious, political and natural), disciplines
dealing with spatial matters (from astrology to cartography), and the physical body. However, the
other vast range of discourses interfering practically with the making of imperial processes suggests
a different composite typology. This was formed by descriptions of ceremonies shaped by an
antiquarian style (sometimes articulated with genealogy) usable in diplomatic relations with
princely courts as well as in comparing religions. Secondly, another type of knowledge was the
result of concrete technologies of power in areas such as the organization of justice, military
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matters, and the establishment of fiscal machineries of surplus extraction. In these concrete domains
colonial states depended heavily on gathering local information through collaborators, and they also
showed an ability to transfer technologies. A political culture of counsel, political arithmetic and
later on political economy were related with the same type of technological powers. A last item of
the same composite typology corresponds to the making of individual careers offered by imperial
and colonial enterprises. In this case, individual actions were associated with an ability to tell life
stories, creating one of the most generalized forms of autobiography. The paper will concentrate on
Iberian empires (1450-1700) –with their sources in Latin, Castilian, Portuguese and Italian –
making a strong point about the centrality of the referred composite typology of imperial
knowledge, in comparison to ethnographic and presumed scientific discourses (mostly travel
accounts).
José Ramón Marcaida (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid)
New World transfers: Francisco Hernández in the works of Juan Eusebio
Nieremberg
The aim of this paper is to explore the complexities surrounding the preservation and transmission
of natural and medical knowledge in seventeenth-century Spain, through the analysis of several
features, both textual and visual, in the work of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658). Mainly
known for his religious writings, such as the extensively edited and translated On the difference
between the temporal and eternal (Madrid, 1640), and regarded as one of the most eloquent
exponents of Spanish Counter-Reformist thought, Nieremberg was also the first professor of natural
history at the Reales Estudios of the Jesuit Colegio Imperial of Madrid, and the author of several
books on natural knowledge, the most important being his Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae
(Antwerp, 1635).
This paper focuses on Nieremberg’s treatment of a particularly relevant source for his
lectures and treatises on natural history: the materials gathered by the Spanish physician Francisco
Hernández during his expedition to New Spain in the 1570s. Comprising several volumes of texts
as well as thousands of illustrations, these materials remained mostly unpublished, except for a few
editing efforts, including the well-known edition, the so-called Mexican Treasury (Rome, 1651), by
the Accademia dei Lincei.
As it will be argued, Nieremberg’s work not only offers a suggestive chance to enlarge and
enrich the history of the reception and dissemination of these texts and illustrations; it also provides
a unique opportunity to evaluate the appreciation of natural and medical knowledge in Spain during
the first half of the seventeenth century.
Neil Safier (University of British Columbia)
Literary Archaeologies: Uncoverin g Indigenous Technolo gies in Early Amazoni an
Narratives (1539-164 1)
There is perhaps no greater example of the early modern imposition of European ideas onto the
geography of the Americas than the transmigration of female Amazons from Scythia, in Asia
Minor, across the Atlantic to the Americas, where the myth of isolated societies of bare-breasted
women warriors alternatively caught hold in the Caribbean and South America, almost
contemporaneously. Most famously, the reported existence of these gynocratic societies became
attached toponymically to the river that runs from high in the Andes across the continent to the
Atlantic Ocean: the River of the Amazons. This paper seeks to examine a migration in the opposite
direction: the reception of ethnographic ideas about indigenous Amazonian societies and, more
specifically, the social organization of these groups from the Upper Amazonian basin to the lowland
coastal regions of Maranhão and back again to Europe. Through a careful study of three Amazonian
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narratives – those of Francisco de Orellana, Claude d’Abbéville, and Cristóbal de Acuña – this
paper posits that an attention to the warlike behavior of mobile Amerindian groups in Amazonia
obscured a focus on the productive technologies with which indigenous populations had organized
their cultures for centuries, hiding for posterity the large-scale urban networks that archaeologists
have recently discovered to be characteristic of many lowland Amazonian groups, previously
thought to be nomadic and primitive culturally when compared to other early American
civilizations including the Aztecs and the Incas.
Margaret Schotte (Princeton University)
A Sailor’s Delight: Dutch Navigational Textbooks and Information Overload
Europeans set forth across the sea with increasing fervour during the early modern period,
generating new challenges for individuals and states alike. As rival imperial powers sought to
harness wealth made possible by long-distance ocean trade, individual sailors struggled to master
information about distant sea routes and new navigational techniques.
In response to this explosion of technical knowledge, between the 15th and 18th centuries sailing
changed from a memory-based skill to one that relied increasingly on textbooks, printed charts and
tables for instruction and while at sea. This nautical reference library preserves rich examples of
traditional knowledge, while simultaneously documenting how such information was disseminated
and updated as its users found themselves in different environments. In addition to grappling with
new instruments and observational methods, Dutch ships bound for colonies in Africa, the Far East
and the Americas had to deal with seasonal weather patterns, different constellations in the southern
hemisphere and other geographical complexities.
Within 17th-century Dutch textbooks and navigation instructions, examples abound of
mnemonic devices that were intended to make this information easier for mariners to retain. This
paper explores a selection of the songs, counting rhymes, and even images, with particular attention
to those that attempted to make the exotic familiar. I will trace the evolution of such devices as
sailors incorporated first-hand knowledge of distant locations, and also examine differences within
translations produced for rival European nations, a testament both to the cultural specificity of
particular rhymes, and, perhaps, colonial rivalry on the printed page.
Far from being simplistic rhymes for the uneducated, these memory crutches facilitated the
dissemination of technical knowledge and the codification of artisanal wisdom. This interplay
between expertise and practise allowed sailors to navigate the Dutch Republic’s global stage.
Isabel Soler (Universitat de Barcelona) and Juan Pimentel (Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid)
Painting naked truth: The Colóquios by Garcia da Orta (1563)
The Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia occupies a strategic position in a
history of European knowledge ready to confront its global dimensions. Significantly, the work by
Garcia da Orta was published in Goa (1563). It can be regarded as the first refutation of both the
scholastic method and the classical materia medica based on empiricism and non-European local
knowledge. There is a contrast between the fortunes of the Colóquios and the memory of its author.
While the bones of the Jewish physician were exhumed and burned by the Holy Inquisition in 1580,
the Colóquios were incessantly translated and copied in less than a decade. Carolus Clusius and
Nicolás Monardes are but two of the most renown authors among those who benefited from his
work and method. Our aim is to outline the main features of the scientific and expositive method
employed in the treatise, a dialogue between two ways of understanding the materia medica. Garcia
da Orta unfolds in two characters to show that Eastern knowledge and practices complete and
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perfect Western lore. "Truth is painted naked", Garcia da Orta writes in his work, that is, without
the circumlocutions and adornments of tradition, ad vivum and overseas.
E.C. Spary (University of Cambridge)
Writing about coffee in France before 1700: travelling schol ars and the ‘invisible
network’ of Philippe Sylvestre Dufour
In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of one of the best-known works published before 1700 on
exotic beverages, Philippe Sylvestre Dufour’s Traitez nouveaux & curieux du café, du thé et du
chocolate of 1685. Earlier accounts have presented a very limited interpretation of this book,
treating it exclusively as an indicator of the development of the fashion for coffee drinking in
France before 1700. On closer investigation, however, the Traitez proves to tie its author into an
Orientalist network of French antiquarians and philologists closely involved with Colbert’s plans to
dominate the Indies trade. It is this network, I argue, which was responsible for the bulk of the
literature on and about coffee in France in the three decades before 1700, and which helped not only
to define the drink and the plant as objects of scholarly understanding, but also to shape the
conditions of its use. Coffee consumption in Paris between 1670 and 1700 was thus closely tied to a
particular knowledge project whose other outputs included the vast majority of travel accounts of
the Levant written in the French language during the same period. It was no accident that this exotic
good came into general consumption precisely as Crown commercial policy took on a new and
more imperialistic form during the reign of Louis XIV.
Jennifer Spinks (University of Melbourne)
The Devil in Calicut: The uses of non-European wonders and prodigi es in Pierre
Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses
The mid-sixteenth century saw the growth of printed compendia of wonders, or ‘wonder books’, as
a significant genre. Amongst the most important early examples is French author Pierre Boaistuau’s
Histoires prodigieuses of 1560, which drew upon works including Sebastian Münster’s
Cosmographia and Konrad Lycosthenes’s Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon. Boaistuau’s book
is a richly-illustrated compendium of knowledge about natural and unnatural wonders and disasters
including meteors, floods, earthquakes and monstrous births, thematically arranged. It appeared in
various new editions with extensive additional material over the following decades. While the book
is not a work of geography, precise details of locations as well as events are central to Boaistuau’s
claims to truth, underpinning his authority to decode the meanings of extraordinary phenomena.
This paper will examine what sorts of knowledge are sought from different geographical locations
by Boaistuau, and focus upon his limited but at times structurally pivotal treatment of phenomena
that are specifically non-European. This paper will focus primarily upon the first chapter of
Boaistuau’s book, which begins with a warning to readers about the dangers and powers of the
Devil, and rapidly shifts to a discussion of the ‘heathenish’ worship of the devil in the city of
Calicut (modern-day Kozhikode in the Indian state of Kerala). Boaistuau is rather quiet about his
most immediate source, Münster’s Cosmographia, but nonetheless stresses here and elsewhere the
reliability of his sources, and also includes a brief comment concerning Portuguese contact with
Calicut. This paper will examine the context as well as the intellectual and religious imperatives
that shaped Boaistuau’s European presentations of non-European locations and phenomena, and in
particular will examine the religious dimensions of the Histoires prodigieuses, assessing the extent
to which non-European prodigies were used to comment upon issues of religious conflict in
contemporary Europe.
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Marjorie Trusted (V&A Museum, London)
Shipwrecked Ivories from a Manila Galleon
In 1601 a Manila galleon, the Santa Margarita, freighted with its cargo of luxury items, sailing from
the Philippines to Spain, was shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean. Its contents were recently
excavated, and were found to include several dozen carved colonial ivories of Christian subjects,
due to be exported to Europe. They had survived remarkably well, despite having been submerged
in salt water for four centuries.
These works of art can tell us much about the production of Hispano-filipino ivories. Similar
carvings survive in collections in Europe and elsewhere, although often their early provenances are
unknown. Hitherto we have only been able to deduce their origins from the disparate objects
themselves, and from a few scanty contemporary accounts and early collections. Small-scale ivory
sculptures such as those on the Santa Margarita were made from ivory imported from Africa, and
produced by Chinese sculptors working probably in the Philippines. But their subjects are generally
Christian, the iconography being dictated by the local missionaries, often Augustinian, Franciscan
or Dominican friars. However it has always been difficult to date such pieces, and no individual
artists are recorded.
The shipwrecked ivories from the Santa Margarita are vitally important in understanding
better this enigmatic area of art. They are astonishingly vivid records of when and why such
sculptures were made, and how the ivory trade worked at this time, only a generation after the
Philippines had been conquered (and so named) by the Spanish. The confluence of cultures, in
particular the combination of local Chinese styles of carved ivory with imported Christian
iconography - often derived from engraved sources - presents a fascinating picture of the ways in
which visual imagery was used, and ivory as a material was valued and exploited in the early
modern period.
Anna Wint erbottom (University of Sussex)
Monsters and men of the woods: illustration and interpret ation in sevent eent h and
early eight eenth century nat ural histories
Open James Petiver's Gazophylacii naturæ & artis to Tab XLV, and a monster with webbed hands,
cloven hooves, and a rather wistful expression curls around butterflies, leaves, and coral. The
drawing of the mythical creature had been sent to Petiver, a seventeenth-century English botanist
and apothecary, by the lay Jesuit father Georg Camelli (Kamel), a keen student of the natural
history of the Philippines and one of a worldwide network of informers who kept Petiver supplied
with plants, drawings, and botanical and medical information. What was the meaning of this
creature in the local context of the Philippines and how was it received and interpreted by Camelli?
Finally, where did the monster fit within the classifications of the natural world being developed by
Petiver and his contemporaries? I will use this and other examples to examine the production of
illustrations to European works of natural history composed during the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. I will show that the illustrations to works on botany and zoology were
received through global networks of collectors, copied multiple times, and reincorporated in other
works such as accounts of travel. Often, collectors like Camelli copied the illustrations they sent
their European correspondents from local works of art or natural history or commissioned local
artists to produce them. I will discuss how the meaning of such illustrations shifted during this
process of copying and circulation and ask how the history of botanical and zoological illustration
could be reinterpreted by adopting a global approach to the question.
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Ting Xu (London School of Economics)
Western Science in lat e Ming and Early Qing China:
Accommo dation and Diffusion
This paper examines accommodation to and diffusion of Western science in late Ming (13681644AD) and early Qing China (1644-1839AD) by investigating interactions between Jesuit
missionaries and Chinese intellectuals. The core question addressed is: what factors determined
whether knowledge conveyed was ‘useful’? Were certain kinds of knowledge seen by the Chinese
as more useful than others? I will consider economic, cultural and intellectual forces facilitating or
constricting the transfer of ‘useful and reliable knowledge’.
Knowledge transfer could be read as a cultural as well as a specifically intellectual
exchange. Complex processes such as accommodation, translation, and distortions involving
different roles played by agents, patrons, and ‘filters’ were at work. What the Jesuits transferred
was not just science and technology but also new ways of teaching and learning derived from
Western cultural contexts, while Chinese intellectuals had been educated in indigenous ways that
were different from those operating in Europe. For example, generalists created by the Chinese
educational system were more familiar with an ethical body of knowledge than a body of
knowledge associated with academic specialisations. Under the Ming, knowledge conveyed by the
Jesuits diffused more sharply than it did in Qing times, as both the Jesuits and Chinese intellectuals
adopted accommodation strategies so Christian teaching could be reconciled with Confucian
teaching. Controversy emerged in Qing times when the Jesuits became disengaged from a cultural
dialogue with Chinese intellectuals and failed to bridge the cosmological cleavage between
Christians and Confucians. The paper concludes that knowledge transfer is an important aspect to
examine within the global dimensions of European knowledge.
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