Review of S. Brevaglieri, Natural desiderio di Sapere (by Robert John Clines), Renaissance Quarterly, 2021 (original) (raw)
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Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, 2018
Antonio Vallisneri’s (naturalist and physician, 1661-1730) vast correspondence is a unique window on the social, intellectual and economic structure of naturalistic research in early modern Italy. While Vallisneri was a naturalist of European renown, the overwhelming majority of his letters circulated within a tightly-knit web of short-range relations that largely defined his agendas and practices; in this paper, I argue that such local networks were crucial elements of early modern science. The “ingenuous investigators” who corresponded with him – noblemen, physicians, apothecaries or country surgeons – elaborated research projects and obtained credit for observations; entertained autonomous relations with the best-known scholars, manufactured and disseminated scientific instruments and experimental practices. Furthermore, their knowledge of the territory enabled them to play a crucial role in the complex economy of exchange that brought natural specimens from remote locations to the most celebrated museums, leading to the re-discovery of the European “exotic”.
This article discusses the Descrittione dell'India occidentale, a neglected Italian sixteenth-century anonymous and undated text that describes a set of Mesoamerican artifacts brought from Mexico to Italy by an anonymous priest. The text contains data on Mesoamerican material culture, on its Italian reception, and on its contribution to the formation of an early modern corpus of ethno-graphic knowledge. Herein I provide an analysis of the text, revealing its connections to other sixteenth-century texts and proposing hypotheses on its date and place of publication as well as on the identity of the author and of the priest whose arrival in Italy is the subject of the text. In the concluding section, I discuss some research lines that can be tackled on the basis of the Descrittione dell'India occidentale.
Perspectives on Science , 2022
In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas and Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged, and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole.