Oxford Bibliographies-Iberian Science and Empire (with Brian Jones) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2019
This essay-review carries out a bibliographic review of the most representative publications in the field of the history of Iberian science and the Atlantic world of the last decade, with special emphasis on cosmography, navigation and cartography, but also in the field of medicine, pharmacopoeia, natural history, and ethnography. To do so, I start examining six of the most recent books published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, without forgetting to refer to some books published in the last two decades that have somehow marked the course of the new history of the Ibero-Atlantic science. As an interpretive contribution, it is suggested that one of the points of convergence of all these studies is what we could call an empirical turn in knowledge, that is, that the diverse scientific cultures that emerged in the Ibero-Atlantic world were eminently practical cultures, and that these cultures were a constituent part of modern Europe and science.
This doctoral thesis offers a big-picture view of the material and cultural history of science in colonial Latin America. It argues that science in the Viceroyalty of New Spain can be best understood not as isolated from centres of European culture, but rather as a productive extension of Old World and Indigenous techniques for observing and quantifying nature. Moreover, it also shows that Mexico City quickly became a central node in the production and funding of science within the Spanish Empire, rather than being peripheral to early modern scientific discourse. It examines the nerve centre of Spain’s overseas territories, the viceregal capital of New Spain, as a hub not only of funding but also of vibrant activity for Spanish and Novohispanic science from 1535 to 1700.
Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?
Perspectives on Science, 2004
The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in ªelds such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientiªc Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difªcult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of "modernity." The roots of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians ªrst created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese and the Spanish conªdently saw themselves as the ªrst "moderns," superseding the ancients. The English were the ªrst to recognize this fact and they sought to imitate the new institutions of knowledge-gathering created by the Iberians. I demonstrate, for example, the Iberian origins of many of Francis Bacon's epistemological insights and metaphors. Spanish and Portuguese scholars have long been making this point. I therefore introduce English-speaking audiences to some of the most recent scholarship by Spanish scholars on sixteenth century Iberian science and technology.
Science, Medicine, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
Early American Literature, 2023
Literature Review of Yarí Pérez Marín's Marvels of Medicine: Literature and Scientific Enquiry in Early Colonial Spanish America, Sophie Brockman's The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784-1838, and Mauro José Caraccioli's Writing the New World: THe Politics of Natural History in the Spanish Empire
The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, 2016
The globalization of knowledge in the Iberian colonies is a subject that in the last forty years has been approached from many different perspectives. Nevertheless, it is still important to investigate this knowledge formation process by attempting to evaluate the contribution of the Spanish and the Portuguese to the European scientific tradition ) and to trace the different ways this knowledge was gained. Such studies will help us reconsider our understanding of European and non-European economies of science; they will help in understanding how these scientific cultures merged and what role they played in the colonial situation at the intersection of non-human processes and human action.