Early-Modern Knowledge as Inquisitorial-Legal Inquiry
Ed. Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer. Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science. (The Early Modern Americas.) vi, 355pp., notes, Index. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. £47.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780812250930.
Dozens of witnesses would be summoned and queried following carefully crafted questionnaires. Indigenous specialists would offer information on classifications of birds or herbal cures. Scribes and translators would confirm the accuracy of testimonies. Indigenous scholars and missionaries would act as “judges” collating and glossing testimonies. Often the “inquisitor,” who presided over the carefully choreographed extraction of truthful facts from witnesses, would also clinically test the alleged curative power of plants, animals, and stones revealed by witnesses. Clearly, Baconian science as a form of an inquisitorial, legal probe on the secrets of nature via experimentation and interrogation emerged out traditions of sixteenth-century imperial Iberian science.
Such acts of interrogation and translation did not deliberatively seek to hide the Native American origins of colonial texts on materia medica and natural history. On the contrary. The final document would not only reveal the voice of “European” synthesizers, but also that of indigenous witnesses. Dozens of these manuscript texts appeared in 16th century Spanish America, including among them the Florentine Codex (a twelve-volume encyclopedia of Nahua knowledge) (1530s-70s), Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo’s gargantuan Historia Natural (1520s-50s) Francisco Hernández’s massive Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium mexicanorum, and Martín Cruz and Juan Badiano’ Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (1540s). There are also dozens of volumes of relaciones geográficas (1530s to 1600s).
The many contributors of ‘Translating Nature’ explore the creation and afterlife of many of these texts to make several arguments, some more persuasive than others:
1) Early-modern cartography, materia medica, and natural history did not compile “discoveries” but translated indigenous testimonies (Juan Pimentel, Jaime Marroquín-Arredondo, Luis Millones-Figueroa);
2) Native knowledges informed not just the big systems of classification and naming in natural history; they provided the details and nuance in descriptions, both in prose and images (Marcy Norton, Daniela Bleichmar)
3) English natural history was, in turn, an act of translation of the original Spanish translations (Ralph Bauer)
4) All acts of sequential translation were often acts of deliberate and inadvertent misappropriation that concealed origins and genealogies. Misappropriation, in fact, was far more pronounced in the case of the British with Iberian sources than of the Iberians with indigenous testimonies (Pimentel, Norton, Bleichmar, Sara Miglietti).
5) English Baconian epistemologies, as an alchemical science to extract secrets of nature through fire and interrogation, originated in Spanish American earlier practices of ‘inquisitorial’ (as on inquiry, not torture) extraction (Ralph Bauer, Miglietti)
6) Seventeenth-century Spanish natural histories of imperial bounties deliberatively shunned print and Latin as the latter two became associated with northern European misappropriation and theft (John Slater)
7) ‘Renaissance’ knowledge did not seek to conceal its non-European origins as much as the ‘Enlightenment’ did (Christopher Parsons and Ruth Hill).
8) The Enlightenment’s focus on formal logical systems and empirically-based universal laws not only marginalized indigenous knowledges, but it also paradoxically liberated Christian missionaries, uninterested in Lockean conjectural histories of the mind, to explore indigenous complex systems of knowledge concealed in the vocabulary and grammar of a language (Sarah Rivett).
Marroquín and Bauer use the introduction to focus on only two of the many tantalizing arguments outlined above, namely, that early modern Spanish knowledge was an act of translation and legal interrogation of indigenous testimonies and that Spanish inquisitorial systems for extracting the truth from witnesses served as the foundation of Baconian experimentation. This latter insight, in turn, is the argument of Bauer’s far more ambitious The Alchemy of Conquest (2018).
One of the obvious blind spots of this collection is to study how early-modern science as interrogation, translation, and obfuscation of citation applies to peoples of African descent. How did early modern naturalists, physicians, cartographers siphon off knowledge from African captives? There are too many scholars now working on this area to justify such blatant exclusion. Finally, the model of translation and interrogation has another blindspot: natives appear as active producers of knowledge at the start of the extractive conveyor belt. What did natives do in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the hybrid encyclopedias they helped to create in the first place?
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. The Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author and editor of How to Write the History of the New World (2001), Puritan Conquistadors (2006), Nature, Empire, and Nation (2007), Entangled Empires (2018), among others.
