Abstract
Writing the New World calls on political theorists to read the writing on nature of sixteenth-century Spanish thinkers for their contributions to our understanding of modernity and the study of natural history and in order to understand the complex workings of empire, where nature was not just for domination but also a source of knowledge and wonder. Sixteenth-century natural history, in particular, argues Caraccioli, “was a contentious field of narrative inquiry, and should be read today as a distinct genre of early modern political thinking” (3). Its development challenges the view that scientific knowledge advanced as it distanced itself from spirituality.
The book focuses on well-known thinkers like Dominican friar and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas, “official royal chronicler” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Franciscan friar and “ethnographer” Bernardino de Sahagún, as well as lesser-known figures such as the “imperial doctor” Francisco Hernández de Toledo and the Jesuit historian José de Acosta. Caraccioli shows how these figures were not simply agents of a violent Spanish imperial project but also precarious and complicated intellectuals who saw their work as contributing to a new world view not entirely reducible to the policies and actions of the Spanish state, and who risked “life, limb and reputation to defend an emerging style of inquiry that was ethnographic and empirical in scope, as much as it exegetical and demonological” (4). While their encounters with, and accounts of, nature were attempts to domesticate and control at the service of empire, Caraccioli argues it is wrong to reduce their intellectual production to that alone, as most of political theory’s focus on liberalism and the state of nature suggests. Rather, their concern with nature was primary and led them to question the authority of “ancient and biblical historiography,” to consult and appreciate indigenous cultures and knowledge, and to produce a new theory of knowledge that was “part of a distinctively scientific world view” (9, 21). This science was, of course, not neutral, since the stories centering nature (both landscape and people) framed the imperial project, and specifically the Reconquista, as a consequence of political, economic, and social differences between Europeans and indigenous peoples.
Within the overarching “naturalist epic,” Caraccioli charts in chapter 1 three distinct “moral frames of reference” or “constitutive narratives” (15, 22) for different historical periods—the narrative of conquest (1492–1552), demonology as anthropology (1552–1590), and natural dissonance (1570–1590)—each with its own narrative style, tropes, forms of evidence, and narrative effects and corresponding to different moments of imperial expansion from conquest to colonization to institutionalization.
The narrative of conquest, characterized primarily by Oviedo’s Sumario and Las Casas’s Brevisima Historia, relied on the trope of nature as timeless. Oviedo’s chivalrous account treated this new land as a source of wonder, but also of degradation and corruption, one whose meaning only a properly trained historian such as himself could access. Las Casas’s style was taxonomical and relied upon eyewitness accounts and theories of natural law to present nature in the New World as evidence of God’s presence, and as a mirror into which Spaniards, corrupted by modernity, could look to see how far they had strayed from their true faith. Demonology as anthropology, exemplified by Sahagún, was ethnographic and interlingual and its primary trope that of nature as bifurcated, as a place of both order and fear. As with Las Casas, Sahagún’s complicity with the Spanish project of indoctrination led him to seek out and rely upon the help of indigenous informants and interpreters. However, as a consequence, “he found himself likely adopting more of the indigenous cosmology he was supposed to extirpate than what likely sat comfortably with imperial authorities” (29). Finally, the constitutive narrative of naturalist dissonance had an experimental narrative style, in the case of Hernández, and philosophical one, in the case of Acosta. In keeping with a general story of unintended consequences, Acosta’s attempts to catalog the New World so as to better rid its people of idolatrous practices led him to question the adequacy of prevailing classical and biblical sources. For both Hernández and Acosta, nature itself was a great book in need of interpretation in its own right, and they viewed nature and man as “mutually interpretive” (23). In all these cases, natural historians attempted to go beyond what was immediately visible in order to naturalize imperialism, but in doing so they introduced information and methodologies that were not always in sync with the empire they represented. This challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies and even empire itself was not, however, the result of a rejection of spiritual concerns. Spiritual concerns drove their focus on nature and their investment in scientific inquiry.
The subsequent four chapters explore these constituent narratives with closer attention to specific texts. And in these details, one really begins to see and understand the position and challenges of these thinkers as agents of empire, natural historians, and religious and scientific men, as well the unanticipated effects of their work. For instance, in chapter 2, we learn that Oviedo and Las Casas did not intend to provide a systematic narrative of the natural world in the Americas. They came to see the limits of the dominant scholastic tradition (Ancient and Medieval Christian thought) in seeking to make sense of the unfamiliar and different, even as those attempts were driven by the desire to facilitate the spread of Christianity. They brought existing assumptions, categories, and hierarchies to bear on their studies, and also developed a new vocabulary to make sense of knowledge acquired through experience. Not only did they wish to account for the unknown and unfamiliar, but also to share in the wonder they provoked, since this too was part of experiential knowledge. A striking example from the book is Oviedo’s reliance on sketches to present what words could not describe. Illustrations were meant not just to account for the fact that certain creatures, such as the iguana, did not fit into existing taxonomies, but also were meant to share with the reader the wonder of experiencing something new. Oviedo also reported writing from memory and this, argues Caraccioli, was done both to emphasize experience as the basis for natural knowledge and, even more importantly, to distinguish “the textual authority of Old World ways of knowing from New World ways of living” (52). Following Oviedo, Las Casas also privileged and gave authority to facts gathered through first-hand experience and suggested these facts were readable as texts. Natural laws worked hand in hand with natural texts, with the former meeting its limits in the latter.
Caraccioli argues that scholars have long overlooked the centrality of the study of nature to Sahagún, who privileged empirical observation in the name of a spiritual project of exposing the demonic and inhuman in the Americas. This tactic allowed him to better control and repress, while also making Christianity more legible to the Amerindians in need of conversion and salvation. Paradoxically, this tactic required the help of indigenous informants and interpreters and “inadvertently helped to establish the Aztecs as pioneering new world naturalists and the Spaniards as conveyors of that information” (74). The more Sahagún learned, the more difficult it became to unequivocally condemn. Such ambivalence can be seen in what Caraccioli argues is the systematic differences in the Florentine Codex between Spanish portions pointing to the danger of idolatrous practices continuing to operate “under the guise of Christian rites” and corresponding Nahuatl portions taking these practices on their own terms. “Sahagún’s attention to the shifting valence of Nahua language,” writes Caraccioli, “raises for him a political sensitivity that verges on toleration” (79).
In the final two chapters, Caraccioli turns to thinkers representing the experimental and philosophical narrative style and working at the height of scientific inquiry when the Spanish empire was suffering materially. As a true Renaissance man, the medical alchemist Hernández attempted to integrate indigenous botanical knowledge into a “reconfigured and natural classification” (100). However, he suffered “ideological duress” as a result of the “conflicting demands of cataloging a land with infinite potential economic and scientific resources” (100). In chapter 5, and one of the best of the book, we learn of the methodological innovations of José de Acosta. Like earlier thinkers, he questioned existing classical and biblical orthodoxies (but even more forcefully and explicitly), and introduced a “distinctly modernist conception of judgment . . . to differentiate between the cultural, scientific and theological lenses Jesuit missionaries were to employ in their readings of the new world” (104). This experimental conception of judgment did not equate with secularization, but rather with the ability to reconcile scripture and experience. Proper judgment required a type of disorientation. As Caraccioli writes, for Acosta, “the treasures of the new world are only deemed remarkable for those who are willing to experience the dissonance of nature’s wonders” (116). Acosta called less for an alignment of empirical and experimental principles with the goals of imperial Spain, than for imperial Spain’s faith to be “in greater communion with science” (124). This paradox of wonder and domination exists in the thought of all the thinkers analyzed.
The book seeks to foreground what the author calls “microhistories” and “an anti-grand narrative of Western history” and achieves this aim with great success. It shows the necessity of including Catholic contributions to the scientific revolution that trouble any easy opposition between science and faith, dominance and knowledge, nature and progress, and ethnography and empire. The book also points to the ways that Spanish influences (Locke’s reliance upon and misuse of Acosta, for instance) have fallen out of accounts of the development of political thought more generally. That said, the author is a better interpreter of his own sources than of some of the secondary literature.
The strongest parts of the book are where Caraccioli delves into microhistories, and shows, rather than tells, revealing fascinating details of the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and power, experience, and faith on the other. Faith and spiritual concerns drove thinkers to seek more and more sophisticated ways of knowing and understanding what they found in the Americas. At the same time, they were complicit with imperial goals of domination, and the status of these commitments is not always quite clear in the text. Spanish imperialism was an exercise in force, but what is less clear is the relationship between Christian faith and Spanish imperialism, and that between faith and science. Neither faith nor the knowledge it produces can be separated out from the project of empire, and although the author never suggests this, in a sense the book vindicates science and faith while criticizing others for dismissing them because of their associations with empire and Christianity. The issue of intentionality could have been explored in more detail, as well as the relationship of these thinkers to natural history and the political, economic, and military consequences of their conclusions.
Although the author rigorously lays out three distinct understandings of nature (constitutive narratives) and the consequences of these understandings, one view of nature as a blank slate predominates as an underlying premise of the book. This may be because the book never explores the status—indeed accuracy—of the knowledge these thinkers produced, or what was and was not visible to them and why. What are the advantages and pitfalls of their methods? The book relies upon a nuanced distinction between faith and ideology, on the one hand, and science and nature, on the other, but does this not require some assessment of what makes their work scientific and also part of a tradition called “natural history”?
Relatedly, while the author explains that he focuses on “oppressors” rather than the “oppressed” in order to highlight the former’s oft-ignored contributions to natural science, the absence of indigenous voices matters precisely because Spanish thinkers relied so heavily on them. Including their voices or writings would have enriched the discussion of these thinkers’ relationship to indigenous interpretation and of how indigenous contributions changed the understanding of nature more generally. What exactly did these Spanish thinkers incorporate from indigenous knowledge, and why, how, and how much did they rely on doing so? Was it only content or also method, and are the two distinguishable in these cases?
These questions emerge from a thoughtful and original book that is particularly important to read during these times of environmental decline. The epilogue’s call to center nature and the fascination with it is just as pressing and valuable as it was in the sixteenth century.