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Being Beyond: the Black Legend and How We Got Over It (Slater And HOS0010.1177/0073275317694897 694897research-article2017 Special Issue: Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies HOS History of Science 2017, Vol. 55(2) 148 –166 Being beyond: The Black © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: Legend and how we sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317694897DOI: 10.1177/0073275317694897 got over it journals.sagepub.com/home/hos John Slater University of California – Davis Maríaluz López-Terrada INGENIO (CSIC-Universitat Politècnica de València) Abstract We used to think it was the job of a historian of Spanish science to combat the negative evaluations of Hispanic cultures that came to be known as the Black Legend. Paradoxically, attempts to amend dominant narratives of the history of science (such as the Scientific Revolution) so that they might accommodate Spain bolstered the very stories we meant to dismantle. Caring about the Black Legend deformed the history we were trying to write and never convinced the people we hoped to sway. In this article, we provide an overview of the historiographic tendencies that most shaped our careers – responses to the Black Legend, such as contributionist history and bibliometrics – and explain why we have chosen to move on. Keywords Spain, the Black Legend, history of science, early modern Spanish science, bibliometrics, historiography If we viewed the early modern landscape of scientific knowledge from the perspective of Philip II, who ruled from 1556–98, we would see many different cities and regions, each Corresponding author: John Slater, One Shields Avenue, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. Email: [email protected] Slater and López-Terrada 149 with particular capacities and traditions.1 Antwerp was a publishing powerhouse that churned out beautiful works of natural history.2 Naples produced distillers and works on natural magic.3 Seville was a bureaucratic center where cartographic and epidemiologi- cal information was compiled.4 The life of the court took place largely at the palace of the Escorial, with its extraordinary alchemical laboratory and an exquisite library that held, among other riches, the manuscript of Francisco Hernández’s natural history of New Spain.5 To that list we could add the botanical gardens at Aranjuez, as well as those in Lisbon, Manila, Lima, Veracruz, and so on.6 Philip made use of them all while physi- cians, natural philosophers, geometers, and naturalists from across these territories dedi- cated their books to the monarch. It is not the case, however, that that these physicians, natural philosophers, geometers, and naturalists felt that they shared a scientific or medical culture, even though they were fellow subjects of the same king.7 They belonged to him in a way that they did not belong to each other. And the varied landscape of scientific knowledge production that Philip 1. David Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and Science in Philip II’s Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michele L. Clouse, Medicine, Government, and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain: Shared Interests, Competing Authorities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 2. Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 3. William Eamon, Science and The Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Montserrat Cabré i Pairets, “Keeping Beauty Secrets in Early Modern Iberia,” in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds.) Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp.167–90. 4. María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); José Pardo-Tomás, “‘Antiguamente vivían más sanos que ahora’: Explanations of Native Mortality in the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias,” in John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (eds.) Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (London: Routledge, 2014), pp.41–66. 5. José María López Piñero and José Pardo-Tomás, La influencia de Francisco Hernández (1515-1587) en la constitución de la botánica y la materia médica modernas (Valencia: Universitat de València-CSIC, 1996); Mar Rey Bueno, “La mayson pour distiller des Eaües at El Escorial: Alchemy and Medicine at the Court of Philip II, 1556-1598,” in Teresa Huguet- Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold J. Cook (eds.) Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009), pp.26–39; María M . Portuondo, “The Study of Nature, Philosophy, and the Royal Library of San Lorenzo of the Escorial,” Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1106–50. 6. José María López Piñero, “Los jardines y los laboratorios de ‘destilación’,” in José María López Piñero, Historia de la Ciencia y de la Técnica en la Corona de Castilla. Siglos XVI y XVII (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 2002), pp.91–106. 7. John Slater and Andrés Prieto, “Was Spanish Science Imperial?,” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 3–10; Maríaluz López-Terrada, “Medical Pluralism in the Iberian Kingdoms: The Control of Extra-Academic Practitioners in Valencia,” in Teresa 150 History of Science 55(2) saw is not quite what nineteenth-century historians such as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo wrote of when they considered Spanish science and medicine; it was a natural outgrowth of Romantic nationalist projects to consider Italian, Flemish, German, Portuguese, or Mexican science in isolation from one another.8 The result was twofold. First, instead of seeing a diverse set of overlapping trajectories of knowledge, historians tended to appre- hend a Spain abstracted from its early modern political and geographic complexity. Second, the cold light of that unnatural isolation led historians to ask why Spain was so different from its neighbors.9 The history of Spanish science became a history of national difference. Nationalist mythos obscured the complexity of the empire, but it also rendered com- plexity on the Peninsula invisible. The former problem – obscuring the complexity of a polycentric empire – has been addressed with spectacular success lately.10 The latter problem – discerning the importance of local diversity, internal or confined networks of circulation, and so forth – persists and in some ways has intensified. Now that we have a marvelously complex imperial tapestry coming into view, with indigenous American practices existing alongside ‘conversion medicine’, there exists a dangerous temptation to believe that the people whose experimental or medical practices were not shaped by the Transatlantic trade winds of a global medical marketplace are somehow deficient or not the real story.11 We sometimes combat narrow nineteenth-century nationalism with a frame so large that the innumerable Menocchios of the Hispanic monarchy seem uniform. Ten years ago, it seemed as if the history of early modern Spanish science was simply missing its grand maxim, a pithy expression that might shed light on the particular mech- anism that would explain the production of scientific knowledge (or the presumed lack thereof) in Spain. It was a time to make sweeping statements about empire or economics Huguet-Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold John Cook (eds.) Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009), pp.7–25. 8. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, La ciencia española: Polémicas, indicaciones y proyectos (Madrid: Imprenta Central, 1879). 9. William Eamon, “‘Nuestros males no son constitucionales, sino circunstanciales’: The Black Legend and the History of Early Modern Spanish Science,” The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 7 (2009): 13–30; Víctor Navarro Brotóns and William Eamon, “Spain and The Scientific Revolution,” in Víctor Navarro Brotóns and William Eamon (eds.) Mas allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la revolución científica. Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution (Valencia: Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero, 2007), pp.27–38; William Eamon, “The Difference that Made Spain, the Difference that Spain Made,” in Slater, López-Terrada and Pardo-Tomás, Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, pp.231–43 (note 4). 10. Brian Jones and Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “Science and Empire in the Iberian Atlantic” (Oxford bibliographies, Latin American Studies, 2013) Available at: http://www.oxford- bibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0150.xml. 11. José Pardo-Tomás, “La ‘medicina de la conversión’: el convento como espacio de cultura médica novohispana,” in José Pardo-Tomás and Maruicio Sánchez Menchero (eds.) Geografías médicas: orillas y fronteras culturales de la medicina (siglos XVI y XVII) (Mexico: CEIICH-UNAM, 2014), pp.17–46. Slater and López-Terrada 151 or America, partly in an attempt to render the Habsburg monarchy comprehensible to an Anglophone academy. However, it proved difficult to integrate the history of Spanish science into broader accounts of science and technology. In 2004, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra asked how much longer “Iberian Science in the Renaissance” could be ignored, and the answer always seemed to be, just a little longer.12 Two years later, in 2006, Antonio Barrera Osorio and Cañizares published important reevaluations
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