Being Beyond: the Black Legend and How We Got Over It (Slater And

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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 physicians, 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 complexity 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 Lopez Pinero, 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 of the role of Spanish knowledge production within the history of European science.13 That same year, Brian Ogilvie published a magnificent book on Renaissance naturalism that had next to nothing on Spanish naturalism, and Stephen Gaukroger explained in a single sentence how he could leave Spain out of a five-volume account of the development of a scientific culture in the West.14 The Iberian Peninsula, like China and Islam, simply would not fit, Gaukroger explained. We have become accustomed to the invisibility of Spanish cultural production. Antonio Sánchez and Henrique Leitão recently published an overview of early modern Iberian science, hopefully pointing to “a new generation of historians of science,” but even in their list of recent publications, 2006 was a watershed year now a decade gone.15 Less sanguinely, Sánchez and Leitão lament that, “in some quarters, silence still seems to be the norm.”16 Even if we look at the most familiar texts within Hispanic letters, such as Antonio de Nebrija’s prologue to his 1492 grammar of the Spanish language, we find Orientalizing performances of Hispanic non-canonicity. Nebrija’s grammar is the point of intersection among philology, literary history, and historical linguistics, as well as any consideration of the role of the Spanish language within the genesis of global cultures.17 When Oxford University Press published his 1926 edition of the grammar, Ignacio González Llubrera, writing in English, called Nebrija one of the “great precursors of Erasmus,” and Walter Mignolo referred to the prologue as a “well-known anecdote in the

12. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 86–124. 13. Antonio Barrera Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2006); Jorge Cañizares- Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 14. Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.24; Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.v. 15. Antonio Sánchez and Henrique Leitão, “Revisiting Early Modern Iberian Science, from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” Early Science and Medicine 21 (2016): 107–12, 107. 16. Sánchez and Leitão, “Revisiting Early Modern Iberian Science,” p.107 (note 15). 17. Antonio de Nebrija, “On Language and Empire: The Prologue to Grammar of the Castilian Language (1492),” Introduction and translation by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, PMLA 131 (2016): 197–208, 197; Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp.184–6. 152 History of Science 55(2) history of Spanish culture.”18 PMLA, the flagship journal of US literary studies, recently published the prologue as a “little known document.”19 We mention this example from historical linguistics because it highlights the amphibious status of many touchstones of Hispanic culture: they can be at the same time “well known” and “little known.” The constant rediscovery of classics that were never lost simply enshrines their status as exotic, raising the question of whether any Hispanic text can truly be considered canoni- cal in the Anglophone academy. The problem of Hispanic invisibility is even more acute when the subject becomes the history of Spanish science. (The interplay between visibil- ity and invisibility is at the center of Daniela Bleichmar’s theoretical meditations in Visible Empire.)20 Documenting Hispanic invisibility is irksome but necessary in a culture such as that of the US, in which Spanish-speakers have come to be seen by some as invaders, p. 197. Documenting invisibility is not the same thing as caring about the Black Legend, however. Scholarship motivated by the values of the Black Legend often begins with a perverse set of questions, such as “why didn’t something happen in Spain,” or, to paraphrase William Eamon, “why didn’t Spain make a difference?” Why was Spain so different is the subtext of many of the questions we are asked about Spain at conferences. Was it perhaps the influence of the Moor? Or Roman Catholicism and the Counterreformation? Or disillusionment and skepticism? Hiding in these hypotheses is the presupposition that Spanish history is nonstandard, noncanonical, deviant. The questions are not simply academic.21 Wondering why something didn’t happen or why it isn’t happening came to motivate historical actors in global Hispanic cultures. In other words, asking a particular set of questions about Spanish marginality served to produce Spanish marginality.22 Beatriz Helena Domingues suggests as much by inverting the question: “shouldn’t we ask what criterion it is that determines who is important (or worth quoting in the official history of science) and who is not?”23 We would go even further: why shouldn’t Spain be allowed to be different? Since when is cultural difference a problem? The two of us have been exhausted by years of questions about Spanish exceptionality that imply a hierarchy of relative worth. Thinking about Spanish difference as a problem to be explained away kept us from thinking about the richness of the lived experiences of people who populated the Iberian Peninsula. Similarly, attempting to account for global

18. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, Ignacio González-Llubera (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p.xiii; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p.38. 19. Nebrija, “On Language and Empire” (note 17). 20. Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 21. Eamon, “The Difference that Made Spain” (note 9). 22. Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine, From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp.2–11. 23. Beatriz Helena Domigues, “Spain and the Dawn of Modern Science,” Metascience, 7.2 (1998): 298–312, 299. Slater and López-Terrada 153 trajectories of knowledge has sometimes made the histories that played out within a particular municipality, region, or kingdom seem like nothing more than picturesque local history. So we are done writing history as coded apology or justification. We are done trying to assimilate our histories to a master narrative. We’re over it. We are beyond the Black Legend. To be clear: neither of us trained to be historians of science, and our work has generally focused on the points of contingency between the social history of early modern Spain and the histories of medicine and science (López-Terrada) and the interactions between scientific discourses and other forms of cultural production, especially literature (Slater).24 Although neither of us identifies as a historian of science, our research has been profoundly shaped by the field, and in return we hope that our work makes a contribution to its understanding. Additionally, one of us (López-Terrada) participated directly in the historiographic developments of the 1990s we discuss in this article.25 With that in mind, we document in what follows the techniques that have long been used (ineffectually) to justify Spain’s relevance to the history of science. They were the techniques used to request a place at the table, techniques that became an obstacle to historical inquiry into the history of the Habsburg monarchy. We go on to discuss what we find to be the effects of these tools of justification and why we believe they are obsolete and unnecessary. We close by explaining what it means to us to be beyond the Black Legend, and how letting go of the myth freed us up to think about other things.

The tools of justification The history of Spanish science used to serve a clear function within broader accounts of European scientific and technical progress: Spain was a cautionary tale, a story of how a particular alloy of backwardness, arrogance, religious zealotry, and obsession with status could thwart the beneficial ends of science. That phase of the Spanish history of science is clearly over. However, one of the oddities of recent histories of Spanish science, especially those written during the last few decades, is that it is not always apparent what work this new history is supposed to do. It is not always clear what the history of Spanish science means if it is no longer a warning about the costly resistance to modernity. As José Ramón Marcaida López recently pointed out, Peter Dear’s question, “What is the history of science the history of?”, takes on a particular urgency in the case of the Spanish history of science.26 One response to the uncertain status of the history of Spanish science has been to assert the importance of Spanish contributions to the development of science across

24. John Slater, Todos son hojas: literatura e historia natural en el barroco español (Madrid: CSIC, 2010). 25. See, for example, José María López Piñero and Maríaluz López-Terrada, La influencia española en la introducción en Europa de las plantas americanas (1493–1623) (Valencia: Universitat de València – CSIC, 1997). 26. José Ramón Marcaida López, Arte y ciencia en el barroco español (Madrid: Focus-Abengoa – Marcial Pons, 2014), p.279; Peter Dear, “What is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis 96 (2005): 390–406. 154 History of Science 55(2)

Europe. These accounts have attempted to prove – often via reference to the reign of Charles V (r. 1516–56) – that Spain actually anticipated scientific developments elsewhere. Such histories claim that the Scientific Revolution had its roots in the Spanish experience of contact with the Americas, as if colonialism and America were mono- causal explanations for early modern European science and philosophy. Still others claim that Spanish conquest and imperialism triggered an epistemic shift, the results of which would only be manifested much later, in fields such as anthropology and ethnobotany. Starting in the early 1990s, José María López Piñero helped inaugurate a new phase in the history of Spanish naturalism, particularly the natural history of American plants. Essentially, López Piñero codified a point-based system for determining the importance of the work of naturalists. He examined the published works of natural history and tallied up the number of books published by an author like Nicolás Monardes, the number of editions those works went through, and the number of translations that were made of the book.27 More editions and more translations meant more importance. In a way, his scientometric or bibliometric school of historiography was an attempt to approximate impact and to assign greater impact to Spanish naturalists. Translations were especially important to López Piñero because translations indicated international diffusion. In addition to translations of books by Spanish authors, López Piñero documented the Iberian authors who had been quoted in books written by naturalists and natural philosophers elsewhere; he paid particular attention to accounts of the New World that were incorporated into European works of naturalism and medicine.28 His attempt was to trace the ‘influencia española’, or the Spanish influence, on the consti- tution of modern botany.29 The effect of this work was, in many cases, electrifying. Suddenly, we had a much clearer sense of the influence of Spanish naturalists and the ways in which knowledge about American flora was disseminated in Europe. But contributionist histories – of which the bibliometric school is one example – have tended to be useful in very discrete cases and can leave out important parts of the story. One of the most troubling lacunae was the entire reign of Philip IV, a period about which the history of science has had almost nothing to say. In contrast, art historians and literary historians have made this moment vivid and comprehensible; we see Philip IV as a patron of the arts and of theater – playful, discerning, the cynosure of early modern taste – and this has rendered him wonderfully present to twenty-first-century readers. Seen through the lens of the history

27. For summaries of this work, see: José María López Piñero, Medicina e historia natural en la sociedad español de los siglos XVI y XVII (Valencia: Univesitat de València, 2007); and José María López Piñero and María Luz Terrada Ferrandis, Introducción a la terminología médica (Barcelona: Masson, 2005). 28. López Piñero and Pardo-Tomás, La influencia de Francisco Hernández (note 5); José María López Piñero and José Pardo Tomás, Nuevos materiales y noticias sobre la historia de las plantas de Nueva España de Francisco Hernández (Valencia: CSIC-Universitat de València, 1994). 29. José María López Piñero and Maríaluz López-Terrada, La influencia española en la introduc- ción en Europa de las plantas americanas (Valencia: Universitat de València – CSIC, 1997). Slater and López-Terrada 155 of science, however, Philip IV is almost entirely invisible, incomprehensible, or incapable of sharing our values. The history of science has reduced this vibrant moment in the life of Spain and its cultural production to a dark enigma. The response to this invisibility and silence by historians of Spanish science has often been some form of contributionist history. Contributionist history of Spanish science makes the implicit claim that the history of Spanish science could be assimilated to standard narratives of scientific progress, great ideas, and high moral purpose. These stories reproduce the structure of arguments that Vincent Harding dismantled in a very different context more than forty years ago.30 As Harding said, treating translation as the measure of greatness is to measure how great it is “that someone else wanted it.”31 Contributionist history trivializes and impoverishes Spanish science by asking such lim- iting questions as whether or not Francis Bacon read works written by Spanish chroni- clers or naturalists. (Hernández, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, or Pedro Cieza de León would probably be stupefied if they were told that they would be important once they’d been read in London.) The answers to the questions posed by the history of Spanish science will not be found in England, or France, or Germany. Compounding the problems in the history of science were structural tendencies in the history of medicine (which, in the case of Spain, generally included natural history). The history of medicine is a discipline with deep institutional roots and, beginning in the nineteenth century, was often written by physicians who sought to identify in the past the academic origins of their own ideas about health and disease.32 Focusing on academic medicine frequently allowed historians to draw on print materials that were more widely available; the problem was that printed books came to seem like a measure of the robust- ness of a medical culture.33 By focusing on physicians and their books, as Andrew Cunningham explains, historians tended to create a bacteriological version (“versión bacteriológica”) of the history of medicine, one that conceived of medicine as a contest pitting evidence and common sense against empty theorizing and stupidity (“la evidencia y el sentido común contra la teoría y la estupidez”).34 For the most part, the history of medicine dealt with concepts or ideas (the circulation of the blood is a famous example) that often had little bearing on patients’ experience of health, sickness, and the wide range of therapeutic options that was available to them. This overlooked that health and sickness, as well as the attempts to alleviate suffering and cure diseases, were experiences shared by an entire culture or society (whether or not access to academic medicine was widely available or affordable). In theory, studies of epistolary networks or the commercial networks overseen by religious orders could have been more permeable to the diverse scientific cultures of the

30. Vincent Harding, “History: White, Negro, and Black,” Southern Exposure 1 (1974): 51–62. 31. Harding, “History: White, Negro, and Black,” p.55 (note 30). 32. Luis García Ballester, “La historia de la medicina, disciplina médica,” Cuadernos his- panoamericanos 446–7 (1987): 343–56; José María López Piñero, “El estudio histórico de la medicina en la obra de Laín Entralgo,” Dynamis 1 (1981): 231–9. 33. Bjørn Okholm Skaarup, for example, treats printed books as metadata of anatomical investigation in Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 34. Andrew Cunningham, “La transformación de la peste: El laboratorio y la identidad de las enfermedades infecciosas,” Dynamis 11 (1991): 2–71, 59. 156 History of Science 55(2)

Habsburg monarchy than the history of medicine. In practice, however, studies of the Republic of Letters or Jesuit knowledge practices often obscure the complexity of Spanish information sharing. The Jesuits were undeniably important, but they were one of many religious orders that exchanged information about plants, animals, minerals, diseases, and so on. Jesuit science was developed in the context of rivalries with Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites, all of which had their own libraries, epistolary networks, programs for poverty relief, gardens, and prestigious university chairs. Some religious orders maintained vast enterprises for the exchange of knowledge and speci- mens; other orders tended to concentrate on particular regions or kingdoms and traded local information. Scholars have barely begun to understand this intellectual and institutional diversity.35 Studies of the Republic of Letters, on the other hand, tend to sideline Spanish authors who participated in large networks for the exchange of information that existed within the Habsburg monarchy, but may have had few correspondents in Paris or Amsterdam. This is not to say that the Republic of Letters and Jesuit networks are not important. However, to the extent than historians confuse the production of books in the Low Countries with the production of modern science, or conflate the illusion of universality produced by the Republic of Letters with the history of global epistolary exchange, those historians manufacture Spanish invisibility.36

Why the tools of justification exist Historians get baited into questions such as whether someone in Germany or France read a colonial chronicle because it sometimes seems the only widely accepted measure of impact (by which is meant any sort of cultural relevance at all) is international influence. Jesús Pérez Magallón, building on the work of Eduardo Subirats and Edward Said, called this the “insufficiency” of Spanish scientists, when compared to French or English models.37 Put

35. Víctor Navarro Brotóns, “Los Jesuítas y la renovación científica en la España del siglo XVII,” Studia Historica: Historia Moderna 14 (2009): 15–44; Víctor Navarro Brotons, Disciplinas, saberes y prácticas. Filosofía natural, matemáticas y astronomía en la sociedad española de la época moderna (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2014). John Slater, “Les cultures matemàtiques i religioses de la primeria de la València de l’edat moderna,” Afers, fulls de recerca i pensament 82 (2015): 499–521. 36. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, Vol. 3 of Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Florike Egmond, The World of Carolus Clusius: Natural History in the Making 1550–1610 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); Maríaluz López- Terrada, “Flora and the Hapsburg Crown: Clusius, Spain, and American Natural History,” in Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy (eds.) Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011), pp.43–68. 37. Jesús Pérez Magallón, Construyendo la modernidad: La cultura española en el tiempo de los novatores (1675–1725) (Madrid: CSIC, 2002), p.50. Mar Rey Bueno examines the supposed insufficiency of chemical medicine in Spain in “Los paracelsistas españoles: Medicina química en la España moderna,” in Navarro Brotóns and Eamon, Mas alla de la Leyenda Negra, pp.41–55, 42–43 (note 9). Slater and López-Terrada 157 differently, the knowledge practices of the inhabitants of global Hispanic cultures are not worthy of a reader’s notice in the absence of a prestigious non-Hispanic association. Histories that attempt to avoid questions of insufficiency sometimes go too far in stressing Spanish power. In this vein, imperialism is one of a number of terms that scholars use to sell the history of Spanish science in ways that can impoverish accounts of the acquisition of natural knowledge during the early modern period. We know as well as anyone that ‘empire’ provides an easy mode of narration that immediately makes our scholarship comprehensible to broader audiences.38 It certainly goes over better than ‘composite’ or ‘polycentric’ or ‘Habsburg monarchy’. But the use of the term ‘empire’ (and a focus on relative power, rather than comparative insufficiency) can take on a particular charge in the context of the history of Spanish science. This is because attempts to combat the Black Legend often put historians of Spanish science in the position of advocates for the relevance of their own culture. López Piñero relied heavily on phrases such as “nuestra patria” [our homeland] and “nuestro país” [our country] early in his career, but as late as 2002 spoke of the time the physician Leonardo Fioravanti spent in “nuestro país,” by which he meant the court of Philip II.39 These statements by López Piñero are representative examples of the first- person voice of the history of Spanish science that can make it sound inward facing. When the subject is empire, however, this identification – “nuestra patria” – turns history into an admission of complicity or an act of mortification. Mortification does not produce history, it footnotes the old tale of Hispanic deviance, a tale that was be internalized as prophecy in the eighteenth century and realized in our own time as historical memory. The past is not a foreign country when it comes to Spain. One of the developments in recent histories of Spanish science that has helped us to stop thinking about the Black Legend are studies of Atlantic and Pacific knowledge practices. We are enthusiastic about the extraordinary scholarship that is illuminating the interrelatedness of many knowledge practices within the Hispanic monarchy. It is undeniably true, for example, that the difference that America made was too often and for far too long missing in histories of European science, and that the broad Atlantic and Pacific contexts that the history of early modern science now considers are tre- mendously useful. Given the variety and complexity of the Habsburgs’ polycentric monarchy – as well as the obvious power that analyses of early modern networks of information exchange have to decenter Eurocentric ideologies – one might reasonably ask why a historian would focus on the Iberian Peninsula at all. However, when we think about our own perspectives on the history of science, we find that a focus on the Spanish- and Catalan-speaking kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula continues to be productive. In light of the extraordinary diversity of the Habsburg’s global empire, it may seem passé to focus on Valencia or Zaragoza. But once you are over the Black Legend, you stop worrying that your documents don’t mention Manila or that the friar you

38. Slater, López-Terrada and Pardo-Tomás, Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (note 4). 39. José María López Piñero, “La medicina del Barroco español,” Revista de la Universidad de Madrid, 11 (1962): 479–515, 480, 486; López Piñero, “Los jardines y los laboratorios,” p.103 (note 6). 158 History of Science 55(2) study never saw a cabinet of curiosities. The silences and differences become objects of inquiry, not triggers of anxiety.40 Scientific theories and practices are social constructions that are culture-dependent, as Maarten Bode explains, and there are compelling reasons to focus on the lives and experiences of people whose culture was not discernably a product of transoceanic exchange.41 Partly, this is because we see continuity to be as important as change in the communities we study. Partly, this is because we find our focus to be a practical aid in documenting the histories of science and medicine in ways that are coherent. In the society of the ‘Antiguo Régimen’, in which an individual’s immediate community plays a central role in the experiences of daily life, a person’s history is socially inscribed within a sphere of relationships and dependencies that condition his or her possible actions, expressions, thoughts, and feelings. This is especially important when we are dealing with practices related to health and sickness within a particular community, municipality, or house- hold.42 It is our own study of the documents that we rely on – hospital records, wills, reci- pes, Inquisitorial processes, sermons, and pamphlets – that leads us to focus on Castile, the Crown of Aragon, Navarre, and occasionally Portugal. These kingdoms maintained their own political diversity, economic particularities, and even their own weights and measures. In basic terms, this means that even when medicines were imported from the colonies, they were not sold the same way and under the same regulatory regimes in Palma de Mallorca and Pamplona. These structural differences shape individual experiences, even when patients across the Peninsula use a specific American drug plant, such as guaiacum, to treat the same disease. What is more, territorial identities and distinctiveness actually strengthened and consolidated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – despite sporadic efforts at centralization. Portugal, which gained its independence from the Habsburg monarchy in 1640, is an exemplary case; Catalonia, which began a frustrated war for independence in the same year, provides many of the same lessons. This does not mean that Spain’s colonies are unimportant. It is simply a recognition that an approach to knowledge practices that attempts to take into account both the complexity of colonial cultural diversity, as well as the colonies’ distinct political, social, and economic structures, alongside the regulatory realities of the municipality of Valencia, for example, is practicably impossible. Viewing the history of knowledge practices from the perspective of the history of medicine means that local conditions on the ground can- not be ignored; it also accentuates the differences among differing political and economic climates within the monarchy.

40. John Slater, “The Green Gold Fallacies: Myth and Reality in the Transatlantic Trade in Medicinal Plants,” in José Pardo-Tomás and Mauricio Sánchez-Menchero, Geografias médi- cas. Fronteras culturales de la medicina hispanoamericana, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico: CEIICH-UNAM, 2014), pp.99–122. 41. Maarten Bode, “The Transformations of Disease in Expert and Lay Medical Cultures,” Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine 2 (2011): 14–20, 14. 42. Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). Slater and López-Terrada 159

A good example of the ways in which differing regulatory and cultural climates lead us to focus on local phenomena is the case of curanderos (empirical healers) and their patients. On the Peninsula, curanderos worked within a society that was ideologically and culturally more homogeneous than its counterparts in the colonies; Iberian medical cultures were profoundly influenced by centuries of Galenism in ways that the colonies were not. Knowledge and healing practices in New Spain should, we believe, be studied within the diversity of medical concepts found in the colonies. It would not make sense to try to locate the same kinds of diversity on the Peninsula.43 Of course we find it fundamental to consider large-scale issues alongside geographi- cally circumscribed phenomena. It was our commitment to presenting the very complexity and variability of medical practices within the Habsburg monarchy that led us to co-edit Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. But the utility of history is not exclusively determined by the scope of the study. One very helpful reviewer of this article wondered whether we were turning our backs on recent studies within Atlantic and Latin American history. We by no means are. We purposefully seek to locate our work within broader frameworks and approaches to the Habsburg monarchy.44 It is also true, however, that our reading of historical documents does not always lead us across oceans, or raise the scent of products newly arrived from afar. The balance that we try to strike is to comprehend the incredible variability within the Spanish empire, while rec- ognizing that variable factors are not uniformly distributed.

43. Teresa Huguet-Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold J. Cook, Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009); Kristy Wilson Bowers, Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013); Berco, From Body to Community (note 42); Michael Solomon, Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing on Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, Oxford: Penn Press, 2010). 44. Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine and Kevin Sheehan (eds.), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Adam Warren, Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Jose Ramon Jouve Martin, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); Emily Berquist, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Gerardo Martínez Hernández, La medicina en la Nueva España, siglos XVI y XVII. Consolidación de los modelos institucionales y académicos (Mexico: UNAM, 2014); R. A. Kashanipour, “Contagious Connections: Recent Approaches to the History of Medicine in Early America,” William & Mary Quarterly 73 (2016): 141–59. 160 History of Science 55(2)

As appealing as it might be to bring the full armament of medical practices of the vast Habsburg Empire to bear on an argument about supposed Spanish belatedness, we are not trying to ‘win’ the ideological battle that has come to be known as the Black Legend. It is the wrong fight. In a popular culture that compares Columbus to Hitler, describes mission- aries as nothing more than unreconstructed slavers or deviously witting agents of epidemic infection, many scholars of Spanish history feel they have something to be ashamed of. It sometimes feels that the wonder and delight our colleagues working in other traditions unabashedly display would be unseemly in our case. The tools of justification exist because historians of Spanish science labor between these two poles: on the one hand, ignorance of Spanish science; and on the other, the weight of the past that makes the history of Spanish science more about the legacy of imperialism (that is, more about the twenty-first century) than the experiences of human beings who lived and died hundreds of years ago. These feelings about complicity and insufficiency have been very well studied. So well, in fact, that discussions of the ‘polémica de la ciencia española’ [polemic about Spanish science] themselves became an abiding topic of historiographic inquiry. In the introduction to his Ciencia y técnica, López Piñero explained that the debates about Spanish science, which had lasted for more than a century, could be reduced to two positions: lamentations over Spanish inferiority, and chauvinistic claims about Spanish discoveries.45 Polemicists charac- terized Spain as either entirely out of step or confidently calling the tune. López Piñero intended to put the subject to rest, but a funny thing happened on the way to forgetting about the ‘polémica de la ciencia española’: talking about these debates became a convention of the history of Spanish science. In other words, many historians made López Piñero’s explanation of the fruitlessness of historiographic Manichaeism a feature of their studies; it is still common to find histories of Spanish science and medicine that begin with an introduction about the ‘polémica’. In some cases this led to pen- etrating analysis, as in the work of Pérez Magallón and Eamon. Eamon helped to spearhead a change in the status of these debates, shifting the focus from an inward- facing discussion of the meaning of a Spanish national culture to broader consideration of the deleterious effects of the Black Legend. Concretely, Eamon suggested the ways in which the Scientific Revolution was a narrative tool of Hispanic exclusion because it could not account for the Habsburg monarchy. This shifted the onus from historians of Spanish science, who had felt the need to stress Spanish contributions, to historians of European science, who, Eamon suggested, had failed to tell a story capable of accom- modating the scientific activity of a massive state. Despite Eamon’s efforts, oscillation between anxieties over power and handwringing over insufficiency persists. We are aware that complaining about the way that history has been done can make us sound ungrateful. We are not. López Piñero’s nearly innumerable works are among those that we keep constantly at hand and cite frequently, and one of us (López-Terrada) is proud to have contributed to the important developments in the history of early modern naturalism. At the same time, we are no longer interested in justifying Spain by answer- ing questions about what the Spanish did for modernity or for Europe (or why Spain did not do more). Our own modernity is not the measure of all things.

45. José María López Piñero, Ciencia y técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII (Barcelona: Labor, 1979). Slater and López-Terrada 161

Being beyond Rather than focusing on the history of one nasty form of bigotry, a bigotry that deformed even the historical accounts meant to combat it, we believe that the best way to lay the Black Legend to rest is to focus on the dignity of the human beings we study. Their knowledge practices, technological solutions, observations, diagnoses, experiments, and reali- zations are in no way insufficient or inferior because they differ from someone else’s. We do not want to set aside our own values, but we do try to understand historical subjects on their own terms. These methods are not so different from those used in literary, social, economic, demographic, and local history, in which cultures and societies can be studied without concern for their relative worth. The history of science still places an inordinate weight on extrinsic criteria (such as belatedness or advancement) in a search for the self-congratulatory story of how moderns arrived at the right answers. We are not searching for unknown great men, or making new maps of undiscovered centers and distant peripheries, or uncovering signs of progress that others might have missed. None of these attempts would contribute much to the rich and complex histories of the communities we study. The history of science in the Habsburg monarchy itself is a field that is at once global and, to use Carla Nappi’s terms, “polyvocal,” “decentered,” and “multisited.”46 This complexity is why we collaborate. Some years ago, each of us realized that we were working on problems related to the history of Spanish science that were too complex for one person to figure out alone. Our collaboration, whether we are presenting at conferences together, organizing col- loquia, writing, or editing, is due to the points of convergence in our research. There are scenes of interaction and mediation among discourses, practitioners, and experiences that allow us to document the complexities of the control and practice of medicine in all of its cultural dimensions.47 In this sense, we build on the work of John H. Elliott and many others who explain the political intricacies of the Hispanic monarchy. The same intricacies exist within the world of baroque medicine, whether we find medical practices represented in Inquisitorial processes, literary texts, or medical manuals. Our collaboration is possible because we share a theoretical orientation, an interest in a wide range of scenes and practitioners of scientific activity, and a commitment to expanding the kinds of source materials that inform our work. Our point of departure is that scientific theories and practices are social constructions that are culture-dependent, and must be situated in their social, cultural, and political contexts. To paraphrase Bolufer and Morant, science, like an identity, is socially constructed, multiple, and changing.48 We do not feel the need to compare the marvels, insights, and trials of the world we study to experiences conditioned by different cultures. There are

46. Carla Nappi, “The Global and Beyond: Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science,” Isis 104 (2013): 102–10. 47. John Slater and Maríaluz López-Terrada, “Scenes of Mediation: Staging Medicine in the Spanish Interludes,” Social History of Medicine 24 (2011): 226–43. 48. Mónica Bolufer Peruga and Isabel Morant Deusa, “Identidades vividas, identidades atribui- das,” in Pilar Pérez-Fuentes Hernández (ed.) Entre dos orillas: Las mujeres en la historia de España y América Latina (Barcelona: Icaria, 2012), pp.317–52, p.318. 162 History of Science 55(2) cultures enough within the Iberian Peninsula. Because of this, we have focused our recent work on the diversity of scientific and medical cultures of Spain: the history of a plural past in which a wide range of actors contribute to varied discourses, form “local systems of exchange,” and develop “ever more elaborate exchange languages.”49 Setting aside normative history of science, which predicts when novel theories ought to have surfaced in a particular place and documents their arrival, we study the conditions that made ideas and beliefs attractive to individuals and communities. This means that we attempt to understand the values and perspectives of people who encountered and generated scientific knowledge in order to create a picture of the scientific cultures of a society at a given moment. The historians of early modern medicine who have expanded the objects of the field to include diverse practices and concepts related to disease and healthcare have influenced us.50 Their efforts have multiplied approaches, sources, spaces, patients, and practitioners. For some time now, historians of medicine have demonstrated a growing interest in the coexistence of medical systems, or medical pluralism, within a given city, university, or region. In particular, the concept of medical pluralism has been useful in elucidating the interactions between academic and extra-academic medicine, and essen- tial for understanding the strategies of patients who routinely sought out multiple forms of medical assistance.51 Furthermore, focusing on the nature of the interactions among medical systems – especially when taking into account the experiences of patients – less- ens the temptation to understand past practices in terms of their ‘proven’, modern counterparts. Sickness, health, cure, and remedy are unstable concepts, each with a history that can be better understood when we understand medicine as a cultural act imbricated in other cultural acts (religious, political, artistic, and so on). Expanding our definitions of what science and medicine entail means including new practitioners and patients, as well as spaces and scenes of treatment. Magic, empirical cures, fakery and quackery, home remedies, and convent medicine are now routine elements in a broader conception of medical pluralism. This broadening of subjects and spaces has allowed us better to understand unregulated and extra-official

49. Peter Galison, “Scientific Cultures,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith and Matthew Norton (eds.) Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.121–9, 124. 50. Teresa Huguet-Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold J. Cook, Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009). 51. Robert Jütte, Motzi Eklöf and Marie C. Nelson, Historical Aspects of Unconventional Medicine: Approaches, Concepts, Case Studies (Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health Publications, 2001); Robert Jütte (ed.), Medical Pluralism: Past—Present—Future. Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, 46 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013); David Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); David Gentilcore, “Was there a ‘Popular Medicine’ in Early Modern Europe?,” Folklore 115 (2004): 151–66; L. W. B. Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Willem de Blécourt and Cornelie Usborne, “Preface: Situating ‘Alternative Medicine’ in the Modern Period,” Medical History 43 (1999): 283–5. Slater and López-Terrada 163 medical practices; paradoxically, it has also led one of us (López-Terrada) to consider regulatory regimes in a new light.52 Most importantly for us, expanding the way we understand medicine has put individual patients and their choices front and center. This shift in focus – from healer to patient – has taken place over the past thirty years.53 Nevertheless, it is still relatively uncommon to recount “medical history from below” in studies of early modern Spain.54 In order to document more perspectives, we have had to draw on different source materials. López-Terrada’s current work is a good example. As one of fifteen researchers cur- rently collaborating on the construction of early modern identities [construcción del yo moderno], López-Terrada reconstructs the biographies of ‘sanadoras’ [women healers], drawing on the archives of the Inquisition. The ‘sanadoras’ who gave testimony before the Inquisition were healers during a time when women were prohibited from being physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. The documentation is fragmentary, often episodic, and obviously problematic: the archival materials themselves are tools of repression, not expression. The documents record the testimony of accusers and the accused; they are in no way impartial. That does not mean, however, that these ‘sanadoras’ were without narrative strategies that allowed them to explain and defend a worldview that was their own. Inquisitorial documents are valuable partly because the archives of other justice systems with jurisdiction over medical practice are more fragmentary and widely dispersed. Nevertheless, historians of medicine have seldom used Inquisitorial archives.55 Although there are studies of witchcraft that draw on the Inquisition’s records, there are few modern studies of the people who were processed by the Inquisition for their healing practices. In addition to Inquisitorial archives, literary representations have been particularly useful to us. Interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literary and medical sources have long typified histories of the Great Pox.56 Literature does not serve as evidence of

52. López-Terrada, “Medical Pluralism in the Iberian Kingdoms” (note 7). 53. Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below,” Theory & Society 14 (1985): 175–98; Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Philip Rieder, La figure du patient au XVIII siècle (Genève: Droz, 2010); Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 54. José Pardo-Tomás and Àlvar Martínez-Vidal, “Stories of Disease Written by Patients and Lay Mediators in the Spanish Republic of Letters: 1680–1720,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2008): 467–91; Alfons Zarzoso, “El pluralismo médico a través de la cor- respondencia privada en la Cataluña del siglo XVIII,” Dynamis 21 (2001): 409–33; Carolin Schmitz, Los enfermos en la España barroca (1600–1740) y el pluralismo médico: espacios, estrategias y actitudes (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2016). 55. Luis García Ballester, Los moriscos y la medicina. Un capítulo de la medicina y la ciencia marginadas en la España del siglo XVI (Barcelona: Labor, 1984); José Pardo-Tomás and Àlvar Martínez-Vidal, “Victims and Experts. Medical Practitioners and the Spanish Inquisition,” in John Woodgard and Robert Jütte (eds.) Coping with Sickness. Medicine, Law and Human Rights - Historical Perspectives (Sheffield: European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, 2000), pp.11–27; Tayra M. C. Lanuza Navarro, “L’astrologia en la vida quotidiana en una ciutat de l’edat moderna. Entre la Universitat i les creences populars,” Afers XXX:82 (2015): 467–97. 56. Berco, From Body to Community (note 42). 164 History of Science 55(2) medical practices, but rather as evidence of the interrogation of medical practices and concepts. The ridicule, satire, parody, delight, and pleasure associated with medical practices are particularly evident in plays, for example.57 Representations of patients negotiating a varied medical marketplace – in which Galenic, chemical, and popular remedies are on offer – inform our understanding of patients’ choices, as we find them documented in medical manuals and archival documents. Again, literary texts are not evidence of decision-making processes; however, literature does explore the fascination with popular and supernatural remedies, studied by scholars in other contexts.58 Literature can dis- seminate medical ideas, but it first reorganizes the medical field according to literary values; this reorganization and representation forms part of baroque medicine. Our claim is not that we have come to our convictions about the subjects and sources for the history of Spanish science and medicine especially early; on the contrary, we believe it is important to point out just how long it has taken us to get beyond the Black Legend. Our efforts are deeply indebted to the decades-long transformation of the histories of science and medicine of the early modern and medieval periods. Our attitudes are profoundly informed by the work of scholars such as Portuondo, Pérez Magallón, and others. In Secret Science, Portuondo asked what the silences in the historical record mean; documenting secrecy proved a productive way of understanding sixteenth-century scientific activity.59 Pérez Magallón insisted nearly fifteen years ago that scientific cultures had to be understood on their own terms, without allowing comparisons to create false hierarchies.60 More recently, Marcaida tells this history of seventeenth-century science using the tools of art history, and Matthew Crawford shows how competing knowledge communities – popular and elite – determined the political utilities of botanical science.61 All of these works – and many more than we could name here – situate the use and production of scientific knowledge within complex cultural milieus and are largely unconcerned about how Spanish ideas played in Paris.

Conclusion The need to study Spanish science as a history of useful responses to culturally bound questions about nature now presents itself with greater urgency, as we feel the great appa- ratus of historiographic generation whir into action to mark the centenary of Luther’s 95 Theses. The debates about the relative value of Spanish science date to the early days of

57. Slater and López-Terrada, “Scenes of Mediation” (note 47). 58. See, for example: María Tausiet, Ponzoña en los ojos: brujería y superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Turner, 2004); Julio Caro Baroja, Vidas mágicas e inquisición (Madrid: Taurus, 1967); José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del Barroco (Barcelona: Ariel, 1990), pp.461–2. 59. Portuondo, Secret Science (note 4). 60. “… cada cultura hay que estudiarla como lo que es, relacionándola con las demás, pero sin el criterio de authoridad y valor que subyace a paradigmas inmutables que establecen jerarquías difícilmente aceptables.” Pérez Magallón, Construyendo la modernidad, p.51 (note 37). 61. Marcaida, Arte y ciencia; Matthew Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). Slater and López-Terrada 165 the Reformation, and many continue to labor under their spell.62 Since at least the seventeenth century, talking about Spanish science has been a means to sort out a variety of questions about the status of Hispanic cultures. This sorting out is still important, as we have said. But asking ‘What does modernity owe Spain?’ puts twenty-first-century values and struggles first, in a way that can quickly slide into polemic. We are not naive about the power and utility of history. But the work of a naturalist, an astrologer, a midwife, or a mathematician does not simply gain importance in light of their relationship to us. The temptation to construct an image of the past by foregrounding its relationship to the present (and what we think is praiseworthy or lamentable about ourselves) is under- standable. The past, however, is more than prologue. It is not enough to ask that the history of science in the Hispanic world be narrowly understood as either contribution to modern science as we understand it today or a colorful anecdote about tomatoes and maize that makes a feeble nod to inclusiveness. Another of our long-time collaborators, José Pardo-Tomás, expressed the hope that the history of science would move beyond attempts to abolish differences – “abolir diferencias” – between Spain and its neighbors, and begin to focus on the richness and variety of European scientific cultures.63 We agree. Teleological accounts of the steady march toward scientific enlightenment tend not to account for the experiences of the people whose lives might otherwise be the object of study. The study of Spanish scientific ideas, abstracted from the lives of human beings who used technologies, advanced theories, wrote books, and diagnosed and suffered disease, has in practice been reduced to a story of ignorance, lack of access to or aware- ness of the truth, and intransigence. We have decided that these are games we do not want to play anymore. Ours is not a Pollyannaish belief in a post-racial history of Spanish science; it is more like giving up on explaining racism to people who insist that all lives matter. There just happens to be more productive work to be done. Of course, we write from positions of privilege, largely free from the more pernicious, ongoing effects of the Black Legend and institutional racism. But on a practical level, existential questions about the relative status of Spanish science have not led anywhere or persuaded anyone. While combatting the Black Legend may be still be important to some, it is no longer interesting to us. Fighting the Black Legend does not help elucidate the subjects we want to understand. We may find that negative evaluations of Spain still haunt the minds of a few reviewers and editors, but to us, at least, the Black Legend no longer feels like an obstacle to producing good history and textual scholarship. Forms of discrimination and racism that affect the lives of people today, including the invisibility of Hispanic cultural production, will continue to matter. The Black Legend as a feature of early modern history, on the other hand, will not. It is a myth that will not be defeated or disproved; it will be forgotten. We’re moving on.

62. Peter Harrison, “Myth 24: That Religion has Typically Impeded the Progress of Science,” in Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (eds.) Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp.195–201; Claudia Stein, Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany (Farham: Ashgate, 2009), p.101. 63. José Pardo-Tomás, Review of Teresa Huguet-Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga and Harold J. Cook, Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009), in Hispania 71 (2011): 856–60, 860. 166 History of Science 55(2)

Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography John Slater and Maríaluz López-Terrada have collaborated formally since 2011, but have drawn informally on one another’s input and expertise for much longer. López-Terrada’s research uses the tools of social history to examine the medical cultures of early modern Spain, from the academic medicine of physicians to popular remedies. Slater studies the ways in which Spanish textual genres—from satire, to sermons, to plays—organize medical and scientific knowledge.