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Not Even Past NOT EVEN PAST The past is never dead. It's not even past NOT EVEN PAST Search the site ... The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World By Ralph Bauer (2019) Like 46 Tweet By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra This book has been an intellectual adventure to read, all 600-plus pages of it. The Scientic Revolution, Ralph Bauer argues, carries a connotation of “the discovery of new worlds” in nature. In historiography, the early modern revolution in cosmology has long been connected to the Age of Discovery in cosmography. Yet the two things remain conceptually distinct. We can indict Christopher Columbus for the violence of conquest but not Galileo for the discovery of spots on the sun. Yet what if discovery and conquest were conceptually intertwined from the very beginning? The Alchemy of Conquest completely reframes the concept of the Scientic Revolution by taking medieval nominalism and alchemy seriously. Privacy - Terms Bauer traces the origins of the categories of discovery and conquest back to the thirteenth-century Renaissance, particularly to the rise of Franciscan nominalism, artisanal alchemical experimentation, and the late medieval spiritual conquest of pagan and heathen souls. Both the alchemical-atomistic conception of matter and the nominalist interpretation of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of divine and human creation. Nature and thus God could be understood not through Aristotelian logic and Scholastic syllogism but through a painstakingly empirical exploration of randomly assembled matter. Universal law could only be known though the careful empirical codication of myriad local laws. The discovery of the secrets of nature happened through violent artisanal extraction and alchemical re. Artisanal tinkering, in turn, could improve nature. Such a voluntarist understanding of God’s power and human knowledge of nature led to a voluntarist understanding of religious conversion and to Franciscan global chiliastic religious missions of spiritual conquest. The empirical conquest of both nature and souls (religious transformation) began with William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Ramon Llull, Arab Aristotelians, and dozens of other artisan alchemists. By remapping the medieval conceptual history of discovery and conquest, Bauer’s The Alchemy of Conquest does a number of things. First, it shows the deep alchemical, Franciscan, Llullian roots of Columbus’s ideas of discovery as the artisanal conquest of the occult. Image via Wikipedia Second, it presents New World missionary Franciscan notions of conversion as tied to alchemical notions of material and spiritual transformations and to demonology and apocalyptic chiliasm. In colonial Spanish America, there was a science of conversion. Religious reducciones (the congregation of natives in towns and missions) did not merely mean social reengineering, as the scholarship on colonial missions and Indian cabildos seems to suggest. Reducción meant a craft, artisanal, and alchemical transformation of the soul via an empirical science of ethnography. Third, it radically reframes the origins of early modern Epicurean atomism. As Bauer shows, atomism as a commentary on the structure of matter and as a moral-religious discourse of disorderly teleologies rst began as a commentary on American cannibalism. Fourth, the book squarely connects English discourses of colonization to Spanish Franciscan and Spanish Neoplatonic humanist ones (not Spanish Scholastic Dominican ones). English and Spanish interpretations of conquest were connected to alchemical nominalism, demonology, and the natural right to reshape American humans and religious landscapes through craft and conquest. The similarities arose despite the obfuscating English rhetoric of negative contrast (the Black Legend) and England’s outright denial of conquest (the White Legend). Finally, Bauer’s completely reframes Francis Bacon’s new revolutionary empiricism as a deliberate project of applying Spanish alchemical discourses of American colonialism not to peoples but to objects. This book will remain an enduring accomplishment of scholarship and erudition. · · · Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheeld Professor of History, the University of Texas At Austin Posted September 22, 2020 More 1400s to 1700s, Atlantic World, Books, Empire, Europe, Ideas/Intellectual History, Science/Medicine/Technology, Transnational 19th century 20th Century African American History american history Asia Asia & Middle East book review Brazil British Empire China Civil War Cold War Colonialism communism cultural history digital history Early Modern Europe Europe lm gender history History of Science immigration India Islam Latin America Latin American History Mexico Not Even Past Public History race religion Russia slavery Texas Texas History Texas History Day Transnational Twentieth Century History United States US History USSR Womens History world history World War II NOT EVEN PAST is produced by The Department of History THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts And our READERS DONATE CONTACT All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted Sign up to receive the monthly Not Even Past newsletter Your email address SUBSCRIBE FEATURES BOOKS TEACHING DIGITAL & FILM BLOG IHS & PUBLIC HISTORY TEXAS ABOUT.
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