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Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World

2011; Duke University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1416756

1527-1900

Andrés Iglesias,

Historical Studies in Science

The Iberian expansion overseas had profound repercussions for the historical and intellectual transformations that took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the impact of the discovery of a new continent populated by hitherto unknown (to the Europeans) peoples, plants, and animals has long been acknowledged by scholars, the specific mechanisms by which information about the new lands was gathered and processed has only recently been brought to the fore in the English-speaking world, thanks to the work of historians such as Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Ruth Hill, or Daniela Bleichmar, to name just a few. To this group of important works we must now add María M. Portuondo’s Secret Science, a book devoted to the cosmographic and cartographic activities developed in Spain after the discovery of America. Following a tendency in recent studies on early modern scientific practice in the Iberian world, Portuondo sees the different cartographic and topographic efforts deployed by cosmographers in sixteenth-century Spain not as isolated endeavors, but rather as coordinated scientific practices performed to the service of the state and its imperial ambitions. Portuondo focuses on three loci of cosmographical practice — the Casa de Contratación, the Consejo de Indias, and the court — and probes the institutional development of cosmography and cartography in each of these places and the work of some of their more important practitioners. Although the book’s title alludes directly to the secrecy imposed by Philip II on cosmographical practice and information — one of the reasons why so few early modern Spanish maps have survived to our days — the story that Portuondo tells in her carefully researched book has more to do with methodological changes and epistemological shifts than with the crown’s policy towards cosmography. To be sure, Portuondo does address the fact that, while cosmography was considered a secret of state under Philip II, under his successors the cosmographical work undertaken at the Consejo de Indias began to be published. But the narrative thrust of the book comes from the internal changes of the discipline — from a Ptolemy-based humanist cosmography, in which descriptive techniques and historical narratives dominated the discourse, to a mathematically based cartography and geography — and the disciplinary separation of cosmographer and chronicler at the end of the sixteenth century.In the first chapter, Portuondo describes the evolution of what she terms Renaissance cosmography from the mid-fifteenth century to 1530. The different intellectual and practical traditions that informed the discipline are analyzed not only in the seminal texts of cosmography (Ptolemy, Apian, and the like) but also in two places of knowledge production: the University of Salamanca and the Casa de Contratación. Whereas at Salamanca, cosmography was understood as an ongoing dialogue with the classics in a curriculum in which mathematics made only small advances, at the Casa de Contratación “cosmography . . . became the handmaid of navigation” (p. 61). If cosmography was in a good measure defined by these two institutions, by the second half of the sixteenth century, official cosmographical knowledge production was being conducted at the Casa de Contratación, the Consejo de Indias, and, to a lesser degree, at the court. In fact, as one reads the book, it become increasingly clear that the Consejo and the court were beginning to dominate the official practice of cosmography to the detriment of the Casa de Contratación. Chapter 2 focuses on the royal cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz and on Juan de Herrera, advisor to Philip II, who sought to advance the mathematization of cosmography. Chapter 3 focuses on Juan de Ovando’s reform of the Consejo de Indias and its influence on cosmographic practice, in particular during the tenure as cosmographer-chronicler of Ovando’s protégé Juan López de Velasco, who implemented the information-gathering process known as the relaciones geográficas. López de Velasco’s career is the theme of chapter 4, and his relaciones geográficas as well as his project to observe lunar eclipses around the world are discussed in chapter 5. The book concludes with the transition from the secretive cosmographic practices to the more open policies of Philip III, as embodied in the work of Andrés García de Céspedes, whose Regimiento de navegación (1606) was the first cosmographic work published by the Consejo de Indias, thus marking the end of cosmography as a secret science, an end also marked by the dismissal of classically rooted Renaissance cosmography for the less descriptive and more mathematically oriented methodology favored by García de Céspedes.Overall, María Portuondo’s Secret Science makes an important contribution to our knowledge of Hispanic science in the sixteenth century, in particular regarding its institutional side. Although it could be argued that a good deal of cosmographic practices occurred outside the institutional settings described in the book, particularly in America (and, therefore, not necessarily subject to the disciplinary changes described in the book), Portuondo’s carefully documented book illuminates the intricacies of the practice of science within an official setting in sixteenth-century Spain.