By Antonio Barrera-Osorio
As Spain colonized the Americas throughout the 16th century, Spanish infantrymen, bureaucrats, retailers, adventurers, physicians, send pilots, and friars explored the flora and fauna, amassed facts, drew maps, and despatched domestic specimens of America's colossal assets of animals, vegetation, and minerals. This gathering of empirical wisdom approximately Spain's American possessions had far-reaching results. It overturned the medieval realizing of nature derived from Classical texts and helped start up the fashionable clinical revolution. And it allowed Spain to commodify and regulate the average assets upon which it equipped its American empire. during this e-book, Antonio Barrera-Osorio investigates how Spain's desire for exact information regarding its American colonies gave upward thrust to empirical medical practices and their institutionalization, which, he asserts, was once Spain's leader contribution to the early medical revolution. He additionally conclusively hyperlinks empiricism to empire-building as he specializes in 5 parts of Spanish job in the USA: the quest for commodities in, and the ecological transformation of, the hot global; the institutionalization of navigational and information-gathering practices on the Spanish Casa de l. a. Contratacion (House of Trade); the improvement of tools and applied sciences for exploiting the normal assets of the Americas; using reviews and questionnaires for accumulating info; and the writing of usual histories in regards to the Americas.
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Additional resources for Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution
Example text
55 As late as the 1650s, according to Father Bernabé Cobo (1572 –1659), people were still surprised by how quickly European animals and plants flourished in and adapted to the New World. Cobo tried to explain this phenomenon. Animals and plants, he maintained, had proliferated in the New World because Spaniards took them everywhere; and, even when the Spaniards died, animals and plants survived. Cobo also observed that indigenous people liked the new plants and animals and took good care of them.
In 1538 Alberto Cuon brought a sample of pastel from New Spain to Segovia, a famous textile center, “to test it” there, as Villasante had brought samples of balsam to test them in Spain. 69 In New Spain, some pastel was sold for testing in 1539. 70 Similarly, the production of balsam had required the transfer of knowledge from Catalina de Ayahibex and her family to the Spaniards and the testing of the product in different areas (Santo Domingo and Spain). , the search for new commodities). In the alliance of private and state commercial interests, natural entities became the object of empirical observations and testing that took place outside the traditional venues of guilds, universities, and humanist circles.
25 Searching the Land for Commodities 19 Garciperez Morales would write his treatise at the request of the crown in 1530. 26 Morales framed his treatise in classical and traditional terms familiar to his audience. Villasante, by contrast, framed his account in empirical and commercial terms (as Monardes would do in his own account of American medicines and plants) and addressed his report to commercial partners and to government bureaucrats back in Spain. The difference in audiences, with their diverse interests and backgrounds, explains the difference between Villasante’s and Morales’s approaches to reporting on the Santo Domingo balsam.