Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World

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Empires of Knowledge

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks  –​local and long-​distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular –​as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-​ known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-​ betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine. Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University, USA. Her research focuses on science and culture in early modern Italy. She is the 2016 recipient of the Premio Galileo. Recent publications include Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–​1800.

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Empires of Knowledge Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World Edited by Paula Findlen

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First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Paula Findlen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paula Findlen to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Findlen, Paula, editor. Title: Empires of knowledge : scientific networks in the early modern world / edited by Paula Findlen. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018013305 (print) | LCCN 2018019809 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429461842 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138207127 | ISBN 9781138207134 Subjects: LCSH: Communication in science–History. Classification: LCC Q223 (ebook) | LCC Q223 .E47 2018 (print) | DDC 501/.4–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013305 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​20712-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​20713-​4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​46184-​2 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Out of House Publishing

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To the generations of students who make the early modern Republic of Letters a delightful reality

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Contents

List of figures  Notes on contributors  Acknowledgments  Introduction – Early modern scientific networks: knowledge and community in a globalizing world, 1500–​1800 

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1

PAU L A F I N D L EN

PART I

Brokers of knowledge 

23

1 A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe 

25

R O B E RT M O R R I S ON

2 How information travels: Jesuit networks, scientific knowledge, and the early modern Republic of Letters, 1540–​1640 

57

PAU L A F I N D L EN

3 Deciphering the Ignatian Tree: the Catholic horoscope of the Society of Jesus 

106

M A R C E L O   A R ANDA

4 The early modern information factory: how Samuel Hartlib turned correspondence into knowledge  C A R O L   PA L

126

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viii Contents PART II

Configuring scientific networks 

159

5 Letters and questionnaires: the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg and the early Royal Society of London’s Inquiries for Natural History 

161

I O R D A N AVRAMOV

6 Ingenuous investigators: Antonio Vallisneri’s regional network and the making of natural knowledge in eighteenth-​century Italy 

181

I VA N O D A L  P RE TE

7 Corresponding in war and peace: the challenge of rebooting Anglo-​French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens 

205

E L I S E L I P K OWI TZ

PART III

How knowledge travels 

223

8 Giant bones and the Taunton Stone: American antiquities, world history, and the Protestant International 

225

LY D I A B A R NE TT

9 The tarot of Yu the Great: the search for civilization’s origins between France and China in the Age of Enlightenment 

246

A L E X A N D E R S TATMAN

10 Spaces of circulation and empires of knowledge: ethnolinguistics and cartography in early colonial India 

269

KAPIL RAJ

PART IV

The local and the global 

295

11 Recentering centers of calculation: reconfiguring knowledge networks within global empires of trade 

297

M AT T H E W S ARGE NT

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Contents ix

12 The Atlantic World medical complex 

317

L O N D A S C H I E BI NGE R

13 Semedo’s sixteen secrets: tracing pharmaceutical networks in the Portuguese tropics 

342

BENJAMIN BREEN

EPILOGUE

Scientific networks reconsidered 

365

14 Following ghosts: skinning science in early modern Eurasia  367 CARLA NAPPI

15 Conceptualizing knowledge networks: agents and patterns of “flow” 

373

R A C H E L   M I D URA

16 Afterword 

378

H A R O L D J .   C OOK

Index 

386

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Figures

0 .1 0.2 0.3

Francis Bacon’s Intellectual Globe, 1627.  The Italian postal network in the late seventeenth century.  Knowledge networks between Tahiti, England, and Sweden in the late eighteenth century: Mai, Joseph Banks, and Daniel Solander.  1.1 Regiomontanus’s reciprocation mechanism.  1.2 The Light of the World’s second modification of the reciprocation mechanism.  1.3 The Light of the World’s third modification of the reciprocation mechanism.  1.4 The double-​circle device in The Light of the World.  1.5 The double-​circle device in Amico’s astronomy.  2.1 The globalization of the Jesuit missions: “One World Is Not Enough.”  2.2 Creating Jesuit natural history in the Indies.  2.3 Jesuit eclipse observations in Nagasaki and Macao.  2.4 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, 1617.  2.5 Francisco Hernández Mexican Treasury, including the Jesuit and former Lincean Johann Schreck’s commentary on Mexican plants.  2.6 Jesuit observations of the comet of 1618 in the East Indies.  2.7 Johann Schreck’s Letter from the Chinese Kingdom Sent to European Mathematicians, with a Little Commentary by the Mathematician Johannese Kepler, 1630.  2.8 Kircher’s table of magnetic declination, including missionary readings in Aleppo, Goa, Macao, and Canton.  2.9 Kircher’s disciple and missionary collaborator, Martino Martini.  2.10 Riccioli’s compilation of observations of the altitude of the polestar in Asia, including information on Japan “from maps in the Roman Archive.”  3 .1 The Ignatian Tree from the Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1646 edition. 

3 7 10 35 37 39 40 41 59 62 68 70 71 76 79 90 91 95 107

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List of figures xi 3.2 The Jesuit world, c.1646.  3.3 The Ignatian Tree from the Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1671 edition.  4.1 A page from Hartlib’s Ephemerides for 1639.  4.2 A transcription of the page in Figure 4.1.  4.3 John Dury’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, December 14, 1644.  4.4 Printed version of the same letter, which appeared as: John Dury [and Dorothy Moore], Madam, although my former freedom (London, 1645).  6.1 Front page of the letter sent by physician Bernardino Bono to Vallisneri in February 1713, with detailed instructions on how to use the microscopes he manufactured (upper right corner, in Vallisneri’s handwriting: “How to observe small things with the microscope”).  6.2 Girolamo Cesare Fantasti, drawing of a “monstrous placenta” with “grapes of vesicles.”  7.1 Sir Joseph Banks, Bart.  7.2 Banks’s scientific letters received from the United Kingdom, France, and other countries by major time period.  8.1 A fossil mastodon molar from the Royal Society’s collections, incorrectly identified as belonging to “a Sea Animal.”  8.2 The Taunton Stone in situ, photographed in 1902.  8.3 Mather’s transcription of two “lines” of writing on the Taunton Stone.  9.1 Ink rubbing of the Stele of Yu (Yu bei 禹碑, or Goulou feng bei 岣嶁峰碑).  9.2 Rider-​Waite tarot deck, arranged in conformity with the Stele of Yu.  10.1 Portrait of Mirza Shaikh I’tesam ud-​Din from James Edward Alexander, Shigurf Namah-​I-​Velaët, or, Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe: Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen in Great Britain and France (London, 1827).  10.2  William Jones, “Discourse the Ninth: On the Origin and Families of Nations …” (February 23, 1792), Asiatick Researches 3 (1794).  10.3 James Rennell, 1782 map of the Indian subcontinent.  11.1 Archam Arbore Indiano from Giacomo Zanoni, Istoria Botanica (Bologna, 1675).  11.2 Schunda (Indian nightshade, Solanum lasiocarpum), from Hendrik van Rheede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1679).  12.1 Jean-​Baptiste Pouppé-​Desportes’s entry for “bois de fer” in his American pharmacopoeia.  12.2 Robinia panacoco, known in the vernacular as “bois de fer.”  12.3 West Gondwana, a southern supercontinent of the Pangaea. 

112 117 132 133 140 141

185 189 208 210 231 233 234 252 255

270 281 284 305 312 329 331 332

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xii  List of figures 1 2.4 “Negro Dr” as knowledge broker.  12.5 The circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth-​century Atlantic World medical complex.  13.1 Recipe for Bezoartico Curviano according to José Diez de Medina. 13.2 The title page of Semedo’s Polyanthea Medicinal in its third edition (Lisbon, 1716).  13.3 Geographic origins and characteristics of the 61 “simples” (medicinal drugs) described by Semedo in his Memorial de Varios Simplices. 

334 335 344 346 348

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Contributors

Marcelo Aranda has a PhD in History of Science from Stanford University. He is interested in the intersection of science, religion, and empire in the early modern world. Aranda is currently a history teacher at the Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA, where he has developed a curriculum integrating classical Western and Asian texts, historical analysis, and new digital methodologies. Iordan Avramov is a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a historian interested in early modern intellectual communication. His research has been focused on the early Royal Society of London and figures like Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle. He has co-​authored (with Michael Hunter and Hideyuki Yoshimoto) Boyle’s Books:  The Evidence of His Citations (London, 2010) and is currently working on the role of communicator in early modern science. Lydia Barnett is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her research explores the early modern earth and environmental sciences in transnational contexts and in relation to the histories of religion, climate, gender, and labor. She is currently completing a book on Noah’s Flood as a figure of global environmental thought in early modern Europe. Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published in The Journal of Early Modern History, The Journal of Early American History, and History Compass, and is currently completing his first book, a study of the drug trade in the early modern world. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Harold J. Cook is an award-​winning historian of early modern Europe who has published on medicine and science in England and the Netherlands, on topics such as the politics of knowledge, the medical marketplace, war and medicine, capitalism and science, and globalizing processes such as “translation.” He is currently the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University, having previously served as Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

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xiv  Notes on contributors Ivano Dal Prete is a lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine program, Yale University. He has published a book on the scientific culture of the Republic of Venice and articles on early modern scientific networks, theories of human generation, and Earth history. His forthcoming book documents the diffusion in Italian society of the idea of an ancient Earth, well before its alleged discovery in the eighteenth century. Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her research focuses on science, collecting, and culture in early modern Italy and she has a long-​standing fascination for what we can learn by reading early modern letters. Her recent publications include Early Modern Things (2013) and the co-​authored volume, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: Birds, Other Animals, and Natural Curiosities (2017). In 2016 she was the recipient of the Premio Galileo. Elise Lipkowitz is an independent historian and Science Policy Analyst at the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows. Her research explores questions of nationalism and internationalism in science in Enlightenment and Revolutionary Europe. She is currently at work on a book provisionally titled The End of Cosmopolitan Science: The Transformation of the European Scientific Community in the Era of the French Revolution. Rachel Midura is a PhD candidate at Stanford University and fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. In her dissertation, “Reading the Mail: The Culture of the Post in Northern Italy, 1550–​1720,” she approaches the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and the European postal network. She is dedicated to increasing the accessibility of historical knowledge through digital curation and annotation, as shown by collaborations related to the Stanford Republic of Letters project. Robert Morrison is the George Lincoln Skolfield, Jr. Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. A specialist in the history of science in Islamic societies, his current project is a study of scholarly intermediaries between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe. His most recent book is Astronomy in al-​ Andalus: Joseph Ibn Nah￱mias’ The Light of the World (University of California Press, 2016). Carla Nappi is the Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on bodies and their translations in early modernity, especially in the Chinese-​and Manchu-​speaking worlds. You can find out more about her historical practice –​including work with nonfiction, short fiction, and podcasting –​at www.carlanappi.com. Carol Pal teaches history at Bennington College. Her first book, Republic of Women:  Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century, was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize by the American Historical Association. She is currently editing a sourcebook in the history of

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Notes on contributors xv medicine, and preparing a volume on Marie du Moulin for the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.” Her next monograph is the biography of a manuscript. Kapil Raj is Professor of History of Science at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research is focused on the construction of scientific and technical knowledge through processes of circulation and intercultural encounter in a global context, seventeenth to twentieth centuries, especially between Europe and South Asia, a theme on which he has published widely in various European languages. His book, Relocating Modern Science (2007), has recently been translated into Japanese. Matthew Sargent is a management scientist at RAND Corporation and a researcher at the USC/​Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. His historical research explores the ways that developing trade routes and evolving organizational forms transformed the globalization of knowledge in the pre-​ modern world. He has a PhD in history and organizational behavior from UC Berkeley and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California and a research associate at Caltech. Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. Her books include: The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science; Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science; Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; and with Robert N. Proctor, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Alexander Statman is a historian based at the Global Intellectual History Graduate School, Freie Universität and Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin and a fellow at the Huntington Library in 2018−2019. His research focuses on the intellectual relations between the West and China since the Enlightenment, with broader interests in global approaches to European intellectual history and the history of science.

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Acknowledgments

Empires of Knowledge began life as a 2015 workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. The idea for this project emerged from my years working with Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters. I  wanted to think more carefully about the implications of renewed interest in the early modern Republic of Letters for the history of science, and conversely the role of the history of science in stimulating a rich body of research on long-​distance networks, scholarly communities, and scientific travel. Many thanks to Dan Edelstein, Nicole Coleman, Giovanna Ceserani, and Caroline Winterer, and the generations of students who participated in this multi-​pronged experiment in digital humanities and many conversations over wine and cheese, and Nicole’s espresso machine, regarding the nature of early modern networks. Thanks to the Office of the President and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the funding for this collaborative project, of which Empires of Knowledge is an inadvertent offspring. Two days of lively and stimulating conversation several years ago has now become a book. A  warm thank you to the Stanford History Department, the Stanford Humanities Center, and especially the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (HPST) for their generous support. As always, Rosemary Rogers in HPST and Monica Wheeler in History offered us the benefit of their superb administrative support. Working with them for over 20 years is a constant reminder that good scholarship happens thanks to the wonderful staff who support our scholarly lives and make good things possible. I also want to acknowledge a number of colleagues who contributed to the discussion but were unable to participate in the volume. Thanks to Daniela Bleichmar, Robert Hatch, Pamela Smith, and Caroline Winterer for their earlier contributions, and the entire Mapping the Republic of Letters team, including Hannah Marcus, Iva Lelkóva, and Suzanne Sutherland who have worked on other parts of this project. No book appears without the work of good editors and their production team. A warm thanks to Laura Pilsworth and Morwenna Scott at Routledge for their care with the editing, and Céline Durassier and Georgina Boyle who oversaw copyediting and production. My most important acknowledgment goes to Rachel Midura. She has kept this project marvelously on track, given all of us the benefit of her careful editing, solved last-​minute illustration problems, and shared her considerable knowledge

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Acknowledgments xvii of early modern networks from her research on postal systems for her dissertation. It has been a great pleasure to collaborate with her on this publication and she rightfully deserves to have the penultimate word on Empires of Knowledge. My family has lived with this project a bit longer than I had planned, after I returned for a second term as department chair. Their love, good humor, and pointed lack of interest in early modern scientific networks have reminded me to get on with it, and Rachel has ensured that I did exactly that. As I complete this, I am looking at the snow-​capped Rocky Mountains and Jeff has encouraged me to stop editing and join him on a hike. To him, our daughter Natalie, our furriest family member Coco, and several generations of students who constantly rejuvenate the meaning of the Republic of Letters, I offer this book. Paula Findlen

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 Introduction – Early modern scientific networks Knowledge and community in a globalizing world, 1500–​1800 Paula Findlen They that weave net-​works shall be confounded. –​King James Bible (Isaiah 19:9)

In 1627 Francis Bacon’s posthumously published New Atlantis created an indelible portrait of an unknown society, invisible to the rest of world until a European ship traveling from Peru, bound for China and Japan, accidentally discovered it. Blown off course, they are met by a boat carrying inhabitants of the island bearing a scroll in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Spanish. The European sailors converse with them in Spanish about whether they can land, and marvel at how much knowledge these people have. “We of the island of Bensalem,” declared the governor, “know well most part of the habitable world, and are ourselves unknown.”1 This bold declaration of global omniscience, while living utterly off the grid that connects all other societies in some fashion, further incites the curiosity of their visitors. “This we found wonderful strange, for that all nations have inter-​ knowledge one of another either by voyage into foreign parts, or by strangers who come to them.” How did the inhabitants of a remote Pacific island learn all these ancient and modern languages? What led them to embrace Christianity? How have they managed to gather so much information about everyone else? Their “knowledge of the languages, books, affairs, of those that lie such a distance from them” seems almost superhuman, if not miraculous.2 Fundamentally, the Europeans want to understand how a seemingly invisible society learned so much while revealing so little, since it violates the norms of travel, commerce, diplomacy, and exchange to which they are accustomed. No one could know this much and remain unknown. The Bensalemites are well aware of the value of “news and intelligence,” two precious commodities flowing through the early modern world, more or less smoothly, and not always predictably.3 They explain how they have perfected a system of gathering information at a distance by sending agents –​the Merchants of Light  –​incognito to different locations on a 12-​year cycle. The sole purpose of these missions is to learn from other societies. They collect valuable

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2  Paula Findlen artifacts, natural and man-​made, to bring home while identifying sites for future expeditions so that knowledge will continuously increase. Silent interlopers, they leave no trace of themselves behind, nor do they wish to facilitate the conquest of anything but knowledge. The Bensalemites also possess practical knowledge. They have honed their navigational skills to direct ships wherever they wish to send them, confident of their return. They have learned enough of the languages and customs of every other society to observe without drawing attention to themselves. To invoke a term that was increasingly common by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Merchants of Light are skillful “intelligencers.”4 Their society reaps the rewards of investing in their voyages. All the interesting books, instruments, and natural specimens that the Merchants of Light acquire find their place in the growing pile of stuff inside Salomon’s House. The carefully organized inspection and manipulation of these raw materials by other members of this society, trained specifically for this purpose, yields provisional understanding and ultimately absolute knowledge. Without a perfect system of long-​distance intelligence, none of this could occur. The failure of European science, then, is partly a matter of how information travels, with whom, and to what end. Learning is indeed about broadening one’s perspective on what Bacon evocatively called the “intellectual globe,” one of his great and surprisingly understudied metaphors of knowledge as a voyage of discovery into the unknown.5 The Bensalemite network is a closed circuit that relies solely on the abilities of its members to achieve its goals.6 Bacon thought very carefully about the sociology of knowledge. The Merchants of Light are ideal early modern agents, protean beings who can become anything to anyone to extract useful information. They do not require go-​betweens to access other cultures because these actual brokers of knowledge, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam aptly observes, “emerged in a world of imperfect information.”7 The New Atlantis deliberately erases that messy reality. The materials gathered by the Merchants of Light enter Salomon’s House in a pristine state, ready to become knowledge. Nothing escapes this system and it reveals nothing of itself, until the fateful encounter that finally permits knowledge of such a society to exist. The Bensalemites are pragmatically aware of the alternatives. They understand how European imperial and commercial ambitions are reshaping their world. They have learned Spanish because it is becoming a lingua franca for travel between the Americas and Asia after the conquest of the Philippines in 1565.8 They know that Europeans possess valuable information and are hungry for even more to fuel their desire for commerce and empire. By contrast, Bensalem is a true empire of knowledge. It possesses the most valuable commodity of the early modern era  –​global information collected by reliable agents. Their only agenda is the betterment of society and the making of a new science. When the recently disgraced Lord Chancellor of England sketched his plan for an ideal scientific society based on a perfectly functioning, utterly disinterested information economy, no one could have been better aware than Francis Bacon was of just how far reality fell short of utopia. In the early seventeenth

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Introduction 3

Figure 0.1 Francis Bacon’s Intellectual Globe, 1627. Credit: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or A Naturall Historie in Ten Centuries (London, 1635 ed.) Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

century, news traveled unevenly. Intelligence was imperfect and almost never disinterested, and the means of communication often failed, sometimes miserably. It was far more prudent to sail into the unknown, hedging one’s bets on the return. Long-​distance information was a scarce commodity, dangerously acquired, that passed through many hands. It was often the product of the kind

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4  Paula Findlen of partial understanding prone to misperception. Bacon belonged to a generation which had seen both the problems and the possibilities of a world redefined by the emergence of new empires during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The English had only recently begun to explore opportunities for themselves. Bacon felt that they might not only learn from their predecessors, but also seize the opportunity to do things differently. The Bensalemite system of perfect knowledge and communication was as imaginary as the society that became powerful and prosperous because of it. Nonetheless, it reflected the aspirations of a world in which people traveled farther with great frequency, communicated more often at some distance, and had access to a wide range of commodities from many different parts of the world.9 Their news was not just local or even regional but selectively global. Their curiosity about the things they did not know increased measurably, as they traveled and explored, profited and conquered. The rhumb lines of Mercator’s map traced more than simply how to get from one place to another in a post-​ medieval world, since they reflected a new understanding of space, time, and place.10 Fundamentally, Bacon’s New Atlantis offers us a portrait of what mattered to the early modern world –​and it is not solely what takes place inside Salomon’s House. The ability to acquire information at a distance through powerful and productive networks was the necessary precondition. This was the foundation of Bacon’s utopia, which harbored the potential to create new realities.

Why all the fuss about networks? Historians have a certain ambivalence about the idea of the network, even though we have been discussing them in one form or another for several decades. Are networks material or immaterial? Surely they are both, since the movements of people, artifacts, and ideas make visible relations that might otherwise be as invisible as Bacon’s imaginary society. We travel along pathways that are themselves expressions of how we build, maintain, and extend networks. In the early modern period roads, shipping routes, couriers, postal systems, commercial fairs, and stock exchanges were all part of an increasingly elaborate social and economic infrastructure. These material realities undergirded the conceptual possibilities, forging connections that made certain kinds of encounters, transactions, and forms of communication at a distance possible. Fernand Braudel, the great historian of the early modern Mediterranean, famously described distance as “the first enemy.” He analyzed sixteenth-​century efforts to make the world smaller by conquering time and space with different technologies, transforming the Mediterranean into a world approximately “sixty days long.”11 Behind these efforts were human agents, devising and improvising various means to extend their reach for power, knowledge, and profit. These new long-​distance networks became a defining feature of the early modern world, reconfiguring the local and regional networks that pre-​dated them.12 They have become an essential component of writing global history, supporting a definition of “early modern” that is a far more expansive category than its original use

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Introduction 5 implied. As Lynn Hunt recently observed, “Only by tracing commodities and networks –​the things exchanged and the people who exchange them –​can the workings of globalization be truly understood.”13 This approach helps to define the limits of a phenomenon as much as its possibilities, underscoring the importance of thinking of the early modern world as a series of distinct overlapping networks organized around local and regional centers of power. Thus, networks are both deeply historical and contemporary, which means that they are more than one thing. The desire to understand human networks long pre-​dates the age of superconnectivity, which has made them ubiquitous and inevitably overdetermined our vision of what a network is or can do. We can study networks concretely by paying closer attention, for example, to the history of transportation, mobility, cartography, and communication. We can rethink the intimate social and political world of Renaissance Florence as “an historical venue par excellence of networking activity,” observing how people managed their relationships and to what end.14 As Miles Ogborn writes in his study of the English East India Company, the early modern letter  –​the information it contained, the objects it accompanied, the people who communicated through this medium, the means by which it traveled, the transactions it accomplished, and the archives created from all this paper in motion  –​demands “a material geography of written objects.”15 To follow a letter, an object, a person, or an idea is to begin to trace the pathway of a network. This is a history of partial success, if not abject failure, since the web of relations binding people and places together was a fragile, indeed tenuous connection.16 In recent years, historians of the early modern world have rediscovered the value of understanding merchant networks, seeing merchants as the group that traveled furthest and assumed the greatest risk. With this rediscovery of the merchant, merchant partnerships, and trading companies, we have returned to the study of mercantile correspondence.17 Economic and business historians have long made use of these archives, which are among the most extensive of the early modern period. Increasingly, they have captured the attention of a wider group of scholars interested in exploring the records of individual merchants, trading diaspora, and joint-​stock companies to understand how they behaved as communities, including the underlying principles that informed their ability to function at a distance. They approach this material with the tools and sensibilities of twenty-​first-​century scholarship. Increasingly, historians are contemplating how to explore this kind of material dynamically, as a geospatial archive.18 For example, thinking about the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602) and the Dutch West India Company (WIC, founded in 1621) as “knowledge networks” allows us to understand how new commercial circuits produced far more than a balance sheet of profits and losses, and the shiploads of commodities they disgorged.19 The idea of a knowledge network is especially appealing because it is a broadly conceived enterprise with the potential to involve many different agents producing multiple outcomes. To paraphrase Mario Infelise, information may first have been a mercantile asset, but it gradually took on a life of its own that transcended the original reasons why information circulated

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6  Paula Findlen widely, eventually created new practices of information gathering and redistribution, and new kinds of projects and publications to accompany them.20 Let us imagine a ship filled with people, cargo, and papers traveling between two locations. They take the same voyage but the knowledge and experience they acquire is not the same, even though there will be certain shared elements. One voyage can matter to multiple networks. We do not have to traverse oceans to see how the early modern world multiplied the nature, range, and reach of its networks. Peter Miller rightfully observes that we need to pay more attention to local and familial networks in relation to “glamorous long-​distance correspondence.”21 One way to do this is to follow the mail. Literally. Recently, the history of postal systems has migrated from being a somewhat marginalized and obscure subject –​the province of historically minded philatelists and postal enthusiasts –​to one that reflects current preoccupations with the history of travel, diplomacy, commerce, news, and information.22 Braudel’s patient efforts to calculate changing perceptions of the space of the Mediterranean relied on postal information as the unit of measurement. How long did it take a letter to go from one place to another? By what means? Venice’s role conveying mail between western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the speed of the papal couriers, Jesuit mail, and the imperial postal monopoly of Thurn and Taxis, not to mention the Fuggers’ ability to utilize the Hapsburg post to their commercial advantage, are all examples of early modern networks whose reconstruction reveals a distinctive material geography. Every port city was a correspondence node.23 The belated expansion of the French and English postal systems during the 1630s and the emergence of new postal hubs in cities such as Frankfurt and Amsterdam by the mid seventeenth century, connecting different mail systems and commercial ventures that pushed ever outward in all directions, made the “communications revolution” described by Wolfgang Behringer possible.24 We need to attend closely to these developments. The interactions between different runner, courier, and postal systems throughout the early modern world are an equally fascinating if far more complicated subject. Virtually every society had well-​established communications systems transformed by the encounters between them and by the growing desire for long-​distance communication. The mailbag became a microcosm of all the different reasons that people felt that words should travel; mail went much further by the eighteenth century than it did in the sixteenth century, allowing regular communication by letter to become an increasingly ordinary expectation for many people rather than the privilege of a few. The intensification of political and diplomatic news in times of war further stimulated these developments. While the early modern world did not invent postal systems, it produced the first postal maps, built roads to take the mail to new places, and encouraged people to travel with the post. These decisive innovations forged regular, even fairly predictable connections between many different places, facilitating all sorts of social, political, economic, religious, and intellectual networks. Knowing when the mail arrived and departed, how it traveled, and how these routes ramified and changed over time was essential knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Introduction 7

Figure 0.2 The Italian postal network in the late seventeenth century. Credit: Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, Giacomo Cantelli, and Domenico de Rossi, L’Italia con le sue poste e strade principali (Rome, 1695). Courtesy of the Rumsey Map Collection 11438.085, Stanford University Libraries.

The early modern “Republic of Letters,” the subject of a rich interdisciplinary historiography for the past few decades, could not have occurred without these developments.25 Letters were not simply vessels of information but instruments of friendship, kinship, and exchange, and often harbingers of knowledge to come. The emergence of the idea of “learned commerce” (commercium litterarium) by the middle of the seventeenth century demonstrates how mercantile practices shaped a new understanding of scholarly communication.26 Learned commerce implied a volume and frequency of correspondence that the occasional act of writing a letter did not. It needed a better postal system to accomplish more of the business of scholarship –​the Aix lawyer and savant Nicolas-​Claude Fabri de Peiresc famously improved the southern French route in the early seventeenth century because he wrote and received so many letters.27 It required travel, which put scholars on horses and ships with those doing other forms of commerce. It encouraged people to reach out to different networks in order to magnify the power of what they knew. The value of information increased accordingly, making Bacon a prophet for these next generations that transformed his elaborate

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8  Paula Findlen metaphor into a world in which “intelligencers” came to represent what it meant to accrue power through knowledge.28 While no one “center of information” dominated these developments, we can indeed talk about the emergence of multiple centers of information and communication, as Peter Burke has done in a series of illuminating case studies.29 For all these reasons, historians of the early modern world need to study networks  –​and not only with the tools of the kind of ambitious quantitative social science history that Braudel and the French Annales School represented well.30 The “umbilical cord of correspondence,” to invoke Alison Games’s apt description of the letters tracing the contours of the English cosmopolitan ethos before the full-​fledged rise of the British Empire, does not always have be counted to be understood.31 Sometimes we need to follow an entirely singular, perhaps even idiosyncratic itinerary, to get down to the “small-​scale level of everyday communication” where rumor is not easily distinguished from news.32 An individual voyage can reveal many things about a large-​scale network, just as a small, intense correspondence can illuminate elements of human behavior and interaction that thousands of documents may not reveal. Francesca Trivellato has characterized this kind of approach as “global history on a small scale.”33 It has been highly influential in multiple fields as a way of envisioning how well-​defined case studies make the world in the concrete (rather than the global in the abstract) tangible and comprehensible, in coming to a better understanding of patterns of early modern globalization. Historians of early modern science have increasingly found this perspective appealing for the current vision of where the field is going. As the tightly woven, elegant narrative of the Scientific Revolution gives way and finds its place within a global history of early modern science –​geographically diffuse, conceptually open, yet defined by the pursuit of scientific knowledge by many different means –​we are in search of new models to explain this transformative period for understanding the natural world.34 What does the study of scientific networks do to advance this agenda?

The scale of things we want to know Historians of science have even less reason to apologize for wanting to understand networks, since it is hardly the fashion of the moment for this field, which has played an important role in making networks a useful category of historical analysis. We have a long and productive investment in studying how human communities make and remake knowledge. The ongoing dialogue between the history and sociology of science has framed a great deal of this discussion.35 Lately, however, we have also begun to worry about the tyranny of networks in our thinking about society, especially in the “new networky world” aptly described by sociologist of science Bruno Latour in a recent reflection on Actor-​Network Theory (ANT), a subject he helped to invent and continues gleefully to disassemble.36 We wonder if we have defined the word to death (sociologists and communications theorists probably have, though not without some utility for those of us trying to understand it as a historical phenomenon).37 We recognize

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Introduction 9 that “network” was not exactly an early modern actor’s category, even if the word existed in Bacon’s England. We wonder whether we are committing the sin of bad social science –​flattening the complexity of human relations to boring data points in search of recognizable patterns –​by performing network analysis on a distant past. Nonetheless, the idea of the network endures. I have described the reasons why historians of the early modern world gravitate toward networks, as part of rethinking the significance of Annaliste methodology and its subjects with the tools of twenty-​first-​century scholarship, including social network analysis, and becoming far more conscious of the material conditions that shape intellectual communities and their forms of communication. Historians of science interested in studying human interaction and social organization are explicitly indebted to the work of sociologists such as Bruno Latour, John Law, and Mark Granovetter. It is rather hard to envision a sociology of knowledge without eventually discussing networks. They allow us to identify who is involved in the emergence and circulation of ideas, information, practices, and institutions. Who participates and why? What connects them, whether in the enclosed space of a laboratory, the intermediate space of correspondence, or the vastness of empire? Are the ties weak or strong?38 What gives a network cohesion, making it recognizably a network, if not at the moment of its inception, then certainly at the height of its activity? Which factors lead a network to break down?39 Networks are a convenient shorthand for understanding certain kinds of social relations that go beyond the individual and facilitate the making of knowledge by communities.40 They help us to see how ideas, objects, information, and people can be mobilized, sometimes repeatedly and often for different ends. There is intentionality in a network but there is not necessarily a limit either. As Latour famously observed, networks “bridge the local and the global,” the here and the somewhere else. For him they go beyond physical connection or forms of communication, which can of course be part of what makes a network, to define “a mode of inquiry.”41 They are often fragile and in need of constant maintenance to be truly productive. We might think of a network as a form of Cartesian extension that opens up the space between things, yet leaves us somewhat confounded in explaining how it actually makes connections. Perhaps we should make this concrete, just for a moment, by taking a close look at William Parry’s portrait of Sir Joseph Banks with Omai, the Otaheitan Chief, and Doctor Daniel Charles Solander (1775–​1776). In July 1774 Mai (c.1751–​1780), often called Omai, disembarked from the Adventure in Portsmouth, having traveled all the way to England from Tahiti on one of Captain Cook’s ships. A native of the island of Raiatea who fled to Tahiti, Mai met the English naturalist Joseph Banks (1743–​1820) and future president of the Royal Society during Cook’s first voyage to the South Pacific. The Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander (1733–​ 1782), already a Fellow of the Royal Society, accompanied Banks on this expedition and became Keeper of the British Museum’s Natural History Department in 1773. Parry depicts Mai in a version of Polynesian clothes rather than the European dress he adopted during his two years of being feted by London society.

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10  Paula Findlen

Figure 0.3 Knowledge networks between Tahiti, England, and Sweden in the late eighteenth century: Mai, Joseph Banks, and Daniel Solander. Credit: William Parry, Sir Joseph Banks with Omai, the Otaheitan Chief, and Doctor Daniel Charles Solander (1775–​1776), oil on canvas, 60 × 60 in (152.6 × 152.6 cm). NPG 6652. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London.

Banks gestures to Mai, their hands practically touching, as Solander looks up from his writing. This staged reunion commemorates Mai joining the Banks household shortly after his arrival. The Raiatean Mai went almost everywhere with Banks and Solander, including meetings of the Royal Society, parliament, court, and coffeehouse, social gatherings, and botanical excursions; he returned to Tahiti on Cook’s third voyage with a compass, globes, maps, charts, and Banks’s gift of an electric machine.42 What did this acquisition of European instruments and knowledge mean to Mai? What use did he make of them and what role did he also play

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Introduction 11 in Banks and Solander’s vision of making knowledge? Whether Mai found their scientific work on Polynesian nature interesting, in light of his own political and military ambitions to gain British support for returning to Raiatea, is unknown since there is no record in his own words. Nonetheless, he is a great example of the “brokered world” described by Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo in an influential collection of essays on this subject.43 This late-​eighteenth-​century portrait of three men is an artifact of circumstances that brought an ambitious Polynesian and a Swedish naturalist, one of Linnaeus’s most important disciples, together with Banks, first in Tahiti and again in London. Banks’s reputation as a cosmopolitan man of science whose network circled the globe is already apparent in this portrait.44 There is more than one way to understand this portrait of a scientific collaboration and the unequal relations of its three protagonists. Early work on scientific networks focused on the emergence of what Latour famously called “centers of calculation” and “centers of accumulation.” Much like Salomon’s House, they stockpiled everything needed to make knowledge and devised the tools to perform this function, accruing capital and credit in the process.45 The past decade or more has seen much greater emphasis on the diffusion of roles, the circulation of information and knowledge, and the mobility of human agents. Rather than being organized around a single center, networks are often polyvalent. There was no global Republic of Letters, Sven Dupré and Sachiko Kusukawa observe, but a series of “intersecting networks and communities” defined by the obligation to communicate.46 Thus, networks direct our attention to their hubs and nodes  –​each its own center  –​and the edges that make connections between them. They take us deep into contact zones to capture moments of productive interaction. When we dig down to the capillary level to perform the most fine-​ grained analysis, less well-​known people and processes that mediate, exchange, and transform knowledge in medias res begin to emerge.47 Perhaps by now we are more interested in arriving at the limits of a network to probe its intersections with other networks. The potentially expansive, at times fluid dimensions of networks have encouraged historians of science to think of new ways to capture the dynamic processes of knowledge making and its participants.48 Less discussed, at least by historians of science, is the influence of network theorists who have been especially vocal in defining key characteristics of an information age. Since the 1980s, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has played an important role in explaining the nature of a modern, post-​industrial society, its forms of social organization and political economy. Castells’s concept of an “information order” first proposed in The Informational Age (1989) emerged in some of the most influential work on the history of information such as Christopher Bayly’s Empire and Information (1996). Bayly’s important study of the knowledge of an empire inspired Simon Schaffer to consider how society determines the nature of the information available in the creation of a great monument to knowledge such as Newton’s Principia (1687). Schaffer’s important insight that “an information order could help make a world” has inspired a number of recent reflections about how observers of the natural world collected,

12

12  Paula Findlen transmitted, and collated observations, making works of science possible from the big data of the early modern era.49 To date, Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society (1996), the first part of his trilogy on The Information Age (1996–​1998), has had far less impact on historians than the insights gleaned from sociologists of knowledge, yet it nonetheless laid the groundwork for the kind of ubiquitous discussion of information and society that we see today. This work draws inspiration from a variety of different methods, including mathematical modeling and computational analysis, to explore the formal properties of networks. Duncan Watts’s Small World (1999) provides a useful window into this burgeoning literature, and reinforces the insight that no matter how great the distance, many networks are the product of fairly intimate communities, even if they ultimately have a large impact. Projects such as “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” have used the insights and methodologies emerging from this work to reconstruct the community that formed in relation to the author of the New Atlantis, making the redoubtable Lord Chancellor a node in a network.50 Yet another approach draws inspiration from bibliometrics to explore the possibilities of citation and co-​citation analysis. In a series of interesting papers, Yves Gingras has used the ability to read digitized editions of early scientific correspondence to hypothesize how we might reconstruct the “global structure of the intellectual field and its transformation over space and time,” taking the pulse of its conversations by exploring the authors, living or dead, mentioned in correspondence. This approach takes advantage of new ways of reading digital documents to explore “generational patterns.”51 Thus, the work of intelligencers such as Marin Mersenne in Paris and Henry Oldenburg in London, or for that matter the Philosophical Transactions that he published as part of his work as secretary for the Royal Society, become a corpus to be read as a whole in search of interesting patterns that capture the changing dynamics of community and conversation. Similarly, Robert Mayhew’s reflections on the “spatial inequalities in the production, reception, and dissemination of knowledge” suggest the potential of a spatial reading of early modern scientific publications –​in his case works of geography, though the possibilities for doing this with works of astronomy, medicine, and natural history are equally promising –​to reconstruct the community that produced them.52 This work also inspired Schaffer’s rethinking of how to read Newton’s Principia. It is far too soon to say what effect this wave of research will have on stimulating new approaches to the history of science and new insights into the making of knowledge. Nonetheless, we can discern a certain desire to see what happens when we treat historical materials like contemporary data flowing through networks. Carla Nappi’s recent reflection on what to do with fragmentary information that does not easily lend itself to satisfyingly causal explanations is an interesting experiment in thinking about the limits of circulation as a model, for example. She instead proposes a history that does not literally reassemble the archive but creates a new kind of archive of knowledge, allowing us to read across and within documents that may have been generated together but did not

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Introduction 13 generate each other.53 This approach also capitalizes on new ways of handling research materials to rethink the entire premise of the network itself.

Mapping the volume: a user’s guide The contributions to Empires of Knowledge represent well the value of qualitative, quantitative, and digital approaches to the historical study of networks, without prioritizing any single methodology, in some instances, combining more than one to good effect. They do not all share the same preoccupations by any means, beyond exploring the question of what a scientific network does, how it comes into being, and the nature of the communities that define its existence. This project began with an invitation to the participants to consider the early modern scientific network in light of the considerable and diverse historiography of this subject discussed above. How does it form and what work does it do in making knowledge? How do intersecting networks, intellectual brokers, “go-​ betweens,” and other cultural and linguistic intermediaries make scientific knowledge possible? This volume explores networks that are local, regional, and global, arguing that all of them are worth studying since they are equally important to the production of knowledge. The goal of this volume is not to privilege any single approach but to shine a spotlight on the ways in which the study of historical networks has become a lively, methodologically sophisticated intellectual field. Intellectual networks have always been essential to the circulation and evolution of knowledge. They are entangled in and facilitated by other forms of organized human activity. Merchants, missionaries, religious minorities, travelers, diplomats, and ultimately colonial servants and subjects, to name but a few examples, all gave shape to the early modern worlds of knowledge. Their commercial, religious, and political networks defined the possibilities. Our goal has been to capture elements of this conversation by examining different kinds of scientific networks that emerged between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and the functions they served in giving shape to knowledge in the early modern era. While some attempt has been made to be geographically diffuse by offering many different kinds of case studies that traverse Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, this volume is not designed to be geographically comprehensive, let alone comprehensively global. The asymmetry of sources and linguistic skills continues to make it easier for many historians to work with British, European, and American documents, though a new generation of scholars is rising to the challenge of working across cultural and linguistic domains, inspired by the work of senior historians well represented in this volume who have led the way. A brief overview of crucial developments, in broad strokes, may encourage readers not only to enjoy the particularities of each chapter but also to locate them on the early modern map of knowledge. During the fifteenth century the cultural, multi-​faith networks of the Mediterranean that had been in development since antiquity were reoriented as the Ottoman Empire increasingly played a role that would eventually surpass the presence of the Italian trading nations.54 At the same time, the emergence of the Portuguese Empire and by the end of the

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14  Paula Findlen century nascent Spanish imperialism gave rise to a new Atlantic economy that, in the Portuguese instance, would reach far into Asia, encouraging the sophisticated commercial, political, and intellectual world of the Indian Ocean and ultimately East Asia. The Jesuit missionary networks not only grew within Europe, especially in areas where Catholicism was most under threat, but followed the trail of Catholic empires. Protestant missionaries learned from this model without ever creating the kind of large-​scale network that the Society of Jesus developed for more than two centuries. This was the landscape in which travel, curiosity, translation, and print came to define the nature of scientific knowledge. By the mid sixteenth century, these ongoing developments in commerce, faith, and colonialism began to intersect with the emergence of a “Republic of Letters.” The quantity and quality of communication increased rapidly between the mid sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries, creating densely layered, overlapping networks of correspondents who exchanged books, specimens, drawings, instruments, ideas, information, and news. Such correspondence networks facilitated a wide variety of collaborative projects: large-​scale editorial collaborations, encyclopedic works of reference, natural histories, cabinets of curiosities, botanical gardens, astronomical observations, weather diaries, geographic and natural historical questionnaires, and the replication of experiments, to offer a few examples. They made the figure of the “intelligencer” an essential component of a world bound together by traveling pieces of paper. They encouraged brokers, informants, and go-​betweens to contribute what they knew, willingly or unwillingly. In the seventeenth century, the end of the Ming dynasty raised important questions about how Manchu rulers appropriated millennia of Chinese learning and culture while they also learned from the Jesuit missionaries which aspects of European knowledge might be usefully incorporated into their visions of Qing empire.55 The expulsion of Europeans from Japan, save for the Dutch presence on the tiny man-​made island of Deshima, produced one of the other fascinating episodes of appropriating Western knowledge. The rise of “Dutch Studies” in the eighteenth century was a direct result of the process by which Tokugawa Japan gradually dissociated Western learning from the Catholic missionary projects that precipitated the decree forbidding a European presence.56 The Dutch were indeed brokers of knowledge throughout Asia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, following the diffusion of Arabic, Persian, and Confucian learning whose networks have yet to be fully studied since they demand a significant linguistic investment to accomplish this task. Observing these moments of dramatic political and economic transformations, and their effect on knowledge and culture, we have moved beyond a simple formulation of science and empire. The collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British India raised equally fascinating questions about European attitudes toward Persian and Sanskrit learning, and the ancient wisdom it represented. Recent work on this subject has brought to light a series of scholarly collaborations in map-​making, writing the history of Indian science, and efforts to translate Newton’s Principia.57 They have inspired scholars to look

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Introduction 15 closely at many different scholarly collaborations –​Dutch physicians and South Asian healers; Jesuit missionaries, Manchu rulers, Chinese literati, and French philosophes; Caribbean slave healers and colonial physician-​naturalists; North American members of the Royal Society and their counterparts in London –​as a means of understanding with greater specificity what it means to exchange knowledge. They have also inspired studies of the disruption of networks when war not only changes patterns of communication but divides scholars because of politics. During the early modern period a new kind of landscape of learning emerged. It sent a small but influential group of physicians, naturalists, experimenters, and mathematicians on ships to far-​flung locations –​even learned Catholic converts like Michael Shen Fuzong (c.1658–​1691), who traveled from China with the French Jesuit mission, collaborated with the Bodleian Library and Orientalist Thomas Hyde, and met Robert Boyle in 1687.58 It also permitted scholars who traveled rarely, if at all, many of them living far from capital cities, to participate in giving shape to knowledge and envision themselves as participants in intellectual communities that transcended vast amounts of space. Sometimes, marginality was the strength of a network because it was possible to create something truly distinctive in a location without competing projects, communities, and institutions. I began this introduction with Bacon’s utopia of knowledge at a distance. It seems appropriate to end with the iconic figure of the Royal Society’s first secretary, Henry Oldenburg (1619–​1677), founder of a scientific journal that still exists today. A  product of German émigré and diplomatic networks emerging from the chaos of the Thirty Years War, Oldenburg observed and participated in many different experiments of knowledge before becoming part of the new, self-​consciously Baconian enterprise of a scientific society in 1660. He knew the value of communication, information, and publication.59 He knew how to ask questions and did his best to get answers whenever possible. Increasingly, we are fascinated not simply by what Oldenburg did in London but by the range and reach of his activities, including his ability to identify other scholarly communities he wished to gain access to, knowing that it would increase the power of his role in the Royal Society and ultimately the function of a scientific society in transforming the nature and shape of knowledge. Oldenburg never used the term “network” to describe what he created. Yet he would have appreciated and understood what John Florio had to say about the Italian word rete in the 1611 edition of his famous Italian–​English dictionary: “any kind of net for fish or fowle, a snare or haye. Also the caule of any bodie. Also any kind of net or caule-​worke. Also a fret in armorie.”60 Networks were first and foremost found in nature, but they could also be man-​made. They covered, connected, ensnared, at times protected. If we dig deeper into this vocabulary, for instance, by exploring the uses of rete and reseaux in the mid-​eighteenth-​century Encylopédie, we see that the origins of this vocabulary that has become so ubiquitous today lie in understanding not only the means to catch things but the nature of pre-​modern biological systems.61 And yet there is already a hint of our

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16  Paula Findlen understanding of network, since Florio leaves open the possibility that there are many other kinds. Oldenburg would surely have agreed with this definition.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Rachel Midura for sharing with me her considerable reading on network theory, to Daniel Edelstein and Nicole Coleman for sharing my fascination with historical networks, and to the participants in this volume, along with many others whose work is cited in the notes, for stimulating my thinking about the larger subject.

Notes 1 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, ed. Jerry Weinberger, rev. edition (Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson, 1989), 46. 2 Ibid., 50–​51. 3 Ibid., 51. To contextualize Bacon’s use of this phrase, see Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001); Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice:  Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); and Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 4 Joad Raymond, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. On the use of this term to describe certain roles in facilitating scientific knowledge and communication, see Justin Grosslight, “Small Skills, Big Networks: Marin Mersenne as Mathematical Intelligencer,” History of Science 51 (2013): 337–​374. 5 Francis Bacon, “A Description of the Intellectual Globe,” in The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. 6:  Philosophical Studies c.1611–​ c.1619, ed. Graham Rees (Oxford:  Clarendon University Press, 1996), 95–​169. For an interesting use of this imagery in relation to knowledge at a distance, see Steven J.  Harris, “Long-​Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6 (1998): 269. 6 David S.  Lux and Harold J.  Cook, “Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science 36 (1998): 179–​211. 7 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Some Afterthoughts,” in The Brokered World: Go-​Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), 432. See also Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus, eds., Your Humble Servant:  Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum:  Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006); Andreas Hëfele and Werner von Koppenfels, eds., Renaissance Go-​ Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); and Alida Metcalf, Go-​Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–​1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005). 8 Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon:  Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

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Introduction 17 9 These developments are well described in Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion 1560–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Hugh Thomas, World without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire (New York: Random House, 2014). 10 Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars:  A Social History of the Mercator Projection (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2004); more generally, see David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 11 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), vol. 1, 355, 387. 12 For an informative case study of the building of roads and the emergence of the idea of public works, see Katherine McDonough, Public Works Laboratory: Building a Province in Eighteenth-​Century France (forthcoming). 13 Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014), 69; for an interesting reflection on these developments, see Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” Aeon (March 2, 2017), accessed at:  https://​aeon.co/​essays/​is-​global-​ history-​still-​possible-​or-​has-​it-​had-​its-​moment. On the question of early modernity, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian History 31 (1997): 735–​762; Randolph Starn, “The Early Modern Muddle,” Journal of Early Modern History 6 (2002): 296–​307; Jan de Vries, “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World,” The Economic History Review 63 (2010): 710–​733; Anne Gerritsen, “From Long-​Distance Trade to the Global Lives of Things: Writing the History of Early Modern Trade and Material Culture,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 526–​544. 14 Paul D.  Maclean, The Art of the Network:  Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007), 226. Readers interested in this approach should look especially at the work of John Padgett, including Padgett and Walter W. Powell, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 15 Miles Ogborn, India Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 21. 16 Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–​1763 (Montreal: McGill-​Queens University Press, 2006). 17 For an introduction to this literature, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); Francesca Trivellato, “A Republic of Merchants?” in Finding Europe: Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, ca. 13th –​ca. 18th Centuries, ed. Anthony Molho, Diogo Ramada Curto, and Niki Koniordos (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 133–​158; idem, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2009); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); and most recently, Manuel Herrero Sánchez and Klemens Kapps, eds., Merchant and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, 1550–​1800:  Connectors of Commercial Maritime Systems (New York: Routledge, 2017). 18 Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?” Spatial History Lab (February 1, 2010), accessed at:  https://​web.stanford.edu/​group/​spatialhistory/​media/​images/​publication/​ what%20is%20spatial%20history%20pub%20020110.pdf.

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18  Paula Findlen 19 Siegfried Huigen, Jon L. de Jang, and Elmer Koflin, eds., The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden: Brill, 2010); also Woodruff D. Smith, “The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 44 (1984): 985–​1005; Claudia Schnurmann, “ ‘Wherever Profit Leads Us, to Every Sea and Shore’: The VOC, WIC, and Dutch Methods of Globalization in the Seventeenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 17 (2003):  474–​493; and Jan Willme Veluwenkamp, “International Business Communication Patterns in the Dutch Commercial System, 1500–​1800,” in Cools et al., eds., Your Humble Servant, 121–​134. For recent work in the history of science that also highlights the relationship between knowledge and commerce in the Netherlands, see Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange:  Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); and Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions:  Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 20 Mario Infelise, “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Political Avvisi: Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, Vol. 3:  Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–​1700, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33. For the broader context, see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge:  From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). 21 Peter Miller, “Nicolas-​ Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Mediterranean World: Mechanics,” in Les grandes intermédiares culturels du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles, ed. Christiane Berkvens-​Stevelinck, Hans Bot, and Jens Häseler (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 108. 22 Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity:  The Theory of Travel, 1550–​ 1800 (Cluwer, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), provides an interesting overview of the practicalities of early modern travel. 23 Emily Erikson and Samila Sampsa, “Social Networks and Port Traffic in Early Modern Overseas Trade,” Social Science History 39 (2015): 151–​173. 24 Wolfgang Behringer, “Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept,” German History 24 (2006):  333–​374. See also Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la second moitié du XVI siècle (Paris:  Ed. De Boccard, 1957), vol. 1, 37–​79; Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information:  Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​1846 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14–​15; Cools et al., eds., Your Humble Servant; Eric R. Dursteler, “Power and Information: The Venetian Postal System in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in From Florence to the Mediterranean: Studies in Honor of Anthony Molho, ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Eric R. Dursteler, Jules Kirshner, and Francesca Trivellato (Florence: Olschki, 2009), 601–​623; Raymond, ed., News Networks; and Pettegree, The Invention of News, 167–​181. I am grateful to Rachel Midura for our discussions about this subject, which lies at the heart of her own research. 25 For a recent study of the Republic of Letters which takes into account the Braudelian infrastructure that made it possible, see Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2015). Further bibliography on this subject can be found in Dan Edelstein, Paula Findlen, Nicole Coleman, Giovanna Ceserani, and Caroline Winterer, “AHR Forum:  Historical Research in the Digital Age  –​Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project,” American Historical Review 122 (2017): 400–​424.

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Introduction 19 26 Bethencourt and Egmond, eds., Correspondence and Cultural Exchange, 5.  On this phrase, see Hans Bot and Françoise Waquet, eds., Commercium Litterarium: Forms and Communication in the Republic of Letters (Amsterdam and Maarssen:  APA-​Holland University Press, 1994); David A. Kronick, “The Commerce of Letters: Networks and ‘Invisible Colleges’ in Seventeenth-​and Eighteenth-​Century Europe,” The Library Quarterly 71 (2001): 28–​43; and Franz Mauelshagen, “Networks of Trust: Scholarly Correspondence and Scientific Exchange in Early Modern Europe,” The Medieval History Journal 6 (2003): 1–​32, esp. p. 22. 27 J.  L. Pearl, “The Role of Personal Correspondence in the Exchange of Scientific Information in Early Modern France,” Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 8, no.  2 (1984): 109. 28 Cools et  al., eds., Your Humble Servant; Berkvens-​Stevelinck et  al., eds., Les grandes intermédiares culturels du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles; and Schaffer et  al., eds., The Brokered World. 29 Peter Burke, “Rome as a Center of Information and Communication for the Catholic World, 1550–​1650,” in From Rome to Eternity:  Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–​1650, ed. Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 253–​ 269; idem, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication,” in Venice Reconsidered:  The History and Civilization of an Italian City-​State, 1297–​ 1797, ed. John Jeffreys Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 389–​418. See also Filippo De Vivo, “Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-​ Century Venice,” in Raymond, ed., News Networks, 35–​49. 30 For an interesting reflection on digital methodologies and the study of early modern networks, see Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Queen Mary I: A Quantitative Approach,” English Literary History 82 (2015): 1–​33. 31 Games, Web of Empire, 89. 32 John-​Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. See also De Vivo, Information and Communication; Elizabeth Horodowich, Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 33 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 8; see also her “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2 (2011), accessed at: https://​escholarship.org/​uc/​item/​0z94n9hq. 34 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science:  Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–​1900 (New  York:  Palgrave, 2007); idem, “Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science,” Isis 104 (2013): 337–​347. See also James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Neil Safier, “Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, Amerindian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science,” Isis 101 (2010):  133–​145; Antonella Romano, “Fabriquer l’histoires des sciences modernes: Réflexions sur une discipline à l’ère de la mondialisation,” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70 (2015): 381–​408; Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra, “On Ignored Global ‘Scientific Revolutions,’ ” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 420–​432; and Carla Nappi, “Paying Attention:  Early Modern Science beyond Genealogy,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 459–​470.

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20  Paula Findlen 35 No discussion of this subject can be complete without reference to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2011; 1985), especially their new introduction, “Up for Air: Leviathan and the Air-​Pump a Generation On,” xi–​l. For an overview of the broad contours of this field, see Shapin, “Here and Everywhere:  Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” Annual Reviews of Sociology 21 (1995): 289–​311. 36 Bruno Latour, “Networks, Society, Spheres:  Reflections of an Actor-​ Network Theorist,” International Journal of Communications 5 (2011):  796. See also his “On Recalling ANT,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 15–​25. 37 Bruno Latour, Science in Action:  How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1987), esp.  177–​257; idem, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129. Latour usefully points readers to a site created by John Law, The Actor Network Resource:  http://​wp.lancs.ac.uk/​sciencestudies/​ant-​ resource/​. 38 Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no.  6 (1973):  1360–​1380; idem, “The Strength of Weak Ties:  A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–​233. For the most frequently cited works of John Law by historians of science, see his “On the Methods of Long-​Distance Control:  Vessels, Routes, and the Portuguese Navigation to India,” The Sociological Review 32, no.1 suppl. (1984):  234–​263; and idem, “On the Social Explanation of Technical Change:  The Case of Portuguese Maritime Expansion,” Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 227–​252. 39 See the essays in William Rankin and Dániel Margócsy, Breaking Scientific Networks, special issue of Social Studies of Science 47 (June 2017). 40 For an early and influential exploration of these possibilities as a way of understanding early modern scientific communities, see Lux and Cook, “Closed Circles.” 41 Latour, Science in Action, 232; Latour, “Networks, Society, Spheres,” 799. 42 Caroline Turner, “Images of Mai,” in Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, ed. Michelle Hetherington (Canberra:  National Library of Australia in Association with the Humanities Research Center, the Australian National University, 2001), 25–​26; and Harriet Guest, “Omai’s Things,” also in Cook & Omai, 32. To further contextualize how to read this fascinating portrait, see John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Edward Dycker, Nature’s Argonaut: Daniel Solander, 1733–​1782 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publisher, 1998); and Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island:  The European Discovery of Tahiti (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 389–​402. For a recent discussion of the role of Linnaeus’s apostles in the global scientific networks and his influence on Banks, especially through Solander, see the essays by Kenneth Nyberg and Hanna Hodacs in Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, eds., Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolution, 1750–​1850 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 73–​104. 43 Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World. 44 Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 58. 45 Latour, Science in Action.

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Introduction 21 46 Sven Dupré and Sachiko Kusukawa, “Introduction:  The Circulation of News and Knowledge in Intersecting Networks,” special issue of History of Universities 23, no.  2 (2008):  4. For a similar discussion, see Dirk van Miert, ed., Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500–​1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution (London and Turin:  The Warburg Institute/​Nino Aragno Editore, 2013); and Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens:  Tycho Brahe and the Astronomical Community of the Late Sixteenth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007). 47 Annemarie Mol and John Law, “Regions, Networks, and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology,” Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 641–​671. 48 Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33 (2009): 9–​30; idem, “Accumulation and Management in Global Perspective: An Introduction,” History of Science 52 (2014): 227–​246; Sugjit Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global:  On Methods, Questions, and Theory,” Isis 101 (2010): 146–​158; and Raj, “Beyond Postcolonialism”; and idem, “Thinking without the Scientific Revolution:  Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 445–​458. 49 Simon Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach:  The Information Order of Principia Mathematica,” History of Science 47 (2009):  243–​276, originally published as The Information Order of Isaac Newton’s Principia (Uppsala University, 2008), 17 (quotation). The first historian, to my knowledge, to borrow Castells’ term is Christopher Bayly, in Empire and Information, 3.  See Manuel Castells, The Informational City:  Economic Restructuring and Urban Development (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1989); and idem, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Vol. 1: The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For a recent discussion of the development of the history of information as a field, see Paul N. Edwards, Lisa Gitelman, Gabrielle Hecht, Adrian Johns, Brian Larkin, and Neil Safier, “AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1392–​1435. 50 Duncan J. Watts, Small World: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); for further reading in this technical, interdisciplinary field, see John Scott, Social Network Analysis:  A Handbook (London:  Sage, 2000); Albert-​László Barbási, Linked:  The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002); Matthew O. Jackson, Social and Economic Networks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and M. E. J. Newman, Networks: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). To explore Carnegie Mellon’s collaborative “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon,” go to:  www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon. com/​. 51 Yves Gingras, “Mapping the Structure of the Intellectual Field Using Citation and Co-​ Citation Analysis of Correspondence,” History of European Ideas 36 (2010): 339, 331. See also Yves Gingras and Alexander Guay, “The Uses of Analogies in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-​Century Science,” Perspectives on Science 19 (2011): 154–​191. 52 Robert Mayhew, “British Geography’s Republic of Letters:  Mapping an Imagined Community, 1600–​1800,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004):  273; idem, “Mapping Science’s Imagined Community: Geography as a Republic of Letters, 1600–​ 1800,” The British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2005): 73–​92. 53 Nappi, “Paying Attention.” 54 The literature on Ottoman science is growing rapidly but a good starting point to this lively field is B.  Harun Küçuk, “Early Modern Ottoman Science:  A New

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22  Paula Findlen Materialist Framework,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017):  407–​ 419; Avner Ben-​Zaken, Cross-​Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–​1660 (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Miri Shefer-​Mosensohn, Science among the Ottomans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015). 55 A fine starting point on this rich and complicated historiography is Catherine Jami, “Western Learning and Imperial Scholarship:  The Kangxi Emperor’s Study,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 27 (2007): 146–​172. Carla Nappi and Fabian-​ Stefan Morar are among a group of scholars beginning to explore the role of Manchu translations in the early Qing Empire. 56 The classic point of departure for this subject is Sugita Gempaku, Dawn of Western Science in Japan, trans. Ryozo Matsumoto (Tokyo:  Hokoseido Press, 1969); more recent literature is cited in Cook, Matters of Exchange; and Lissa Roberts, “Frontier Tales: Tokugawa in Translation,” in Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World, 1–​47. 57 See the work of Kapil Raj in this volume; Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture, AD 1498–​1707 (Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1998); and Simon Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy,” in Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World, 49–​104. 58 William Poole, “The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687–​88,” Electronic British Library Journal (2015), accessed at: www.bl.uk/​eblj/​2015articles/​pdf/​ebljarticle 92015.pdf. See also Han Qi, “Sino-​British Scientific Relations through Jesuits in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in La Chine entre amour et haine: Actes du VIIIe Colloque de Sinologie de Chantilly, ed. Michel Cartier (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998), 43–​59. 59 Marie Boas Hall, “The Royal Society’s Role in the Diffusion of Information in the Seventeenth Century,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 29 (1975):  173–​192. More recently, see the work of Iordan Abramov, including his contribution to this volume; and Maurizio Gotti, “Scientific Interaction within Henry Oldenberg’s Letter Network,” Journal of Early Modern History 3 (2014): 151–​171. 60 John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London, 1611 ed.), 431. 61 Readers are invited to explore the possibilities through the online edition at ARTFUL: https://​encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/​.

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Part I

Brokers of knowledge

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1  A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe Robert Morrison

For several decades, historians of astronomy have been aware of circumstantial evidence that Nicholas Copernicus (1473–​1543) drew, without acknowledgment, on the achievements of the astronomers of Islamic civilization, particularly Ibn al-​Shāṭir (d. 1375).1 Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer, in their 1984 book Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus,” saw Copernicus as the last astronomer in the tradition of the astronomy of the Marāgha Observatory in northwest Iran.2 Recently, F. J. Ragep has found that the work of ‘Alī Qushjī (d. 1474), an astronomer in the Ottoman Empire, was relevant for understanding Copernicus’s transformation of a geocentric system into a heliocentric one.3 As a start to explaining the numerous, overwhelming similarities between Copernicus’s work and that of the Islamic world, Neugebauer and Swerdlow proposed a Greek transmission of Naṣīr al-​Dīn T￴ūsī’s (d. 1274) lunar model via Gregory Chioniades.4 Beginning in the 1990s, George Saliba found substantial evidence of the transmission of scientific manuscripts from the Islamic world to Renaissance Europe in the mid sixteenth century, including Guillaume Postel’s (1510–​1581) copy of T￴ūsī’s Tadhkira. Although Copernicus did acknowledge some astronomers from the Islamic world, none of them was later than al-​Biṭrūjī (fl. c.1200).5 Copernicus mentioned Biṭrūjī once in De revolutionibus, regarding the placement of Venus and Mercury with respect to the sun.6 But since there is a consensus that Copernicus relied on the work of Regiomontanus (d. 1476), though he did not actually mention Regiomontanus by name, the issue of other uncited sources for Copernicus’s work remains.7 When exploring why the findings of Saliba, Neugebauer, E. S. Kennedy, and Swerdlow have not had much of an impact on the research of historians of European science, Ragep has noted that historians of science have found Copernicus’s most important innovation to be the heliocentric arrangement, a hypothesis absent in the work of the astronomers of the Islamic world.8 But while there is no evidence of any astronomer in Islamic civilization proposing a heliocentric astronomy, discussions of a rotating earth did exist.9 And Qushjī’s proof of the possibility of transformation of epicyclic models to eccentric models in the models of the lower planets has been recognized by Owen Gingerich as relevant to the history of the heliocentric arrangement.10 Ragep, for his part, has recently argued that developments in the conception of the discipline of ‘ilm al-​hay’a (astronomy)

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26  Robert Morrison reassessed the relationship of mathematical astronomy to Peripatetic philosophy and should be seen as part of the conceptual background of Copernicus’s work. This chapter will show that the range of circumstantial connections between the theoretical astronomy of the Islamic world and Renaissance astronomy extends beyond the appearance of the innovations of astronomers of the Islamic world in Copernicus’s work. Then, the chapter will describe a network of scholars that not only accounts for this wider range of circumstantial connections, but also expands our understanding of the specific context for Copernicus’s work.11 Searching for cross-​cultural points of contact to explain the circumstantial evidence has the potential to tell us more about the rise of Renaissance astronomy in general and about the dimensions of Copernicus’s work that have less to do with the science of the Islamic world. In the past decade there has been significant research detailing scientific and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the mid sixteenth century.12 Though research into contacts between Renaissance Europe and the Islamic world does focus on a wide range of communities, Jewish communities may be a particularly promising direction of research.13 The persecution and then final expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 both further dispersed and created connections among these transnational communities, rendering them a conduit for scientific knowledge.14 For instance, members of an Ibn Nah￱mias family went from Castille to Albania, and then to Salonika, before moving to Venice by the 1600s. Members of that family also established the earliest printing press in the Ottoman Empire, by the end of the fifteenth century, probably in 1493.15 In fields such as medicine and philosophy, Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire all contributed to the transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world to Renaissance Europe.16 In particular, we know that Jews were a means of communication between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.17 As non-​Muslims, Jews could be connected to the Ottoman Empire without Europeans perceiving them to be associated with Europe’s most significant enemy; hence, Jews were more viable colleagues for European scholars. As negative portrayals of the Ottomans were politically motivated, not due to intellectual disdain, Europeans’ interest in scientific and philosophical texts from the Islamic world continued unabated.18 The subject of this chapter is Moses Galeano, who wrote in Arabic under the name Mūsā Jālīnūs, a potential transmitter of scientific information between the Ottoman Empire and the Veneto, primarily between 1497 and 1502.19 Galeano brought with him knowledge of scientific theories that appeared not only in Copernicus’s work, but also in the homocentric astronomy (where each celestial body maintained a fixed distance from a static earth) of Giovanni Battista Amico (d. 1538)  and Girolamo Fracastoro (d. 1553), two other astronomers writing at the University of Padua. The question of Galeano’s contact with Christian scholars during his time in the Veneto is significant because Copernicus spent time (1501–​1503) at the University of Padua studying medicine.20 And Galeano’s knowledge of and preference for homocentric astronomy broadens the

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A scholarly intermediary 27 investigation of his role as an intermediary beyond a possible connection with the work of Copernicus.21 Galeano’s Hebrew and Arabic writings increase the circumstantial evidence for his having had contact with Christian scholars in the Veneto. The circumstantial evidence extends beyond the parallels between Copernicus and the astronomers of Islamic societies, to include the homocentric astronomy that appeared in the work of other astronomers at the University of Padua. Galeano also turns out to be part of a network of scholars who did have contact with Christians in Europe. Further investigation of the possibility of his connections with the University of Padua is important because there was a long history of Jews studying in the Faculty of Medicine, which included philosophy, at that university, which graduated its first Jewish physician in 1409. In 1501, the Polish legate to Rome reported that he knew “of six Jews of Polish origin who were attending the university under assumed names.” Beyond the long-​standing presence of Jews at the University of Padua, there was, as well, a significant Jewish community in the city. In 1508, Elijah Capsali (d. 1555), the Chief Rabbi of Candia, came to Padua to study at the yeshiva there.22 Unfortunately, the War of the Cambrai, which took place between 1508 and 1516 and cut short Capsali’s time in Padua, means that the archives of the University of Padua are thin for precisely the period in which we are interested. Galeano also spent a significant amount of time in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and named Elijah Mizrah￱i (d. 1526), the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul in the early 1500s, as a teacher. In a major work in Hebrew, Ta‘alumot h￱okmah [Puzzles of Wisdom], composed around 1500, Galeano described events at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit II (r. 1481–​1512). In a different text, one that favored homocentric models for astronomy, he likened the order of the planets to the way people sit before the Sultan.23 The latter text is now found in the Ahmet III collection of the Topkapi Library, the personal library of Sultan Ahmet III (r. 1703–​1730). While Galeano’s presence at the Sultan’s court is noteworthy, his was not a unique case, as he was not the only Jew associated with scientific activity at the court of Bayezit II. Ilyās ibn Ibrāhīm al-​Yahūdī (d. after 1512), known as ‘Abd al-​Salām al-​Muhtadī or ‘Abd al-​Salām al-​Daftarī after his conversion to Islam, came from Andalus to the court of Bayezit II and wrote a text in Hebrew about how to use an astronomical instrument that he invented, known as al-​Dābid.24 Then he translated the text into Arabic at the Sultan’s request in 1502. Also under Bayezit II, the court physicians were members of the Hamon family, originally of Granada, and were caught up in court intrigue.25 Even half a century earlier, Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror’s (d. 1481) personal physician was Jewish, named Yacub (i.e., Jacob) Pasha. We have a firmān from 1452 from Mehmet the Conqueror that exempted Jacob and his offspring from the payment of many different taxes.26 Jacob was originally from Gaeta, a city in central Italy; hence he was also seen by the Venetians as a possible opening to the Sultan.27 Jews held positions of parallel importance at the papal court. Jacob ben Immanuel (Bonet da Lattes), originally of Provence, became the personal physician of Pope Alexander VI (d. 1503), who was probably pope during Galeano’s visit to Italy. Jacob ben Immanuel dedicated to the pope an astronomical

28

28  Robert Morrison instrument known as Gemma’s rings and wrote an astrological prognostication for Rome, which he dedicated to Cardinals Valentiani and Borgia, as well as annual astrological prognostications from 1493 to 1498. He also studied at Pisa with Giovanni de Medici, the future Leo X. Jacob ben Immanuel eventually became the Chief Rabbi of Rome, indicating that his associations with the papal court did not entail a corresponding loss of contact with his co-​religionists. His influence was such that Johann Reuchlin (d. 1522), a Christian Hebraist interested in the Qabbalah, called on him in 1513 to intervene on his behalf in a dispute.28 Jewish scholars in the Ottoman Empire in the generation before Galeano evinced an interest and skill in astronomy that brought them into contact with Muslims and Christians. Mordechai Comtino (d. before 1487), who was Elijah Mizrah￱i’s teacher, attained a level of proficiency with astronomical instruments that brought him to the attention of a kadiasker, an Ottoman chief military judge.29 Comtino donated an instrument to that judge. Comtino’s Commentary on the Persian Tables was addressed to a Christian critic, indicating that, even by Comtino’s lifetime, astronomy was a space for exchange among Jews (including between Karaites and Rabbanites), Christians, and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire.30 Astronomy’s position as a locus of contact between religious communities had a history.31 Mizrah￱i eventually attained currency in Europe, as his Compendium of Mathematics was published in Basel in 1546 in Hebrew with Latin annotations by Oswald Schreckenfuchs and Sebastian Münster. He also wrote a commentary on the Almagest, in which he attempted to emend the text of the Hebrew translation through references to Arabic and Greek manuscripts of the text.32 Mizrah￱i’s knowledge of these languages and his position as leader of the Jewish community, not to mention his ability to gain access to the manuscripts, are all strong indications that his relatively advanced study of astronomy involved contact with Muslims and Christians, albeit in Istanbul, not in Italy. Given Galeano’s presence at the Sultan’s court, it would follow that he had contact with Muslims. From Galeano’s own account in Puzzles of Wisdom, we know that he traveled to Venice between 1497 and 1502 and visited the famous printer Gerson Soncino (d. 1534). Unfortunately, Galeano did not mention any other contacts he made during that trip. Because Galeano knew of recent developments in the field of theoretical astronomy that would have been of interest to scholars such as Copernicus, Amico, and Fracastoro, the likelihood of his contact with Christian scholars in Europe is worth researching further. Indeed, by the time Galeano returned from the Veneto to Istanbul he knew enough Latin to translate the canons of the Almanach Perpetuum from Latin into Arabic for the Ottoman chief military judge.33

What was the astronomy that Galeano described in Puzzles of Wisdom? In a key passage of Puzzles of Wisdom, first studied by Tzvi Langermann in an excellent 2007 article, Galeano described the challenges of astronomy and four types of solutions to those problems:

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A scholarly intermediary 29 An example from astronomy … It is [of the same type] as the example from medicine that we have just mentioned, i.e., a confusion between what is essential and what is accidental. But it is also to confuse separation and combination. Indeed, the configuration has been established –​and it is the truth  –​that the heavenly bodies, and every heavenly motion, trace equal arcs on their orbs in equal times. This is true, even though we observe with our instruments that it is not so. Confusion is caused in this way because it does not follow that the same rule which applies to each motion individually must [also] hold when they combine together. Indeed, from the combination of uniform equal motions that are traced out, there results an unequal motion that is not uniform; I mean that the star will not traverse equal arcs in equal times. This may occur (a)  from the compounding of motions of uniform direction, models, and centers, as we maintain, along with “the man [whose theory] shook [the world]” and The Light of the World of R. Joseph ibn Ya‘ish; or (b) from varying centers, models, and directions of the motions, according to the principles of Ptolemy; or (c)  from varying centers, directions of motion [and] models on the epicycle alone, according to the astronomy of Ibn al-​Shāṭir; or (d) from varying the models, directions, and centers, but by means of eccentrics alone, as in the new astronomy of Gersonides, of blessed memory.34 In the first paragraph, Galeano explained the real challenge of theoretical astronomy, which was to account, using combinations of uniform motions, for the planets’ observed non-​uniform motions. In the second paragraph, he listed the four dominant approaches to representing the planets’ non-​uniform motions with combinations of uniformly rotating orbs. There are three main things of interest in this list. The first is the fact that Galeano was aware of the astronomy of Ibn al-​Shāṭir (d. 1375), an astronomer from Damascus who worked as a mosque timekeeper (muwaqqit). Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s text Nihāyat al-​sūl fī taṣh￱īh￱ al-​ uṣūl [The Ultimate Quest in the Rectification of the Hypotheses/​Principles] has been understood to build on the work of the astronomers affiliated with the Marāgha Observatory, such as T￴ūsī and Quṭb al-​Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 1311). Scholars have noted strong, striking parallels with the models of Ibn al-​Shāṭir in Copernicus’s work.35 Copernicus’s and Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s models for the moon were identical. The models for the planets differed primarily in that Copernicus’s were heliocentric while Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s were geocentric; otherwise they were mathematically equivalent. Though Galeano was the first Jewish scholar to mention Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s important theoretical advances, another figure roughly contemporary with Galeano, Abraham Zacut (d. 1515), produced a copy of Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s al-​ Zīj al-​Jadīd [The New Astronomical Handbook with Tables] in Hebrew characters.36 Most important, Galeano is the first person with knowledge (not to mention understanding) of Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s theoretical astronomy whom we know to have been in the Veneto when Copernicus was.37 Hebrew notations on the Qonya manuscript of Mu’ayyad al-​Dīn al-​‘Urdī’s (d. 1259) Kitāb al-​Hay’a, an innovative

30

30  Robert Morrison text produced by another astronomer affiliated with the Marāgha Observatory, elements of which were crucial for Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, is further evidence that Jews in the Ottoman Empire were able to gain access to high-​level texts on Islamic astronomy.38 Because Galeano recorded events at the court of Bayezit II (d. 1512) in Puzzles of Wisdom, we have 1512 as a terminus ante quem for his presence at the court, the likely source for his knowledge of Ibn al-​Shāṭir; Langermann’s dating of the composition of Puzzles of Wisdom to c.1500 meant that Galeano probably knew about Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s astronomy before he traveled to Italy.39 The second item of interest is that models of homocentric orbs were Galeano’s preferred (“as we maintain”) solution to the problem of representing the planets’ non-​uniform motions with combinations of uniformly rotating orbs. He referred to two astronomers who devised these models. The first was “the man who shook the world” (Hebrew: ha-​mar’ish) –​that is, Biṭrūjī, the most famous exponent of astronomical models composed of homocentric orbs.40 The Light of the World, the second reference to homocentric astronomy, was a text from c.1400 that aimed to improve on Biṭrūjī’s astronomy, particularly in terms of predictive accuracy.41 This text (Nūr al-​‘ālam) was originally composed in Judeo-​Arabic and also existed in a Hebrew recension (Or ha-​‘olam) that differed from and expanded on the Judeo-​Arabic original in certain places.42 Though the author of The Light of the World was Joseph Ibn Joseph Ibn Nah￱mias and not R. Joseph Ibn Ya‘ish, as Galeano stated, Langermann presumed that Galeano was referring to Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World and not to some other text. A study of Galeano’s Arabic composition, entitled Dhikr ba‘d￴ al-​mah￱allāt (sic –​this should read muh￱ālāt) [An Account of Some of the Impossibilities], has found significant overlaps with the content of Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World.43 In fact, the fourth chapter of An Account of Some of the Impossibilities follows the text of The Light of the World verbatim. Hence, we have every reason to conclude, as Langermann presumed, that Galeano was very familiar with the models of both Biṭrūjī’s On the Principles of Astronomy and Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World.44 While the question of what Copernicus learned from the astronomy of the Islamic world has attracted a great deal of attention, the question of what other astronomers at the University of Padua might have learned from the astronomy of the Islamic world (most immediately the Ottoman Empire), including models of homocentric orbs, is relevant if we are to understand the extent and wider context of communication facilitated by figures such as Galeano.

The context of Moses Galeano’s astronomy The third way in which Galeano’s summary of the approaches to the underlying theoretical problem of astronomy is noteworthy is that the style of his discussions of astronomy in Puzzles of Wisdom, in which he surveyed the options for accounting for the planets’ non-​uniform motions with combinations of uniformly rotating orbs, had a context in the Hebrew scientific texts of the period. In this

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A scholarly intermediary 31 section I will elucidate that context. There were clear parallels between Puzzles of Wisdom and three Hebrew astronomy texts from the last two decades of the fifteenth century. The first such text was Eliyahu al-​Fājī’s Miktab Eliyahu [Elijah’s Letter].45 The author was probably from the Ottoman Empire, as his responsa (Hebrew: teshubot –​answers to questions of Jewish law) appeared in a collection of responsa from Turkey and Palestine.46 Al-​Fājī posed the same question (how to represent non-​uniform motions with uniformly rotating orbs) about astronomy that Galeano did; the three approaches he mentioned as answers were those of Ptolemy, ha-​Mar‘ish (probably Biṭrūjī), and Gersonides (1288–​1344).47 These were three of the four that Galeano mentioned in Puzzles of Wisdom. Astronomers were not able to demonstrate through a proof (mopet) which of the three was true.48 While al-​Fājī did not present Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s approach, he did refer to an attempt to account for celestial motions with epicycles alone –​which was what distinguished that approach.49 One can see how Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s exclusion of the eccentric lent a certain symmetry to the other three approaches, as Gersonides’ models were characterized by the exclusion of the epicycle, Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s models by the exclusion of the eccentric, Biṭrūjī’s (and Ibn Nah￱mias’s) by the exclusion of both, and Ptolemy’s by the inclusion of both.50 Thus, al-​Fājī provides a context for Galeano’s interest in Ibn Nah￱mias (as an improvement on Biṭrūjī) and in Ibn al-​Shāṭir (as an astronomy that excluded eccentrics, which would lend a symmetry to Gersonides’ theories that excluded epicycles). Al-​Fājī’s work also gave a nuanced response to Gersonides’ implication that only his models met the standard of predictive and retrodictive accuracy while also being consistent with Aristotle’s philosophy.51 Al-​Fājī wrote that he based his solar model on the eccentric not because the eccentric was true in an absolute sense, nor because the eccentric involved fewer orbs than the epicycle, but because only Biṭrūjī rejected the eccentric and Gersonides, in al-​Fājī’s view, conclusively refuted (biṭṭel) Biṭrūjī in book five of The Wars of the Lord. Al-​Fājī pointed out that astronomers would, for example, propose (nani’ah￱) that the sun’s yearly west-​to-​east motion could be accounted for via geometric demonstrations (moptim handasiyim) with an epicycle, along with all of the observed variations in its motion.52 But, al-​Fājī noted, there was no geometric demonstration for why the sun had to have a model based on the eccentric hypothesis, as all of the observed phenomena could flow just as easily from a model based on the epicycle. The phenomena could also flow from another model that was as yet unknown. Isaac ben Samuel Abū al-​Khayr’s 1497 commentary on Farghānī’s Elements of Astronomy argued, as al-​Fājī’s Miktab Eliyahu had, that none of the available schemes of physical models for celestial motions was necessarily true. Abū al-​ Khayr was expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in Padua, where he composed the commentary. Again like al-​ Fājī, he criticized the relationship between Ptolemy’s theoretical proposal (hanah￱ah) and his geometrical proofs. Abū al-​ Khayr commented that Ptolemy’s hypotheses served only to rationalize or account for the observations; Ptolemy’s observations did not necessitate the hypotheses that he devised. Thus the proofs in the Almagest were deficient (h￱aseirim) in that they showed neither that the heavens must be arrayed in the way that Ptolemy

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32  Robert Morrison proposed nor that they could not be arrayed in a different way. Since Gersonides proposed models without epicycles for the planets, which was the opposite of Ptolemy’s astronomy, Abū al-​Khayr concluded that “the human intellect had not yet arrived at the knowledge of the true situation of the stars in their orbs in the heavens.”53 Like al-​Fājī, Abū al-​Khayr used Gersonides as a way to show that certain models could not be true. Al-​Fājī was not arguing that Gersonides’ models represented the best or final answer as to the structure of the heavens. Both scholars also used the contingency of Ptolemy’s models as a way to criticize his demonstrations, though they accepted Ptolemy’s models as the default for the purposes of calculations.54 Both scholars provide an intellectual context for Puzzles of Wisdom’s presentation of interchangeable alternative models for celestial motions. The case of Abū al-​Khayr indicates that there was a Jewish astronomer in Padua (in addition to the Christian astronomers to whom we shall turn in the next section) who would have been interested in what Galeano had to say. The third text that contributes to our knowledge of Galeano’s intellectual context is a commentary on the Almagest (St. Petersburg Oriental Institute MS C128) attributed to Elijah Mizrah￱i, Galeano’s teacher.55 There is evidence to accept the attribution of the commentary to Mizrah￱i. Another manuscript (St. Petersburg Oriental Institute MS D33), containing a 1478 copy of Jacob Anatoli’s Almagest translation, includes marginalia attributable to Mizrah￱i (and Comtino); these marginalia indicate that Mizrah￱i actually did comment on the Almagest.56 One of those marginal comments has Mizrah￱i correcting Anatoli’s text on the basis of the Greek Almagest.57 That comment is fascinating because it means that Mizrah￱i must have become aware of how the Greek version had something to offer beyond what was found in the Arabic and Hebrew versions. Moreover, the Almagest commentary attributed to Mizrah￱i also contained corrections of the Hebrew translation on the basis of the Greek version; accepting the attribution of an Almagest commentary to Mizrah￱i seems safe.58 The Almagest commentary attributed to Mizrah￱i had numerous references to an Arabic version of the Almagest, as well as to the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes; d.  1198)  and Jābir ibn Aflah￱ (twelfth century) on the Almagest, reflecting the depth in which Mizrah￱i and his students probed Anatoli’s translation of the Arabic.59 Finally, Mizrah￱i’s Almagest commentary provides evidence that 1500 was the approximate date of composition for Puzzles of Wisdom, with only tinkering occurring during the next few decades. When discussing homocentric astronomy, Mizrah￱i referred not only to Biṭrūjī but also to those who followed him.60 That was most likely a reference to Ibn Nah￱mias, because the only known improvement on Biṭrūjī was Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World. Thus, if Mizrah￱i knew about Ibn Nah￱mias by the time he wrote his Almagest commentary, it is likely that Galeano would have known about Ibn Nah￱mias by the time he traveled to Venice. An important feature of Mizrah￱i’s Almagest commentary is the text’s reference to two aspects of Ptolemy’s geometric models as sepaqot (doubts).61 The commentary simply acknowledged that two great doubts were possible (yith￱ayyabu shenei sepaqot gedolot). The first of these was how a single point could move with two

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A scholarly intermediary 33 motions in the same instant. The second doubt was that the Ptolemaic lunar model brought the epicycle noticeably closer to and farther from the earth.62 Mizrah￱i explained that the response to the second doubt would be to allow a change in the measure of the anomaly (we-​yigdal we-​yiqṭan shi‘ur he-​h￱illup ha-​ qoreh mi-​ṣad galgal ha-​haqqapah). This solution to the doubt entailed introducing another problem akin to that of the prosneusis, Ptolemy’s determination that the motion of the lunar epicycle was uniform with respect to an imaginary point.63 One indication that Mizrah￱i had considered this consequence, the epicycle’s irregular motion, to require extra explanation was that he wrote, apropos his figure for the lunar model: The motion of the deferent should always be about point G, even though its [the epicycle’s] mover is line AB which goes out from the center of the Earth. And it is impossible [emphasis mine; Hebrew: ’i epshari] that they be pictured (she-​yiṣuyyaru) except by way of repelling (mi-​ṣad ha-​deh￱yiyyah). He stressed that one needed to think of the line as the mover, not the endpoint where the line terminated in the orb, pushing the circumference of the deferent. Mizrah￱i added that the potential distortion in the observed motion of the epicycle was addressed with a correction or equation (tiqqun).64 He proposed a new explanation in order to retain the predictive accuracy of the Ptolemaic lunar model. Mizrah￱i has expressed both doubts in ways that pay more attention to the physical structure of the orbs than to the philosophical ramifications of orbs’ non-​uniform motions. Gersonides, too, had used observational evidence to argue against the epicycle and to dismiss Ptolemy, whose theories could not account for the apparent size of the moon or planetary distances.65 Gersonides was, nevertheless, aware of the equant problem, though neither Galeano nor his contemporaries referenced his critique.66 It is possible that Mizrah￱i, despite his comment (“it is impossible”), accepted the epicycle’s resulting non-​uniform motion, though a student (i.e., Galeano) might have seen things differently. While there is little doubt that Galeano’s knowledge of astronomy well surpassed that of his teacher Elijah Mizrah￱i, Mizrah￱i’s Almagest commentary, as well as the works of Eliyahu al-​Fājī and Abū al-​Khayr, shows that Galeano was by no means the only Jewish scholar of his era who was thinking critically about theoretical astronomy, either in the eastern Mediterranean or in Padua (cf. Abū al-​Khayr).

Homocentric astronomy at the University of Padua While Copernicus was the astronomer, among those who spent time at the University of Padua, who would have been most interested in Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s astronomy, the homocentric astronomy produced by other astronomers there in the 1500s strongly resembled key details of Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World. This section explores the work of these astronomers and their predecessors, in order to establish that other figures affiliated with the University of Padua would have been interested in talking to Galeano. Scholarship on homocentric models

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34  Robert Morrison has found them to be less effective than alternatives involving eccentrics and epicycles in accounting for the planets’ varying velocities in longitude.67 In addition, the key feature of a homocentric, geostatic cosmos was that each celestial body maintained a fixed distance from the earth, so these uniform distances contradicted observations in which the size of the moon, to take one example, was seen to vary.68 Thus, modern scholars have found it difficult to accept that an outstanding astronomer such as Regiomontanus (d. 1476) could have taken homocentric astronomy seriously, though he does seem to have. Whatever the limits to the predictive accuracy of these models of homocentric orbs were, homocentric astronomy was a philosophically coherent way of disagreeing explicitly with Ptolemy.69 As Michael Shank has noted in seeking to understand Regiomontanus’s interest in homocentric astronomy, even if homocentric models could not account for all observations, certain physical problems with Ptolemy remained. Peter Barker has recently identified the criticisms of Averroists (i.e., scholars who favored a homocentric astronomy) as a reason for the realist portrayal of the orbs in Capuano’s (d. c.1490) commentary on Georg Peurbach’s (d. 1461)  Theoricae novae, probably written while Capuano taught at Padua. In fact, a 1531 printed edition of Capuano’s commentary also included a Latin translation of Biṭrūjī’s On the Principles and presented that book as Biṭrūjī’s own Theorica.70 So while Ibn Nah￱mias’s interest in homocentric models has led contemporary scholars to be a bit dismissive of his overall scientific acumen, there is ample evidence that serious astronomers at Padua might have been interested in Ibn Nah￱mias’s homocentric models.71 This shared interest is the foundation of the circumstantial evidence for the transmission of Ibn Nah￱mias’s homocentric astronomy to astronomers at the University of Padua. The story begins with Regiomontanus’s homocentric models for the sun and the moon, produced in 1460.72 Both Regiomontanus and Ibn Nah￱mias attempted to address the signal weakness (or challenge) of homocentric astronomies: preserving predictive accuracy without either eccentrics or epicycles. Both astronomers improved on Biṭrūjī by devising ways to use uniformly rotating homocentric orbs to produce linear or nearly linear oscillations. Then, these orbs that produced the oscillations could be combined with another uniformly rotating orb. If the period of the oscillation were calibrated with the period of the uniformly rotating orb, the homocentric models would come much closer to accounting for the sun’s observed positions.73 A key component of both Regiomontanus’s and Ibn Nah￱mias’s models was, as we shall see shortly, a reciprocation mechanism, also known as a slider-​crank mechanism, that used a rotation to produce a linear oscillation.74 In Figure 1.1, a picture of Regiomontanus’s reciprocation mechanism, all motions are taking place on the surface of an orb.75 Noel Swerdlow has argued that Regiomontanus could certainly have devised this improvement on Biṭrūjī independently.76 As the precise form of the reciprocation mechanism proposed by Regiomontanus did not appear in The Light of the World, Regiomontanus’s innovation might have led to contact between Galeano and later astronomers at Padua in the following way. Jewish astronomers knew of Regiomontanus, as MS Vatican Ebr. 387 included a text from the 1460s on lunar

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A scholarly intermediary 35

Figure 1.1 Regiomontanus’s reciprocation mechanism. Credit:  Based on Noel Swerdlow, “Regiomontanus’s Concentric-​Sphere Models for the Sun and Moon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 30 (1999): 1–​23, on p. 7. I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the journal’s editor, Michael Hoskin, to reproduce part of the original figure.

stations, aligned to the longitude of Padua, that was attributed to him.77 Even if the attribution is spurious, it suggests that Jews in Italy, and perhaps specifically in Padua, who were interested in the sciences were aware of Regiomontanus’s achievements. A clear link between developments at Padua in this era and the community of Jewish scholars associated with Candia –​for example, Galeano –​is the Candiote scholar Elijah Delmedigo, who was actively sought out by Christian scholars in the 1480s and 1490s.78 Delmedigo became licensed to teach at some Italian universities, including the University of Padua, and spent time in Venice, which controlled Crete during his lifetime. Among his students was Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494).79

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36  Robert Morrison In his Hebrew commentary on Ibn Rushd’s De substantia orbis, Delmedigo made, regarding Andalusian critics of Ptolemy, a tantalizing reference to attempts to reform Ptolemaic astronomy:80 All of these [i.e., Ibn Rushd, Ibn T￴ufayl, and Maimonides] said that the roots of natural science contradict what Ptolemy proposes regarding this [i.e., astronomy]. And it [natural science] is true and, without doubt, there are attached to Ptolemy’s astronomy enormous gaps (harh￱aqot ‘aṣumot) in his proofs since he did not have completely satisfactory evidence for the epicycle and eccentric he proposed, as Ibn Rushd explained in many places. Even the words of the modern astronomers81 and their like, who thought to save Ptolemy, necessitate that there be a heavenly body without any function so that there will not be proposed any void with a few of the planets. This body nearly solves the difference, that is to say that a part of it is very thick and that a part is very thin and that it occurs with this that it moves in a way agreeing with the rest of the bodies that are with it until no void occurs nor interpenetration of [celestial] bodies as is known to whomever looks at their words. All of this is a worthless fancy.82 This quotation began by citing contemporaries of Ibn Rushd who questioned the existence of epicycles and eccentrics. Then Delmedigo mentioned Ibn Rushd’s Epitome of the Almagest (Qiṣṣur al-​Magisṭī), a text in which Ibn Rushd accepted the existence of epicycles and eccentrics and referred to Ibn al-​Haytham’s Shukūk ‘alā Baṭlamyūs.83 Next Delmedigo referred to modern (i.e., post-​ Ptolemaic) astronomers (ha-​ah￱aronim we-​dimyoneihem) who also sought to save Ptolemy and noted that they, too, accepted the existence of the complementary bodies, bodies that prevented the existence of a void between, say, eccentric and parecliptic orbs. At the end of the cited portion, Delmedigo rejected the existence of these bodies, suggesting that he favored a homocentric astronomy. Clearly, the would-​be savers of Ptolemy to whom Delmedigo referred could not have been those, such as Biṭrūjī or Ibn Nah￱mias, who, like Delmedigo, favored a homocentric astronomy. It is possible that he was thinking of Ibn al-​Haytham or Jābir ibn Aflah￱, critics of Ptolemy cited in Ibn Rushd’s Qiṣṣur.84 Delmedigo’s commentary was composed and copied before he returned to Crete around the time of Pico’s death in 1494.85 Given the young age at which Delmedigo left Crete for Italy, it is also possible that the attempts to save Ptolemy to which he referred were something he learned of once in Italy, such as Regiomontanus’s better-​known non-​homocentric astronomies. Delmedigo might even have been referring to Gersonides. But whatever the identity of the referent of Delmedigo’s comment about modern astronomers, we have in Delmedigo a Jewish scholar who was connected to Christians, moved between Crete and the Veneto, and thought that Ptolemy needed to be reformed, probably with homocentric astronomy. This evidence offered by Delmedigo is important because parts of Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World responded to the shortcoming of the salient

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A scholarly intermediary 37

Figure 1.2 The Light of the World’s second modification of the reciprocation mechanism. Credit: Drawn by Robert Morrison.

feature of Regiomontanus’s homocentric models, the reciprocation mechanism. Swerdlow concluded that the slider-​crank mechanism does function geometrically but that there are physical problems with it. In particular, how would the oscillating point know to remain in the ecliptic without some sort of track?86 The Hebrew recension of The Light of the World, in its expansions on the solar model found in the Judeo-​Arabic original, included three proposals for a physical mover that would keep the oscillating point on track. The first two proposals entailed ways to counterbalance the point’s displacement from the linear path on which it was supposed to oscillate.87 For instance, in Figure 1.2, DGK, the great circle arc upon which K would oscillate, was part of the equator of the second orb, the poles of which were T and H. Poles T and H were fixed in a lower orb. K and the point opposite it are fixed in a third orb with pole Z. Z is fixed in a fourth orb that rotates about A. So when pole Z went to point E, K would want to go to

38

38  Robert Morrison X, but the second orb would rotate about poles T and H, fixed in the first orb, to allow K only to go toward G. As the effect of this second of the first two solutions was to fix the oscillating point in another orb, the author of the Hebrew recension provided a third proposal, which has not been described in earlier scholarship (see Figure  1.3). This proposal allowed the rotation of Z to E to cause an oscillation from K to G, all through the complete (i.e., without the back-​and-​forth oscillations that characterized the first two proposals) rotations of orbs. The Hebrew recension of The Light of the World paid attention to the question of physical movers for these motions, whereas Ibn Nah￱mias, in the Judeo-​Arabic original, was more interested in locating all the celestial motions on the surface of an orb than he was in questions of how one orb would move another. The dashed lines from P to N and from N to Y, along with my step-​by-​step description, are there just to help the reader envision how the proposal functions. All of the ensuing motions should, in fact, occur simultaneously. First, pole Z on the first orb rotates about pole A a certain number of degrees, 45 in the figure, to arrive at point P. As a result, the position of point K becomes point N, with a latitude from T equal to arc KY. Then, the second orb whose pole is A rotates about pole Z to bring point K from point N down to point Y.88 As the author of the Hebrew recension, perhaps Ibn Nah￱mias himself, acknowledged, this solution will not work precisely, because for arc EG to be 90 degrees, the rotation from Z to E cannot be exactly 90 degrees.89 This solution incorporates a Eudoxan couple: one orb encloses another and the pole of the first is inclined to the pole of the second. The two orbs rotate the same amount in opposite directions.90 Any attempted solution to a flaw in Regiomontanus’s homocentric astronomy would undoubtedly have interested astronomers at the University of Padua in The Light of the World. Circumstantial evidence for the actual interest of Padua scholars is the presence of a double-​circle device in the text, on homocentric astronomy, of Giovanni Battista Amico (d. 1538), who wrote in the 1530s at Padua.91 The double-​circle device was Amico’s way of producing a linear oscillation on the surface of concentric orbs (Figure 1.5). Amico’s double-​circle device closely resembled the double-​circle device found in Ibn Nah￱mias’s The Light of the World (see Figure  1.4).92 The double-​circle device also strongly resembles an early version of the T￴ūsī couple found in T￴ūsī’s recension of the Arabic translations of the Almagest.93 It is highly unlikely that Ibn Nah￱mias invented the double-​circle device himself, as there is evidence of transmission of mathematics and instruments from Marāgha to Andalusia before his lifetime.94 In the figure, pole Z, the center of the circle of the path of the center of the sun, has moved with the mean motion (45° in the figure), and A revolves with the motion (also 45° in the figure) of the circle of the path of the center of the sun.95 Ibn Nah￱mias has shown, though, that these two motions are insufficient to keep A in the ecliptic. The double-​circle hypothesis serves to eliminate the outstanding displacement of A from the ecliptic. The upper small circle revolves θ (45° in the figure) about A, moving the center of the lower small

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A scholarly intermediary 39

Figure 1.3 The Light of the World’s third modification of the reciprocation mechanism. Credit: Drawn by Robert Morrison.

circle from point H to point B. Simultaneously, the lower small circle revolves 2θ (90° in the figure) about its pole, now at point B.  Point X marks the sun’s final position after the revolution of 2θ from point A. Arc AN is the diameter of the circle HBC, and in the figure arc AN is perpendicular to arc HC. The sun is supposed to oscillate on arc AN. There remains a small, though negligible, displacement from AN. Another astronomer at Padua, Girolamo Fracastoro, was also pursuing a homocentric astronomy in the 1530s; Fracastoro had been an instructor of logic in the Faculty of Medicine at Padua during the period in which Galeano visited the Veneto.96 Copernicus knew of Fracastoro’s work by the time he wrote De revolutionibus, though he disagreed with Fracastoro’s contention that the problems with the Almagest were due to the hypotheses of the epicycle and eccentric.97

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40  Robert Morrison

Figure 1.4 The double-​circle device in The Light of the World. Credit: Drawn by Robert Morrison.

Swerdlow’s study of Amico’s De motibus corporum coelestium showed that Amico used only double-​circle devices to account for the planets’ anomalies. Ibn Nah￱mias generally used the double-​circle device for a slightly different purpose, eliminating a remaining displacement from the zodiac. Nevertheless, at one point in the Hebrew recension, Ibn Nah￱mias did propose using only the double-​ circle device to account for the sun’s anomaly.98 But while Amico’s double-​circle mechanism does work in the plane, there is a displacement on the surface of an orb, a fact of which Amico was unaware. Ibn Nah￱mias, however, was aware of enduring inaccuracies, even after the inclusion of the double-​circle device in the solar model.99 These strong similarities and slight differences could be explained by oral transmission of much of the content of The Light of the World but not the whole text. Another reason why it is important to investigate whether Galeano transmitted Ibn Nah￱mias’s theories to the astronomers at Padua is that I have found, in Giulio Bartolocci’s (1613–​1687) Bibliotheca magna rabbinica de scriptoribus, a biobibliographical dictionary of Jewish literature, a report of The Light of the World being seen at Padua.100 Thus the mid seventeenth century becomes the terminus

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A scholarly intermediary 41

Figure 1.5 The double-​circle device in Amico’s astronomy. Credit: From Noel Swerdlow, “Aristotelian Planetary Theory in the Renaissance: Giovanni Battista Amico’s Homocentric Spheres,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 3 (1972): 36–​ 48, on p.  41. I  gratefully acknowledge the permission of the journal’s editor, Michael Hoskin, to reproduce this figure.

ante quem for the arrival of The Light of the World in Padua. Arguing that the similarities between Ibn Nah￱mias’s and Amico’s homocentric astronomies, as well as the similarities between Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s models and those of Copernicus, were due to independent, parallel discoveries would necessitate that a number of astronomers in Padua who had the same interests as Galeano somehow never came into even distant contact with him. It is difficult to imagine that all the scholars in the Veneto, in the intellectual ferment of the times, and given the prominence of Elijah Delmedigo among Christian Hebraists, would have been unaware of all the knowledge that Galeano brought with him. In light of the potential contacts of astronomers at Padua with Galeano, Mario di Bono’s proposal that the presence

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42  Robert Morrison of the T￴ūsī couple in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus may stem from the time he spent at Padua, with its tradition of Averroism, is fascinating.101

A scholarly network connecting Galeano to Christian scholars The final section of this chapter locates Galeano within a network of scholars who transmitted texts between Crete, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. We will see that Galeano was not an isolated example of a scholarly intermediary. His place in this network of scholars makes it even more probable that he had contact with Christian scholars when he was in the Veneto between 1497 and 1502. Galeano was part of a network of Jewish scholars in Candia, with connections to Istanbul, that sold Hebrew manuscripts in the early 1540s to Ulrich Fugger (d. 1584), perhaps via an agent.102 Transfer of manuscripts to Fugger may have taken place in Venice as well. The Fuggers, in addition to their wealth, had wide interests and assembled a collection of Hebrew manuscripts in Heidelberg that became part of the Vatican’s collection in 1623. For those manuscripts that could not be purchased, Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–​1575; a.k.a. Hans Jakob) had Jewish copyists in Venice.103 The Fugger mercantile network, in the early 1500s, had established connections to both Venice and Padua.104 Thus Venice, like Padua, Rome, and Florence, became an important site for the Fuggers’ book acquisitions in Italy.105 The Fuggers’ acquisitions in Candia began in 1541. Elijah Capsali was the conduit for 175 Hebrew volumes. Capsali had served as head of the Jewish community as early as 1515 and had represented the Jews before the Venetian authorities.106 A codex of religious texts, Vatican MS Ebr. 44, was acquired by Fugger from Capsali in Candia in 1541. Vatican MS Ebr. 285, a codex that included primarily texts of midrash and halakah, with several folios on astrology and astronomy, was also acquired by Fugger from Capsali in 1541, probably in Candia.107 Capsali’s life history is one indication that Fugger’s (or his agent’s) voyage to Candia to buy manuscripts was the result of pre-​existing relationships. But because Capsali was not the sole vendor, and because the manuscripts were acquired over a period of at least two years, the story involves more than just the sale of Capsali’s personal library. An example of an enduring relationship between Christian scholars in Italy and Jewish scholars on Candia begins with Elijah Delmedigo, whom I  have already described as one of Pico’s teachers and informants and who was also a Latin translator of some of Ibn Rushd’s works. A  member of the same family, Meyuh￱as Delmedigo, sold a corrected and heavily annotated manuscript of Kalonymus b. Kalonymus’s (d. after 1328) translation of Averroes’ middle commentary on Aristotle’s Physics to the Fuggers in 1542 in Candia. The manuscript had made its way from the Iberian Peninsula to Candia and, according to one colophon, was studied by Saul b.  Moses ha-​Kohen Ashkenazi (c.1470–​1523), concluding in 1520.108 Elijah Delmedigo’s reputation could well have brought the family to the attention of the Fuggers.

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A scholarly intermediary 43 Saul b. Moses ha-​Kohen Ashkenazi’s father, Moses Kohen Ashkenazi, was also known to Christians in Italy. Moses Kohen Ashkenazi composed an astrology text entitled Urim we-​Tummim that was purchased by the Fuggers. The text was produced in the middle decades of the fifteenth century at Candia. This manuscript is particularly good evidence for the continuation of contacts between Jewish scholars in Crete and Christians, because Moses Kohen Ashkenazi had produced horoscopes for a government advisor and a physician, both from the Vittori family in Candia, as well as a prediction for a boy born in Venice in 1454.109 Given this history of the Ashkenazi family’s earlier contacts with Christian scholars, it would be a stretch to claim that the Fuggers learned about the Ashkenazis only upon the purchase of the manuscript in Candia in 1541 or 1542. Also important for this story of transmission is the content of Urim we-​Tummim, as it offers a vigorous justification of astrology, holding that the self-​knowledge gained from astrology is, in fact, an aid to fulfilling religious obligations. Astrology was the ultimate goal (taklīt) of the study of the heavens, and astrological knowledge was a religious duty (a miṣwah).110 The author, Ashkenazi, though he praised the work of Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. c.1164–​1167), some of which was available in Latin, did not simply rely on authorities. He criticized all previous astrology texts for failing to discuss the conjunctions of the moon with the planets; Ashkenazi filled the lacuna.111 The purchase of this text is evidence that Pico’s condemnation of astrology seems not to have been the final word in Renaissance Europe. Recently, Robert Westman has discussed Copernicus’s desire to respond to Pico’s criticisms of astrology as a crucial motive for his work in astronomy.112 Fugger’s acquisition of Urim we-​Tummim is, in addition, evidence for the interest of Christian scholars in astrology as an alternative (or accompanying) religious philosophy to Qabbalah, which Pico and others were certainly interested in. Elijah Delmedigo was a known opponent of Pico’s views on Qabbalah.113 There is exciting evidence that Galeano was part of this network of scholars that sold manuscripts to the Fuggers. Vatican MS Ebr. 201 contains Qabbalistic commentary on the Torah and was purchased by the Fuggers, though no date of purchase is given.114 Thus, it may or may not have been purchased during the 1541–​1543 trip. The end of the manuscript contains a 1539 statement of sale from Galeano’s student Abraham Algazi to Galeano, naming Galeano as a rabbi, physician, and his (Algazi’s) teacher.115 Thus, when the Fuggers’ agent came to Candia in 1541 and 1542 to buy manuscripts –​including, eventually, this one –​it was, as far as we know, in Galeano’s possession.116 There is one potential reason for caution in my reading of the statement of sale. The buyer’s name is spelled Agaleano, with an aleph at the beginning. We know from the colophon of Puzzles of Wisdom that Galeano completed that text in Candia in 1536. Algazi copied the only surviving manuscript of the text in Candia in 1539.117 So unless Algazi had another teacher at the same time, who was also a rabbi and a physician (as the statement of sale identifies him as such) with almost the same name, I am comfortable with equating Agaleano and Galeano, as one of the colophons in the manuscript of Puzzles spells the last name Agaleano.118

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44  Robert Morrison It is possible that the book that Galeano bought from Algazi was not Vatican MS Ebr. 201, but MS Ebr. 202, a jumbled, unbound codex of 21 texts. In his 1935 book on the Hebrew manuscripts of the Vatican’s Palatine collection, Umberto Cassuto stated, though without citing evidence, that the statement of sale bound in Vatican MS Ebr. 201 actually belonged to Vatican MS Ebr. 202. Cassuto added that much of 201 would still be part of the Fuggers’ collection (though not owned by Galeano).119 I would speculate that since the statement of sale for 201 was on a folio with no other writing, and because the folio had been mostly reattached to the binding, Cassuto presumed that that statement of sale came from 202. An expertly prepared catalog of the Vatican Hebrew manuscripts, published in 2008, states that folios 239–​241 of the manuscript were originally blank.120 As there is no doubt that folio 239 was originally part of MS 201, because it contains a brief text that began on 238, just below where the Torah commentary ended, so folio 240, with the statement of sale, would have been part of Vatican MS Ebr. 201 all along. I have examined the original manuscripts and do not believe that the ownership statement was pasted onto folio 240, suggesting that Cassuto’s concern was misplaced. But even if Cassuto was correct, MS Ebr. 202 still became part of the Fuggers’ collection, meaning that the statement of sale is highly significant for assessing the likelihood of Galeano’s contact with Christian scholars.121

Conclusion We have reached several conclusions. First, though a full assessment of the reasons for Christians’ interest in these Hebrew manuscripts and an investigation of the full dimensions of the contacts between Christian and Jewish scholars are topics for a longer project, it is clear that the range of texts and ideas transmitted through this network of scholars went well beyond theoretical astronomy. Thus the ideas, and perhaps the texts, of Ibn Nah￱mias and Ibn al-​Shāṭir were circulating with other ideas and texts, the transmission of which is not contested. Second, the chapter has noted many instances of contact between scholars in Europe and the Jewish communities of Crete and Istanbul; Galeano, if he did indeed meet Christian scholars, as the evidence from the statement of sale in Vatican MS Ebr. 201 strongly suggests, was not an isolated case. The only thing about Galeano that was exceptional was the range and depth of his knowledge of non-​Ptolemaic astronomy. But even Galeano’s exceptional level of knowledge of the subject, this chapter has shown, emerged from the context of Jewish intellectual life in the eastern Mediterranean. Even a scholar like Elijah Delmedigo, not at all an accomplished astronomer, was aware of the shortcomings of Ptolemy’s astronomy. Third, this chapter has also provided a context for why Christian astronomers in Renaissance Italy would look to Jewish informants. Broadly speaking, Jews had a history of being sources for Christians in other areas –​for example, Qabbalah, astrology, and medicine. And, more specifically, the chapter has shown that Ibn Nah￱mias’s work on homocentric astronomy meshed perfectly with that of other scholars at the University of Padua and that a copy of The Light of the World was reported to have been at Padua. The possibility of independent (or parallel)

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A scholarly intermediary 45 discoveries in some of these areas is still arguable, but there may be a limit to how much can be attributed to independent discovery in the face of a plausible path of transmission. André Goddu has written that without a clear path of transmission to explain the parallels between the astronomy of the Islamic world and the work of Renaissance astronomers, including Copernicus, we should entertain other explanations. To account for the overwhelming parallels between Copernicus’s models and Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s, he noted that Sandivogius of Czechel and Albert of Brudzewo proposed double-​epicycle models for the moon.122 But those lunar models were not the same as Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s and Copernicus’s, and there is no explanation of how those double-​epicycle lunar models led to planetary models that, with the exception of heliocentrism, were equivalent to Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s. In contrast, the network of transmission that this chapter has described would seem to offer a more plausible explanation. Finally, this chapter has acknowledged that the work of European astronomers was the context for the transmission; without the work of Regiomontanus, there would be no reason to presume that astronomers at Padua would be interested in Ibn Nah￱mias’s ideas. Transmission is not a simple story with clearly defined paths. There is a complex interplay between individuals’ insights and networks of transmission. Still, in the case of Moses Galeano, given the context for his scientific interests as well as both circumstantial and direct evidence for his contact with European scholars, it would be difficult to believe that he did not speak to Christian scholars while in the Veneto between 1497 and 1502 and transmit his knowledge of the theories of Ibn Nah￱mias and Ibn al-​Shāṭir to someone of significance.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the three anonymous referees for Isis as well as Jamil Ragep (McGill University) and Tzvi Langermann (Bar Ilan University) for their advice and encouragement at various stages of this project. This chapter is based on talks I gave in 2011 at the University of Washington and at the History of Science Society annual meeting.

Notes 1

Early studies include Victor Roberts, “The Solar and Lunar Theory of Ibn al-​Shāṭir: A Pre-​Copernican Copernican Model,” Isis 40 (1957):  428–​432; E.  S. Kennedy and Victor Roberts, “The Planetary Theory of Ibn al-​Shāṭir,” Isis 50 (1959): 227–​235; and Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957; rpt. New  York:  Dover, 1969), 202–​205. These results and some subsequent findings are presented in Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus,” 2  vols. (New  York:  Springer, 1984), vol. 1, 41–​64. The most important recent studies –​which include more direct historical evidence for transmission –​are George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 193–​232; and F. Jamil Ragep, “Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks,” History of Science 45 (2007): 65–​81.

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46  Robert Morrison 2 Neugebauer and Swerdlow, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus,” vol. 1, 47, 295. For a survey of the achievements of the astronomers of Islamic societies, see George Saliba, “The Astronomical Tradition of Maragha: A Historical Survey and Prospects for Future Research,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 1 (1991): 67–​99. 3 F. Jamil Ragep, “ ‘Alī Qushjī and Regiomontanus:  Eccentric Transformations and Copernican Revolutions,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 36 (2005):  359–​371. This final point of similarity is significant because, while no Islamic astronomer proposed a heliocentric cosmos, the mathematical accuracy of Copernicus’s heliocentric system would have been unattainable without the mathematical transformation enabled by Qushjī’s demonstration of the equivalence of the epicyclic and eccentric hypotheses for retrograde motion. 4 The evidence for this claim first appeared in Otto Neugebauer, History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (New York: Springer, 1975), 11, 1035, 1456 (for a reproduction of the relevant MS folio). 5 Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 217–​218. Biṭrūjī’s On the Principles of Astronomy was available in Europe in a Latin translation attributable to Michael the Scot (d. 1217). For the Latin translation of Biṭrūjī’s Kitāb al-​ Hay’a, see Abū Ish￱āq Nūr al-​Dīn al-​Biṭrūjī, “De Motibus Celorum”: Critical Edition of the Latin Translation of Michael Scot, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1952). Goldstein’s translation (with commentary) of the Arabic original took account of the Hebrew translation:  Al-​Biṭrūjī, On the Principles of Astronomy, trans. Bernard Goldstein, 2  vols. (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1971). 6 Edward Rosen, “Copernicus and Al-​Bitruji,” Centaurus 7 (1961): 152–​156, on p. 152, rpt. in Rosen, Copernicus and His Successors, ed. Erna Hilfstein (London: Hambledon, 2003), 41–​45. 7 Noel Swerdlow concluded that there were five main sources for Copernicus’s work: Peurbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum, Peurbach and Regiomontanus’s Epitome of the Almagest, the Alphonsine Tables, the Almagest, and the work of the astronomers of Islamic societies, whom he referred to as the Marāgha astronomers. See Noel Swerdlow, “The Derivation and First Draft of Copernicus’s Planetary Theory:  A Translation of the Commentariolus with Commentary,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117 (1973): 423–​512, esp. pp. 425–​426. 8 Ragep, “Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors,” 69. Robert Westman’s recent The Copernican Question (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), while covering a lot of ground, does not discuss how Copernicus would have become acquainted with or have discovered independently Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s models. Westman cites Neugebauer and Swerdlow’s argument “for the virtual identity” of Copernicus’s and Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s models without further discussion:  ibid., 531 n136. For another recent explanation of the origins of Copernicus’s heliocentric hypothesis, see Bernard R. Goldstein, “Copernicus and the Origin of His Heliocentric System,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 (2002): 219–​235. 9 On Islamic discussions of a rotating earth, see F. Jamil Ragep, “T￴ūsī and Copernicus: The Earth’s Motion in Context,” Science in Context 14 (2001): 145–​163. 10 See Owen Gingerich, “Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (review),” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39 (2008): 310–​111, on p. 311. Gingerich wrote, apropos Qushjī’s demonstration, “At present, there appears only one small avenue where a specific geometrical insight from the Islamic world might have given an indispensable impetus toward the radical heliocentric rearrangement.”

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A scholarly intermediary 47 11 Ragep, “Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors,” 72. Ragep has called for more attention to be paid to Copernicus’s context: “What seems to be overlooked by those who advocate a reinvention by Copernicus and/​or his contemporaries of the mathematical models previously used by Islamic astronomers is the lack of an historical context for those models within European astronomy” (ibid., 70). 12 George Saliba, “Arabic Science in Sixteenth-​ Century Europe:  Guillaume Postel (1510–​ 1581) and Arabic Astronomy,” Suhayl 7 (2007):  115–​ 164. See also Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 13 See, e.g., Rivka Feldhay and F.  Jamil Ragep, eds., Before Copernicus:  Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century (Montreal:  McGill-​Queens University Press, 2017). On the role of Middle Eastern Christians as scholarly intermediaries, see George Saliba, Rethinking the Roots of Modern Science: Arabic Scientific Manuscripts in European Libraries (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, Center for Contemporary Arabic Studies, 1999). 14 Bernard Goldstein has written of astronomy as a “neutral zone.” See Bernard R. Goldstein, “Astronomy as a ‘Neutral Zone’: Inter-​religious Cooperation in Medieval Spain,” Medieval Encounters 15 (2009): 159–​174. An older study that remains important is Moritz Steinschneider, Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893; rpt. Graz: Akademische Druck-​u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956). 15 Regarding the Ibn Nah￱mias family, see Abdelkader Modena, Medici e chirurghi ebrei dottorati e licenziati nell’Università di Padova dal 1617 al 1816 (Bologna: Forni, 1967), 49:  “Nella prima metà del ‘600 una famiglia Namias si trova stabilita a Venezia. Il medico Abram Namias fu scolaro dello Studio nel 1645, ma pare si sia laureato altrove … Nel 1645 furono pure scolari dell’ Università artista Joseph ed Isach Namias.” On their printing establishment, see A. K. Offenberg, “The First Printed Book Produced at Constantinople,” Studia Rosenthaliana 3 (1969): 96–​112. 16 See Y.  Tzvi Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit: New Perspectives,” in Science in the Medieval Jewish Communities, ed. Gad Freudenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 438–​453. See also Langermann’s and Goldstein’s survey articles cited in ibid., note 18. 17 Kenneth M.  Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–​1571, 4  vols. (Philadelphia, PA:  American Philosophical Society, 1976–​1984), vol. 2, 296. In a covert attempt at negotiations to stall further Ottoman military advances, the Venetian Senate sent David Mavrogonato, a Jew, to Istanbul in 1469. See David Jacoby, “Un agent juif au service de Venise: David Mavrogonato de Candie,” Bollettino dell’ Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Post-​Bizantini 9 (1972): 68–​96, esp. p. 72. 18 Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 117. On astronomy as a cross-​cultural meeting ground in a slightly earlier period, see Bernard Goldstein, “Astronomy in the Medieval Spanish Jewish Community,” in Between Demonstration and Imagination: Essays in the History of Science and Philosophy Presented to John D. North, ed. Lodi Nauta and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden:  Brill, 1999), 225–​241. See also Y.  Tzvi Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 1999), 2–​54. On the cultural dynamics between European Christians and Muslims, see Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 172. Bisaha remarks that “it is important to remember that many humanists transferred their disdain for the Turks to other Islamic peoples –​the

48

48  Robert Morrison conflict of West versus East was not limited to the Turks alone.” For a slightly different view, see Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought, 208: “European historians had revised their estimates of almost every Asiatic empire (whether Persian, Arab, Turk, or Mongol) once it ceased to pose a threat to Christian interests or once a new and more aggressive dynasty rose to replace it.” 19 Y. Tzvi Langermann, “A Compendium of Renaissance Science:  Ta‘alumot h￱okma by Moshe Galeano,” Aleph:  Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 7 (2007):  283–​ 318, 296; this recent article is very important for the present chapter. Earlier scholarship on Galeano includes Juan Vernet, Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia medieval (Barcelona:  Bellaterra, 1979), 333–​351; and José Chabás and Bernard Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 90)  (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2000), 163, 170. See also Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Medicine, Mechanics, and Magic from Moses ben Judah Galeano’s Ta‘alumot h￱okma,” Aleph 9 (2009): 353–​377; and Robert Morrison, “An Astronomical Treatise by Mūsā Jālīnūs alias Moses Galeano,” Aleph 10 (2011): 315–​353. 20 On Fracastoro and Amico, see Mario di Bono, “Copernicus, Amico, Fracastoro, and T￴ūsī’s Device: Observations on the Use and Transmission of a Model,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 26 (1995): 133–​154. See also Enrico Peruzzi, La nave di Ermete: La cosmologia di Girolamo Fracastoro (Florence: Olschki, 1995). Regarding Copernicus’s time at Padua, see André Goddu, “Nicholas Copernicus,” in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie et al. (Detroit, MI: Scribner’s, 2008), 176–​182, esp. p. 177. 21 Regarding Galeano’s views on homocentric astronomy, see Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 290–​292. See also Morrison, “Astronomical Treatise by Mūsā Jālīnūs alias Moses Galeano.” Presuming that Galeano actually thought that the epicyclic and eccentric hypotheses were problematic, then this Arabic treatise by Galeano (writing as Jālīnūs) is more evidence that the alternative would have been homocentric astronomy. 22 Isaac Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, Yashar of Candia: His Life, Works, and Times (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 35 (quotation), 36. In note 2, one finds that there were Jewish students studying at the University of Padua in 1501 under assumed names. 23 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 287 (regarding the Chief Rabbi), 287–​289 (Puzzles of Wisdom); and Morrison, “Astronomical Treatise by Mūsā Jālīnūs alias Moses Galeano,” 401 (ordering of the planets akin to people sitting before the Sultan). 24 I would like to thank Jamil Ragep and İhsan Fazlıoğlu for bringing Ilyās al-​Yahūdī to my attention. My information about him comes from Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu et  al., eds., Osmanlı Astronomi Literatürü Tarihi, 2  vols. (Istanbul:  İslâm Tarih, Sanat ve Kültür Araştırma Merkezi, 1997), vol. 1, 71–​73. 25 Elli Kohen, History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: Memories of a Past Golden Age (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), 27: “A rumor, perhaps originating in the apocryphal stories about Mehmed II’s Galenus, Hekim Yakub, attributed to the Elder Hamon a leading role in the poisoning of Bayezit II, masterminded by his son Selim.” 26 Abraham Galanté, Documents officiels turcs concernant les juifs de Turquie (Istanbul: Haim, Rozio, 1931), 194–​295. On Jacob’s position as a wazīr (minister), Galanté cited Achik Pacha Zadé Tarihi (Constantinople, 1916), 191–​192. See also Kohen, History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim, 158, where there is a quotation

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A scholarly intermediary 49 from a document that referred to Yacub Pasha as the Galen and Hippocrates of his time. 27 Setton, Papacy and the Levant, 1204–​1571, vol. 2, 296. 28 Regarding Gemma’s rings, see Annuli astronomici pereum compositi super astrologiam utilitas (Rome, 1493). A  description of these rings frequently appeared in print, in the early 1500s, together with an edition of Sacrobosco’s De sphaera; see http://​ ghtc.ifi.unicamp.br/​Sacrobosco/​SB1534b.htm. On the astrological prognostication for Rome, see Moritz Steinschneider, “Die mathematischer Wissenschaften bei den Juden, 1441–​1500,” Bibliotheca Mathematica 3 (1901): 58–​76, esp. p. 72; on the annual prognostications, see Daniel Carpi, “Bonet Lattes,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 22 vols., 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), vol. 12, 518–​519 (this reference work can also be accessed through the Gale Virtual Reference Library). On Jacob ben Immanuel’s studies with Giovanni de Medici, see Anna Esposito and Micaela Procaccia, “Un astrologo e i suoi prognostici: Bonnet de Lattes a Roma alla fine del quattrocento,” Materia Giudaica 7 (2002): 97–​104, www. enzobarilla.eu/​ospiti/​bonetto%20de%20lattes%20-​%20un%20astrologo%20e%20 i%20suoi%20prognostici.pdf. Regarding the episode where Reuchlin sought his intervention, see Carpi, “Bonet Lattes,” 518. 29 Mordechai Comtino, Tiqqun keli ṣafih￱a, Munich Hebrew MS 36 (Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts [hereafter IMHM] 1166), fol. 173b. This text was probably composed on the 17th of Tevet in 5223, or July 14, 1463. 30 Philippe Gardette, “Judaeo-​ Provençal Astronomy in Byzantium and Russia,” Byzantinoslavica 63 (2005):  195–​ 209, esp. p.  202. Gardette gives the name as Eliezer Khomatiano, but see Ephraim Kupfer, “Mordecai ben Eliezer Comtino,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 5, 132–​133. Comtino’s (a Rabbanite) belief that science was important for an understanding of Scripture led to a rapprochement with Karaites. See Jean-​Christophe Attias, “Intellectual Leadership:  Rabbanite–​Karaite Relations in Constantinople as Seen through the Works and Activity of Mordekhai Comtino in the Fifteenth Century,” in Ottoman and Turkish Jewry:  Community and Leadership, ed. Aron Rodrigue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 67–​86, esp. p. 77. 31 See, e.g., Goldstein, “Astronomy in the Medieval Spanish Jewish Community”; and Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Iberian Peninsula.” 32 Elijah Mizrah￱i, Compendium arithmetices:  Decerptum ex libro Arithmeticarum institutionum magistri Eliae Orientalis, commentary by Oswald Schreckenfuchs and Sebastian Münster (Basel, 1546; rpt. Jerusalem: Maqor, 1970). Münster’s dedication to the readers noted his pre-​existing interest in Abraham Bar Hiyya’s Seper S￴urat ha-​Areṣ, a text on which he also commented in Latin. For more on Mizrah￱i’s commentary on the Almagest, see Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 446–​449. 33 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 295 (visit with Soncino in Venice); and Julio Samsó, “Abraham Zacut and José Vizinho’s Almanach Perpetuum in Arabic (16th–​19th C.),” Centaurus 46 (2004): 82–​97, esp. p. 83. 34 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 291 (this is Langermann’s translation). On Gersonides’ astronomy, see Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–​1344) (New York: Springer, 1985). See also Goldstein, “Levi ben Gerson’s Contributions to Astronomy,” in Studies on Gersonides, a Fourteenth-​Century Jewish Philosopher-​Scientist, ed. Gad Freudenthal (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 3–​19.

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50  Robert Morrison 35 The first publication to point out the connection was Roberts, “Solar and Lunar Theory of Ibn al-​Shāṭir,” 428: “What is of most interest, however, is that his lunar theory, except for trivial differences in parameters, is identical with that of Copernicus (1473–​1543).” See also Kennedy and Roberts, “Planetary Theory of Ibn al-​Shāṭir,” 227. For a summary of the parallels between Copernicus and Islamic astronomers, parallels that cannot be explained only by independent discovery, see Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 196–​209. 36 See Ibn al-​Shāṭir, al-​Zīj al-​Jadīd, Jewish Theological Seminary of America MS 2580 Acc. 0191 (IMHM 28833). See also Bernard Goldstein, “The Survival of Arabic Astronomy in Hebrew,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 3 (1979): 31–​39. 37 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 290. 38 George Saliba, ed., The Astronomical Work of Mu’ayyad al-​Dīn al-​‘Urd￴ī: A Thirteenth Century Reform of Ptolemaic Astronomy, Kitāb al-​Hay’ah (Beirut: Center for Arab World Unity Studies, 1990), 11–​13. On the connection between ‘Urḍī and Copernicus, see Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 202–​204. 39 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 287. 40 Ibid., 292. A likely contemporary of Galeano, Elijah al-​Fājī, used the same Hebrew epithet (ha-​mar‘ish) to refer to Biṭrūjī. 41 On The Light of the World, see Robert Morrison, “The Solar Theory of Joseph Ibn Nahmias,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15 (2005):  57–​108; and Robert Morrison, “Andalusian Responses to Ptolemy in Hebrew,” in Precious Treasures from Hebrew and Arabic, ed. Jonathan Decter and Michael Rand (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2007), 69–​86. See, now, Robert Morrison (ed., trans., and comm.): The Light of the World: Astronomy in al-Andalus (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2016). 42 An initial exploration of some of these expansions can be found in Morrison, “Andalusian Responses to Ptolemy in Hebrew.” 43 Morrison, “Astronomical Treatise by Mūsā Jālīnūs alias Moses Galeano,” 385, 385–​388. 44 One of the few surviving manuscripts of Biṭrūjī’s Kitāb al-​Hay’a is in the Topkapi Palace Library, in the same codex (MS Ahmet III 3302) as Mūsā Jālīnūs’s Dhikr ba‘d￴ al-​mah￱allāt. Both texts misspell Biṭrūjī as Biṭrūghī. 45 Eliyahu al-​Fājī, Miktab Eliyahu, BM 1017 Add. 15454 (IMHM 4939), 114 fols. I base my dating of this text to around 1500 on Steinschneider’s statement in “Die mathematischer Wissenschaften bei den Juden, 1441–​1500,” 73. 46 See Jewish Theological Seminary of America Rab. 1429 (IMHM 43432). Margoliouth’s catalog of Hebrew and Samaritan manuscripts identified al-​Fājī with the Elijah ben David al-​Fājī who signed a teshuvah (i.e., a responsum) for Elijah Mizrah￱i in 1518. 47 Al-​Fājī, Miktab Eliyahu, fol. 2b. See also Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 290–​291. 48 Al-​Fājī, Miktab Eliyahu, fol. 2b. The entire paragraph draws on this folio. 49 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 295 n 17, mentioned this reference in Miktab Eliyahu. 50 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 291, made this observation with regard to Galeano. 51 Al-​Fājī, Miktab Eliyahu, fol. 3b. On Gersonides’ position, see Goldstein, Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–​1344), 22–​23. 52 Al-​Fājī, Miktab Eliyahu, fol. 2a. The entire paragraph draws on this folio. 53 Yiṣh￱aq ben Samuel Abū al-​Khayr, Peirush al-​Fargani, Bodleian Neubauer 2015 (IMHM 19300), fols. 2a–​2b (here and throughout this chapter, translations into

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A scholarly intermediary 51 English are mine unless otherwise indicated). The quotation from fol. 2b reads, in Hebrew:  “ ‘Adayyin lo higi‘a ha-​sekel ha-​enoshi li-​yeda‘ amitat maṣab ha-​kokabim ba-​galgalim.” 54 As far as I  am aware, this line of argument is absent in the astronomy of Islamic societies. 55 This text (Elijah Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi) is available in MS St. Petersburg, Oriental Institute C 128 (IMHM 69356). 56 Ptolemy, al-​Magisṭi, trans. Jacob Anatoly, MS St. Petersburg, Oriental Institute MS D33 (IMHM 69609); see, e.g., fols. 10b, 11a, 11b, 26a, 42a, for marginal comments from Mizrah￱i. 57 Ibid., fol. 86b. For more on Mizrah￱i’s references to other manuscripts, see Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 447. More generally, Anne Tihon has written, “The fifteenth century was a period of intense intellectual exchanges, which left their traces in manuscripts, so that one finds notes in Latin or Hebrew in Greek astronomical manuscripts of the period.” See Anne Tihon, “The Astronomy of George Gemistus Plethon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 (1998): 109–​116, on p. 116. 58 Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 446, has accepted the attribution of the Almagest commentary to Mizrah￱i. 59 Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi, fols. 85v, 86v, 89v (for references to the Arabic Almagest). On fol. 86r, Mizrah￱i compared two Hebrew versions of the Almagest. Comparisons with other texts of the Almagest served to clarify perceived corruptions in the available text. On Mizrah￱i’s references to Ibn Rushd and Jābir ibn Aflah￱’s writings, see Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 447. Langermann notes that Mizrah￱i had misgivings about Andalusian (i.e., homocentric) astronomy. See also Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi, fol. 21v. 60 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 285; and Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 447. 61 See al-​H￴asan Ibn al-​Haytham, al-​Shukūk ‘alā Baṭlamyūs, ed. A.  I. Sabra and Nabil Shehaby (Cairo:  Maṭba‘at dār al-​kutub, 1971), for the Arabic discussion of doubts (shukūk) about Ptolemy. 62 Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi, fols. 163r–​v, 164r. See also Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 447–​448. 63 Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi, fols. 163v–​ 164r. See also Langermann’s discussion in “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 448. Langermann did not mention Mizrah￱i’s acknowledgment of the practicability of allowing a variation in the anomaly. 64 Mizrah￱i, Peirush Seper al-​Magisṭi, fol. 164r. 65 On the relationship between observations and theory in the work of Gersonides and Ibn al-​Shāṭir, see Bernard Goldstein, “Theory and Observation in Medieval Astronomy,” Isis 63 (1972): 39–​47, esp. pp. 46–​47 (for Ibn al-​Shāṭir; on Gersonides, see pp. 41–​42). On observational considerations and Ibn al-​Shāṭir’s solar model, see George Saliba, “Theory and Observation in Islamic Astronomy: The Work of Ibn al-​ Shāṭir of Damascus,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 18 (1987): 35–​43. 66 José Luis Mancha and Gad Freudenthal, “Levi Ben Gershom’s Criticism of Ptolemy’s Astronomy,” Aleph 5 (2005): 35–​167, esp. pp. 101, 161–​164. Ibn Nah￱mias’s contemporary Profiat Duran (d. 1415) also knew of the equant problem. See Profiat Duran, Peirush al-​Majisṭī, BNF MS 1026 (IMHM 15025), fol. 10a. On Ibn Rushd’s own awareness of the equant problem, see Juliane Lay, “L’abrégé de l’Almageste: Un inédit

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52  Robert Morrison d’Averroès en version hébraïque,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 6 (1996): 23–​61, esp. p. 38. Ibn Rushd expressed the equant problem, without actually naming it as such, in physical terms as a supposed intersection of the deferent orb and the orb of the deferent center’s mean motion (i.e., the equant orb). See also ibid., 32–​33. Lay cites European and Christian astronomers, including George of Trebizond (d. 1486) and Pico, who knew about the Epitome, a text that has survived only in Hebrew. 67 Al-​Biṭrūjī, On the Principles of Astronomy, trans. Goldstein, vol. 1, 131–​ 140. More fundamentally, see Almagest 3.3, in Ptolemy’s Almagest, trans. G.  J. Toomer (London: Duckworth, 1984), 141, where Ptolemy entertained the eccentric and epicyclic hypotheses as equivalent ways to account for the observed anomalies in the sun’s motions. Ptolemy, therefore, framed the question as one of predictive accuracy, not idealized consistency with Aristotelian philosophy. 68 Of course, the Ptolemaic lunar model predicted variations in the size of the moon that were not observed. 69 Regiomontanus became skeptical of eccentrics and epicycles owing to their inability to account for observed changes in the sizes of the planets. See Michael Shank, “Regiomontanus as a Physical Astronomer:  Samplings from The Defence of Theon against George of Trebizond,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 38 (2007):  325–​ 349, esp. p.  326; see also p.  327, where Shank discusses “the inaugural lecture of his [Regiomontanus’s] course on al-​Farghānī at the University of Padua in 1464, in which he mentioned wistfully Averroes’ unsuccessful efforts to construct a concentric astronomy.” See also Michael Shank, “The ‘Notes on al-​Biṭrūjī’ Attributed to Regiomontanus:  Second Thoughts,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 23 (1992): 15–​30, on p. 15: “And yet, paradoxical though it may seem, Regiomontanus was very interested in the homocentric tradition, in spite of the fact that he was an exceptionally competent mathematical astronomer.” 70 Michael Shank, “Regiomontanus on Ptolemy, Physical Orbs, and Astronomical Fictionalism,” Perspectives on Science 10 (2002): 179–​207, esp. p. 192; Peter Barker, “The Reality of Peurbach’s Orbs: Cosmological Continuity in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Astronomy,” Archimedes 27 (2011): 7–​32, esp. pp. 14, 18 (this essay is part of a special issue of the journal entitled Change and Continuity in Early Modern Cosmology, edited by Patrick Boner). 71 See Gad Freudenthal, “Towards a Distinction between the Two Rabbis Joseph ibn Joseph Ibn Nah￱mias,” Qiryat Seper 62 (1988–​1989):  917–​919 (in Hebrew). See also the English translation in Gad Freudenthal, Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Freudenthal’s position –​that Ibn Nah￱mias’s contributions were not that significant  –​derived from the way Profiat Duran cited Gersonides’ observational proof of the need for eccentric orbs in his (Duran’s) response to The Light of the World. Duran’s assessment of The Light of the World was appended to the unique manuscript of the Hebrew recension of The Light of the World. 72 Noel Swerdlow, “Regiomontanus’s Concentric-​Sphere Models for the Sun and the Moon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 30 (1999): 1–​23, esp. p. 2. José Mancha has argued that Ibn al-​Haytham’s (eleventh-​century) homocentric epicycles were transmitted to Europe by the fourteenth century. See José Mancha, “Ibn al-​Haytham’s Homocentric Epicycles in Latin Astronomical Texts of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Centaurus 33 (1990): 70–​89. 73 I say more about these connections between Ibn Nah￱mias’s homocentric astronomy and the work of astronomers at Padua in Robert Morrison, “The Position of the Jews

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A scholarly intermediary 53 as Scientific Intermediaries in the European Renaissance,” in Feldhay and Ragep, eds., Before Copernicus. 74 Swerdlow, “Regiomontanus’s Concentric-​Sphere Models for the Sun and the Moon,” 14–​ 15. Here Swerdlow commented that the slider-​ crank mechanism is the key element of Regiomontanus’s homocentric models, the element responsible for producing a linear oscillation through the motion of orbs. 75 Drawing on the original Latin arcus reciprocationis, Swerdlow also called Amico’s device a reciprocation mechanism, in which the reciprocation of motions between two contiguous orbs effected the oscillation of a point. See Noel Swerdlow, “Aristotelian Planetary Theory in the Renaissance:  Giovanni Battista Amico’s Homocentric Spheres,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 3 (1972): 36–​48, esp. pp. 38–​41. 76 Swerdlow, “Regiomontanus’s Concentric-​Sphere Models for the Sun and the Moon.” 77 ‘Esrim we-​shmoneh mah￱anot ha-​lebanah li-​shnat 1464, Vatican Ebr. 387/​4 (IMHM 469). The astrological tables contained in the text were composed for the longitude of Padua. Vatican 379, Parma 2637, and Budapest Kaufmann A 508 contain more extensive Hebrew translations from tables produced by Regiomontanus. 78 David Geffen, “Insights into the Life and Thought of Elijah Medigo Based on His Published and Unpublished Works,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 41–​42 (1973–​1974):  69–​86, esp. pp.  71–​72. Though little is known of Galeano’s life, there is evidence that he had a connection to Candia. First, Candia was where he completed Puzzles of Wisdom. See Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 287. Second, there were scholars with the same last name in Candia, probably cousins. See ibid., 287; see also Steinschneider, Die Hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (1956 ed.), 595, 578. Third, a prominent rabbi in Istanbul, Moses ben Elijah Capsali (d. c.1500), was the cousin of Elijah Capsali, the leader of the Jewish community on Candia. See Abraham David, “Moses ben Elijah Capsali,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, 456. 79 David Bercovy, “La famille Delmedigo,” Revue d’Histoire de la Medecine Hebraique 22 (1969): 13–​20, esp. p. 14; and Alberto Bartòla, “Eliyahu del Medigo e Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:  La testimonianza dei codici vaticani,” Rinascimento n.s. 33 (1993):  253–​278. Some of the contact between Pico and Delmedigo occurred in Padua (see pp. 259–​265). 80 The classic article on Andalusian critics of Ptolemy is A. I. Sabra, “The Andalusian Revolt against Ptolemaic Astronomy: Averroes and al-​Biṭrūjī,” in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 133–​153. 81 Note, though, that on fol. 74b of the same manuscript Delmedigo referred to Ibn Rushd as one of the ah￱aronim (which can mean any post-​antique figure) in philosophy. 82 Elijah Delmedigo, Bi’ur Eṣem ha-​galgal, Paris MS Hébreu 968, fol. 49a. This manuscript indicates a composition date of 1485 and a copying date of 1492; see ibid., fol. 74a. For more on the dating of the Hebrew and Latin versions of Delmedigo’s commentary on De substantia orbis, see Bohdan Kieszkowski, “Les rapports entre Elie Del Medigo et Pic de la Mirandole (d’après le ms. lat. 6508 de le Bibliothèque Nationale),” Rinascimento 4 (1964): 41–​91, esp. p. 45. 83 See Lay, “L’abrégé de l’Almageste,” 47–​48 (for the Shukūk), 46–​48 (for discussion of eccentrics and epicycles). 84 If one were to read “ha-​ah￱aronim” (“later ones”) with Ibn Rushd as the reference point, it would be odd to refer to Ibn Rushd’s predecessors as later or modern

54

54  Robert Morrison astronomers and their like (ha-​ah￱aronim we-​dimyoneihem) in the course of a discussion of Ibn Rushd. 85 On Delmedigo’s return to Crete, see Jacob Levinger, “Elijah ben Moses Abba Delmedigo,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 5, 542–​543. 86 Swerdlow, “Regiomontanus’s Concentric-​Sphere Models for the Sun and the Moon,” 17: “To expect S to know to remain in the ecliptic while L moves about a circle is to expect a great deal.” I thank Swerdlow for reminding me of his articles. 87 The first two options are discussed more in Morrison, “Andalusian Responses to Ptolemy in Hebrew,” 83; and Morrison, “Position of the Jews as Scientific Intermediaries in the European Renaissance.” See also The Light of the World, 365–376. 88 Ibn Nah￱mias, Or ha-​‘olam, Bodleian Canon Misc. 334, fols. 116a–​115b (the manuscript is numbered backward). See also The Light of the World, 210–211. 89 Ibid., fol. 115b. See also The Light of the World, 211–212. 90 There is no evidence that Ibn Nah￱mias knew that this device could be understood as being inspired by Eudoxus’s work. Mathematical analysis of this hypothesis can be found in the commentary on my forthcoming edition and translation of The Light of the World. For more on Eudoxan couples in the work of Biṭrūjī, see J. L. Mancha, “Al-​Biṭrūjī’s Theory of the Motions of the Fixed Stars,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 58 (2004): 143–​182. Mancha pointed out that there was no evidence that Biṭrūjī actually knew that his model incorporated a Eudoxan couple (pp. 157–​161). 91 Goldstein, Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–​1344), 14. Goldstein wrote that Amico’s criticism of the epicycle may have been inspired by Gersonides. Jews did not attend the University of Padua in large numbers until the end of the sixteenth century. See David Ruderman, “Medicine and Scientific Thought: The World of Tobias Cohen,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 191–​210, esp. p. 191. 92 There was a double-​circle device in the Judeo-​Arabic original of The Light of the World as well. See Morrison, “Solar Theory of Joseph Ibn Nahmias,” 92–​98. Unlike the refinements of the reciprocation mechanism found only in the Hebrew recension of The Light of the World, the double-​circle device was in both versions. 93 On the rudimentary T￴ūsī couple in Tah￱rīr al-​Majisṭī, see George Saliba, “The Role of the Almagest Commentaries in Medieval Arabic Astronomy: A Preliminary Survey of T￴ūsī’s Redaction of Ptolemy’s Almagest,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 37 (1987): 3–​20. 94 Gersonides (d. 1344)  was certainly aware of the Pseudo-​T￴ūsī commentary on Euclid’s Elements and may have been aware of the authentic T￴ūsī commentary as well. See Tony Lévy, “Gersonide, commentateur d’Euclide,” in Freudenthal, ed., Studies on Gersonides, 83–​147, esp. pp.  90–​91. On instruments, see M.  Comes, “The Possible Scientific Exchange between the Courts of Hulaghu of Maragha and Alphonse 10th of Castille,” in Sciences, techniques et instruments dans le monde iranien, ed. Nasrallah Pourjavady and Živa Vesel (Tehran: Presses Universitaires d’Iran, 2004), 29–​50. 95 This sentence and the rest of the paragraph are not in the original version of the article. I discuss this material in further detail in Robert Morrison, “Position of the Jews as Scientific Intermediaries in the European Renaissance,” 198–​214. 96 On Fracastoro’s appointment as a professor of logic at the University of Padua, see Archivio Antico dell’ Università, Vol. 669, fol. 3r; fol. 1r ff. contains “Professori di Logica in 1° Luogo.” On Fracastoro’s astronomy, see di Bono, “Copernicus, Amico, Fracastoro, and T￴ūsī’s Device,” 143–​144. See also Peruzzi, La nave di Ermete.

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A scholarly intermediary 55 97 Miguel Granada and Dario Tessicini, “Copernicus and Fracastoro: The Dedicatory Letters to Pope Paul III, the History of Astronomy, and the Quest for Patronage,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 36 (2005): 431–​476, esp. pp. 458–​464. 98 Swerdlow, “Aristotelian Planetary Theory in the Renaissance,” esp. p. 41; and Ibn Nah￱mias, Or ha-​olam, 113b. 99 Morrison, “Solar Theory of Joseph Ibn Nah￱mias,” 98. Naṣīr al-​Dīn T￴ūsī was aware of such a displacement with his own slightly different double-​circle device. See E. S. Kennedy and George Saliba, “The Spherical Case of the T￴ūsī Couple,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 1 (1991): 285–​291. The commentary in my edition and translation of The Light of the World shows that Ibn Nah￱mias’s double-​circle device was mathematically equivalent to the spherical T￴ūsī couple. 100 Giulio Bartolocci, Bibliotheca magna rabbinica de scriptoribus (Rome:  Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1675–​1694), vol. 4, 501. The report came via a certain Petrus Rivier, who was associated with the Collegium Neophytorum (where Bartolocci had also been a professor) and was a convert from Judaism (ibid., 228). Petrus Rivier was likely a contemporary of Bartolocci (ibid., 229). The Collegium Neophytorum was founded in 1543; see Robert Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 42. 101 Di Bono, “Copernicus, Amico, Fracastoro, and T￴ūsī’s Device,” 146. 102 Paul Lehmann, Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1956), vol. 1, 91–​93. Umberto Cassuto noted in I Manoscritti Palatini ebraici della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana e la loro storia (Vatican City, 1935), 29–​30, that the manuscripts were sold for Venetian currency. 103 David H.  Stam, ed., International Dictionary of Library Histories, 2  vols. (Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), vol. 1, 202. This information is found in the entry for the history of the Bavarian State Library. Later in his life, Johann Jakob Fugger served as librarian for Albrecht of Bavaria; see Mark Meadow, “Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origin of the Wunderkammer,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 182–​200, esp. p. 191. 104 E. Martellozzo Forin, “A Padova col Caiado: Marco Fugger e Pandolfo Rem (1504–​ 8),” Quaderni per la Storia dell’Università di Padova 4 (1971): 76–​97. On the Fuggers and Venice, see Jacob Strieder, Jacob Fugger the Rich: Merchant and Banker of Augsburg, trans. Mildred Hartsough and N. S. B. Gras (New York: Adelphi, 1931), 103. 105 Lehmann, Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken, vol. 1, 61. On Ulrich Fugger’s connection to Venice, see ibid., 91. 106 Ibid., 93 (175 Hebrew volumes); and Cecil Roth, “Elijah Capsali,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, 455–​456. 107 Vatican MS Ebr. 44, fol. 3r. See also Benjamin Richler, ed., Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library (Studi e Testi, 458) (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticano, 2008), 31, 215. The catalog explains that Fugger’s inscription indicated that Capsali was the head (contestabile) of the Jewish community at the time. 108 Richler, ed., Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, 292. See also Kalonymus b.  Kalonymus, trans., Bi’ur Ibn Rushd li-​Seper ha-​sheima‘ ha-​tẹ ba‘i, Vatican MS Ebr. 343, fols. 1v, 134v (studied by Ashkenazi). On Ashkenazi, see Jacob Haberman, “Saul ben Moses Ha-​Kohen Ashkenazi,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 2, 577. 109 Moses Kohen Ashkenazi, Urim we-​Tummim, Vatican MS Ebr. 393, fols. 1r, 1v (horoscopes).

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56  Robert Morrison 110 Ibid., fol. 137v. On fol. 122r, Ahskenazi wrote that astrology was also a ta‘alumat h￱okhmah (puzzle or mystery of wisdom). See also Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 449–​450. 111 Ashkenazi, Urim we-​Tummim, fol. 152v ff. Ibn Ezra’s writings in Latin were not the same as those in Hebrew. See Renate Smithuis, “Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Astrological Works in Hebrew and Latin:  New Discoveries and Exhaustive Listing,” Aleph 6 (2006): 239–​338. 112 Westman, Copernican Question, 103–​105; see p. 192 for more on Fugger’s mathematicus Leovitius, who wrote a book defending astrology. 113 Delmedigo has traditionally been considered to be a rationalist opponent of the Qabbalah and of Pico’s attempts to integrate the Qabbalah with Christian theology. But Kalman Bland has argued that Delmedigo’s position on the Qabbalah was nuanced and dependent on the audience. See Kalman Bland, “Elijah del Medigo’s Averroist Response to the Kabbalahs of Fifteenth-​Century Jewry and Pico della Mirandola,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1991): 23–​53. 114 The manuscript may contain more than one commentary on the Torah. See Cassuto, I Manoscritti Palatini ebraici della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana e la loro storia, 25. 115 Vatican MS Ebr. 201, fol. 240v. The colophon reads: “modeh ani eik makarti ha-​ seper ha-​zeh li-​mori rabbi he-​h￱akam ha-​shalem ha-​ropei … Mosheh Agaleano … kesep yadu‘a bein kebodo u-​beini … ani Abraham al-​Gazi ha-​koteib bi-​yadi mamash.” 116 Though the manuscript is part of the Fondo Fuggeriana, there is no statement of sale. 117 Langermann, “Compendium of Renaissance Science,” 287, 290. Langermann has described the surviving manuscript of Ta‘alumot H￵okmah as “a professional copy that the author later revised.” 118 Moses Galeano, Ta‘alumot h￱okmah, Cambridge University MS Add. 511.1, fol. 95a. 119 Cassuto, I Manoscritti Palatini ebraici della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana e la loro storia, 36, 25. 120 Richler, ed., Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, 140. 121 Cassuto, I Manoscritti Palatini ebraici della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana e la loro storia, 36. 122 André Goddu, Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition:  Education, Reading, and Philosophy in Copernicus’s Path to Heliocentrism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 486, 144.

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2  How information travels Jesuit networks, scientific knowledge, and the early modern Republic of Letters, 1540–​1640 Paula Findlen By the beginning of the seventeenth century early modern Europeans envisioned the Society of Jesus as a community of informed observers who might, willingly or unwillingly, assist with various efforts to collect strategic information in different parts of the world. Traveling to Rome from Salvador de Bahia in 1601, the Portuguese Jesuit Fernão Cardim (1540–​1625) and 15 of his confrères found themselves aboard a ship captured by the English pirate Francis Cook. Cardim had been in Brazil since 1583 and served as rector of the Jesuit colleges in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. He carried with him a number of valuable manuscripts –​a petition to Philip II to improve the treatment of the indigenous peoples by the Portuguese and further support evangelical efforts in Brazil, and his detailed history of Brazilian society and nature. Of all the Jesuits who had been in Brazil in the first half-​century of their mission, he was one of the most well-​informed observers who translated what he saw into a lengthy, detailed report. He surely aspired to write the kind of natural history inaugurated by his fellow Jesuit José Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590). Cardim’s detailed observations of the parts of the Portuguese Indies he knew well was a parallel project which complemented Acosta’s detailed and informative account of the Spanish Indies. Someone on the ship probably knew enough Portuguese to peruse Cardim’s manuscript, perhaps even interview the author, and recognized its value. The English pirates followed the well-​established practice of confiscating anything that seemed valuable, including papers. Cardim eventually returned to Brazil but his manuscript remained in London, where it was translated and eventually published by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus (1625). The intervening decades had obscured the author’s identity, though the manuscript retained certain distinguishing characteristics that illuminated the kind of observer who had written these things down. Purchas lamented no longer knowing the name of the author of the “exactest Treatise of Brasil which I have seen written by any man,” but he was fairly certain that this astute observer was a Jesuit.1 Thus, Cardim temporarily enjoyed a kind of anonymous celebrity for inadvertently giving the English exactly what they needed to know, as they explored the potential of the Americas for their own nascent imperial ambitions and imminent profit while subverting Iberian empires. A purloined Jesuit manuscript was a valuable commodity in the marketplace of knowledge. This act of piracy and publication offers

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58  Paula Findlen an instructive example of how information traveled and was transformed to serve quite different purposes than the author intended. In recent years the Jesuit “information network” has been the subject of growing interest by historians of science, historians of early modern bureaucracy, and historians of the Society of Jesus.2 The phenomenal growth of the Society of Jesus between 1540 and its suppression in 1773 created an unparalleled combination of a well-​organized, hierarchical, and centralized administration in Rome, directing the growth and maintenance of educational institutions and missions throughout the world, while also striving to maintain a strong sense of spiritual community and brotherhood. It also created strong centers for faith and knowledge in key locations removed from yet connected to the Eternal City such as the Jesuit college in Coimbra, which has been described as a “true college for the Indies.”3 In 1600 the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius with six original members in 1540, had 5,164 confrères and 144 colleges distributed across 21 provinces. The year after Purchas published Cardim’s A Treatise of Brasil, the Society’s ranks swelled to 15,544 members with 444 colleges distributed across 36 provinces. The number of Jesuits would continue to increase for the next century, though the most dramatic exponential growth belonged to the first century of their existence.4 From a European perspective, the Jesuits seemed to be everywhere, “one nation and one province” as Francisco Suarez described the Society of Jesus in 1609, traveling with merchants and empires to disseminate faith throughout world.5 The Jesuits self-​consciously celebrated their presence in different parts of the world, underplaying the failure of a number of key missions to thrive. They were Baconian “merchants of light” in Catholic priestly garb. Soon after the order’s inception, Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit’s first apostolic secretary, Juan de Polanco, envisioned the Society engaged in a “mission of mobility.”6 They began to create an infrastructure that allowed the General Superior to direct individual Jesuits to different locations, best suited to their abilities and the current needs of the order. In 1547 Polanco encouraged the increasingly dispersed early members to engage in regular correspondence. These practices were made official in the Constitutions (1558), where Ignatius described “the exchange of letters between subjects and superiors” as the best means to make a geographically dispersed religious order function well. By mandating regular and structured communications between Rome, “where communications with all regions can more easily be maintained,” and the Jesuit provinces, he ensured the circulation of “news and reports” in more than one direction.7 The largest surviving correspondence for any individual in the sixteenth century belongs to Ignatius of Loyola since he modeled what he preached. Polanco’s Ratio scribendi (1560) institutionalized the obligation to correspond; revised periodically, its essential goals remained in place for the next two centuries.8 The inaugural generation of Jesuits who innovated the practices of their order thought very carefully about what letters could accomplish as well as the limits of this form of communication. With the creation of overseas missions inaugurated by Francis Xavier (1506–​1552), who arrived in Goa in 1542, Ignatius recognized that Jesuit missionaries in remote locations had access to valuable information

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How information travels 59

Figure 2.1 The globalization of the Jesuit missions: “One World Is Not Enough.” Credit:  Johannes Bolland, Jean de Tollenaer et  al., Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu a Provincia Flandro-​Belgica eiusdem Societatis repraesentata (Antwerp, 1640), 326. Courtesy of Special Collections, Saint Louis University Libraries, http://​libraries.slu.edu/​digital/​ spiritual-​journeys/​images/​imago-​0326.jpg.

which satisfied curiosity about the unknown. He encouraged them to put it in a letter. In 1554, responding to growing public interest in Jesuit missionary reports, Ignatius instructed missionaries: Finally if there are other things that may seem extraordinary, let them be noted, for instance, details about animals and plants that either are not known at all, or not of such a size, etc. And this news … may come in the same letters or in other letters separately.9 He actively encouraged Jesuits to become purveyors of interesting information about the world, putting observations regarding natural history, geography, astronomy, and cosmography in their missives to Rome. In the age of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigations and Travels (1550–​ 1559), Ignatius understood the appetite for reading reports of other worlds. He wanted early modern Europeans to see just how far Jesuits traveled, how much

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60  Paula Findlen they learned, and how bravely they struggled to increase the number of faithful around the globe.10 Ultimately, the Society was not one but many intersecting networks. The Jesuit procurator in Lisbon, established in 1554, became a conduit for news from Asia, Africa, and Brazil, while the Roman hebdomadarius prepared summaries of all the information for circulation throughout the Jesuit provinces. With the arrival of the Jesuits in New Spain in 1572, Seville emerged as another key node in Jesuit global communication, making the Spanish Americas and the Philippines equally fertile terrain.11 As the order grew and its missions expanded, the quantity and quality of Jesuit news increased exponentially, despite numerous problems in communicating over such distances. As Xavier informed Loyola in January 1544, “It has been two years and nine months since I left Portugal and in all that time I have written three times and received only one of your letters since I have been in India.” A year later, Xavier reiterated his concern that letters failed to arrive.12 He had begun to worry that his own letters were also lost somewhere between Goa and Rome. The powerful appeal of global information inspired the generations after Ignatius to envision a program of publications which made carefully edited letters and histories of different missions widely available. In 1583, the year Cardim arrived in Brazil, the Annual Letters became a yearly publication, ensuring widespread circulation of Jesuit news and reports that yielded 36 published volumes upon its conclusion in 1658.13 From Macao, Alessandro Valignano (1539–​1606) was reporting on what he learned after three years of evangelizing in Japan and reflecting on the limits of what he could effectively communicate at a distance.14 During this same period José Acosta (1540–​1600), who became provincial of his order in Peru, reflected on the success of the mission in this viceroyalty at the meeting of the Third Council of Lima (1582–​1583). He returned to Spain in 1587 with manuscripts filled with everything he had learned, laying the groundwork for his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590). This moment marked the intensification of interest in the role that the Society of Jesus might play in expanding the scientific understanding of nature. The Jesuits were now explicitly contributing to the globalization of knowledge.15 The idea of a distinctively Jesuit natural and moral history did not exist before Acosta, though Cardim’s writings on Brazil, composed around 1584–​1585, indicate that the possibilities were in gestation in multiple locations. A community of Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers was also beginning to emerge under the leadership of Christopher Clavius (1538–​1612).16 Acosta would bring his vision of how and why to report on the natural world back to Europe in his popular and influential publication, inspiring others to continue what he began. Clavius’s disciples transformed what they learned into a distinctive culture of missionary observations of heaven and earth. They began to make their own contributions to mapping different regions of the world –​and of course the globe itself –​as their missions took them to places most western Europeans knew very little about. The result was a flourishing culture of Jesuit scientific publications.17 Jesuit observational practices stimulated new approaches to scientific knowledge at a distance. This growing body of information inspired early modern Europeans who did not

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How information travels 61 always share their evangelical faith, but nonetheless considered them potentially valuable observers of nature, to find ways to harness an emerging religious network. The Jesuit capacity to observe and report was valuable not only within the Society but could also be mobilized in the service of specific projects of knowledge that mattered to the early modern Republic of Letters.

Creating Jesuit observers Within a decade of his arrival in Asia, Xavier recognized that a good scientific education prepared missionaries to engage the curiosity of the people they met with effective demonstrations of European knowledge as an aid to conversion. “I do not want them to be ignorant of astrology,” Xavier wrote Ignatius from Goa in 1552, describing the ideal characteristics of future missionaries. The Japanese wanted to know about the phases of the sun and the moon and what made them predictable. Xavier reproduced a list of sample questions that a well-​educated missionary should be able to answer: “What is the origin of rain, snow, and hail? Where do comets, thunder, lightning, and other similar phenomena come from? It is incredible how effective the explanation of such things is in gaining the goodwill of the Japanese.”18 Observing and explaining nature became part of the logic of conversion so this was knowledge to be used within the mission as well as information to send home. Thus, almost from the start, Xavier articulated why a good grasp of Aristotelian natural philosophy, especially meteorology, and Ptolemaic geography and astronomy mattered for missionaries. Science lubricated the wheels of faith. Two decades later, Acosta became the model Jesuit observer of nature for his generation in the Americas rather than Asia. He survived extreme altitude sickness, snow-​blindness, and other challenges of traversing the Andes, and witnessed the comet of 1577 at Julì. He gathered information on the course of the Amazon, explored the mountainous terrain of the Peruvian highlands filled with unusual flora and fauna, described American volcanoes, and talked extensively about oceans and tides with pilots while carefully inspecting their maps. He was seemingly curious about everything, eager to interview well-​informed people, and smart enough to understand that some of the things he heard and saw transcended the limits of his own understanding. The answer was to listen carefully and write it all down. Acosta returned to Spain laden with manuscripts he had been writing since the 1570s. One of them became his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in Seville in 1590. Acosta constructed his account of the “natural phenomena of these lands and their characteristics” based not only on his lengthy experience of Peru but on frequent conversations with “learned and expert persons” whose knowledge allowed him to write of Mexico, and even make a few observations about China and Japan.19 Conversations with Father Alonso Sánchez (1547–​1593), one of the first Jesuits to reach the Philippines from Mexico, who had traveled from Manila to Macao before returning to Spain, encouraged Acosta to envision how the scope of natural history might expand with empire. In Peru he became acutely aware

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Figure 2.2 Creating Jesuit natural history in the Indies. Credit: José Acosta, Historia natural y moral de los Indios (Barcelona, 1591 ed.). Courtesy of Loyola University Chicago Digital Special Collections, www.lib.luc.edu/​specialcollections/​ items/​show/​856.

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How information travels 63 of the Pacific while never losing sight of the Atlantic. In his Natural and Moral History of the Indies Acosta deployed the range of skills a late-​sixteenth-​century observer of nature ought to have. He used his basic knowledge of astronomy to calculate the time difference between Peru and Spain “by computing the eclipses of the sun and moon,” concluding erroneously that it was six hours yet taking great pride in the care with which he did his calculations.20 Acosta described animals and plants with an equivalent attention to detail, demonstrating a decent mastery of Renaissance natural history. His portrait of an interconnected globe emerged from a strategic understanding of how Europeans traversed time and space, forging a web of connections between specific places, and adjusting their mental maps to accommodate what they now knew. This was the imagined map of the world that he helped make real. Acosta presented his decision to publish his Natural and Moral History of the Indies as an example of knowledge for the greater good: “I was offered some information that could be used and taken advantage of by intellects superior to mine.”21 At the same time, Acosta’s ambition to be known as more than an observer by publishing an account of the nature of the Indies under his own name helped to establish a new kind of knowledgeable Jesuit observer, the missionary-​ scientist who shared his findings with the world. His book would be mined by the next generations, including Protestants devoutly committed to a different vision of faith, as an important point of departure for understanding the nature of the Indies. Acosta demonstrated concretely why Jesuit missionaries were important observers of a distant nature, possessing the kind of cumulative experience and understanding that few others could claim. They were training their eyes to see. At the heart of the Society of Jesus, the German Jesuit mathematician Clavius, who had taught at the Roman College since 1563 and was the principal author of the Gregorian Calendar Reform in 1582, reinforced this view by entirely different means. For Clavius it was a matter of pedagogy since he insisted on the importance of mathematics in the Jesuit curriculum. Between 1580 and 1593 Clavius outlined a new program of mathematical education in the Jesuit colleges, underscoring its foundational importance for natural philosophy and astronomy and arguing for its broad significance in showcasing the strengths of Jesuit education.22 Clavius specifically underscored the importance of having missionaries have a good understanding of the mathematical sciences in order to use these skills wherever they traveled. During the 1580s the careful empirical work of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made astronomy an even more compelling science, filled with the prospect of new discoveries and the insights that came with them. A  growing community of Jesuits learned to observe the heavens. Not every Jesuit educated at the Roman College where Clavius taught for over 40  years became a member of his elite Academy of Mathematicians (1594–​1612). Yet a number of influential missionaries –​Matteo Ricci, Sabatino de Ursis, Jan Wremann, Giulio Aleni, Giacomo Rho in China, Carlo Spinola in Japan, and Giovanni Antonio Rubino in India (like Spinola, martyred in Japan) –​studied at least some mathematics and astronomy with Clavius. His disciples taught, wrote,

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64  Paula Findlen and observed nature in many different locations and continued to build the Roman College’s reputation as a center for scientific learning.23 Thus, by the end of the sixteenth century the Society of Jesus actively promoted the qualitative and quantitative skills that made Jesuits useful partners in advancing scientific knowledge. Jesuit mathematical culture instilled habits of observation and calculation among several generations of Jesuits who also had some familiarity with and interest in the instruments required to perform these tasks. In exceptional cases, Jesuit expertise vastly exceeded basic literacy in Western mathematics and astronomy. The famed Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci (1552–​ 1610), repeatedly requested that the Society send “a good mathematician” who skills exceeded his own, accompanied by a scientific library to support further research, in order to fully realize the seeds he planted in Peking by introducing Confucian literati to Euclidean geometry, Mercator’s cartography, and Clavius’s astronomy. In one of his two surviving letters to Clavius, Ricci warmly thanked his mentor in 1597 for sending his latest work on the astrolabe to Nanchang.24 Yet at the time of his death, despite the arrival of Sabatino de Ursis (1575–​ 1620), he still felt that the Chinese mission lacked enough missionaries with scientific training. Writing from Peking in 1610, de Ursis requested more books from Clavius’s successor as professor of mathematics at the Roman College, his Austrian colleague Christoph Grienberger (1561–​1636).25 Grienberger played a much more important role than Clavius in missionary scientific correspondence. He not only belonged to a younger generation enthralled with the possibilities of measuring and observing the world but taught privately in Coimbra (1599) and officially at the Jesuit college of San Antão (1599–​1602) in Lisbon, giving him direct contact with missionaries departing for Portuguese Asia.26 The most enterprising missionary-​scientists sought to keep abreast of recent developments in astronomy and mathematics, despite the considerable challenges of receiving news from Europe. In 1609 Giovanni Antonio Rubino (1578–​1643) wrote Clavius from Chandrapur, also hoping to get a copy of his Astrolabe (1593) which he could not find anywhere in India. He already had a copy of Clavius’s Practical Geometry. After writing Clavius, Rubino corresponded with Grienberger, asking him to send Clavius’s sine tables and “two or three eclipse observations taken from Magini’s ephemerides, calculated to the meridian of Venice.”27 Three years later, Rubino finally reported from the island of São Tomé that “a father who is my friend sent me Magini’s ephemerides that I wanted so much.” However, Rubino wondered if Tycho Brahe’s astronomic data or Erasmus Reinhold’s Prutenic Tables (1551) might not be preferable to the calculations of the Bolognese mathematician Giovanni Antonio Magini (1555–​1617) since “Magini’s ephemerides err not only in minutes but entire hours.”28 This Jesuit observer in southern India did not hesitate to privilege the work of Lutheran astronomers if he felt they produced better results than their Catholic counterparts. Rubino was trying to complete a detailed coastal map of the Vijayanagara empire, following the success of his world map prepared for Emperor Venkata II. He wanted to calculate the longitudes of the principal cities and map the provinces with the best knowledge

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How information travels 65 that European science could provide. Accuracy did not have a faith but could serve faith. Conversely, Jesuit knowledge had utility for those with little love for the religious order. In his studies of Jesuit science, Steven Harris has frequently remarked that virtually every scientific correspondence contained at least a few Jesuit letters.29 We need to probe this issue further to come to a fuller understanding of what the Republic of Letters thought of the Society of Jesus, and how both worked together to create a new culture of scientific information in the seventeenth century. In 1608 Galileo Galilei’s close friend Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571–​1620) found himself temporarily posted to Aleppo for several years, representing Venetian commercial and diplomatic interests in this part of the Levant. From Syria, the Venetian patrician Sagredo looked further east. He marveled at how different nature was becoming as he left behind his native city and everything that seemed familiar. “Here the material for philosophy is infinite,” Sagredo exulted in a letter to the Servite father Paolo Sarpi, theologian to the Republic of Venice. Like Sagredo, Sarpi supported new, experimental approaches to natural philosophy in collaboration with their friend, the Paduan mathematics professor Galileo. On the easternmost edge of the Mediterranean, Sagredo found himself on the cusp of the Indies. He became intoxicated with the prospect of gaining access to fresh information he might otherwise hear about only indirectly. Surely inspired by practices he had seen elsewhere, Sagredo decided to mail “questions and queries” to more than 25 people in the Levant and Asia. He primarily sent them to missionaries, though presumably some also went to merchants since Sagredo used diplomatic intelligence to identify potential informants in strategic locations where European commercial and religious communities had emerged. Hoping for a good response, Sagredo joked:  “and who knows if the Jesuit Fathers won’t be the only ones to come up with something to match my desires?”30 Sarpi received a full account of Sagredo’s plan for his scientific “project in far-​off countries.” Sagredo also apprised Galileo of his efforts to expand the range of their observations. He used his position as a servant of the Venetian Empire in the eastern Mediterranean to establish relations with scientific missionaries further east. Uncommon curiosity, stimulated by unusual circumstances, makes strange bedfellows. At home, Sagredo was pointedly critical of Jesuit efforts to gain a foothold in the Venetian Republic where they were generally unwelcome. He was prone to satirizing their cozy relationship with the papacy and ambitions to conquer souls through politics and knowledge. Abroad, however, they became potential partners in knowledge due to their shared understanding of the value of scientific information and mutual interest in the use of instruments to make good observations. Sagredo delighted in the idea of returning home with a “collection of letters sent and received from these Fathers.”31 He relished the prospect of creating, indeed diverting a bit of Jesuit news. What exactly did Sagredo wish to know? He had brought a portable magnetic instrument, created from materials extracted from his family mine in the

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66  Paula Findlen Dolomites, to Aleppo to make observations. Sagredo distributed copies of the instrument, presumably with instructions regarding how to use it, and encouraged recipients to make observations with it. Sagredo had other questions about the nature of the Indies that disappeared with the lost letters sent to places such as Isfahan, Goa, and Macao, and from there presumably to other locations throughout the East, but measuring magnetic declination was especially on his mind. To demonstrate what such observations could accomplish, Sagredo used his bussola to measure the distance between Venice and Aleppo by calculating the difference in magnetic declination. In October 1609, he sent the results to Galileo, inviting him to review his findings while he awaited the hoped-​for results from other locations. “I sent a good needle to the Jesuit Fathers of Goa, imploring them to make a precise observation with it.”32 The Jesuits responded positively to his offer of scientific collaboration but communication remained slow and uneven. After three years in Aleppo, Sagredo returned to Venice in 1611. He told Galileo that he had “seen something of the world” and enjoyed “a close correspondence with the brothers of Messer Rocco” –​Sagredo’s satirical name for the Society of Jesus –​in India, but little more. Sagredo confessed that he returned empty-​ handed, having acquired “nothing curious” from these exchanges beyond paper promises. It is possible that missionary observations arrived after his departure, yet this seems unlikely since his Venetian successor would have forwarded this correspondence. Almost a decade after encouraging missionaries to use his instrument to observe nature, Sagredo recalled that the Jesuits also neglected to send him seeds and exotic plants, let alone the much-​desired measurements of the variation of magnetic north and true north in different locations.33 In the end, all he had was their letters. This frustratingly incomplete transaction echoes Rubino’s complaint to Grienberger in 1618: “I have written three letters in the past years and had no response.”34 Even fellow Jesuits found it difficult to sustain intellectual conversation and share what they learned, let alone coordinate observations, across oceans and territories. Despite his inability to acquire new scientific data, Sagredo’s discussion of the potential benefits of corresponding with missionaries offers a preview of why the seventeenth century became the great age of Jesuit information. He did not view the Jesuits as exclusive providers of scientific information. There were missionaries from other religious orders, colonial administrators and servants, ship captains, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, enterprising merchants, and the occasional global traveler who also might be encouraged to observe nature. Nonetheless, Sagredo felt that the Jesuits were the most likely to respond, joking on one occasion that the Jesuit missionaries wrote him more often than his good friend Galileo during his time in Aleppo. Perhaps we should now posit a connection between these different letters exploring how to create and share knowledge at a distance. By the time Sagredo arrived in Syria, Rubino had been in India for five or six years.35 Rubino’s surviving letters to Clavius and Grienberger make him a likely candidate for Sagredo’s project to globalize scientific data.36 He was not the only possibility. De Ursis was in Macao and Giulio Aleni (1582–​1649) was en

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How information travels 67 route from Lisbon to China. The network of knowledgeable Jesuit observers was expanding, one missionary at a time. Around the time that Sagredo returned to Venice, Aleni posted his observations of an “almost total [lunar] eclipse” on January 9, 1610 in Goa and “a very clear darkening of the sun” on December 15, 1610 in Macao to his mentor Magini in Bologna. Magini was one of the leading Ptolemaic astronomers of his generation whose astronomical tables were widely used by practicing astronomers. Aleni informed Magini how helpful his ephemerides and equally popular portable edition of Ptolemy’s Geography were for missionary scientific research. In the melting pot of Portuguese Asia, Aleni had a unique opportunity to compare European, Japanese, and Chinese methods of calculating an eclipse. His experience, even before arriving in mainland China in 1613 where he would be the first Jesuit in Jiangxi and where he would help to establish the mission in Fujian, was so empirically rich that he found himself compelled to share what he learned, not only with his confrères through the standard channels of communication but with a European mathematician and astronomer he admired. “There are many other things about these lands of the Indies –​China, Korea, Japan, and newly discovered lands –​that I am about to write to you,” Aleni exclaimed, “but since I hope to make a complete map of them, which possibly I will send to you because, to tell the truth, geographic things have to be seen, thus for now I will not extend myself further.”37 Aleni mentioned that the Dalmatian Jesuit Jan Wremann (1583–​1621) was also writing to Grienberger from Macao. He encouraged Magini to support the mission by sharing his knowledge. “If you were to print any new mathematics book, it would be received here with great pleasure.”38 This was precisely the same message that Rubino repeatedly sent to Grienberger. Aleni’s report on the November 8, 1612 lunar eclipse does not survive in a letter but the information reached Magini. Giambattista Riccioli (1598–​1671), who taught astronomy at the Jesuit college in Bologna, reproduced Spinola’s observations in Nagasaki, and Aleni’s and Wremann’s observations in Macao, noting that Aleni had posted them to Magini and Wremann to Grienberger. Eventually the Paris Academy of Sciences published the Macao observations, as they mined the Jesuit archive for interesting data to publicize during the heyday of the French Jesuit scientific mission in the late seventeenth century.39 Despite the languid pace of communication Jesuits missionary-​scientists recognized that astronomy was a discipline undergoing rapid transformation. They wanted to gain access to new books, exchange knowledge, and contribute to this heterogeneous scholarly community. A culture of long-​distance scientific communication was emerging –​not only among Jesuits following a relatively fixed itinerary between Europe and Asia, but also involving lay correspondents in other locations. Their shared interest in observing the natural world with the best skills and tools available, rather than the “union of hearts” which bound all Jesuits together, united them.40 The scientific missionaries and the ambitious scientific minds of Europe had begun to envision how they might work together. This was the background to Rubino’s letter to Grienberger from São Tomé of Mylapore in November 1612, requesting

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Figure 2.3 Jesuit eclipse observations in Nagasaki and Macao. Credit: Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (Bologna, 1661), 365. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional Digital, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, http://​purl.pt/​14357.

a treatise describing Galileo’s telescope. We do not know who wrote Rubino “from Italy” about “certain spyglasses with which one sees things fifteen and twenty miles away and discovers many novelties in the heavens, principally in the planets.” Yet we see how eager he was to get his hands on a telescope accompanied by “some little treatise on such spyglasses.” If this was too difficult, he hoped for a paper instrument in scriptis et in figuris in order to explain to Indian artisans how to fashion a telescope using their skills working with local supplies of rock crystal.41 At that moment, Rubino was uncertain if he would remain in India since the Vijayanagara mission might not be renewed. He might be sent to China. Yet in the midst of these uncertainties, we see him trying to envision precisely what a European spyglass might look like based on the written account he received. Rubino knew how long it would take for an instrument or an illustrated

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How information travels 69 description to arrive, if it arrived, and he was not sure if he would be there to receive it. Despite these myriad uncertainties scientific news, books, instruments, and information were beginning to flow in multiple directions.

The lynx-eyed missionaries News traveled faster than instruments or books, being the most transportable of all commodities.42 A  telescope finally reached Macao in 1619, carried by the Swiss German Jesuit Johann Schreck (1576–​1630). A former physician and member of the Academy of the Lynxes (Accademia dei Lincei, 1603–​1630), Schreck joined the Roman scientific academy shortly after Galileo became a member, only to depart abruptly in November 1611, when he decided to abandon his medical career and academy affiliation to enter the Society of Jesus. After hearing about Schreck’s surprising decision from the Roman nobleman Federico Cesi, prince and founder of the academy, Galileo lamented “the great loss for our Company” as a result of “the acquisition for the other Company.”43 Implicitly comparing the Lincean Academy and the Society of Jesus as two exclusively fraternal organizations whose membership could not overlap, Galileo slyly suggested that the gain for faith was a loss for science. But was that really the case with the lynx-​eyed missionary? When Schreck took his vows, he was in the midst of completing his contributions to an ambitious and complex Lincean project known as the Mexican Treasury. Based on materials collected by the Spanish royal physician Francisco Hernández during a royal expedition to Mexico in 1570–​1577, the Mexican Treasury brought aspects of Hernández’s extensive studies of American nature into print, from a partial copy of his manuscripts made by the physician Nardo Antonio Recchi who brought them back from Spain to Naples. Linceans knowledgeable in different aspects of natural history supplemented this material with extensive commentaries. Schreck’s close friend and collaborator, the German papal physician and botanist Johan Faber (1574–​1629) who served as academy secretary, was the principal editor. He was perfecting the section about Mexican animals that became the first publication to emerge from this project.44 Schreck had been asked to write about Mexican plants; with his unanticipated departure, the Neapolitan lawyer and naturalist Fabio Colonna completed what he began. Schreck’s participation in the Chinese mission organized by the Jesuit procurator Nicolas Trigault (1577–​1628)  –​who left Hangzhou in 1612, seeking missionaries to answer Ricci’s call for good mathematicians and to help him encourage European patrons to build a Western scientific library that he might bring back to China45  –​became an interesting opportunity for him to consider how his missionary vocation might also advance Lincean science. Schreck hoped to bring the Mexican Treasury with him to China. He did his best to encourage Cesi to place this “monument of the Linceans in the Chinese Library.”46 The definitive version of this book did not appear in 1651 –​still listing Schreck as a Lincean even though he had not been a member of the academy for 40 years and died a Jesuit in Peking in 1630.47

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Figure 2.4 Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, 1617. Black, red, and white chalk, blue pastel, and pen and brown and black ink on light brown laid paper, 17 9/​16 × 9 3/​4 in. (44.6 × 24.8 cm). Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1999.222, www.metmuseum.org/​art/​collection/​ search/​337844.

In the Escorial Schreck carefully examined Hernández original manuscripts en route to Lisbon to prepare for his departure on the 1618 mission, double-​checking his work against the Spanish original, wishing he had a copy of his manuscript on Mexican plants with him, hoping to increase his knowledge of the nature of this part of the Indies before heading to the other Indies.48 Fundamentally, Schreck saw himself poised to become a scientific witness in an expanding and increasingly interconnected world. He envisioned writing to Peru and Mexico from China and continuing a correspondence with the Linceans as a Jesuit missionary-​scientist. Schreck’s sense of himself as a member of two societies, one religious and the other scholarly, is encapsulated in his plan to travel with an album amicorum, a book in which European scholars inscribed their names and locations for him to recall their friendship in a distant land. Friendship was indeed the language that united rather than divided Jesuits and lay scholars in the early modern Republic

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Figure 2.5 Francisco Hernández Mexican Treasury, including the Jesuit and former Lincean Johann Schreck’s commentary on Mexican plants. Credit:  Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651), ed. Johann Schreck, Johan Faber, and Fabio Colonna, with Nardo Antonio Recchi. Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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72  Paula Findlen of Letters in the shared pursuit of knowledge. Schreck encouraged Faber to be his primary conduit of news about mutual friends, including Colonna and Galileo, and further developments in European science. Just prior to his departure, Schreck carefully instructed Faber in the different ways to write to him in China. He could post letters to Ernst Fugger in Augsburg, using Fugger’s privileged access to the imperial postal network to communicate at a distance. Alternately, Faber could send mail through the Jesuit postal network. Schreck offered two possibilities –​ the first through the Spanish assistancy, reaching China via Mexico and Manila, and the second through Lisbon, where letters traveled directly to Portuguese Goa and from there to Macao, at which point they would enter the Chinese postal system or be delivered personally by courier for communication further inland. “Write to me as much by East as by West, and they will certainly be delivered,” he declared, reminding Faber of the importance of sending multiple copies of a letter via different routes to reach its destination when communicating at vast distances.49 Awaiting his ship in Lisbon in 1618, Schreck was envisioning concretely how information traveled. In May 1619 Schreck posted a letter to Faber from Goa. During his four months there he identified “five hundred plants, a few fish, some stones, even a few serpents,” all of them unknown in Europe, “but no birds since they fly too high for me.” Schreck carefully compared what he saw with the content of Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies and the Portuguese New Christian physician Garcia d’Orta’s Colloquies of Simples and Drugs, and the Medical Things of the Indies (1563), which had been published in Goa based on d’Orta’s long experience practicing tropical medicine. With more time, Schreck felt that the number of new plants he could describe and illustrate would double, making him the Hernández or Acosta of the Portuguese Indies, but his departure for China was imminent. He had not yet seen opium but heard it grew in Cambodia. Taking advantage of this precious opportunity to communicate with Rome, Schreck asked Faber to remind Grienberger to post a book from a mutual friend through the “Father Assistant of Portugal.”50 The Roman community of Jesuits and Linceans included an intimate world of German-​speaking Catholics who created a strong node for exchanging knowledge and information in comparison with Sagredo’s desultory efforts to engage Jesuits he had not known previously, when he found himself temporarily in the East, or even Aleni’s occasional correspondence with Magini.51 Writing from Hangzhou in August 1621, Schreck explained how political tensions in China virtually shut down the arrival of ships and with them “letters from Europe.” He was struggling with the challenges of learning a new language and culture  –​“I am busy with my Chinese study”  –​which occupied all of his time to achieve a level of proficiency where he could speak, read, write, and translate. His knowledge of Chinese medicine had been accelerated by his own illnesses, slowing the progress of his language studies in Macao, but he nonetheless had begun to understand the basic principles of Chinese science. Schreck used his anatomical skills to dissect two confrères, the now deceased Father de Ursis and a Japanese priest who had traveled to

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How information travels 73 Europe. He finally left Macao in May, covertly making his way to Canton with a Portuguese missionary and Chinese brothers, and from there to Nanking and ultimately Hangzhou where he joined Trigault and four other Jesuits, still awaiting Schall’s arrival.52 The politically fraught nature of his mission precluded much in the way of missionary science. “I have observed hardly anything of nature, since exiting was not allowed. Thus I  will be brief.” He noted some similarities with European fruit and enclosed a Chinese botanical specimen that he thought would please Faber, who might even show it to the pope as his botanist. “I greet all my friends,” he concluded, remembering the world he left behind. A few days later, he posted a letter to Joachim Koller in Munich describing the arduous and uncertain voyage he had undertaken into the mainland and growing concerns about Dutch efforts to wrest Macao from the Portuguese and piracy in the South China Sea. Schreck began to wonder if “new letters from Europe” would ever reach the Chinese mission. His joy and relief upon receiving Faber’s January 1620 letter to him in a mere two-​and-​a-​ half years in April 1622 was unmistakable.53 In January 1624 Faber shared Schreck’s 1621 letter with Cesi containing the precious “leaf of the tree that makes camphor.” Schreck regretted that he could not also send the flower and the fruit. Faber had just finished reading Acosta, “without whose knowledge I  would not have been able to compose anything about that new world,” in order to finalize his parts of the Mexican Treasury.54 Yet he was also engaged in a conversation about the global shape of nature that his Jesuit friend helped to facilitate. In China, Schreck was still thinking of America. Several years into his Chinese mission, Schreck came to the provisional conclusion “that Chinese plants have nothing in common with the plants of the New World.”55 He felt that Chinese plants had more similarities with European species while also seeing them as distinctively Asian, including their medicinal uses in Chinese medicine which greatly interested Schreck as a trained physician. These differences further encouraged Schreck’s construction of a great herbarium which led other Jesuits, including Kircher in his China Illustrated, to describe him and the manuscript as the “Indian Pliny” (Plinius Indicus).56 Schreck redoubled his efforts to absorb this new knowledge in “such a difficult language,” whose mastery challenged even the most learned and curious European. He still couldn’t really speak or read much, even after mastering 300 characters, but was slowly becoming familiar with plant names.57 In this lengthy and heartfelt letter, Schreck reminded Faber that long-​distance knowledge came at a high cost and took time to become a truly productive form of understanding nature. While Schreck struggled to master Chinese, collected Indian and Chinese plants, and began to understand Chinese medicine, he also used his mathematical and observational skills to chart his travels, knowing that the Chinese interior was still relatively unknown territory for Europeans.58 His greatest frustration as a missionary lay in the realm of astronomy. The former Lincean, who once observed the Medicean stars with Galileo from Cesi’s Roman villa on the Janiculum in April 1611, could not persuade Galileo to contribute any eclipse data or reveal his methods for calculating eclipses, let alone share his observations of Saturn and

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74  Paula Findlen his theories of planetary motion. Schreck had been a well-​informed if minor participant in the new astronomy, including attending some of Galileo’s lectures in Padua before arriving in Rome. He promised to make Cesi the “third benefactor of the Chinese mission” if he could ever persuade Galileo to send his observations and theories.59 Schreck’s 1622 letter from Jiading, recalling the Roman scholar who refused to look through “Galileo’s telescope in order to avoid being obliged to sustain that what he saw was true,” clearly indicates what he hoped to accomplish by engaging Chinese literati with the most recent developments in Western astronomy.60 Better informed than Rubino a decade earlier, Schreck understood very well what Galilean observational astronomy might do for Jesuit missionary science. Both before and after his departure from Lisbon, Schreck repeatedly encouraged Galileo to contribute to “the public good of the Chinese mission.” In 1616 Cardinal Federico Borromeo gave Schreck the telescope he brought to China.61 Galileo sent him nothing during six long years, in which Schreck patiently explained the potential importance of the new astronomy to the success of the Chinese mission so that their calculations would not replicate the errors he now perceived in Tychonic astronomy. Schreck’s generation of Jesuit mathematicians, among them a young Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–​1666) who traveled with him from Lisbon to China observing the heavens with Schreck and their other confrères on Trigault’s mission, brought Western learning to bear on the problem of Chinese calendar reform. Sagredo’s efforts to engage the Jesuits in India did not inspire Galileo to write to China, especially during the years immediately following the 1616 condemnation of Copernicus and other authors advocating heliocentrism. Galileo’s silence did not dampen the enthusiasm of a new generation of Jesuits to create their own network of global celestial observers and share the results with European astronomers. In 1618 the Milanese Jesuit Cristoforo Borri (1583–​1632) observed the comet from Hôi An during his mission to Cochinchina (Laos and southern Vietnam), comparing what he saw with Manuel Dias’s observations in Cochin and Wremann’s in Macao.62 Writing to the procurator of the Chinese mission in February 1619, the Bohemian Jesuit convert Wenceslas Pantaleon Kirwitzer (1588–​1626) informed his superior that he had seen the comet in Goa on November 10, 1618, shortly after his arrival. Schreck previously had reported Kirwitzer’s observations of Venus in June 1618, after they sailed from Lisbon on the San Carlos on April 15, suggesting that he was regularly observing the heavens during his travels between Europe and India.63 Kirwitzer subsequently described how “Father Antonio Rubino next wrote to Father Giacomo Rho from Cochin, having seen this new star by himself the same day in Cochin.”64 Starting on November 14, Rho observed it from the Jesuit college in Rachol, recalling Grienberger’s advice on what to observe. Rubino continued to observe from Cochin through January 1619, composing a letter to Grienberger in December 1618 describing the appearance of two larger comets on November 10 and 24, the later one still visible at the time he wrote. “I doubt that the first was seen in Europe,” Rubino concluded,

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How information travels 75 but I believe that this second one will be seen because it seems very high. If this one was easily seen, Your Reverence will be able to collect its parallax, the diversity of its appearance, and its distance from the earth from what I say.65 He encouraged Grienberger to send him a detailed report of any observations he was able to make in Rome. Even young novices enlisted for Trigault’s scientific mission like “Father Adam” observed the comet’s path while studying at the College of St. Paul.66 Here we see precisely how outposts of colonial commerce, administration, and faith became important locations for observation, exchange, and communication.67 The spectacular nature of the comet of 1618, which fascinated astronomers all over Europe, including Galileo and his adversaries, encouraged Kirwitzer to rush a compendium of missionary observations into print. Given what we know about the vicissitudes of the long-​distance post, the appearance of a printed version of the Observations of the Comet in the Year 1616 in the East Indies Made by the Mathematicians of the Society of Jesus Sailing to the Kingdom of China, Having Been Recorded on Their Voyage in That Place. Transmitted to the Mathematicians of the Same Society and Other European Friends in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg in 1620 seems positively providential  –​and probably explains the unfortunate chronological error in the title. Galileo may have been reluctant to assist Jesuit missionaries but his Jesuit admirers were quite eager to share the results of doing missionary science. In a prefatory letter written from Goa on February 11, 1619 addressed to his “European friends” enumerating the 1618 Jesuit missionary observations, Kirwitzer recalled Trigault’s efforts to attract the best Jesuit mathematicians in Germany, Italy, France, Flanders, and Spain to the Chinese mission, creating a noteworthy scientific and religious community. He presented the journey from Lisbon to Goa as a voyage of scientific observation –​“we observed with European eyes” –​whose results appeared in Jesuit letters. Kirwitzer described a certain division of labor among the missionary-​scientists to master what they needed to know. Some learned “the history of that people, others the geography, others the astronomy, a few men the customs and institutions of people.” Observing nature was essential to acquiring foreign knowledge. Once they disembarked, the missionaries sought to gain a historical understanding of the “sciences of the ancient Asiatics and the vestiges of Indian philosophy,” local techniques of navigation, weather, climate, “birds, fish, animal remains, herbs, and trees.” The goal was nothing less than the “universal knowledge of natural philosophy and every kind of learning.”68 Like Schreck, Kirwitzer shared his vision of the Jesuits as learned apostles pursuing knowledge under great hardships. Many passengers and sailors aboard the San Carlos became gravely ill and died, occupying missionary time and energy as they administered sacraments and performed other acts of charity en route.69 Yet they did not neglect to observe nature, God’s other important book. Despite his hasty prose, Kirwitzer captured the sensibilities of the Jesuit observers on a storm-​tossed, disease-​ridden ship making its way to Goa. Contemplating

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Figure 2.6 Jesuit observations of the comet of 1618 in the East Indies. Credit:  Wenceslas Pantaleon Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum anni 1616. In India Orientali factae a Societatis Iesu Mathematici Sinense Regnum navigantibus ex itinerare eo delatis (Aschaffenburg, 1620). Courtesy of Biblioteca Complutense, Universidad Complutense Madrid/​Hathiwell Trust, http://​cisne.sim.ucm.es/​search*spi~S29/​o(ocolc)915430239.

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How information travels 77 the wonders of celestial, terrestrial, and aquatic nature in the southern hemisphere filled the missionary-​scientists with awe. The vastness of the Indian Ocean, with its peculiar currents, made them feel small and helpless yet blessed to bear witness to what they saw. Of all the things they observed, Kirwitzer declared that “one alone to us” seemed worthy of reporting immediately back to Europe –​the comets of 1618.70 He hoped to be sending more scientific reports “from the East Indies” back to Europe that would be even more exact than the ones made hastily with “only an astrolabe and astronomical rod” at the College of St. Paul in Goa. He held himself to a high standard. Once his publication reached its destination, Kirwitzer knew that their observations in remote places would be scrutinized by the “Lincean eyes of Europe.”71 This telling phrase suggests how coordinated Schreck’s and Kirwitzer’s efforts were to keep in touch with the European community of naturalists, mathematicians, and astronomers. Having reasonably concluded that Galileo might never respond, even encouraging Cesi to see if the Grand Duchess of Tuscany Maria Magdalena of Austria, her brother Emperor Ferdinand II, or Archduke Leopold might intervene, Schreck now decided to try his luck closer to home. Schreck had generously offered Galileo access to 4,000 years of Chinese eclipse data, receiving only silence in return. Probably encouraged by Kirwitzer, he now wrote the Germans. Having finally become proficient enough in his intensive language studies to begin to comprehend Chinese science and history, Schreck wrote the renowned Jesuit mathematicians in Ingolstadt from Hangzhou in 1623. His question to them was the same that he put to Galileo –​he wanted the most recent books of astronomy to assist the reform of the Chinese calendar –​but with a slight difference. He now asked specifically for “Kepler’s Hipparchus and others by Galileo.”72 Schreck never mentioned the relevance of Kepler’s astronomy in his conversations with the Linceans, knowing that Galileo did not consider the imperial mathematician his equal. In return, Schreck reiterated his promise to share his growing knowledge of Chinese astronomy, including its eclipse data, with European astronomers. The Jesuit with a Galilean telescope admired the relative accuracy of this ancient and venerable scientific tradition. Further research might reveal when Schreck’s letter reached Ingolstadt –​he reasonably estimated in 1623 that it typically took three years for European books to reach China. By 1627 a copy of his letter was in the hands of Father Albert Curtz in Dillingen, another Bavarian town with a Jesuit college not far from Ingolstadt. Curtz did precisely what Schreck hoped when he decided to engage the German community of mathematicians –​he made sure Kepler saw the letter when he visited Dillingen in November 1627. In the midst of completing the long-​awaited Rudolphine Tables (1628) based on Tycho’s data and his own valuable contributions to observational astronomy, the imperial mathematician Kepler had already read Kirwitzer’s Observations of the Comet. He found Kirwitzer aggravating but appreciated his good empirical qualities. Nonetheless, Kepler questioned Kirwitzer’s use of João de Barros’s Decades of Asia, published between 1552 and 1613, as the source of his account of an eclipse observed in Cochin a century earlier, on January 13, 1507.73 Kepler’s skepticism about the value of Portuguese information on Asian nature suggests how parallel systems

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78  Paula Findlen of information-​gathering did not always combine easily when trying to create a more global account of nature.74 Upon reading Schreck’s letter, Kepler decided to publish it with his “response to the Chinese letters” sent “to European mathematicians from the outer limits of Asia.” Germany was already in the Indies, Kepler observed, and “German letters” needed to reach the Indies.75 Schreck estimated three years for a letter to travel between China and Germany; Kepler observed that it actually took four because he was not near Lisbon or Seville, or in the vicinity of Rome. He carefully addressed every question or point of information in Schreck’s letter, updating Magini’s astronomical tables with his hard-​won data from Tycho’s heirs in the Rudolphine Tables. Only two parts of these new tables were printed but Kepler, understanding the importance of this information for Jesuit astronomy in China in a way that Galileo pointedly chose to ignore, generously put these sections in the mail. In China Schall had completed his treatise on the telescope in 1626 but, at some point after Kepler’s response reached China, one of the Jesuit mathematicians updated Magini’s ephemerides with references to Kepler’s works.76 Thus, the Lutheran Kepler became a far better source of information than the dubiously Catholic Galileo, thanks to the success of a German mercantile, missionary, and scientific system of communications connecting an imperial mathematician with a Jesuit in China probably via the Fugger mail centered on Augsburg. From Jiading in April 1622, Schreck vividly conjured up the arrival of news contained in “letters from Manila, Malacca, and Goa about various things.”77 He eagerly told Faber about another missionary in Goa who had established a correspondence with other Jesuits in Arabia and Ethiopia about plants. Schreck regretted not having the time or means to send images of the plants he described to accompany the seeds he hoped Faber would cultivate in Rome, but hoped to include images “in other letters.” If he did, they no longer survive. “For now this is the only letter I  am writing to Europe,” he concluded, trying to make it as empirically rich and informative as possible.78 This enticing window into the larger community of missionary-​scientists that we often do not see, given the fame, visibility, and rich documentation of the Chinese mission, serves as a reminder of precisely why Sagredo tried so hard to mobilize the Jesuit network from Aleppo. What he lacked was a lynx-​eyed collaborator like Schreck to further his ambitions –​and perhaps some greater sympathy with the religious aspirations of the Society of Jesus that a skeptical Venetian found difficult to muster. Faber and Colonna thanked Schreck for information he sent from China to include in the Mexican Treasury.79 Schreck did not live to see the Spanish Jesuit polymath Juan Eusebio Nieremberg publish a number of Hernández’s studies of Mexican flora, fauna, and minerals “from the manuscripts preserved in the Royal Library of St Lawrence in the Escorial” in his History of Nature, the Great Pilgrim (1635).80 Nieremberg gained access to these materials as a professor at the Imperial College in Madrid, about 15 years before the Linceans finally brought their version of the Mexican Treasury to its conclusion. He integrated Hernández’s observations of Mexican nature with materials culled from the Dutch naturalist

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Figure 2.7 Johann Schreck’s Letter from the Chinese Kingdom Sent to European Mathematicians, with a Little Commentary by the Mathematician Johannese Kepler, 1630. Credit: Johann Schreck, Epistola ex Regno Sinarum ad Mathematicos Europaeos missum; cum Commentatiuncula Joannis Keppleri mathematici (Sagan, 1630). Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München DigitalisierungsZentrum, www.digitale-​sammlungen.de/​index. html?c=suchen&ab=&kl=&l=en.

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80  Paula Findlen Carolus Clusius’s translations of Spanish and Portuguese natural histories of the Indies, travel reports, and of course his own reading of Acosta. A  Dominican, Francisco Ximenes, published an unillustrated Spanish summary of Hernández’s natural history in Mexico City in 1615. The original manuscripts vanished in the 1671 Escorial fire but two Jesuits  –​the missionary Schreck and armchair naturalist Nieremberg  –​helped to ensure its circulation in words and images throughout learned Europe.

Mobilizing the missionaries In the summer of 1628, Faber spent a long morning discussing German affairs with Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whose many duties as papal nephew included being protector of the German Nation in Rome. Once business was concluded, Barberini let Faber know that he talked with the Franciscan Father General to encourage him to get “his friar now in Spain and going to Peru to send us some fine bunch of simples.” Despite the stated prohibition on admitting scholars in religious orders, which forced Schreck to abandon his formal membership in the Lincean Academy when he became a Jesuit, the academy enthusiastically voted to admit Urban VIII’s nephew, hoping that young Cardinal Barberini would become a second patron to the Linceans. Reminding Cesi that the post left on Friday, Faber encouraged Cesi to get the “lists of these New World simples” together, promising to have three copies made quickly so that the information would not only travel with “the same friar to Lima,” but be deposited in the Franciscan archive by the Father General.81 The 1625 Jubilee brought missionaries from all over the world to the Eternal City, providing a golden opportunity for the Linceans to collect additional materials for the Mexican Treasury. All did not go as planned, however. A key informant, the Franciscan friar Gregorio de Bolivar, unexpectedly subverted the entire operation by burning manuscripts containing his observations of the Spanish Americas in the decades after Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies defined the subject. The Linceans resolved to find other ways to acquire fresh missionary knowledge that would make their work current. They decided to ask Cardinal Barberini’s assistance. This was the first time the Roman scientific community seems to have used their intimate relationship with the papacy to get them to intercede with the missionary orders to facilitate the accumulation of new knowledge. Rome was a hub for political news, Catholic religious communities, and scholarly information, and the fulcrum of its missionary networks which reached beyond Europe in many different directions.82 One could find out things in Rome that were hard to know elsewhere. In December 1628, while attending vespers in Il Gesù, another loyal Lincean, Francesco Stelluti, bumped into the Roman adventurer Pietro della Valle (1586–​1652). Della Valle returned to the Eternal City in 1626 like a secular pilgrim, after 12 years traveling in Turkey, Persia, Syria, and the Holy Land, where he became fluent in a number of Eastern languages and conversant in their scholarly traditions. He arrived home bearing tales of his

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How information travels 81 travels, precious manuscripts, and the mummified body of his deceased wife, the Syrian Christian Ma’anī Jowayrī. In January 1629 della Valle became the penultimate member of the Accademia dei Lincei, just before Cesi’s untimely death led to the academy’s dissolution. Talking with Stelluti, della Valle recalled an especially interesting conversation about missionary science that he had in Goa in 1623 and its potential contributions to the most pressing problems of navigation. As Stelluti reported to Galileo, “He said that a Portuguese Jesuit Father had now found an instrument like an hourglass (horivolo con polvere), with which one is able to observe the longitudes of cities and other parts of the world.”83 Stelluti was skeptical that it would work but he wanted Galileo to know about it, including the fact that the Jesuit in question had returned from Asia and was now in Spain. The Jesuit missionary was not Portuguese, even if this was the language he spoke and wrote comfortably after many years in Portuguese Asia, but Milanese. Cristoforo Borri had emerged from Cochinchina. In 1624, he made his way back to Lisbon, after his encounter with della Valle in Goa where della Valle translated into Persian a treatise on Tychonic astronomy that Borri prepared for him. They also discussed Borri’s different solutions to the problem of longitude. One involved an hourglass, with each hour marked in fifteen-​ degree intervals to capture the sun’s hourly movement, and an astrolabe to measure the changing relationship between the ship’s mast and the shore; the other used the variations in magnetic declination. After teaching mathematics in Coimbra for several years, Borri became a navigational consultant in Lisbon where he composed his Treatise on the Art of Navigation (1628), which was probably why the encounter with Borri in Goa resurfaced in della Valle’s mind in the main Jesuit church in Rome; the treatise itself was now a topic of conversation. Philip IV invited Borri to discuss his theories with his navigational experts in Madrid toward the end of 1629. When he failed to impress the Spanish, Borri made his way to Rome where he completed his work on astronomy that had engendered no small controversy within the Portuguese scientific community. Borri was a fairly heterodox astronomer; indeed, he admired Galileo’s observational astronomy like many of the most talented missionary-​scientists.84 In Rome Borri published his Relation of the New Mission of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in the Kingdom of Cochinchina (1631), from which Riccioli extracted his December 9, 1620 eclipse observation in Vietnam. Ultimately he left his order and probably died a Cistercian in 1632.85 There was great interest in Borri’s techniques, manuscripts, and data in Roman circles. Shortly after Borri’s death Monsignor Francesco Ingoli, now secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith whose critique of Copernican astronomy in 1616 elicited a response from Galileo in 1624, sent a note to della Valle in May 1632, requesting his assistance in assembling “the books of Father Borri” to bring to Cardinal Barberini who wanted to preserve them “as a public service.”86 Borri was the kind of missionary who brought much of what he learned back to the Eternal City, while depositing some manuscripts in Portugal. However, his decision to

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82  Paula Findlen leave his order for another meant that his papers did not automatically become part of the rich Jesuit archive of scientific information. The Society of Jesus acknowledged the importance of their archives during the Seventh General Congregation of 1615, when they began to examine the accumulated documentation prior to 1600. At the Roman College the papers of the mathematicians who taught there, starting with Clavius, also became a considerable scientific archive.87 Barberini’s interest in preserving Borri’s papers had been stimulated by Lincean interest in his work as well as the views of Jesuit mathematicians who knew about his work. From Genoa, the Jesuit mathematician Paolo Bombini let Galileo know about reports of a Jesuit in Spain –​evidently Borri  –​who claimed to have a solution to the problem of longitude.88 There were many reasons to preserve Borri’s papers. While the Roman scientific community debated the value of Borri’s missionary science and gained access to his papers through the papal nephew, the Aix lawyer Nicolas-​Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–​1637) was in the midst of an intense discussion with his close collaborator and ultimately biographer, the priest-​philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–​1655) in Digne. They were debating how best to observe the heavens in an age of great and controversial astronomy. Watching a lunar eclipse in January 1628, they began to consider the value of comparing observations more systematically. Peiresc tested their idea by having astronomers in Paris, Aix, and Digne observe the January 1628 lunar eclipse to improve the longitude measurements for Paris and Aix.89 He was now committed to the idea of long-​distance collaboration, recognizing the benefits for astronomy and geography. Peiresc began to mobilize his correspondents to make simultaneous observations of predictable celestial phenomena in different locations. As the foremost broker of the European-​wide Republic of Letters, Peiresc knew very well how to contact colleagues within Europe but he aspired to go beyond this familiar terrain. The obvious answer was to engage the community of missionary-​scientists. Peiresc had direct access to the French Capuchins who passed through Marseille on the way to North Africa and the Levant. But could he do even more? The answer was to write to Rome requesting assistance. Tellingly, the Society of Jesus was the order that first came to mind; he turned to the same patron then assisting the Linceans in supplementing the Mexican Treasury with more recent observations of the Spanish Americas. “I must put into the Cardinal’s [Barberini] head,” Peiresc told the Dupuy brothers in Paris in March 1628, to command through the general of the Jesuits and other orders who have monks versed in mathematics in several places in the world, to command them to make observations everywhere that it appears, and to prepare for this a small questionnaire on what is necessary and the instruments necessary to do this, with the goal of reestablishing the true longitudes of the places of their residence, at least for those of Europe, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and other well-​known places of antiquity.90

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How information travels 83 Observing a solar eclipse in June 1630 redoubled Peiresc’s interest in the idea of coordinating observations in key locations. At first he thought of Alexandria and Tycho Brahe’s long-​defunct ruin of an observatory at Uraniborg, on the Danish island of Hven, but in time his geography expanded to reflect the full range of possibilities that correspondence permitted. Peiresc wanted to stage a great act of observation in the theater of the world. Plague and political unrest put the most ambitious version of this project on hold. Undeterred, Gassendi coordinated observations of the transit of Mercury in 1631 and encouraged astronomers outside their immediate circle to participate.91 Peiresc did not give up on the idea of using his role in the Republic of Letters to do the kind of observational astronomy that would increase the accuracy of geography, cartography, and navigation, and might yield a better method of calculating longitude. It was during this period that he first encountered the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–​1680), who spent almost a year in Avignon before arriving in Rome in November 1633. Peiresc and Gassendi evidently discussed their plans with Kircher, enlisting him in their project. Kircher had already been collecting his own eclipse data, as part of his activities teaching mathematics and Oriental languages in Würzburg and Avignon.92 He became their first Jesuit observer. The prospect of a lunar eclipse predicted for August 1635 inspired Peiresc and Gassendi to enact a more ambitious version of their plan on four continents. In the months leading up to this celestial event, they sent a flurry of letters to stimulate observations. In June, Peiresc and Gassendi told Kircher that they wanted him and anyone else he might involve to observe an eclipse in Rome … next August 28 in order to compare the calculation with the one that will be done in this country and others in the farthest reaches of the Levant with the goal of extracting from them the true distance of places.93 They reminded him to take care with his observations. Peiresc discussed his plan with other key Roman contacts. Given the importance of Rome as a center for astronomy, he did not count on Kircher alone.94 One week later, he contacted Barberini to encourage the cardinal to get Rome’s best mathematicians to participate. Toward the end of June Peiresc encouraged Cardinal Guidi di Bagni’s librarian Gabriel Naudé to use his contacts and position to see “if there would be some mathematician in Rome capable of observing well and recording the movement over time of the next lunar eclipse.” He carefully explained how best to view it with a telescope to avoid the “false rays which enlarge the borders of it” and other problems that would render the observations useless.95 The result of Peiresc’s flurry of correspondence was three separate Roman observations, coordinated by Barberini favorite Leone Allacci and made by Kircher (with the assistance of the polemical Jesuit Melchior Inchofer), the mathematician Gasparo Berti who taught at La Sapienza, and none other

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84  Paula Findlen than Grienberger.96 The Barberini circle had indeed mobilized the best Roman mathematicians and other learned observers throughout Italy. Peiresc’s Roman correspondence was not only important for organizing observations in Italy but directly relevant to the Mediterranean and ultimately global ambition to observe the heavens together. Naudé encouraged Gassendi to publish a small booklet of instructions that could be sent to remote observers, but the time and energy that it took to coordinate observers in different locations seem to have precluded this possibility.97 Instead, directions on how to observe circulated in letters, including Gassendi’s instructions on June 8, 1636 for Capuchin missionaries and merchants departing for the east. Observers in Paris, Aix, Rome, Naples, Cairo, Aleppo, and Quebec witnessed and recorded the lunar eclipse on August 28. He used this information to recalculate the size of the Mediterranean, reducing its length according to ancient geographers by 1,000 kilometers. Had Sagredo still been alive, he would have applauded the construction of a project that closely mirrored his own ambitions from Aleppo earlier in the century. The day after the eclipse Peiresc wrote Naudé to thank him for coordinating observations in Rome, Naples, and Padua, anticipating the pleasure of comparing them with his own observations in Aix, Gassendi’s in Digne, and sightings in Africa, Egypt, Libya and other locations in the Levant, as well as in Paris, Germany, England, and the Netherlands.98 Peiresc was especially eager to have Dutch colleagues participate, knowing the reach of the Dutch East India Company in many different directions.99 Their data could potentially address other geographic errors. First, however, Peiresc had to receive all the August 1635 observations to allow Gassendi to prepare a summary report. The results were uneven and the process frustrating. Some observers as close as Rome and Naples took almost a year to respond. Kircher was not among Peiresc’s elusive assistants. In October 1635 Peiresc thanked Kircher for sending Gassendi his observation of a lunar eclipse in Rome, yet expressed disappointment at the results. He chastised Kircher for failing to note the position of the moon at sunrise on August 28 and timing the eclipse with an hourglass or geared clock of “little certitude.”100 He wondered why Kircher had not used an astrolabe to measure the height of a fixed star in order to mark a known point. Ultimately, he realized that Kircher had ignored his instructions on how to see “the true body of the moon” through a telescope and avoid being led astray by the false rays which enlarged its appearance. A 22-​ minute difference between Kircher’s and Peiresc’s observations seemed impossible. Peiresc knew that the difference between Rome and Aix should be at least a half-​hour. He was now certain that Kircher had failed to note the beginning of the eclipse. Still, Peiresc did not give up on Kircher as a participant in his project of data accumulation. He and Gassendi set Kircher to work on the task of measuring the polestar in different locations. When they learned that he would be traveling through southern Italy to accompany the recently converted Landgrave Friedrich of Hesse-​Darmstadt to Malta, they hoped that he might make observations from Mount Etna.101 The subsequent eruption of the volcano partly inspired Kircher’s studies of what lay beneath the earth’s surface.

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How information travels 85 In April 1636, Peiresc took stock of his grand experiment. He was still awaiting results from England and Germany but now had a good sense of the rest. Too many participants had observed “in haste.” He was especially disappointed with the quality of the Jesuit data from Rome, “what little was noted in Aleppo and Cairo” by the Capuchins and French merchants, and the failure of the French Jesuits making the “observation in Canada” to note “the hour of any particular phase.” While frustrated at how easily carefully laid plans had gone awry, Peiresc felt that his experiment was a partial success. Peiresc had managed to create a dispersed community of observers, even if they had not always observed well. It should inspire mathematicians to do more work of this kind in order “to promote the execution of some observations for public benefit.”102 Gassendi later observed that Peiresc had developed “a certain method written, of observing Eclipses.” He wanted to train others to observe, calculate, and record as he did, to use similar instruments the same way, to ensure uniformity in the results. The public utility of knowledge transcended success and failure and ought to unite diverse communities who otherwise might not work together to see the improvement of knowledge as a shared endeavor. Knowing that the next summer eclipse would be in a different part of the world, Peiresc resolved to write Cardinal Barberini again to discuss how best to organize this next attempt at simultaneous observation “in both the Indies, and all other parts of the world.”103 Despite Peiresc’s pointed remarks about the deficiencies of certain Jesuit observations, when he envisioned organizing eclipse observations in the southern hemisphere his thoughts turned naturally to the Society of Jesus as the first community to enlist. “I do not doubt that this enterprise would succeed if the Jesuit Fathers want to embrace it fully and the Most Reverend Father General sends them timely orders in the many missions they have throughout the entire world.” He encouraged Barberini’s energetic secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo to talk immediately with the cardinal, impressing the importance of this undertaking. Peiresc predicted that it would soon yield “the most useful fruits for the public for the reformation and true constitution of geographic maps.”104 He wanted his Roman friends to personally visit the Jesuit Superior General Muzio Vitelleschi, bearing eclipse data and maps to show him concretely what a difference this could make in how seventeenth-​century Europeans grasped the physical reality of their world. Peiresc also encouraged French Jesuits to write Vitelleschi. Once again, he was leaving nothing to chance. There would be many other obstacles in communicating, coordinating, and receiving eclipse data from halfway around the world. Peiresc remained concerned that insufficiently prepared and inattentive observers would thwart his efforts to effect a good experiment yielding reliable and accurate results. This was precisely why he wanted to enlist the Jesuit General in orchestrating his plan, using the full benefit of his authority to command missionaries everywhere to do good science. Cardinal Barberini agreed with Peiresc that this was an important opportunity that demanded special measures. By fall he conferred with Vitelleschi who agreed to offer his assistance. Peiresc now felt authorized to write directly to the Jesuit

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86  Paula Findlen Superior General, inviting him to mobilize the entire apparatus of the Society of Jesus “to have celestial observations from his missionaries in distant lands.”105 He expected Vitelleschi to write all the Jesuit provincials who would in turn contact the local superiors or rectors of the Jesuit colleges, ensuring that this order penetrated at the local level.106 At the same time, Peiresc began to consider how the recent Jesuit archive of science might also support this endeavor, as he and Gassendi envisioned what a large influx of global data might do for science. One specific cache of materials came to mind and special permission was needed. Barberini talked with the Master of the Sacred Palace, Niccolò Riccardi, infamously entangled in the approval and condemnation of Galileo’s Dialogue. Riccardi agreed to give Peiresc access to the “charts and writings of Father Borri.”107 Like a phoenix risen from his ashes, he became part of the project. Peiresc shared the general skepticism about Borri’s most provocative conclusions. He remained convinced that some version of Galileo’s idea to use eclipse data to calculate longitude was probably the best course of action. Yet he knew that Borri was a mathematician of great experience and no small talent. He had seen things that most Europeans never saw and traveled all over Asia. Peiresc argued that Borri was worth rereading because an imperfect work on an important subject might be full of interesting insights. His goal was to select “the roses among the thorns.”108 This was also Peiresc’s attitude toward Kircher’s less than exact habits of observation and scholarship.109 Why should Borri be any different? Early in 1637 Vitelleschi graciously let Peiresc know that he had “given the necessary order to all his missionaries to make observations of the next eclipses.” Peiresc continued to think about how best to arrange his plan well into spring. He had Cassiano contact the Dominican General to enlist another important religious order in the project of global observation.110 In southern France, he supplied Capuchins with books and telescopes, instructing them in how to observe and encouraging them to observe with him “so that they might experiment their skill.”111 On June 24, 1637 he died before his dream of mobilizing all the missionary-​scientists could be fully realized.

Jesuit coda: learning from Peiresc Scholars all over Europe and a bit beyond mourned the absence of Peiresc who had organized and facilitated so many worthy projects. Many years later, the Jesuit polymath Kircher recalled the “huge services to the republic of letters” that Peiresc performed by insisting that knowledge was a collective public good.112 Kircher personally benefited from Peiresc’s generosity and had been a participant in his final, unfinished experiment to generate new scientific data. Although the man who set the plan in motion was no longer alive, Peiresc’s colleagues between Rome and Paris knew that the groundwork had been laid for a new rapprochement between Catholic religious orders, especially the Society of Jesus, and the Republic of Letters. How might they ensure that Peiresc’s dream of globally coordinated observation did not simply vanish?

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How information travels 87 Kircher’s encounter with Peiresc and his associates in the 1630s taught him a great deal about current practices of scientific information-​ gathering. He witnessed first-​hand the problems of getting accurate measurements from eclipse data; indeed, he seems to have distributed a paper “geographic wheel” to facilitate lunar eclipse viewing, perhaps in acknowledgment of his own problems doing observations in 1635.113 In addition to his studies of the hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian wisdom, Kircher had a long-​standing interest in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and especially magnetism. He had been measuring magnetic declination since his years in Germany. In Rome he continued to investigate the hidden forces of the universe.114 At some point in 1637, Kircher began to envision how he might pick up where Peiresc left off. Grienberger died in 1636, and Kircher inherited his role at the Roman College along with the mathematical archive. Access to these materials made him aware of earlier projects of long-​distance observation. He was now teaching mathematics to the kind of future missionaries Peiresc had hoped to involve in his project. Among them was a young Tyrolian Jesuit Martino Martini (1614–​1661), destined for the Chinese mission. Martini spent two months in Rome studying with Kircher in 1637, before completing his theological studies and ordination in Portugal in 1639, in anticipation of his departure from Lisbon. Kircher proudly described him as “my private disciple in mathematics in Rome.”115 Kircher encouraged Martini to inform himself about Borri’s magnetic method for calculating longitude and taught him how to measure magnetic declination since he increasingly felt that this might produce more reliable and productive data than the imprecise eclipse measurements. Martini became the template for his model missionary observer.116 Sagredo must have smiled posthumously at the thought of a Jesuit reviving his idea. In 1639 Kircher forwarded a solar eclipse observation to Gassendi. That same year the French Minim Marin Mersenne (1588–​1648), another influential broker in the Republic of Letters and a well-​respected mathematician with broad scientific interests, sent a letter to Naudé in Rome. He reiterated Peiresc’s request, encouraging Jesuits in all the houses and colleges throughout the world to observe lunar eclipses, measure magnetic variation, and record the height of the polestar.117 In collaboration with Peiresc and Gassendi, Mersenne was already a proponent of using questionnaires to coordinate scientific research. Would it be possible, Mersenne wondered, to get Kircher to write to all the rectors of the Jesuit colleges to perform this essential service?118 He implicitly presented it as a moment for Urban VIII to redeem himself as a patron of science after Galileo’s condemnation in 1633. Who was organizing whom? Kircher learned of this request and assured Mersenne that the project was well under way.119 The dream of making better use of the Society of Jesus to improve science by acquiring global information lived on. Mersenne now saw Kircher as the person who could make it happen. In 1641 Gassendi praised Kircher as one of the few in the generation after Peiresc to carry the torch for the Republic of Letters.120

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88  Paula Findlen In 1639 Kircher was in the midst of developing an ambitious project he called the “Geographic Plan” (Consilium Geographicum) to fix the locations of all the Jesuit colleges in the world with the hope of improving longitude measurements and geographic understanding. He had been privately discussing it with key disciples such as Martini. From Évora in February 1639, eager to share his observations and measurements once his voyage from Lisbon to Goa was underway, Martini inquired about Kircher’s “Mathematical Plan.”121 Kircher later declared that Vitelleschi had specifically asked him to undertake the Geographic Plan, knowing that he already received “frequent letters from different locations.”122 Inspired by Peiresc, the Jesuit General hoped that Kircher might realize this great scientific project. The arrival of the Jesuit Procurators from all over the world in November 1639 became an ideal occasion to discuss a coordinated plan of observation. Kircher later told Gassendi that Cardinal Barberini personally urged him to collect data on magnetic declension and coordinate “observations of future eclipses.”123 Peiresc’s most important Roman patron had also placed his confidence in this particular Jesuit. Kircher announced the inauguration of his project in the first edition of The Lodestone, or the Magnetic Art (1641) with characteristic fanfare. He expanded the scope of the original idea to include a wide range of astronomical, natural-​ historical, anthropological, and linguistic data. Kircher apologized for not including all the information contained in “my letters” since some did not arrive in time for publication.124 He invited readers to contribute more observations. The results were two more editions in 1643 and 1654. Peiresc had envisioned a tightly executed, well-​timed plan. Kircher instead delighted in the prospect of a diffuse, open-​ended call to contribute many different kinds of information by putting it in a letter and sending it to him in Rome. He was creating a new scientific archive that would personally benefit multiple projects. Letters, information, artifacts, at times even entire manuscripts began to arrive in greater quantities, addressed to Father Kircher.125 Thanks partly to Peiresc’s early interventions with Cardinal Barberini and General Vitelleschi in the mid-​1630s, Kircher eventually was relieved of his teaching duties at the Roman College in 1646 in order to bring many of his books to completion. His task was to increase the reputation of the Society of Jesus through his numerous publications and eventually his role in the creation of the Roman College museum in 1651.126 The timing of the first edition of The Lodestone did not permit Kircher to gather many fresh missionary observations but he had already been accumulating information about magnetic declination prior to the creation of the Geographic Plan. The Lodestone contained readings of magnetic variation provided by 42 Jesuits –​including Kircher who recorded 13 separate observations to demonstrate the depth of his commitment to this subject –​and 21 other contributors. Kircher’s data charts his personal itinerary from Germany through France to Rome, followed by a cluster of observations made in Sicily as he traveled to Malta, including one on Mount Etna where Peiresc and Gassendi asked him to measure the polestar. None of them were probably made after 1637, save for a reading from Loreto inserted in the second edition of 1643.127 The ghost of Peiresc’s project

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How information travels 89 flitted throughout Kircher’s tables, which contained readings by Mersenne, information Mersenne forwarded from his English correspondents, and Gassendi’s measurements in Digne, Aix, and Marseille. Gassendi also coordinated the work of other observers.128 Despite Kircher’s claims to mobilize the entire Jesuit network along with the Republic of Letters, the vast majority of observations sent directly to him were made in Europe, including Martini’s two readings from Évora and Coimbra before leaving for China. Kircher added a third reading from Martini to the second edition in 1643, from Genoa, and incorporated Martini’s November 1640 letter from Goa.129 The English astronomer John Greaves (1602–​1652), who first met Kircher in Rome in 1636, provided a reading from Alexandria on his way home to England from the Levant in 1639–​1640.130 Jesuit missionaries in Aleppo, including Kircher’s French disciple Aimé Chezaud (1604–​1666), and unnamed observers in Constantinople supplied readings but this was the limit of his direct contacts who could help him to globalize his data. Many other parts of Kircher’s The Lodestone incorporated information from every corner of the world where Europeans traveled. A large portion of it lacked specific attribution, however, having been anonymized in the process of extracting it from different sources. The four readings of magnetic declination in Asia at the end of Kircher’s table  –​Wremann’s observations in Goa, Macao, and Canton, and Rubino’s in Vijayanagara –​came from the mathematical papers in the Roman College. Along with William Gilbert’s reading for London, they were the only historical data incorporated into a project of contemporary observation. Elsewhere in The Lodestone, Kircher proudly discussed his access to letters “mostly from learned mathematicians in different parts of the world that had been given to my predecessors, Clavius, Grienberger, and other Roman mathematicians of the Society of Jesus, in the Archive which belongs to me.”131 He praised the Jesuit mathematicians in China, singling out the Spanish Jesuit Diego de Pantoja (1571–​1618) who accompanied Ricci to Beijing and was expelled with de Ursis from Nanking in 1617, Kirwitzer who had communicated his observations to Europe, and Schreck, “not inappropriately called the Indian Pliny.”132 Kircher selected a handful of letters from the mathematical archive to reproduce. He shared Aleni’s 1609 letter to Clavius describing the passage around the Cape of Good Hope en route to Goa. Wremann’s November 1616 letter to Grienberger from Macao was followed by a June 1617 letter from Gaspar Rues to Christoph Scheiner from Portobelo in Panama, describing the readings he took in the Azores en route to Cartagena. The culmination of this published archive of missionary science was Martini’s 1638 letter to Kircher with readings from the port of Lisbon, Cape Verde islands, and Guinea coast –​the unexpected result of his first failed attempt to get to China when navigational errors threw the ship off course in the Atlantic before limping home.133 Martini proudly informed Kircher that he judged his own mathematical skills to be vastly superior to the clumsy calculations of the Portuguese navigators.134 He was indeed the model observer.

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Figure 2.8 Kircher’s table of magnetic declination, including missionary readings in Aleppo, Goa, Macao, and Canton. Credit: Athanasius Kircher, Magnes sive de arte magnetica (Rome, 1641), 455. Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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Figure 2.9 Kircher’s disciple and missionary collaborator, Martino Martini. Source: Michaelina Wautier, Portrait of Martino Martini (1654), oil on canvas, 69.5 × 59 cm. Signed and dated upper left: Michaelina Wautier fecit 1654. Chinese inscription upper right: Wei Kuangguo (Chinese title of the sitter). Wikipedia Commons, Koller International Auctions Lot 3059-A176.

Kircher concluded this section of his magnetic geography alluding to potential data from the Philippines and eventually the “Australian Ocean.” His aspirations were global even if the results were often highly local and contingent on the uncertain circumstances in which people observed and transmitted information around the world. Perhaps it should not surprise us that at this moment his thoughts turned to the intrepid, irascible Borri. Borri spent his final years in Rome unsuccessfully advocating for new missions in the least explored parts of the southern hemisphere, for faith and for science. Kircher was aware that Borri had made measurements of magnetic declination in many different locations during his years as a missionary, and collected them from others, potentially creating an isogonic map with this information.135 The ghost of this other project also inspired his thinking about what the Geographic Plan could accomplish. In The Lodestone Kircher discussed how his efforts to collect observations “by geographers, sailors and mathematicians throughout

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92  Paula Findlen the world” would produce “a more exact Magnetic Map.”136 He was going to outdo Borri. Writing to Gassendi in February 1642, Kircher exulted his success in collecting European observations “made by distinguished mathematicians” acting in unison, as if they were of one mind. He envisioned the even greater benefit that would accrue “if similar observations by similar minds with equal industry” continued to be made. With no apparent sense of irony, Kircher now instructed Gassendi when and how to observe the next total eclipse. He hoped to enlist Gassendi in creating a community of mathematicians writing regularly to Rome with reliable, well-​executed observations. He felt certain that Gassendi would understand the end product –​“a work for the public good” –​as a worthy endeavor.137 Thanking Gassendi for his kind words about Kircher in his recently published Life of the Illustrious Man Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Senator of Aix (1641), Kircher mentioned his own praise of Gassendi in The Lodestone. He invited Gassendi to send corrections since he was already preparing the second edition for publication in Cologne. Kircher also wrote to astronomers who had not been involved in the initial project, expressing a willingness to share his data if they would reciprocate. In July 1642 Riccioli thanked Kircher “for the generous communication of eclipse observations,” which he also considered part of the “common good of learning.” Riccioli’s willingness to participate gave him access to yet another community of potential observers. “I have not yet undertaken other observations promised by many people,” Riccioli informed Kircher. Ultimately, he would make good on his promise to organize colleagues in northern and central Italy to contribute to the Geographic Plan. Kircher described this project well enough that Riccioli was eager to know if it would “see the light before other works.”138 In August, Kircher shared his Cologne and Paderborn readings with Riccioli.139 The 1654 edition of The Lodestone incorporated observations from Riccioli, his colleagues in Bologna, and other Italian astronomers and mathematicians who worked closely with him.140 There is not a single publication by Kircher that does not reveal something interesting about how he acquired and used information, especially when read together with his correspondence. More than many of his contemporaries, Kircher understood the value of being at the intersection of different systems of knowledge and communication. His desire to study just about everything produced an important archive that grew and evolved throughout the seventeenth century, well beyond the mathematical archive he found in the Roman College upon his arrival in 1633  –​yet just a drop in the sea of documents accruing in the even vaster archive of the Society of Jesus that Kircher used to great effect in his most encyclopedic and outward-​looking publications.141 Kircher did not always finish everything he began and the Geographic Plan never became a book. Or perhaps we should say that it never became his book since Riccioli, following the completion of his New Almagest (1651), the

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How information travels 93 influential summa of Jesuit astronomy, published a massive Reformed Geography and Hydrography (1661). Kircher’s decision to absorb Peiresc’s project into his own plans, transforming it in the process, inspired other Jesuits to see the collection, collation, and publication of scientific information as something they could do especially well. No one cared more about astronomical data than Riccioli.142 He began to create his own mathematical archive. Riccioli acquired copies of Aleni’s correspondence with Magini from the talented Jesuate mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri (1596–​ 1647) who had probably inherited Magini’s archive when he succeeded him as professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna.143 Kircher had already shared material from the archive for Riccioli’s New Almagest where Riccioli cited Grienberger’s measurements of the size of the earth, “whose notes Father Athanasius Kircher graciously communicated to me.”144 Virtually every letter from the Roman missionary archive that Kircher cited reappeared in Riccioli’s work. Riccioli also incorporated new observations from the current generation of Jesuit missionaries whom Kircher knew well. Taking a lesson from Kircher, he directly engaged those he believed could best contribute to his project to maximize the opportunities to have his information directly from the source, since he understood the greater value of this material in relation to indirect reports. Finally, Riccioli did not neglect to mine the Jesuit archives to provide information he could not get from any living source. The Society of Jesus had been expelled from Japan in 1639, following many well-​publicized martyrdoms over several decades. No new observations could be made in Japan, at least by Catholic Europeans. Riccioli did not discuss Rubino’s martyrdom with his confrères, shortly after they illicitly entered Japan in 1643, but when he reproduced Spinola’s measurement of the polestar in Nagasaki, he memorialized his 1622 martyrdom “for the Catholic faith.”145 Spinola’s scientific observations were the hard-​earned gift of faith –​and this was generally true of the generations of missionary-​scientists who made the Reformed Geography truly global. Riccioli did not want his readers to forget the reasons why missionary science occurred. Reflecting on the role of different observers in compiling geographic information, Riccioli enumerated the many European travelers, explorers, navigators, and compilers such as Sir Francis Drake, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, and Richard Hakluyt whose observations greatly enriched his work. His information came from multiple sources, increasingly relying on the Dutch and English more than the Spanish and Portuguese. However, Riccioli understandably gave pride of place to “our Fathers of the Society who sailing to the Indies, East and West, and to New France imparted more than a few observations, in their letters or even in person, to Fathers Kircher, Scheiner, Greinberger, or us.” Listing all the missionaries he knew who enriched the Jesuit archive of science in his century, Riccioli concluded by praising Kircher’s role in taking the lead in examining the “relics” of these distant observers of nature.146 Scientific martyrs did indeed produce relics of knowledge.

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94  Paula Findlen As Riccioli was about to complete his Reformed Geography, Daniello Bartoli published his 1660 account of the Japan mission. Bartoli’s multi-​ volume History of the Society of Jesus (1650–​1673) comprehensively reconstructed the first century of Jesuit missionary activity using materials “from our Roman archive.” It occurred to Riccioli that Bartoli might be able to help him collect all the observations made in Japan. The next year when his book appeared, he warmly thanked Bartoli for communicating everything he needed per litteras.147 Kircher instead was specifically acknowledged for his knowledge of Arabic geography in the preface. His work in The Lodestone was incorporated  –​and at times debated  –​in Riccioli’s far more comprehensive project. Riccioli did not entirely share Kircher’s optimism about the potential for a revised version of Borri’s isogonic map, which Martini had begun to develop by incorporating his own observations between Europe and Asia, to solve the problem of longitude. Yet he understood the basic empirical impulse that lay behind Kircher’s desire to create something “out of multiple observations by many people, which he bequeathed previously to be able to construct a better map, either planar or spherical.”148 In this respect, they both embodied how the Jesuits came to understand scientific information as the first step in the creation of any new knowledge. They were certain that science advanced because of faith, not in spite of it. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Society of Jesus recognized that their scientifically minded members, at home and in the missionary field, had a great deal to contribute to the understanding of the natural world. In the first half of the seventeenth century ambitious missionary-​scientists like Schreck, with a foot in both worlds, faced the logistical problems of how to contribute to science at a distance. Sagredo had a good idea but no mandate to encourage missionaries to observe with his instrument. Instead, influential members of the Republic of Letters such as Peiresc, with the kind of strong ties to Rome that achieved results, encouraged the Society of Jesus to see that it had unique contributions to make to the shape of knowledge through observation, communication, and collaboration with scholars willing to work with them. With the emergence of the Royal Society in 1660 and the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1666, a new generation keenly attuned to the importance of sharing observations and information would grapple with the role of the Jesuits in relation to scientific institutions that were less ephemeral than the Lincean Academy, affiliated with if not actually sponsored by the state, and entangled with the next stage of European overseas empires.149 In time, this early phase of Jesuit missionary science became a memory. Leibniz remained fascinated by Kepler’s response to Schreck. He tried repeatedly to find a copy of this pamphlet in Europe to share with his Jesuit correspondents in China, hoping that it might inspire new plans to globalize knowledge.150 Yet like so many ideas in circulation about how science might be transformed for the better in an expanding, interconnected world, it remained as elusive as the philosopher’s stone.

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Figure 2.10 Riccioli’s compilation of observations of the altitude of the polestar in Asia, including information on Japan “from maps in the Roman Archive.” Credit: Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (Bologna, 1661), 317. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional Digital, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, http://​purl.pt/​14357.

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Acknowledgments This chapter began life in a plenary session on the history of information at the American Historical Association (Chicago, 2012). It equally benefited from a workshop on “Travel, Science, and the Question of Observation, 1500–​1800” (Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, 2013), as well as lively discussion at the workshop on scientific networks that gave shape to this volume. Thanks to all the participants, especially Ann Blair, Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra, Dan Carey, Tony Grafton, Matt Jones, Peter Miller, Jake Soll, Dan Stolzenberg, and Nick Wilding for their suggestions. Finally, Antonella Romano, Florence Hsia, Elisabetta Corsi, Markus Friedrich, Michael John Gorman, Steven J.  Harris, Catherine Jami, Marcelo Aranda, Florin-​Stefan Morar, and Alex Statman have inspired aspects of this chapter with their own globalizing Jesuits, and of course Simon Schaffer who found some Jesuit information inside Newton’s Principia.

Notes 1 Anon., “A Treatise of Brasil, Written by a Portugall Which Has Long Lived There,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James Maclenose and Sons, 1906), vol. 16, 417. This episode is briefly discussed in Steven J.  Harris, “Confession-​Building, Long-​Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996):  312–​313; Miguel de Asúa and Roger French, A New World of Animals:  Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016; 2005), 144–​147. For a full discussion of Brazilian missionary writing, see Charlotte de Castelnau L’Estoile, “Entre curiosité et édification: Le savoir des missionnaires des jésuites du Brésil,” in Sciences et religions: De Copernic à Galilée (1540–​ 1610), ed. Antonella Romano (Rome: École française de Rome, 1999), 131–​157. 2 For a broad inquiry into this dimension of the Society of Jesus, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitorderen 1540–​1773 (Frankfurt:  Campus Verlag, 2011). For specific accounts of how this shaped Jesuit scientific activities, see Harris, “Confession-​Building”; idem, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–​1773, ed. John O’Malley, Gauvin Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 212–​240; Luce Giard and Antonella Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance: Sa mise en pratique par le mathématician Christoph Clavius (1570–​1611),” in Rome et la science moderne:  Entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Antonella Romano (Rome:  École française de Rome, 2008), 65–​119; idem, “Accommodating America:  Renaissance Missionaries between the Ancient and New Word,” in Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–​ 1824:  Circulation, Resistance and Diversity (Houndmills:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 53–​77. 3 François de Dainville, La géographie des humanistes: Les jésuites et l’éducation de la société française (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), 106. 4 Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 17. See Marcelo Aranda’s essay in this volume for a further discussion of how the Society perceived its conquest of space.

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How information travels 97 5 Francisco Suarez, “Tractatus decimus de religione Societatis Jesu in particulari,” in his Opera Omnia, editio nova, ed. Charles Berton (Paris, 1877), vol. 16, 1069. As quoted in Markus Friedrich, “ ‘Government in India and Japan is Different from Government in Europe’: Asian Jesuits on Infrastructure, Administrative Space, and the Possibilities for a Global Management of Power,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017): 2. 6 Thomas M. Lucas, S. J., Landmarking: City, Church, and Jesuit Urban Strategy (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 1997), 108. On the origins of the Society of Jesus, the fundamental study remains John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 7 Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. and trans. Georg E. Gauss, S. J. (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 291–​292. For an analysis of Loyola’s correspondence, see Lucas, Landmarking. 8 On the early evolution of Jesuit letter writing, see Mario Scaduto, “La corrispondenza dei primi gesuiti e le poste italiane,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 19 (1950): 237–​253; Giard and Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance,” 73–​87; Annick Delfosse, “La correspondance jésuite: communication, union et mémoire –​Les enjeux de la Formula scribendi,” Revue d’histoire ecclesiatique 104 (2009):  71–​114; Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms; Paul Nelles, “Cosas y cartas: Scribal Production and Material Pathways in Jesuit Global Communication (1547–​1573),” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2 (2015): 421–​450. 9 In Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. 1:  The Century of Discovery (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1965), Book 1, 319 (Loyola to Gaspar Barzaeus, February 24, 1554); see also Harris, “Confession-​Building,” 304–​305; and Giard and Romano, “L’usage jésuite de la correspondance,” 87–​88. 10 Elizabeth Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 1039–​1062. 11 Harris, “Confession-​Building,” 301n43; Nelles, “Cosas y cartas,” 423, 434. 12 Monumenta Xaveriana (Madrid: Typus Augustini Avrail, 1899–​1900), vol. 1, 278–​279 (Xavier to Ignatius, Cochin, January 15, 1544); see also p. 364 (Cochin, January 27, 1545). Dainville discusses the slow pace of communication, using these examples in La géographie des humanistes, 115. 13 For a case study of the emergence of the printed letters in relation to correspondence, see John Correia-​Afonso, Jesuit Letters and Indian History 1542–​1773, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 14 Friedrich, “Government in India and Japan,” 8. 15 These developments can be situated in the context of Serge Gruzinski, Les quatres parties du monde: Historie d’une mondialisation (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2004), esp. 200–​250, 374–​396. 16 James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christopher Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 17 Steven J.  Harris, “Transposing the Merton Thesis:  Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition,” Science in Context 3 (1989): 29–​65; and idem, “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–​1773,” Isis 96 (2005):  71–​79. Robert Batchelor’s forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies on Jesuit cartography will further illuminate the importance of Jesuits as geographers, cartographers, and surveyors. 18 Monumenta Xaveriana, vol. 1, 738 (Xavier to Ignatius, Goa, April 9, 1552). Also discussed in Dainville, La géographie des humanistes, 109. 19 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan with introduction and commentary by Walter Mignolo, trans. Francisco M.  López-​Morillas

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98  Paula Findlen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 9. See Harris, “Confession-​Building,” 308–​309; Romano, “Accommodating America,” 58–​63. 20 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 153. 21 Ibid., 9. 22 Antonella Romano, La contre-​réforme mathématique:  Constitution et diffusion d’une culture jésuite mathématique à la Renaissance (Rome: École française de Rome, 1999), 94–​134; and Ugo Baldini, “The Academy of Mathematics of the Collegio Romano from 1553 to 1612,” in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 47–​98. 23 Ugo Baldini, Studi su filosofia e scienza dei gesuiti in Italia 1540–​1622 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 70; idem, “The Jesuit College in Macao as a Meeting Point of the European, Chinese, and Japanese Traditions: Some Remarks on the Present State of Research, Mainly Concerning Sources (16th–​17th Centuries),” in The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian Science (1552–​1773), ed. Luis Saraiva and Catherine Jami (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2008), 33–​79. 24 Pasquale M.  D’Elia, Galileo in China:  Relations through the Roman College between Galileo and the Jesuit Scientist-​ Missionaries (1610–​ 1640), trans. Rufus Suter and Matthew Sciascia (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1960), 7 (Ricci to Claudio Acquaviva, March 8, 1608); Ronnie Po-​Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–​1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 168 (Ricci to Clavius, Nanchang, December 25, 1597). 25 D’Elia, Galileo in China, 21 (De Ursis to Father Antonio Mascerenas, September 2, 1610). 26 Michael John Gorman, “Mathematics and Modesty in the Society of Jesus:  The Problems of Christoph Grienberger,” in The New Science and Jesuit Science, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 1–​120; Ugo Baldini and Bernardino Fernandes, “As Assistências ibéricas da Companhia de Jesus e a actividade científica nas missões asiáticas (1578–​1640): Alguns aspectos culturais e institucionais,” Revista portuguesa de filosofia 54 (1998): 230. 27 APUG 529, f. 37 (Rubino to Clavius, Chandrapur, October 25, 1609); in Christopher Clavius, Corrispondenza, ed. Baldini and Pier Daniele Napolitani (Pisa: Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Matematica, 1992), vol. 6, part 1, 143; Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere del Venerando P. Antonio Rubino (Turin, 1901), 215–​216 (Chandrapur, October 28, 1609). 28 Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere, 219 (Rubino to Grienberger, São Tomé, November 2, 1612). 29 Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science,” 232. 30 Antonio Favaro, ed., Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Galileo Galilei (Florence: Giunti Barbèra 1890–​1909) (hereafter GO), vol. 10, 242 (Sagredo to Sarpi, Aleppo, April 30, 1609). I have used the translation in Nick Wilding, Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 73, which first brought my attention to this episode. 31 GO, vol. 10, 242 (Sagredo to Sarpi, Aleppo, April 30, 1609). 32 Ibid., vol. 10, 262 (Sagredo to Galileo, Aleppo, October 28, 1609); Wilding, Galileo’s Idol, 76. 33 GO, vol. 11, 170 (Sagred to Galileo, Venice, August 13, 1611); vol. 12, 335 (Sagredo to Galileo, Venice, August 5, 1617); Wilding, Galileo’s Idol, 77. 34 Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere, 220 (Rubino to Grienberger, Cochin, December 22, 1618).

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How information travels 99 35 Henrique Leitão, “The Contents and Context of Manuel Dias’ Tianwenlüe,” in Saraiva and Jami, eds., The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian Science, 108. 36 In addition to Rubino’s one surviving letter to Clavius (cited in note 27), see APUG 567, f.  267rv (Rubino to Grienberger, Chandrapur, October 28, 1609); f.  36rv (Cochin, November 30, 1613); and those published in Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere. 37 Antonio Favaro, ed., Carteggio inedito di Ticone Brahe, Giovanni Kepler e di altri celebri astronomi e matematici dei secoli XVI e XVII con Giovanni Antonio Magini (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1886), 347–​348 (Giulio Aleni to Giovanni Magini, Macao, January 28, 1611). For a complete prosopography of the missionary-​scientists in Asia during this period, see Baldini and Fernandes, “As Assistências ibéricas da Companhia de Jesus.” On Aleni’s famous cartographic contributions, see Giulio Aleni, Geografia dei paesi stranieri alla Cina: Zhifang waiji, ed. Paolo De Troia (Brescia: Fondazione Civiltà Bresciana/​Centro Giulio Aleni, 2009); Eugenio Menagon, Un solo Cielo: Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–​1649) –​ Geografia, arte, scienza, religione dall’Europa alla Cina (Brescia: Grafo, 1994). 38 Favaro, ed., Carteggio inedito, 349. 39 Giambattista Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (Bologna, 1661), 366; Giulio Aleni and Jan Wremann, “Resultat de l’observation sur l’éclipse de lune du 8 Novembre 1612, faite a Macao,” Mémoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (Paris, 1730), vol. 7, 706. On the state-​sponsored joint mission of the Paris Academy of Science and the French Jesuits, see Florence C.  Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land:  Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 40 Loyola, Constitutions, 285. 41 Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere, 219 (Rubino to Greinberger, São Tomé, November 2, 1612); see D’Elia, Galileo in China, 16; and Massimo Bucciantini, Michele Camerota, and Franco Giudice, Galileo’s Telescope:  A European Story, trans. Catherine Bolton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 227–​236. 42 Filippo DeVivo, Information and Communication in Venice:  Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 43 Giuseppe Gabrieli, ed., Carteggio Linceo (Rome:  Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1996) [hereafter CL], 183 (Galileo to Cesi, Florence, December 19, 1611). 44 Johan Faber, Animalia Mexicana descriptionibus scholiisque exposita (Rome, 1628). On the complex publication history of the Mexican Treasury, a good starting point is Giovanni Battista Marini Bettolò, Una guida alla lettura del Tesoro Messicano: Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome:  Libreria dello Stato, 1992); David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx:  Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2002); Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo, eds., Il Tesoro Messicano: Libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo Mondo (Florence: Olschki, 2013). 45 Edmond Lamalle, “La propagande du P.  Nicolas Trigault en faveur des missions de Chine (1616),” Archivum Historicum Societati Iesu 1 (1940): 49–​120. 46 CL, 625 (Schreck to Faber, Munich, May 26, 1617). 47 Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651), ed. Johann Schreck, Johan Faber, and Fabio Colonna, with Nardo Antonio Recchi. There are other variations of the title for all or part of this work in various publication between 1628 and 1651, but this version, listing all three editors makes the collaboration most apparent.

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100  Paula Findlen 48 CL, 566 (Schreck to Faber, Milan, April 26–​May 1, 1616), 625 (Madrid, January 18, 1618). 49 Ibid., 599 (Augsburg, June 10, 1616), 629–​630 (Lisbon, March 31, 1618), quotation on p. 630. This section of the chapter is indebted to Giuseppe Gabrieli, “Giovanni Schreck Linceo gesuita e missionario in Cina e le sue lettere dall’Asia,” in his Contributi alla storia della Accademia dei Lincei (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1989), vol. 2, 1011–​1051; and Isaia Iannaccone, Johann Schreck Terrentius: Le scienze rinascimentali e lo spirito ell’Accademia dei Lincei nella Cina dei Ming (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1998). 50 Gabrieli, “Giovanni Schreck,” 1034–​1035 (Schreck to Faber, Goa, May 14, 1619). 51 Sabina Brevaglieri’s forthcoming study of Johan Faber explores in greater detail the German scholarly community in Rome and its connections with Central Europe. 52 CL, 747 (Schreck to Faber, Hangzhou, August 26, 1621). 53 Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 90 (Schreck to Giacomo Koller, Hangzhou, August 30, 1621); CL, 764 (Schreck to Faber, Jiading, April 22, 1622). 54 CL, 838 (Faber to Cesi, Rome, January 27, 1624). 55 Ibid., 765 (Schreck to Faber, Jiading, April 22, 1622). For the larger context of this kind of early modern global consciousness, see Antonella Romano, Impressions de Chine: L’Europe et l’englobement du monde (XVIe–​XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2016). 56 Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), 110–​ 111; Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 82–​85. 57 CL, 765 (Schreck to Faber, Jiading, April 22, 1622). 58 Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 87–​84. 59 CL, 747 (Schreck to Faber, Hangzhou, August 26, 1621). 60 Ibid., 765 (Schreck to Faber, Jiading, April 22, 1622). 61 Ibid., 565 (Schreck to Faber, Milan, April 26–​May 1, 1616); Fabrizio Cortesi, “Lettere inedite del cardinale Federico Borromeo a Giovan Battista Faber segretario dei primi Lincei,” Aevum 6 (1932): 516 (Federico Borromeo to Faber, Milan, March 30, 1616). 62 Luís Miguel Carolino, “Cristoforo Borri and the Epistemological Status of Mathematics in Seventeenth-​Century Portugal,” Historia mathematica 34 (2007): 199; idem, “The Making of Tychonic Cosmology:  Cristoforo Borri and the Development of Tycho Brahe’s Astronomical System,” History of Science 29 (2008): 322–​323. 63 Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 48. 64 Wenceslas Pantaleon Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum anni 1616: In India Orientali factae a Societatis Iesu Mathematici Sinense Regnum navigantibus ex itinerare eo delatis (Aschaffenburg, 1620), 5. 65 Tacchi Venturi, Alcune lettere, 221 (Rubino to Greinberger, Cochin, December 22, 1618); Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum, 19. 66 Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum, 19. 67 This point is well made by Baldini, “The Jesuit College in Macao.” 68 Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum, sig. Av. 69 Of the 636 people on the San Carlos, 330 became sick and 45 died, including 5 of the 22 missionaries before arriving in Goa on October 4, 1618; Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 49. 70 Kirwitzer, Observationes cometarum, sig. A2r. 71 Ibid., sig. A2v. 72 Schreck, Epistolium ex Regno Sinarum ad Mathematicos Euroepaeos Missum:  Cum Commentatiunculua Joannis Keppleri Mathematici (Sagan, 1630), sig. Br (Schreck to

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How information travels 101 the Reverend Father Mathematicians of Ingolstadt, Hangzhou, 1623); Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 70–​73. 73 M. W. Burke-​Gaffney, Kepler and the Jesuits (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1944), 127. 74 For a classic account of Portuguese methods of information at a distance in the creation of their empire, see John Law, “On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (Henley: Routledge, 1986), 243–​263; idem, “On the Social Explanation of Technical Change: The Case of the Portuguese Maritime Expansion,” Technology and Society 28 (1987): 227–​252. 75 Schreck, Epistolium, sig. A3r (Kepler to Duke Albert of Wallenstein [Ratisbon], December 1627). 76 D’Elia, Galileo in China, 33. Iannaccone, Johann Schreck, 73, suggested that the Polish Jesuit Michael Boym may have brought the Rudolphine Tables to China. 77 CL, 765 (Schreck to Faber, Jiading, April 22, 1622). 78 Ibid. 79 Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia, 556–​557, 864. 80 Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Historia naturae, maxime peregrine (Antwerp, 1635), 10, 185 (quotation on p.  185). Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 162–​170; Domingo Ledzema, “Una legitimacíon imaginativa del nuevo mundo:  La Historia naturae, maxime peregrine del jesuita Juan Eusebio Nieremberg,” in El saber de los jesuitas, historia naturales y el nuevo mundo, ed. Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledzema (Madrid and Frankfurt am Main:  Iberoamericana/​Vervuert, 2005), 9–​26; Juan Pimentel, “Baroque Natures:  Juan E.  Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires 1500–​ 1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula DeVos, Kristine Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 93–​111. 81 CL, 1172 (Faber to Cesi, Rome, July 5, 1628). It is unclear whether the friar was a Dominican or Franciscan since both contributed to the Mexican Treasury, yet it seems likely that this was a conversation to encourage renewed cooperation by Bolivar as he returned to Peru; see Gabrieli, “Un contributo dei missionari cattolici alla prima conoscenza naturalista del Messico nel ‘Tesoro Messicano’ edito dalla prima Accademia dei Lincei (Roma 1651),” in idem, Contributi, vol. 2, 1567–​1576. 82 Peter Burke, “Rome as a Center of Information and Communication in the Catholic World, 1550–​1650,” in From Rome to Eternity:  Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–​1650, ed. Pamela M.  Jones and Thomas Worcester (Leiden:  Brill, 2002), 253–​269; Antonella Romano, ed., Rome et la science moderne:  Entre Renaissance et Lumière (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008); Jill Kraye and Maria Pia Donato, eds., Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550–​1750 (London: Warburg Institute, 2009). 83 CL, 1190 (Stelluti to Galileo, Rome, December 2, 1628). 84 Angelo Mercati, “Notizie sul gesuita Cristoforo Borri e su sue ‘inventioni’ da carte finora sconosciute di Pietro della Valle,” Acta della Pontificia Academia Scientiarum 15, no. 3 (1951): 25–​45; Olga Dror, “Phantasmatic Cochinchina,” in Views of Seventeenth-​ Century Vietnam:  Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina and Samuel Putnam on Tonkin, ed. and trans. Olga Dror and K. W. Taylor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2006), esp. 45–​46; Avner Ben-​Zaken, “From Naples to Goa and Back: A

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102  Paula Findlen Secretive Galilean Messenger and a Radical Hermeneutist,” History of Science 47 (2009): 147–​174. 85 Riccioli, Geographia, 365. Luciano Petech, “Cristoforo Borri,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome:  Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960–​), vol. 13, pp.  3–​4. Gabrieli, “Un anoninomo, ‘gesuita portoghese,’ ” in his Contributi, vol. 1, 1189–​1295. For further bibliography, see note 62. 86 Mercati, “Notizie sul gesuita Cristoforo Borri,” 28 (Ingoli to della Valle, Rome, May 19, 1632). 87 Delfosse, “La correspondance jésuite,” 101; Gorman, “Mathematics and Modesty.” 88 GO, vol. 14, 137 (Paolo Bombini to Galileo, Genoa, August 30, 1630); see Gabrieli, “Un anonimo, ‘gesuita portoghese,’ ” 1290. 89 Seymour L.  Chaplin, “The Astronomical Activities of Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc,” Isis 48 (1947): 13–​29. The mathematical culture of this era, including the role of the Jesuits, has been carefully studied in Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1995). 90 Peiresc, Lettres, vol. 1, 548 (Peiresc to the Dupuy brothers, March 4, 1628), as quoted in J. L. Pearl, “The Role of Personal Correspondence in the Exchange of Scientific Information in Early Modern France,” Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 8, no.  2 (1984): 111. 91 Ibid. 92 On Kircher’s earlier efforts to collect eclipse data, see APUG 567, f. 266r (Pierre Chifflet to Kircher, Brussels, January 24, 1632); John E.  Fletcher, “Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Other French Correspondents of Athanasius Kircher (1602–​80),” Australian Journal of French Studies 9 (1972):  252. The literature on Kircher has become sufficiently expansive that it seems best to indicate a good starting point in English:  Ingrid Rowland, The Ecstatic Journey:  Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Libraries, 2000); Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher:  The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New  York:  Routledge, 2004); Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher’s Theater of the World:  The Life and Work of the Last Man to Search for Universal Knowledge (Rochester, VT:  Inner Traditions, 2009); John Edward Fletcher, A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher “Germanus Incredibilis,” ed. Elizabeth Fletcher (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus:  Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 93 APUG 568, f. 194r (Peiresc to Kircher, Aix, June 10, 1635). Transcribed in Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage (1620–​ 1637), ed. Agnès Bresson (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 180. 94 John Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 95 Peiresc, Lettres à Naudé 1629–​1637, ed. Philip Wolfe (Paris:  Papers on French Seventeenth-​ Century Literature, 1983), 52–​ 53 (Aix, June 28, 1635). Peiresc’s June 17, 1635 letter to Barberini in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 6503, f. 136r is partly transcribed and discussed in Peter N. Miller, “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean: Geography and Astronomy, 1610–​1656,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters (1500–​1675): Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dirk van Miert (London: Warburg Institute, 2013), 151.

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How information travels 103 96 Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise, 180. 97 Pierre Humbert, “Un manuscrit inédit de Gassendi,” Revue des questions scientifiques (4th series) 106 (July 20, 1934): 6. 98 Peiresc, Lettres à Naudé, 56 (Aix, August 29, 1635). 99 Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World, 127–​133, 245–​246; idem, “Mapping Peiresc’s Mediterranean.” 100 APUG 568, f. 368r (Peiresc to Kircher, Aix, October 8, 1635). 101 APUG 568, f. 217r (Peiresc to Kircher, Aix, October 30, 1636); Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility (London, 1657), vol. 1, 286. 102 Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo (1626–​1637), ed. Jean-​François Lhote and Danielle Joyal (Clermont-​ Ferrand:  Éditions ADOSA, 1989), 238 (Aix, April 29, 1636). 103 Gassendi, Mirrour, vol. 2, 132–​133. 104 Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, 250 (Aix, August 29, 1636). 105 Peiresc, Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Tamizey de Larroque (Paris:  Imprimerie Nationale, 1894), vol. 5, 463 (Peiresc to Lucas Holstenius, Aix, November 6, 1636). Peiresc also let Cassiano know his pleasure in these developments on October 31. 106 This chain of correspondence had been outlined in the Constitutions; Harris, “Transposing the Merton Thesis,” 299n36. 107 Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, 254 (Aix, October 31, 1636). 108 Ibid., 257 (Aix, December 4, 1636). 109 Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus, 71–​103; and Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher, 12–​18. 110 Peiresc, Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, 263 (Aix, February 5, 1637), 267 (Aix, April 1, 1637); Chaplin, “Astronomical Activities,” 25n62 (Peiresc to Holstenius, Aix, April 9, 1637). 111 Gassendi, Mirrour, vol. 2, 134. 112 Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652–​1655), vol. 1, preface. See the discussion in Noel Malcolm, “Private and Public Knowledge: Kircher, Esoterism, and the Republic of Letters,” in Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher, 298. On Peiresc’s sense of his role, see Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 113 APUG 561, ff. 83r–​84v (Kircher to an unknown Jesuit, Rome, October 14, 1636). I owe this citation to Michael John Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher’s Magnetic Geography,” in Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher, 257n18. 114 Martha Baldwin, “Kircher’s Magnetic Investigations,” in The Great Art of Knowing:  The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Libraries, 2001), 27–​36; Mark Waddell, Jesuit Science and the End of Nature’s Secrets (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 115 Athanasius Kircher, Magnes sive de arte magnetica (Rome, 1641), 433. 1 16 For a full analysis of this episode, see Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” 239–​259; Kircher’s discussion of Borri’s solution can be found in his Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 502. On Martini, a good starting point is Giuseppe O. Longo, Il gesuita che disegnò la Cina: La vita e le opere di Martino Martini (Milan: Springer, 2010). 117 Marin Mersenne, Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. Cornelis de Waard et al. (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1932–​1988), vol. 8, 761. Discussed in Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” 244. 118 H. J. M. Nellen, “La correspondance savant au XVIIe siècle,” Dix-​Septième Siècle 45 (1993): 90.

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104  Paula Findlen 119 Kircher to Mersenne, Rome, December 23, 1639, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Fms. Lat. 306. 1 (3) [a copy, apparently in the hand of Gabriel Naudé]. Warm thanks to Michael John Gorman for bringing this letter to my attention. 120 Gassendi, Mirrour, vol. 2, 287. 121 APUG 567, ff.74r–​75v (Martini to Kircher, Évora, February 6, 1639); Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” 242. 122 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 397. 123 Pierre Gassendi, Opera Omnia (Florence, 1727 ed.), vol. 6, 412 (Kircher to Gassendi, Rome, February 13, 1642). 124 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 397. 125 Readers interested in examining Kircher’s inbox should visit The Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project, originally created by Gorman and Wilding: https://​web.stanford.edu/​group/​kircher/​cgi-​bin/​site/​. A  more complete database of Kircher’s correspondence created by Iva Lelková with Suzanne Sutherland, is available through the Oxford University’s Early Modern Letters Online, as part of our work with Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters: http://​emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/​forms/​advanced?people =Kircher%2C+Athanasius. 126 Giorgio de Sepi, The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus:  A Facsimile of the 1678 Amsterdam Edition of Giorgio de Sepi’s Description of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum, ed. Peter Davidson, trans. Anastasi Callinicos and Daniel Höhr, annotated by Jane Stevenson (Philadelphia, PA:  Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2015). On the nature of the museum, see Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” in The Jesuits and the Scientific Revolution, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2002), 225–​ 284; Eugenio Lo Sardo, ed., Athanasius Kircher, S.J.:  Il museo del mondo (Rome:  Edizioni DeLuca, 2001); Mark A.  Waddell, “A Theater of the Unseen: Athanasius Kircher’s Museum in Rome,” in A World Such as This I  Dreamed:  Cosmogony in the Early Modern Mind, ed. Allison B.  Kavey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67–​90. 127 Kircher, Magnes, 3rd ed. (Rome, 1654), 327. 128 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 115, 439–​441, 444, 453–​455, 457, 469, 481–​483. See Mersenne, Correspondance, vol. 9, 31–​38 (Mersenne to Kircher, January 20, 1640), 107 (Mersenne to Theódore Haack, February 12, 1640); Gassendi, Opera Omnia, vol. 6, 87–​88 (Gassendi to Kircher, Aix, July 3, 1640). 129 Kircher, Magnes, 2nd ed. (Cologne, 1643), 401; see “Literae P. Martini Martini Soc. Iesu. datae Goa Ann. 1640. 8 Novemb. Ad P. Athanasium Kircher,” 35–​39. 130 Zur Shalev, “The Travel Notebooks of John Greaves,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. Alastair Hamilton, Maurits H. van den Boogert, and Bart Westerweel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 94–​95. 131 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 431. 132 Ibid., 432. 133 Ibid., 433–​435. 134 APUG 567, ff. 74r–​75v (Martini to Kircher, Évora, February 6, 1639). 135 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 501–​502; Dror, “Phantasmatic Cochinchina,” 52–​ 55, 60; Alexei Volkov, “Traditional Vietnamese Astronomy in Accounts of Jesuit Missionaries,” in Saraiva and Jami, ed., The Jesuits, the Padroado, and East Asian Science, 168–​169. 136 Kircher, Magnes, 1st ed. (1641), 503.

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How information travels 105 137 Gassendi, Opera Omnia, vol. 6, 412 (Kircher to Gassendi, Rome, February 13, 1642). 138 Ivana Gambaro, Astronmia e tecniche di ricerca nelle lettere di G.  B. Riccioli ad A.  Kircher (Genoa:  Quaderni del Centro di Studio sulla Storia della Tecnica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1989), 44, 51–​52 (Riccioli to Kircher, Bologna, July 5, 1642). 139 Ibid., 57 (Bologna, August 30, 1642). 140 Kircher, Magnes, 3rd ed. (Rome, 1654), 328. 141 The relationship between Kircher’s work and the Jesuit information-​ gathering practices is briefly discussed in Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms, 382–​383; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 207–​208. 142 Alfredo Dinis, “Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science of His Time,” in Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, 195–​224; Christopher M.  Graney, Setting Aside All Authority:  Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). 143 Riccioli, Geographiae, 315, 325. 144 Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum (Bologna, 1651), vol. 1, 58. 145 Riccioli, Geographiae, 325. 146 Ibid., 351. 147 Ibid., 317. 148 Ibid., 349. 149 On the relations between the new scientific societies and the Jesuits, Conor Reilly, “A Catalogue of Jesuitica in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665–​1715,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 27 (1958):  339–​362; and Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land. 150 Rita Widmaier, ed., Leibniz korrispondiert mit China:  Der briefweschel mit den Jesuitenmissionaren (1689–​1714) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 17, 65, 74, 130, 176, 204, 206, 215, 218, 232.

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3  Deciphering the Ignatian Tree The Catholic horoscope of the Society of Jesus Marcelo Aranda

In 1646, the sun never set on the Jesuit empire. Or at least that is what Athanasius Kircher wanted the readers of his Ars magna lucis et umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow) to believe when they viewed the Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesus. The title of the image can be translated as either the Catholic Horoscope or the Universal Timekeeper of the Society of Jesus, a name indicative of its purposes.1 At the base of the tree St. Ignatius of Loyola prays below the word “Roma” –​both the headquarters of the religious order he founded and location of the Holy See. Branches covered with sundials and leaves depicting various locations around the world emerge from Rome, essentially producing a schematic map of the Society of Jesus circa 1646 (Figure 3.1). Altogether, Kircher included 466 locales in 39 provinces over five continents in the Horoscopium Catholicum (henceforth referred to as the Ignatian Tree). Kircher had produced an image that celebrated the expansion of the Society of Jesus over the past century and also pointed toward its potential future. Previous scholarship on the Ignatian Tree has focused on it as map of an early modern network of faith and knowledge. In his seminal articles on the early modern Society of Jesus, Steven Harris referenced the Ignatian Tree as an illustration of the Jesuit concept of a centralized organization.2 As correspondence and directives traveled throughout the idealized Ignatian Tree, they facilitated religious conversion, buttressed Catholic faith and orthodoxy, and disseminated scientific information between overseas missions, European schools, and the larger Republic of Letters. Since then, other scholars of the Society of Jesus have either used this image or mentioned it to illustrate the global reach of the Jesuit order.3 The recent work of both Liam Brockey and Markus Friedrich challenged the idea of early modern Jesuit uniformity and centralized control.4 While Brockey illustrated the varying obstacles and responses of local Jesuits in India, China, and Japan through the life of Father Visitor André Palmeiro, Friedrich highlighted the differences between the ideal of Jesuit governance and communication and its actual practice. Given that historical sources related to early modern Jesuit expansion are mostly institutional records (particularly those from the central Jesuit archives in Rome), missionary reports (e.g., the Jesuit Relations from missions in Asia and the Americas), or extant correspondence (e.g., the letters of Athanasius Kircher), studies of early modern Jesuit networks have taken either an

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Figure 3.1 The Ignatian Tree from the Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1646 edition. Credit: Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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108 Marcelo Aranda institutional or egocentric approach. Institutional analyses tend to focus on the attributes that made the Jesuits distinct, for better or worse, from other early modern organizations. In contrast, older egocentric studies were mostly written by members of the Society to highlight noteworthy Jesuits and their religious activities.5 The most recent research on individual Jesuit correspondence networks chafes at the intellectual constraints of such approaches and brings new insights by incorporating digital methodologies. For example, in Findlen, Lelková, and Sutherland’s forthcoming book, their combination of traditional archival work with the digital visualization of a vast corpus of source material allowed them to “decenter” Kircher from his own correspondence and instead use him “as a vehicle to study aspects of the early modern world.”6 In this chapter, I  will deconstruct the design of this map of seventeenth-​ century global Catholicism to postulate its potential impact on early modern viewers removed from Kircher socially, geographically, and chronologically. Many such viewers were part of the broader Jesuit community, a social network that included not only the members of the Society, but also Jesuit patrons and students around the world. In their roles as confessors, missionaries, natural philosophers, courtiers, and teachers the Jesuits interacted with every level of early modern society. In effect, the Jesuits connected historically distinct individuals, institutions, and cultures to one another. It is this juxtaposition of historical actors in the second or third degree that has the potential to reveal new insights about the circulation of knowledge in the early modern world. I  am drawing on the analytical approach used by Zephyr Frank to study the interactions of different social classes in nineteenth-​century Rio.7 While in Frank’s work the city of Rio acts as a space binding its inhabitants together, in my work, the Society of Jesus links disparate actors and locales in the early modern world. To illustrate how the Ignatian Tree and the global community depicted connected Kircher to others, we will use the case of a Mexican cosmographer active in the second half of the seventeenth century. Additionally, the Ignatian Tree was not only a map of a religious network but also a two-​dimensional paper instrument for calculating time around the world and a baroque visualization meant to impress and overwhelm the senses. While the seventeenth-​century Scientific Revolution is often associated with Galileo’s telescope, Boyle’s air-​pump, and Hooke’s microscope, the Ignatian Tree is arguably one of the most interesting and understudied of seventeenth-​century scientific instruments. Understudied since, unlike the artfully crafted early telescopes and surveying instruments often found in science museums, the Ignatian Tree is not an “idea made into brass.”8 Instead, like other early paper instruments, it is an idea printed on paper or engraved in copper, making it more reproducible and portable, but yet more ephemeral and less readily usable. Recently scholars have emphasized that paper instruments are not only potential physical artifacts, but also cultural texts replete with data about social meaning, scientific practice, and personal intent.9 The third aspect highlighted in this chapter is the visual design of the Ignatian Tree. The image is a synthesis of a large amount of geographic and mathematical

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 109 data gathered from Jesuit sources around the world, and Kircher designed the Tree to be both accessible and impressive. While other scholars have discussed the global network exemplified in the Ignatian Tree, they have not analyzed the choices and intent of Kircher in his construction of the image. For example, since the Ignatian Tree displays geographic information, why illustrate it as a tree and not a geographic map? Arguably, because Kircher’s main intent was not geographic accuracy but to spark a moment of spiritual reflection in his viewers.10 To explore these three aspects of the Ignatian Tree I used Palladio, a new tool for network visualization developed by the Humanities + Design lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.11 By going through the process of disassembling and reassembling this image, I recognized that the intellectual “roots” of the tree link it to late-​sixteenth-​century Spanish cosmographical ideas and imperial projects. This connection to a previous global information-​collection project, the Spanish relaciones geográficas, gave the Ignatian Tree a particular resonance among Kircher’s many readers in the late-​seventeenth-​century Spanish Empire.

The Great Art of Light and Shadow Athanasius Kircher (1602–​1680), the renowned mid-​seventeenth-​century polymath, had such a variety of intellectual interests that Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Cosmographer of New Spain and chair of mathematics at the Royal University of Mexico, referred to Kircher as “el monstro de la sabiadura” (the behemoth of learning).12 Kircher was an intellectual wonder, famous not only for his erudition, but also for fantastical instruments such as a cat piano and a sunflower clock as well as his renowned cabinet of curiosities in the Jesuit Collegio Romano.13 In addition to his prodigious scholarship, Kircher also acted as a key mediator and interlocutor in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters, counting many intellectual, scientific, and political figures among his correspondents.14 The publication of Ars magna lucis in 1646 marked the beginning of Kircher’s most productive period of scholarship. Unlike his later works, such as the Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Egyptian Oedipus, 1652–​1654) and the Mundus subterraneus (the Subterranean World, 1665), Ars magna lucis et umbrae was typical of Kircher’s early interest in magnetism, optics, and timekeeping.15 The Ignatian Tree is an illustration in a book section on how the principles of light and shadow used in sundials are combined in the Tree to help determine longitude.16 The appearance of the Ignatian Tree in 1646 was somewhat timely since the Jesuits had recently celebrated the centennial of their founding by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. The Society of Jesus was arguably the most prominent of the newer Catholic religious orders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Renowned as pedagogues, missionaries, and political advisors, the Jesuits created a network of schools and missions all over the Catholic world, which in turn brought a great deal of social and political influence.17 This prominence also made them a target for the many opponents, philosophical, political and theological, who saw the Jesuits as the main defenders of Catholic orthodoxy.

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110 Marcelo Aranda This status eventually led to the expulsion of the order first from the Portuguese Empire, then from the French and Spanish Empires, and the final suppression of the Jesuits in 1773.18 But in 1646, the Jesuit star was still in the ascendant.

The Ignatian Tree as a schematic map As mentioned earlier, the Ignatian Tree is a schematic map of 466 Jesuit provinces and institutions around the mid seventeenth century.19 Around the periphery of the image is a phrase from Psalm 113 (“From East to West, Praiseworthy is the name of the Lord”) in 34 different languages, many of which were used by the Jesuits in their missionary work.20 The image of the tree in the center is complex, almost overwhelmingly so at first glance, an aspect that is perhaps intended by Kircher. Here he displays the global reach of the Jesuits, much more extensive than any single European monarchy. Kircher likely sought to elevate the viewer’s thoughts into the realm of the sublime, by suggesting that Catholicism might become a truly universal faith in the near future. The main trunk of the tree is labeled “Roma” and the various branches from left to right represent the five early modern Jesuit assistancies: Portuguese, French, German in the top center, Italian at the bottom, and the Spanish assistancy on the right.21 Within the assistancies were provinces composed of schools, missions, and professed houses and led by a provincial. The geographic extent of each Jesuit province was based on the number of institutions in an area, and did not necessarily match early modern political boundaries.22 The largest of the assistancies is the German one, composed of 11 provinces with 143 locales, followed in turn by the Spanish (15 provinces/​ 121 locales), Italian (5 provinces/​101 locales), French (5 provinces/​66 locales), and Portuguese (11 provinces/​61 locales) assistancies. Jesuits would often move between assistancies depending on the needs of the order to pursue their pastoral and evangelical duties. For example, Kircher (originally from Geisa, within the domain of the Imperial Abbey of Fulda) traveled throughout Germany during the Thirty Years War, before he finally settled in Rome. His acquaintance with fellow Jesuits in both Germany and Italy, many of whom traveled to the Americas and Asia as missionaries, expanded Kircher’s network of correspondents and intellectual colleagues. In the Ignatian Tree, each of the provinces is depicted as a sundial face with their name and the local time when it is noon in Rome. Some of the provinces have their early modern names; for example, New Granada is the area of present-​ day Venezuela and Colombia. Additionally, the inclusion of some provinces represented future expansion. While Kircher included Sinaloa and California, the Jesuits would not expand into those areas until the second half of the seventeenth century. Emerging from each sundial were leaves bearing the name of a locale with a Jesuit institution. Taking information from the illustration, I then matched the locales in the Ignatian Tree to present-​day locations with geographic coordinates.23 While some of the locales in the Ignatian Tree are still not matched to present-​day

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 111 locations, I  was ultimately able to transform Kircher’s schematic map into a geographic one.24 Figure 3.2 shows a map demonstrating the global extant of the Society of Jesus during the mid seventeenth century. With each point representing a Jesuit college, professed house, or mission we get a sense of the confessional boundaries of mid-​ seventeenth-​century Europe. The blank areas in the north are the Protestant areas of Europe, while the Balkans and North Africa are under Islamic rule.25 Similarly, the Jesuit presence in India and East Asia included the Portuguese Estado da Índia around Goa and the Malabar Coast, the Chinese missions in Beijing, Macao and Nanjing, and the Spanish settlements in the Philippines.26 Oddly enough, Kircher includes missions in Japan, even though Catholic clergy were expelled from Japan beginning in 1614, and any remaining quickly became martyrs.27 The Jesuit locales in the New World are mostly clustered around the highland regions of Spanish America and the coastal areas of Brazil, in effect mirroring the central areas of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas and emphasizing that the Iberian overseas empires acted as the trellis for the expansion of the global Jesuit network.28 The significance of the quotation from the Psalms that Kircher translated around the periphery of the Ignatian Tree becomes clear. In this illustration Kircher showed not only the expansion of the Jesuits from the initial seed planted by St. Ignatius in Rome, but also that the Society of Jesus was a religious order on which the sun never set. Therefore, Kircher’s vision of the Ignatian Tree is part of the early modern Jesuit trend toward globalization that Luke Clossey has termed a “Global Salvific Catholicism” that emerged from shared missionary practices.29 Similarly, Michelle Molina has emphasized the transportability of the Spiritual Exercises as a set of religious practices. This enabled the Jesuits missionaries to bring them to New Spain, but it also allowed female laity and religious to integrate them into their own spiritual practice.30 In the same manner that common missionary and spiritual practices cultivated a global Catholic community, the Ignatian Tree played a role akin to how modern territorial maps promote national community and shared history.31

The Ignatian Tree as a mathematical instrument While certainly an impressive display of Jesuit expansion, the Ignatian Tree also served a practical purpose: it allowed the viewer to know the time of day in other locations around the world relative to Rome. In the early twenty-​first century, our chief concern with time-​zone differences is their impact on communication and travel. In contrast, in the early modern world this was a problem with both theological and imperial implications. Instead, this was part of an ongoing effort to solve the practical problem of the date of Easter, which by the sixteenth century was ten days out of alignment with the solar year. A lack of coordination among different church parishes regarding Easter ceremonies had the potential to cause grave theological problems. Therefore, a papal commission including the Jesuit

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newgenrtpdf

Figure 3.2 The Jesuit world, c.1646. Credit: Designed by author with Palladio by Humanities + Design Research Lab at Stanford University.

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 113 astronomer and mathematician Christopher Clavius came up with a solution in 1582: the Gregorian calendar currently in use today. While the new calendar solved the most grievous timekeeping problem, as Catholicism became a global faith, another problem emerged. How do you make certain that everyone is celebrating holidays on the same day? For example, in 1596, the Italian merchant Francesco Carletti traveled west from Mexico to the Philippines on the Manila Galleon. The following year, Carletti journeyed to Portuguese Macao and Japan where he compared his timekeeping to that of Portuguese missionaries going eastward from Lisbon to Asia. Carletti found that he was a day behind them, since by traveling west from Seville he had lost 12 hours, while those in Macao had gained 12 hours. Carletti then realized that it might be possible for Spanish parishioners in the Philippines to celebrate Holy Saturday on the same day as Portuguese missionaries might celebrate Easter.32 Athanasius Kircher offered a possible solution to this problem.33 The Ignatian Tree suggests a division of the world into different time zones, with Rome as a Catholic Greenwich, in effect proposing a solution to the Longitude Problem.34 In the text of the chapter accompanying the Ignatian Tree, Kircher mentions how others attempted to establish longitude through magnetic variation or by recording the eclipses of the Galilean moons. Instead he believes that the best method for determining longitude is by recording the beginning, middle, and end times of a lunar eclipse, something accomplished by his fellow Jesuits around the world, and he used their observations to create this illustration.35 By championing this method, Kircher was following the approach used by Spanish cosmographers during the reign of Philip II when they attempted to carry out a similar collection of eclipse observations. Those eclipse observations had the potential to solve the Longitude Problem, thereby allowing Spanish vessels to traverse the oceans safely and enabling the Spanish Crown to accurately map its territories. The Spanish and Portuguese crowns divided the Atlantic with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and later, after the return of Magellan’s expedition, the Tordesillas demarcation line was extended around the globe, but due to some vagueness in the language of the original treaty, nobody was certain about its location in the Pacific Ocean. While the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza set a nominal location for the Tordesillas anti-​meridian, Spanish cosmographers continued to work on the problem of precisely measuring longitude. In 1554, the Spanish cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz proposed distributing eclipse questionnaires to correspondents throughout the empire and then compiling their observations for calculation back in Spain.36 Santa Cruz died before he could undertake his project, but in 1577, Juan López de Velasco, the cosmographer-​chronicler of the Indies, circulated an eclipse questionnaire to every corner of the Americas. The questionnaire required recipients to make observations of one of two lunar eclipses, making note of both the location of the moon in the sky and its elevation above the horizon at the beginning and end of the eclipse.37 Unfortunately, the relaciones were a failure, in part due to a lack of trained correspondents in the Americas, and a Spanish policy of imperial secrecy that

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114 Marcelo Aranda condemned the responses to secret archives.38 In contrast, the Ignatian Tree is proof of a more successful project: Kircher’s synthesis of Jesuit letters and reports from around the world.39 Kircher began this project, called the Geographical Plan (Consilium Geographicum), on the orders of Father General Muzio Vitelleschi some time in the late 1630s.40 Like the chronicles of Spanish cosmographers and his fellow Jesuit José de Acosta, Kircher’s Geographical Plan was intended to be a comprehensive scholarly work combining cartography, natural history, anthropology, human culture, and history.41 Kircher had faith in the accuracy of the observations sent by his Jesuit brothers  –​a result of the mathematical training emphasized by Christopher Clavius and his students. In contrast, the recipients of the relaciones geográficas in the Council of the Indies could not be as certain about the expertise of their respondents.42 The cosmographical elements in Kircher’s Geographical Plan and the Ignatian Tree demonstrate that the Jesuits were seventeenth-​century heirs to the Spanish cosmographical tradition.43 Finally, there was also a natural magic element to the Ignatian Tree, by which I mean the use of optics, magnetism, hydraulics, or other phenomena to create a natural spectacle.44 For example, to surprise and delight visitors to his cabinet of curiosities at the Collegio Romano, Kircher often used “speaking trumpets” to animate statues and project his voice.45 Jesuit missionaries like Eusebio Kino used prisms and simple mathematical instruments to engage potential converts.46 In a similar fashion, when the shadows of the sundials on the Ignatian Tree were properly aligned they would spell out the initials of Jesus (IHS) on the map. As the shadows moved through the day, the letters would move around the world.47 Regrettably, Kircher’s Ignatian Tree was one of the few finished products of the Geographical Plan, since his dataset was stolen from his cabinet in the Collegio Romano!48

The Ignatian Tree as a baroque visualization Although we do not have Kircher’s original data, the Ignatian Tree gives a possible glimpse at the wealth of information it contained. The geographic and observational data represented in each of the 466 locales on the Tree chart a vast global network, compelling the viewer to make sense of it. At the same time, the complexity of the image can also invoke a feeling of being overwhelmed by the inability to understand it fully. Given the relative familiarity and authority of geographic maps as a medium in the seventeenth century, why didn’t Kircher present the Jesuit missions on a map? The advantage of a familiar visual medium, such as a geographic map, was that viewers were likely fluent in its language and rhetoric. The choice to present a schematic map was intentional on Kircher’s part; while the schematic format allowed Kircher to design a mathematical instrument enabling viewers to witness the spectacle of the IHS shadows traveling the globe, that requirement also subordinated the Tree’s function as a map to its needs as an instrument. Another aspect of the Ignatian Tree that made it such a powerful image for early modern viewers was the association of tree imagery with the lineage

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 115 of Christ. Starting with the eleventh-​ century Czech Codex Vyssegradensis, illuminators, sculptors, glaziers, and painters were inspired by this passage from Isaiah 11:1:  “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” All over Europe illustrations of the Tree of Jesse appeared in parchment, glass, and stone, always beginning the genealogy of Christ with Jesse, father of King David. By the seventeenth century the use of a tree to depict family lineages had become commonplace, used not only by European aristocrats like the Hapsburgs, but also the indigenous leaders of the Unacaze in the “Relacíon de Michoacan.”49 In that light, the rationale behind combining geography and genealogy in an image of a tree becomes more understandable. Therefore, what we see in the Ignatian Tree, with all its complexity, is Kircher’s attempt to deal with this profusion of data and to visualize it in a meaningful way. We should also consider that the aesthetics of the Ignatian Tree are not necessarily in accord with modern sensibilities. While the Ignatian Tree and the Cartesian Coordinate system were both developed in the mid seventeenth century, their subsequent impact is markedly different. The Cartesian Coordinate system is arguably the intellectual ancestor of many of our contemporary charts, graphs, and data visualizations. Additionally, through the influence of Edward Tufte and others, modern data visualization has tended to value designs that “give visual access to the subtle and the difficult –​that is the revelation of the complex.”50 The best modern data visualizations reveal subtle trends and patterns and are designed to be accessible to a non-​specialist audience. The worst data visualizations overwhelm and confuse the viewer with a profusion of data and opaque methods.51 Instead the Ignatian Tree is a baroque visualization designed according to an entirely different aesthetic, one valuing spectacular effect over visual clarity. Part of the Ignatian Tree’s fascination for us in the early twenty-​first century may be precisely because it seems to be part of a different intellectual lineage. Kircher meant the Ignatian Tree to celebrate the global reach of the Society of Jesus. Therefore that initial feeling of confusion and stupefaction, that recognition of something much larger than either the self or even any kingdom, would prompt the viewer to reflect on the universality of the Catholic Church –​which is what Kircher wanted.

Revising the Ignatian Tree Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae made such an impact that in 1671 a new edition was printed in Amsterdam.52 While the text of the chapter accompanying the 1671 Ignatian Tree (Figure  3.3) did not change, the illustration itself was quite different. The general layout of the image, with the tree in the center and the translated quotation from Psalm 113 around the periphery, is the same, although the image is now smaller to allow the inclusion of text explaining the use of the Ignatian Tree. In the box of explanatory text there is also a circular image, seemingly a decorative rosette, but consisting of two rings divided into 24 sections. With the outermost ring bearing the names of cities, the inner ring has the name of a region or country in the same time zone. In the main image each

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116 Marcelo Aranda province is now depicted as a hyperbolic sundial as described in Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Some of the errors in the 1646 Ignatian Tree have also been corrected: for example, the New Kingdom of Granada is now one province instead of two. While Gorman has proposed that the changes in the illustration were due to the preferences of a Protestant audience in Amsterdam, I would argue that the changes instead reflected the changing interests and fortunes of the Society of Jesus.53 For example, the 1671 tree had a cluster of five new provinces with unnamed leaves added to the left of the Spanish Assistancy. These five provinces (Madagascar, Monomotapa, Constantinople, Magasar, and Abassia) were in southern Africa and the Ottoman Empire, indicating a Jesuit desire to expand into those areas. While there was still a Japanese province, none of its locales were actually in Japan, in effect transforming it into a general East Asia Jesuit province.54 In Europe, the Jesuits of the German assistancy had expanded further into Poland-​Lithuania, Russia, and the British Isles, and there were also three new provinces in South Asia associated with the Mughal Empire (Mogor) and Indochina (Tunchin and Cochin China). So the orientation of Jesuit expansion by the 1670s was not the traditional Catholic strongholds in Latin western Europe and the Americas, but aspirational ventures in Slavic Eastern Europe and the non-​Christian empires and nations of Africa and Asia. In both versions of the Ignatian Tree, Kircher illustrated the expansion, influence, and cosmopolitanism of the Society of Jesus. The various global languages and locations displayed suggest a worldliness akin to that of the Hapsburg coat of arms.55 The various titles and territories across Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the arms of Charles V or his son, Philip II, highlighted their political power and influence by revealing scattered ancestral holdings and overseas conquests. The Ignatian Tree had a similar purpose, although in this case the power and influence on display were spiritual in nature. This is an example of an early modern universality based on the principles of Counter-​reformation Catholicism, not the ideals of science and the French Revolution. While certainly impressive, accuracy was not the guiding principle within the Ignatian Tree. As previously mentioned, neither Sinaloa nor California were evangelized until later in the seventeenth century, while in the case of Japan, those missions had been destroyed and the clergy either expelled or martyred. The inclusion of those provinces was aspirational, expressing a desire to expand into new areas or to reclaim them for the Catholic faith. Kircher’s inclusion of Canada, Ethiopia, Tibet, and new provinces in the 1671 Tree can be seen in a similar light.56 In the Ignatian Tree, linguistic boundaries and the administrative structure of the Society supersede political borders. Additionally, other locations seem entirely fanciful. In one sense, this may not be so surprising, since early modern maps often included features such as imaginary lands and fantastic creatures like dragons. What is surprising is Kircher’s attempt to be mathematically precise about these imaginary locations. In the 1646 Tree, the Hesperides Islands were in a longitude either four hours before Roman time or eight hours afterwards, which meant that they are either in the South Pacific or the

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Figure 3.3 The Ignatian Tree from the Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1671 edition. Credit: Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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118 Marcelo Aranda Azores. As to the Kingdom of Tolm, it was somewhere 12 time zones west of Rome, placing it west of California and east of China, perhaps in the Pacific Northwest. Tolm is not on the main tree of the 1671 illustration, but it is in the time zone rosette in the text box. There are also certain exclusions that are somewhat surprising. For example, Kircher did not include the Jesuit college in Mexico City, an institution founded in 1575.57 This is somewhat surprising given that Kircher had a number of correspondents and readers in Mexico, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Alejandro Favián.58 As we move further from Rome and the European heartland of the Society of Jesus, the Ignatian Tree becomes less a reflection of the actual number and institutions of Jesuits and more a reflection of the dreams of Kircher and his Roman fellows in Rome. Even with such obvious omissions and inaccuracies, Kircher’s vision of global Catholicism resonated with his readers in the larger Spanish monarchy. For example, in 1699 toward the end of his life, Sigüenza became embroiled in a dispute over his mathematical and cartographic expertise. In a letter to the Viceroy of New Spain, Sigüenza gave detailed examples of his scientific abilities concluding with a reconstruction of his participation in the global Jesuit network.59 While Sigüenza listed Kircher among his correspondents, there are no remaining letters directly linking the two. Mostly likely Kircher and Sigüenza shared a second-​hand connection, with their interlocutor being either a mutual correspondent, José Zaragoza, or Kircher’s published work. As the mathematics tutor to Charles II of Spain and chair of cosmography at the Colegio Imperial of Madrid, Zaragoza held a position analogous to Sigüenza, and as a result they exchanged astronomical data in the 1670s. This intellectual exchange between Sigüenza and Zaragoza is referenced in both of their published writings.60 Additionally, we have records of Zaragoza’s exchange of letters with Kircher on at least two different occasions in a 20-​year period.61 The second letter dates to 1675, a period when Zaragoza and Sigüenza had achieved intellectual prominence at the royal court of Madrid and the viceregal court of Mexico City. It is likely that during this period Zaragoza acted as an intermediary between Kircher and Sigüenza. We know from Sigüenza’s various works that he was an avid reader of Kircher and in his last will and testament he declared that he owned a complete collection of Kircher’s books, including the Ars magna lucis et umbrae.62 While Sigüenza did not directly reference the image, given his own attempts to grapple with the Longitude Problem through eclipse observations, it is likely that he was familiar with the section of Ars magna lucis et umbrae on timekeeping. With both Zaragoza and Kircher dead in 1699, there was no one in New Spain able to refute Sigüenza’s claim, but perhaps more important than its veracity is that Sigüenza depicted himself as part of the same global intellectual network that Kircher mapped in the Ignatian Tree.63 Essentially, Sigüenza took the model made by Kircher and recentered it on himself in Mexico City. We know that Kircher’s image was not only in Mexico, but also in Beijing and in many of the other places depicted in the Tree.64 The Ignatian Tree is not just a representation of the Jesuit network, or a paper instrument that represents science as a universal ordering principle  –​the Tree also traveled through the

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 119 very global maritime routes it depicted. Given its complex design combining elements of baroque Catholicism, solar observation, polyglotism, and global correspondents it is likely that no one other than Kircher could have made such a rich visual source. Finally, we should also remember that in addition to depicting an early modern religious, scientific, and intellectual network, the Ignatian Tree is also Kircher’s personal network. The image depicts St. Ignatius in Rome, but we can just as easily imagine Kircher corresponding with patrons, students, and colleagues throughout the Tree. While various websites encourage us to visualize our contemporary personal and business networks, Kircher is unique in depicting his own social network in the seventeenth century.

Conclusions The Ignatian Tree illustrates the intersection between science, religion, and empire in the seventeenth century. Often in the early modern period we find examples of political and religious institutions, like the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church, engaged in the pursuit of scientific knowledge for imperial or religious ends. But the larger an early modern state or institution was, the more it struggled to obtain a comprehensive understanding of its constituent parts and the problems they faced. The global panopticon desired by Philip II through the relaciones geográficas was never a realistic aspiration. That said, the Society of Jesus was more successful in gathering, synthesizing, and sharing information than any other group in the seventeenth century. Jesuit missionaries sent overseas were well prepared linguistically and intellectually to deal with other cultures and to report on their activities to their superiors in Rome. As other scholars have emphasized, the Ignatian Tree illustrates the importance of the Society of Jesus in the early modern world, but as I have demonstrated, there are multiple meanings and purposes for the Ignatian Tree beyond its function as a map, resulting in a skillful blending of art, metaphor, and mathematics.

Notes 1 The Horoscopium Catholicum is a fold-​out within Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae in X libros digesta … (Rome: Herman Scheus, 1646), 553. 2 Steven J. Harris, “Confession-​Building, Long-​Distance Networks and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1, no. 3 (October 1996): 287–​318; and “Mapping Jesuit Science:  The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–​1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), vol. 1, 212–​240. 3 Michael John Gorman, “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines,” in The Great Art of Knowing:  The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2001), 59–​70; J. Gabriel Martínez-​Serna, “Procurators and the Making of the Jesuit’s Atlantic Network,” in Soundings in Atlantic History:  Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–​ 1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L.  Denault

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120 Marcelo Aranda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 181–​209; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 81; Michelle J.  Molina, To Overcome Oneself:  The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–​1767 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), frontispiece. 4 Liam Brockey, The Visitor:  André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Markus Friedrich, “Archives as Networks: The Geography of Record-​Keeping in the Society of Jesus (1540–​1773),” Archival Science 10 (2010):  285–​ 298; and “Government and Information-​ Management in Early Modern Europe:  The Case of the Society of Jesus (1540–​1773),” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 539–​563. 5 An example is Ernest Burrus’s work on the correspondence and life of Eusebio Kino, an early Jesuit missionary in the Southwest borderlands. See Ernest J.  Burrus, Kino escribe a la Duquesa:  Correspondencia del P.  Eusebio Francisco Kino con la Duquesa de Aveiro y otros documentos (Madrid:  Ediciones José Porrua Turanzas, 1964); Kino Reports to Headquarters:  Correspondence of Eusebio F.  Kino, SJ from New Spain with Rome (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 1954). 6 See Paula Findlen, Iva Lelkovà, and Suzanne Sutherland, The Baroque Postmaster:  Athanasius Kircher between Rome and the World (forthcoming book in progress). 7 Zephyr Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-​Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); and “Layers, Flows and Intersections:  Jeronymo Jose de Mello and Artisan Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1840’s–​ 1880’s,” Journal of Social History 41 (Winter 2007): 307–​328. 8 Gerard L’Estrange Turner, the mid-​twentieth-​century British scholar who pioneered the scholarly study of scientific instruments, coined this phrase in his Scientific Instruments, 1500–​1900: An Introduction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 9 See Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2011), 19–​35. 10 In Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills have argued that we should consider the various social, intellectual, and religious practices shared across the larger Spanish world as technologies. Moving away from the present-​day mechanistic meaning of technology, Levy and Mills remind us that “early modern technologies arise from the mind, the heart and the body first and that a considerable adaptability to local circumstances most defines their actual operation.” From that perspective we can perhaps consider the Ignatian Tree as a form of baroque spiritual technology. Levy and Mills ed., Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), 3. 11 Palladio is a web-​based data visualization program. The latest version can be found at http://​palladio.designhumanities.org/​#/​. For more information on Humanities + Design, refer to http://​hdlab.stanford.edu/​about/​index.html. 12 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Contestacion a Don Andres de Arriola,” in Biografia de Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, (seguida de varios documentos ineditos), ed. Francisco Pérez Salazar (Mexico City: Antigua Imprenta de Murguia, 1928), 142. 13 See Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher:  The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Stolzenberg, ed., The Great Art of Knowing for general introductions to Kircher work and influence. See Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1994), for Kircher’s museum at the Collegio Romano. For Kircher

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 121 as an antiquarian, see Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus:  Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). For details on Kircher’s Sunflower Clock and Cat Piano, see Thomas L.  Hankins and Robert J.  Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995), 14–​36. For a recent popular history of Kircher, see John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012). 14 See Findlen et al., “A Jesuit’s Letters.” 15 Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus … (Rome: Ex typographia Vitalis Mascardi, 1652–​1654), and Mundus subterraneus in XII libros digestus … (Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium et Elizeum Weyerstraten, 1665). Oedipus aegyptiacus discusses Kircher’s interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs and antiquities, while Mundus subterraneus covers volcanism and other aspects of geology. 16 Ars magna lucis …, 471–​564. It is in c­ hapter 7 of Book 6. Much of the chapter discusses the “sciatheric” type of sundial designed by Kircher and used in the 1671 edition of the Ignatian Tree. The sciatheric sundial takes the form of a hyperbola-​shaped sundial as opposed to the half-​circle type sundial in the 1646 Tree. 17 See John W.  O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), for the early history of the Society of Jesus, and O’Malley et  al., eds., The Jesuits:  Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, vol. 1, for the broader cultural impact; see Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), for Jesuit influence on early modern science. 18 By the mid eighteenth century, the major Catholic monarchies increasingly saw the Society of Jesus not as valuable agents, but instead as interlopers and sources of rebellion. The Jesuits were expelled from the Portuguese Empire in 1759, from France in 1764, and from the Spanish Monarchy in 1767. 19 By a schematic map, I mean a map that abstracts the spatial relationships involved for an illustrative purpose other than accurate representation of geography. Early examples of such maps include the Peutinger map and T-​O maps. A  more recent example of such a map is the London Underground map. 20 The following languages appear in the Ignatian Tree:  Scottish, Iberian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Sardinian, Thai, Gaelic, Algonquin, Nahuatl, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Arabian, Amharic, Turkish, Persian, Coptic, Armenian, Polish, Hungarian, English, Italian, Castilian, Galician, German, and Flemish. These languages have not been identified:  Stranghelo, Samaratice, Brachmanice, Illyrice, and Chilice (perhaps Mapuche?). 21 The Society of Jesus was led from Rome by the Superior General, who was helped by Assistants charged with large geographic regions, i.e., assistancies. 22 For example, the German Assistancy includes not only the Holy Roman Empire, but also Flanders, the British Isles, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. 23 Kircher tended to use either German, Italian, or Latin versions of the toponyms for locales. For example, he lists the Belgian city of Liège as Leodium. For non-​European locales, Kircher’s transcriptions are more of an approximation:  Nagasaki in Japan becomes Nangasachi and Guadalajara in Mexico is written as Quadalaxaria. 24 Out of 496 leaves on the tree, 26 were unnamed so they were not mapped. Of the 470 named locales, four are double-​listed in the illustration and are thus only counted once. Krosa (Kražiai, Lithuania) in the Lithuanian province is mentioned twice. Liege, Saint-​Omer, and Ghent in the Anglia province are also listed in the Gallo-​Belgian province and the Flandro-​Belgian province. Of the remaining 466 locales, 12 have

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122 Marcelo Aranda not been matched. They are Patipor in the Malabar province; Caleco in the Paraguay province; Tuscul and M.  Santo in the Roman province; Mantia in the Neapolitan province; Montevi and Borm in the Milanese province; Gizin in the Bohemia province; Flumen in the Austrian province; Insulae and Canneracum in the Gallo-​Belgian province; and Faustonium in the Polish Province. 25 The island of Chios is a possible anomaly, since there are no other locales in Ottoman Empire. 26 For locations in India and East Asia I referenced the following works: Liam M. Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–​1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)  and Brockey, The Visitor; Florence C.  Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land:  Jesuits and Their Scientific Mission in Late Imperial China (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ines G.  Županov, Disputed Mission:  Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-​Century India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 27 In 1614, the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns issued an edict expelling foreign missionaries. Over the next 20  years many European missionaries and Japanese Christians were executed, culminating in the 1638 Shimabara Rebellion, the last major uprising against the Shogunate. R. Po-​Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–​1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207–​209. 28 For locations in Spain and the Americas I  referenced the following works:  Ana Carolina Hosne, The Jesuit Missions to China and Peru, 1570–​1610: Expectations and Appraisals of Expansionism (New  York:  Routledge, 2013); Victor Navarro-​Brotóns, “Los Jesuitas y la ciencia: El Colegio Imperial y la educación,” in Momentos y Lugares de la Ciencia Española, Siglos XVI–​XX, ed. Antonio Lafuente and Juan Pimentel (Madrid:  CSIC, 2013)  and “Tradition and Scientific Change in Early Modern Spain:  The Role of the Jesuits,” in Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters; Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–​1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011). 29 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 238–​257. 30 Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 25–​31 and 52–​56. 31 J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 52–​81. 32 Francesco Carletti, My Voyage around the World:  The Chronicles of a 16th Century Florentine Merchant, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New  York:  Pantheon Books, 1964), 102–​103, quoted in Brian Brege, “The Empire That Wasn’t:  The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574–​ 1609,” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2014, 198–​199. 33 Kircher was likely drawing on previous attempts by Galileo, who had earlier been in negotiations with the Spanish Crown to develop a method for determining longitude. Silvio A.  Bedini, The Pulse of Time:  Galileo, the Determination of Longitude, and the Pendulum Clock (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1991), 7–​21. 34 The Longitude Problem was the inability of European mariners to accurately fix their position when moving from east to west and vice versa. Latitude has been relatively easy to determine since antiquity by measuring the altitude of the sun at noon or Polaris in the evening. In contrast, establishing longitude requires the use of widely observed celestial events, such as the orbits of the moons of Jupiter and eclipses, or by the use of clocks accurate enough to maintain time on long voyages. Since such clocks were not developed until the second half of the eighteenth century, earlier efforts to solve the Longitude Problem were either astronomical or mathematical

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 123 in nature, as opposed to technological. See William J. H. Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude:  The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4–​ 6, 1993 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1996)  for coverage on the different aspects of the Longitude Problem. 35 Ars magna lucis et umbrae …, 553. Kircher mentions observations from Europe, China, the East Indies, Peru, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. 36 María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68–​72, 228–​229. 37 The two lunar eclipses were on September 26, 1577 and September 15, 1578. See Portuondo, 223–​256, for a detailed discussion of using lunar eclipses for determining longitude. 38 Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 23–​27 and 55–​56, for some of the problems with eclipse questionnaire respondents in New Spain. 39 Michael John Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass: Athanasius Kircher’s Magnetic Geography,” in Athanasius Kircher:  The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 239–​257. 40 The beginning of the project is uncertain, but Kircher apparently described the project in two separate letters from November and December of 1639. Ibid., 245. 41 Ibid., 242. 42 See James M.  Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo:  Christopher Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 30–​ 38, for details on Jesuit mathematical pedagogy and Clavius; John Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 86–​89, for information on Riccioli, a Jesuit astronomer and contemporary of Kircher. 43 The other heirs, as has been demonstrated in the work of both Antonio Barrera and Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra, were English and Dutch natural historians, explorers, and philosophers; see Antonio Barrera-​Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas 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). 44 Examples include the inflammability of asbestos garments, luminescent stones, and distorting mirrors. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 221–​222. Interestingly enough, unlike his contemporaries in the Royal Society, Kircher did not describe his actions as demonstrating, but instead as exhibiting. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 44. 45 Findlen, Possessing Nature, 107. 46 Marcelo Aranda, “Instruments of Religion and Empire: Spanish Science in the Age of the Jesuits, 1628–​1756.” PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2013, ch. 3, 93–​102. 47 Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” 250; Gorman, “Between the Demonic and the Miraculous,” 63. 48 Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” See also Michael John Gorman, “The Scientific Counter-​ Revolution:  Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Experimentalism in Jesuit culture 1580–​c.1670,” PhD Dissertation, European University Institute, 1998; Antonella Romano, La contre-​reforme mathematique:  Constitution et diffusion d’une culture mathematique jesuite a la Renaissance (1540–​1640) (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1999); Aranda, “Instruments of Religion and Empire.”

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124 Marcelo Aranda 49 Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 4 (1991): 105–​129; Angélica J. Afandor-​Pujol, “The Tree of Jesse and the ‘Relación de Michoacán’: Mimicry in Colonial Mexico,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 293–​307. 50 Edward R.  Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed. (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001), 191. See also Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton Architectural Press, 2013)  and The Book of Trees:  Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton Architectural Press, 2014). 51 While the internet is rife with examples of bad visual presentations, some of the most notorious were produced by the US military for briefings. One general quipped, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” New York Times, April 26, 2010. www. nytimes.com/​2010/​04/​27/​world/​27powerpoint.html?_​r=0. 52 Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae in X libros digesta … (Amsterdam: Joannem Jansonium a Waesberge et haerdes Elizaei Weyerstraet, 1671). 53 Gorman, “The Angel and the Compass,” 250. 54 See Brockey, The Visitor, 195–​214, for details on the persecution of the Jesuits in Japan and the split of the Japanese and Chinese provinces. 55 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 81. Another aspect of the Ignatian Tree is that by learning all the languages of humanity to act as missionaries, the Jesuits were “repairing the curse of Babel” and reuniting the various nations of the world. Anthony Grafton, “Kircher’s Chronology,” in Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher, 178–​179. A modern display of global cosmopolitanism akin to the Ignatian Tree is the display of banks of clocks in corporate headquarters or international airports. 56 While the Jesuit missions to Canada were certainly successful, the same could not be said of their attempts to enter Ethiopia or Tibet. 57 John J. Martinez, S. J., Not Counting the Cost: Jesuit Missionaries in Colonial Mexico –​ A Story of Struggle, Commitment, and Sacrifice (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2001), 18. 58 Paula Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World:  Athanasius Kircher and his American Readers,” in Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher, 329–​362. 59 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Contestacion a Don Andres de Arriola,” in Pérez Salazar, ed., Biografia de Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, 142. Here are identifications of those on Sigüenza’s list:  Athanasius Kircher (1602–​1680), baroque polymath based at the Collegio Romanum and the most renowned scholar of his day; Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606–​1682), Catholic Bishop of Vigevano renowned for his writing on theology, philosophy, astronomy, architecture, and probability; Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–​ 1712), director of the Paris Observatory and founder of the Cassini astronomical dynasty; John Flamsteed (1646–​1719), British Astronomer Royal and Fellow of the Royal Society; José Zaragoza (1627–​1679), Astronomer, professor at the Colegio Imperial and math tutor to Charles II; Antonio del Giudice, Duke of Giovinazzo and Prince of Cellamare (1657–​1733), a Neapolitan aristocrat active at the court of Charles II and who was later the main instigator behind the Cellamare Conspiracy that embroiled Spain and France in the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–​1720); Jean François Petrey (1641–​post 1693), French Jesuit instructor of grammar, rhetoric and mathematics at the Colegio Imperial from 1675 till 1693; Juan Cruzado de la Mesa (c.1688–​1711), Pilot-​Major of the Casa de Contratación, chair of mathematics and naval architect; Fray Josef Ascaray (c.1690–​1705), Augustinian friar

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Deciphering the Ignatian Tree 125 who taught liberal arts and mathematics at the University of San Marcos in Lima; Father Pieter Thomas Van Hamme (1651–​1727), Flemish Jesuit missionary who passed through Mexico on his way to China. Van Hamme was in Mexico from 1684 until 1687. The only individual I have not been able to identify is Pedro Cabina of Florence. 60 For Zaragoza’s social network, refer to José de Zaragoza, Engaños de la otra vida manifestales para desengaño de los hombres de juyzio, que no professan las Mathematicas (Madrid: n.p., 1676). For Sigüenza’s intellectual network, refer to Pérez Salazar, ed., Biografia de Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, 142. 61 A database of Kircher’s correspondence can be found at Early Modern Letters Online. http:// ​ e mlo- ​ p ortal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ ​ c ollections/ ​ ? catalogue=athanasius- ​ k ircher (accessed July 31, 2016). 62 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Testamento (Mexico City, 1700), Clause 39. Bancroft Library Mexican Miscellany 1700. 63 See Aranda, “Instruments of Religion and Empire,” ch. 4, 137–​174; Anna E. More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 202–​249. 64 John Fletcher, “Athanasius Kircher and the Distribution of His Books,” The Library 23 (1968): 108–​117.

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4  The early modern information factory How Samuel Hartlib turned correspondence into knowledge Carol Pal

On June 30, 1649, the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (c.1600–​1662) was at home in Duke’s Place, London. Suddenly, a stranger appeared at his door –​a man who would neither identify himself, nor state his purpose. Instead, Hartlib’s mystery guest proceeded to launch into a description of a plan he had for reforming the entire English educational system. And instead of turning the man away, Hartlib listened respectfully while his visitor read out loud from his unpublished discourse on education.1 Hartlib was impressed, deeming the scheme “very solid and excellent.” The still-​unnamed visitor then went on to list some woes that were not unfamiliar in those turbulent times. He had seven children, had been dismissed for impolitic preaching, and had accumulated great debt as a result –​but this had not slowed down his zeal for the advancement of learning. As Hartlib recalled in his work journal, Ephemerides: Besides hee had other greater matters to propose for a Publick Good and the Advancement of Learning. Hee desired only to bee the Solicitor of Learning and calles him in his title page of the Idaea a Syndic to the common-​wealth of Learning. In a word Hee seemed to bee a very pious real and universally didactical man. Only hee intimated likewise a non-​subsistence.2 And here, the visitor had touched on a subject on which Hartlib was both sympathetic and expert, since non-​subsistence would be a recurring theme in his own career until the day he died. Yet the visitor had chosen his doorstep well, since another recurring theme throughout Hartlib’s career was his unwavering support for educational reform and the advancement of learning. And despite his own ongoing failure to establish reliable funding, Hartlib’s strengths lay in his unique combination of intelligence, diligence, energy, and optimism, interwoven with an enormous network of contacts. So having deemed this educational tract a worthy endeavor, Hartlib put his publication machine into action; less than two months later, a pamphlet entitled The Right Teaching of Useful Knowledg was being sold by John Stephenson on Ludgate Hill.3 Hartlib’s down-​on-​his-​luck mystery visitor turned out to have been George Snell, a Doctor of Divinity and former fellow at St. John’s College Cambridge; and the Epistle Dedicatorie of Snell’s tract, “A Missive shewing The

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The early modern information factory 127 occasion of the hastie Printing of this Tractate,” named the men who had been so “verie importunate” to have it in print this quickly. Those men were “Mr. Durey” –​a reference to John Dury (1596–​1680), Hartlib’s friend and collaborator –​and “Mr. Hartlib.”4 This episode  –​combining educational reform, collaboration, the advancement of learning, and “hastie printing” –​was in many ways emblematic of Samuel Hartlib’s particular place in the Republic of Letters. And while the usual form of contact with Hartlib was through correspondence, rather than Snell’s apparition on the doorstep, the process of putting ideas into immediate circulation was the hallmark of his network. This chapter examines the workings of this ad hoc operation as directed by Samuel Hartlib. It was an unpredictable process that connected conversations, correspondence, print, and scribal publication  –​and one that provides us with a deeper understanding of authorship, publication, and the creation of knowledge in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters.5 The early modern Republic of Letters as a whole is probably best understood as an amorphous, unbounded, and multilayered conversation; like Pascal’s infinite sphere, its center was everywhere, and its circumference was nowhere.6 Yet embedded within that infinite sphere was a multitude of smaller subsets, some of which did have identifiable centers; one thinks, for instance, of the networks of Nicolas-​Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Ismaël Boulliau, Henry Oldenburg, or Marin Mersenne.7 In these smaller subsets, learned men and women conducted more focused conversations, centered on shared scholarly inquiries, religious and political identities, or ongoing projects. And despite the fact that these smaller correspondence networks were dwarfed by the Republic of Letters as a whole, it is worth reminding ourselves here that the scholars at their centers left behind literally thousands of pieces of correspondence –​both in their own archives, and in those of the people with whom they corresponded –​and that these thousands of extant documents represent only a fraction of what once existed. For instance, at his death, Peiresc is said to have left over 10,000 letters, of which less than half have survived; Boulliau’s archive numbers around 5,000 pieces, and Oldenburg’s is over 3,000.8 One of these smaller subsets was the communications network powered by the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib; and here, Hartlib’s example can instruct us regarding the volume of work done in the Republic of Letters. Most of Hartlib’s papers are at the University of Sheffield, and together with holdings elsewhere, these total over 5,500 items.9 To this total, one must add the “scribal shadow” of Hartlib’s presence in the archives of his closest collaborators –​in this case, John Dury and the educationalist Jan Amos Comenius (1592–​1670).10 But as recent work has shown, this impressive remnant is probably only 42 percent of Hartlib’s original correspondence, which would thus have totaled over 11,500 items –​putting him on a level with intelligencers like Peiresc.11 But although Hartlib’s correspondence network resembled Peiresc’s in its extent, it had a very different character, and was more than just an association of like-​minded scholars and scientists. The very nature of communication in the Hartlib network was unlike that of other subsets within the Republic of

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128 Carol Pal Letters. Intellectual exchanges in the Republic of Letters were ideally scholarly, deliberate, and fairly controlled; although correspondence would often be shared within a particular group, the writer’s wishes on that subject were usually respected. In Hartlib’s network, however, destinations were unpredictable, and completely beyond the participants’ control –​because Hartlib’s network was not democratic. Once a letter arrived in Hartlib’s hands, the eventual fate of its content was his to decide. This is because Hartlib’s network functioned quite literally as an information factory, creating what he deemed useful knowledge –​not just knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge that might be useful in constructing a new world. And in reconstructing that emphasis on production, this chapter also demonstrates the need to revisit two of the most familiar lenses used in analyzing his network. The first is the standard formulation of “the Hartlib circle,” resonating with the world of coterie manuscript sharing. This is a misnomer –​both far too contained, and far too neat. The porousness of Hartlib’s network simply does not fit within the tidy social containment suggested by the word “circle.” The second is Harold Love’s concept of “scribal publication.”12 Love articulated scribal publication as a function of English networks in the seventeenth century; the intent was for manuscripts to be copied and circulated among the members of a “scribal community,” in order to “nourish and articulate a corporate ideology.”13 Since Hartlib was responsible for the replication and distribution of so much manuscript material, he could certainly be seen as a one-​man house of scribal publication in this formulation.14 However, Love’s framework also relies on a crucial difference between the communities that circulated manuscripts and those that circulated print –​a difference based on privacy and secrecy. This is where Hartlib does not really fit this rubric, and Love’s original concept must be expanded.15 It is true that certain types of knowledge being discussed were dependent on a genealogy of secrets, and this was especially true of alchemical practices and certain medical recipes; however, Hartlib’s ultimate interest was in sharing and expanding knowledge, rather than keeping it intact.16 For that reason, I  argue that Hartlib’s epistolary network was essentially a locus of knowledge production: an information factory, with the name “Samuel Hartlib” as its intellectual brand. And in order to explore that productive function, we need to approach it from three directions:  first, from an understanding of what that knowledge was for; second, through an introduction to Hartlib’s key collaborators; and third, through some glimpses of his productive practice in action, attained by triangulating his correspondence with the content of his work diary, Ephemerides, and the publications that sometimes resulted.

The knowledge: what was it for? At the heart of Hartlib’s network was a Baconian dream. In 1620, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–​1626) published his Instauratio Magna, or Great Instauration.17 In a structure that mirrored the six days of creation, this unfinished work made the claim that knowledge was no longer capable of being augmented –​it was not only

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The early modern information factory 129 too stale and tainted, but ultimately baseless as well: “the entire fabric of human reason which we employ in the inquisition of nature is badly put together and built up, and like some magnificent structure without any foundation.” Thus the only possible way forward for mankind was to tear that rotten structure down, and begin again: “There was but one course left, therefore –​to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.”18 And this revolution would not be limited to knowledge alone. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning was also a plan to restore man to his prelapsarian state of balance and power: For man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over creation. Both these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and sciences.19 Moreover, this had to happen before it was too late. In addition to these brave statements, Bacon’s Instauratio Magna had the words of the prophet Daniel on its frontispiece: Multi pertransibunt, et augebitur scientia (Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased). This was not a vision of a wide-​open future, but rather a prophecy concerning the end of days.20 For Hartlib, the essence of his knowledge-​making enterprise was this very combination of empirical science and Protestant improvement, for which all information might possibly prove useful.21 Thus Hartlib’s interests and pursuits embraced nearly all the intellectual activities of the era in which he lived. There was almost nothing in which Hartlib was not interested. While his primary pursuits were the ones that seemed most likely to bring the world into closer alignment with God’s plans –​the identification of true knowledge, the organization and sharing of that knowledge, and reforms in education so that humanity would be ready to live in this new world –​there was no end to the ways in which these goals might be realized. The point of it all was to remake the entire world, in order to bring about a new Christian kingdom on Earth. This would be a kingdom secured and nourished by the dissemination and reformation of knowledge, both ancient and new.22 It was a vision of epic and impossible proportions –​but here again, Bacon proved inspirational, and Hartlib’s network was in many respects a realization of Solomon’s House, the idealized scientific society in Bacon’s fable New Atlantis.23 New Atlantis, of course, echoes Atlantis, the lost continent described by Plato in his Socratic dialogue Timaeus. Plato’s Atlantis was far from ideal. In fact it was described as the enemy and antithesis of Athens, which was the best society in the world. As Plato had it, the wicked actions of the Atlanteans had angered the gods, who then created the enormous earthquake that sent Atlantis to the bottom of the ocean. Bacon’s New Atlantis, however, redeemed Plato’s sunken island. Its lost sailors came ashore on the island of Bensalem, where an ideal society was fueled by the scientific engine of Solomon’s house, the learned community at

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130 Carol Pal its center. As described to the visiting sailors, “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”24 In other words, limitless resources, for limitless knowledge. But a closer look reveals that Bacon’s ideal scientific society was actually a practical, hands-​on foundation, and in addition to scientific experiments, it was involved in mining, agriculture, fishing, meteorology, medicine, cooking, and animal husbandry. The scientific imagining in New Atlantis was quite wonderful. There were caves, 600 fathoms deep, used for producing artificial metals, curing disease, and prolonging life. There were towers half a mile high, used for observing comets, and pools filled with the water of paradise, “very sovereign for health and prolongation of life.” There were “great and spacious houses” where the Bensalemites could create their own meteors and observe them. Furnace houses recreated the heat of the sun, while perspective houses allowed them to play with light, and “also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines.” There were telescopes, and engine houses, as well as “ships and boats for going under water.” Most importantly for Hartlib, perhaps, was the method used by the Bensalemites for gathering information: we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, under the names of other nations, (for our own we conceal); who bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants of Light.25 Solomon’s House and its Merchants of Light provided a model in which agents collected information from other lands, so that the information could then be processed at the center and turned into new knowledge. It was also a model in which it was acknowledged that the attainment of certain knowledge was not the work of one scholar alone, but of a larger assemblage of informants, experimenters, and thinkers, all working toward a similar goal. And we can see in here a model for Hartlib’s own network. Hartlib’s web of correspondence was enormous. It crossed the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, as he gathered and disseminated information from England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Prussia, Poland, Scandinavia, America, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Low Countries. As he described his own “correspondencie,” it had engaged with “Men of Eminencie of several ranks in Moscovia Lithvania Prussia Polonia Silesia Moravia Bohemia Hungaria Transylvania Vpper and Lower Germanie Sweden Denmark Fraunce yea in Turkie New England and other remoter Parts of the World.”26 Hundreds of names surface again and again in his work diary, Ephemerides, a remarkable document in which he cites everything he has learned from his contacts –​tidbits relating to angels, to agriculture and everything in between.27 Hartlib solicited ideas, sending out questions and challenges to the scholars in his network. Hundreds of letters were addressed to him each week, after which

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The early modern information factory 131 they might meet with several possible fates. Hartlib might mine a letter for its content, in which case the letter’s information might just be noted in his Ephemerides. These journals were organized chronologically, with a line between individual entries, and large ruled margins on the outer edge of each page. In these margins, Hartlib would characterize each excerpt or entry with a notation; these marginal “Heads” would indicate the category of knowledge, or how he was thinking about it (e.g., “libri theologici,” “eruditio,” “Desiderata,” “logica”). In addition, the Heads would often contain a name –​either the name of the person being discussed, or of the person who had provided the information. (See Figure 4.1 and 4.2) These excerpts might then exist only in the diary for future reference; or, the excerpts might be copied out, and find their way into multiple new letters. And while editing, excerpting, and writing Ephemerides entries were Hartlib’s own tasks, he directed a fluctuating staff of scribes to collate, reformat, and copy the material he selected.28 In this form of scribal publication, these new texts were then sent out to circulate among the members of his various networks –​sometimes in the form of letters, and sometimes in the form of print. But in order to understand how this worked, we must turn now from the model of knowledge-​making to the people who worked within it –​to Samuel Hartlib, his collaborators, and the clues that tell us about the ethos and functionality of their learned web.

The collaborators: Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius In 1641, it seemed to many that England would be the chosen site for initiating Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, wherein the reformation of learning would be a crucial aspect of the millennial transformation. Bacon had presented the world with multivalent, inspirational, yet manifestly unfinished projects –​as Ralph Waldo Emerson has put it: “All his work lies along the ground, a vast unfinished city.”29 But perhaps the time had come to actually build that city, and to construct a real Solomon’s House. Perhaps “the true advancement of Sciences, which my Lord of Saint Albanes hath wished and saluted afarre off,” was now within reach.30 So in that same year of 1641, a Prussian, a Scotsman, and a Moravian met together in London and swore a pact of eternal brotherhood. In this foedus fraternus, Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Jan Amos Comenius formally consecrated themselves to each other; as Dury would later put it, “for though our taskes be different, yet we are all three in a knot sharers of one anothers labours.”31 The Scotsman in this band was John Dury; the Moravian was Jan Amos Comenius; and the Prussian was Samuel Hartlib. And their shared “knot” was the Herculean task of bringing about a new Christian kingdom on Earth, a kingdom secured and nourished by “the Reformation of studies in true Knowledge.”32 In dedicating their lives and efforts to this task, Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius might appear to have been the quintessential intellectual outsiders, whose scriptural interpretation of the world put them on the margins of seventeenth-​ century intellectual events. However, they did not struggle alone, nor were their struggles without very real effects. They were connected with René Descartes,

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Figure 4.1 A page from Hartlib’s Ephemerides for 1639, HP 30/​4/​7A. The reference to the correspondence networks of Constantijn Huygens, Claude Saumaise, and Marin Mersenne is at the bottom. Credit: Courtesy of Sheffield University Library, Special Collections.

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Ephemerides 1639 HP 30/​4/​7A with the Reasons why they were [owned] or rejected. One offered to gaine Dunkirke infaliblely being slighted by the Prince of Orange went to the Dunkirkers and shewed them how to make it invincible. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Theologica should bee handled in the last place. Hubner As long as the Reformatores deale with Papists out of meere Scripture (eg. Lutherus, Calvin etc.) they prevailed mightily. But assoone as they stept aside to Fathers and Schoolmen the Papists seemed to get the better of them. For they have amongst themselves as great gifted Men, more leisure, riches, assistance etc. as the Protestants have. Witnes Baroni Annales in comparison of the Centuries Magdeburg. Id. The Stage-​players will rise once more in judgment against many Christians that trained vp better their boyes 6. 7. etc. years for several abi -​lities then Christians doe their Children. Id. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​​ It is a fault to study other things before wee have studied ourselves, and therefore Herbert’s booke De Veritate should bee better looked -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​into. Id. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​​

Pansophia Didactica Refutationis Pontificae

Educatio Historiales Eruditio Herbert

A Treatise of Metallica. Briefly comprehending the doctrine Libri Se-​ of diverse New Metallical Inventions, but especially how to neale melt lectiores and worke all kinds of mettle oares Irons and Steeles with Sea-​coale pit-​coale, earth-​coale and Brush-​fewell. Also a transcript Invention of his Majesty’s Letters Patents of Priviledge granted vnto Simon Sturtevant for the said Metallical businesses for 31. years. -​-​-​-​ London cum Privilegio. 1616, 22. May -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Didactic a divitiarum Erasmus Roterodamus hat sich mit bucher-​schreiben ernahret. Id est er ist von einem typographo mit allur nothdurft michlichen versorget werden. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-----​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​ Id. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Dr Harveigh in lectionibus publicis Anotomicis singularem et plane Harveigh inauditam Opinionem de Generatione Hominis recitavit dignissimam Medica -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​pleniori scrutinio. Id. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​--​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ Peter Pett Archinaupegus Navis Celeberrimae Caroli Rex Pet. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-- ein sehr Gottesforchtig man intimate with Morfort. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​​ Morfort Hugens a great Correspondent in matters of Learning. Also Hugens Cor-​ Mersennus the whole Cloister maintaining the charges. [Vinconrius?] respondentia Salmesius a mighty Correspondent writes all with his owne hands and no Amanuensis. 2. is much visited. 3. correctes the presses. 4. hase many volumes ready in omni scibili, which will bee printed. Also Notes vpon Novum Testamentum. Id. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​​ At Amsterdam printed an Anonymous Treatise 1. whether it bee lawful for women to administer Caenam. 2. to absent oneself from the Sacrament.

Salmasius

Libri selecti Theologici

Figure 4.2 A transcription of the page in Figure 4.1. Names mentioned: Joachim Hübner; Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury; Desiderius Erasmus; William Harvey; Peter Pett; Constantijn Huygens; Marin Mersenne; Claude Saumaise. Topics mentioned:  Pansophia; the Reformation; Magdeburg Centuries; education; erudition; metallurgy; anatomy; shipbuilding; correspondence and intelligencing networks; women as priests.

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134 Carol Pal Constantijn Huygens, Marin Mersenne, and many other scholars and scientists in the Republic of Letters. And their work engaged with a number of scientific networks, from which the religiously moderate and empirically oriented Royal Society, among others, would eventually emerge. Moreover, this was more than a band of brothers alone, because it also included women such as Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, and the Anglo-​Irish reformer Dorothy Moore.33 Hartlib would have many temporary collaborators over the course of his career, as dictated by particular projects, political changes, and the vicissitudes of war, but Dury and Comenius were perhaps his closest and most enduring allies. John Dury was an itinerant Scottish minister whose never-​ending quest was a mission to unite all Protestants, and throughout his long and peripatetic life, his unwavering goal was to achieve ecclesiastical peace.34 With the fluctuating support of princes and prelates, he traveled throughout Europe on a mission that went far beyond the bounds of reconciling Lutherans and Calvinists. He dreamed of bringing Anglicans together with Independents, anticipated welcoming Jews into the fold, and even held out hope that Catholics might one day join him in this work. Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, these aims were entertained, if not necessarily embraced, by a wide range of actors on the political, religious, and scholarly scene. From the Queen of Bohemia to the Queen of Sweden, from Archbishop Laud to Oliver Cromwell, and from René Descartes to William Penn, many found reasons to praise and support Dury’s mission.35 His quest was, of course, an impossible ideal, and after the Restoration, almost all of Dury’s erstwhile supporters found a reason to create as much distance as possible between Dury and themselves. Yet those who had been closest to Dury’s ecumenical mission continued believing that this shared ideal should override individual interest. It was a close-​knit group that had included men like his fellow-​travelers Samuel Hartlib and Jan Amos Comenius. The group had also included a range of female fellow-​travelers: from Dury’s sister in Christ, the Hebraist Dorothy Moore; to his supporter Lady Ranelagh; to his co-​educationalist Bathsua Makin; to his lifelong friend, the scholarly Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The Moravian, Jan Amos Comenius, was born in the Kingdom of Bohemia, and throughout his life, he was fated to be a wanderer and a survivor.36 Comenius was born into a family of Moravian Brethren, who were a persecuted sect in their homeland. They were dispersed and eventually became extinct, although Comenius survived and became the last bishop of their church.37 He went into hiding, while his family stayed with relatives; his wife and children died during an outbreak of plague, but again Comenius survived. His library and manuscripts were burned in the sack of Fulneck in 1621, and again in Leszno in 1656; still, Comenius survived. This tale of woe, however, has another side  –​for as a consequence of the Bohemian Protestant diaspora, Comenius came into contact with a network of scholars and reformers in Germany, England, Sweden, Poland, and America. His sojourn in Germany resulted in his studying under the celebrated Johann

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The early modern information factory 135 Heinrich Alsted in Herborn.38 Then in the 1630s, heavily influenced by Alsted, Comenius began to publish his own tracts on the reformation of learning. Comenius’s tracts on education were enormously popular in his own time, and are still respected today. His Janua Linguarum Reserata, Didactica Magna, and Orbis Pictus, an illustrated textbook for children, were meticulously detailed programs for using “things, not words” to teach new languages to children.39 They emphasized a natural environment, the pleasure of learning, and universal education. They were translated into numerous languages, and were so influential that there are still many European educational institutions named after Comenius, who has been hailed as “the Galileo of Education.”40 The serious pastor who might never have left Moravia now had a name known throughout Europe, receiving invitations to work in locations as disparate as the royal court in Stockholm and the newly founded Harvard College in the colony of Massachusetts.41 However, Comenius’s concept of Pansophia, or universal knowledge, was much more controversial. Comenius himself thought that the theological content of his Pansophic idea was correcting a defect in Bacon’s unfinished Instauratio Magna. In the Preface to Naturall Philosophie, Comenius wrote that Instauratio Magna was “an admirable work, and which I look upon no otherwise, then as a most bright beam of a new age of Philosophers now arising.” However, it had not gone far enough: Yet it grieved me again, that I  saw most noble Verulam present us indeed with a true key of Nature, but not open the secrets of Nature, onely shewing us by a few examples, how they were to be opened; and leave the rest to depend on observations and inductions continued for severall ages.42 Thus Comenius’s Pansophia was not limited to education alone. For intertwined with these educational goals was a revolution in every possible concept of knowing –​of what should be known, and how it should be known, and by whom –​ and in the final analysis, a plan to reform the entire Christian world. The Prussian in this group was of course Samuel Hartlib, and during his lifetime, it could truly be said that “everybody knew Hartlib.”43 Hartlib was “the Marin Mersenne of Protestant England,” an intelligencer and intellectual broker who was described by his lifelong friend John Dury as “the hub of the axletree of knowledge” –​thus the perfect person to function as the hub of an early modern information network.44 As Dury wrote to a potential backer: The truth of this testimony which I give him, is knowne by all such as are familiarly acquainted with him, who perfectly also cann give wittnesse, of his abilityes and fittnesse, to be imployed in matters of intelligency, and correspondency, for gathering in of all manner of helpes, in learning and sciences, and for solliciting carefully, and labouring indefatigably in good purposes.45

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136 Carol Pal The conclusion, according to Dury, was obvious:  “and therefore it were a fitte and equitable thing, that hee should bee sette uppe as a conduit pipe of things communicable.”46 Dury’s proposal was that Hartlib should be paid for his work as an intelligencer –​the work which, according to Dury, Hartlib had been supporting with his own meager funds, so that by now he was “unfitt to subsist by himselfe.”47 The work of intelligencers in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters was quite different from the work of intelligencers in the employ of governments or nobles –​for instance, the espionage network of Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Government intelligencers had paid positions, directed from above, with direct military and diplomatic consequences; in the Republic of Letters, by contrast, the work of intelligencers like Hartlib was not compensated, and pathways linking information and action were anything but direct. For a brief period, Hartlib lived in Chichester, where he worked with the mathematician John Pell to establish “a little academie for the education of the gentrie of this nation, to advance pietie, learning, moralitie, and other exercises of industrie, not usual then in common schools.”48 However, the promised patronage never materialized, and the school failed after several months. Hartlib then returned to London, where he lived until his death on March 10, 1662. A flurry of letters written in 1635 discussed the possibilities that might materialize for Hartlib as an intelligencer working for Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, should the proposed match between the princess and Wladislaus IV, king of Poland, have succeeded. Hartlib’s network of contacts, and fluency in Polish, would have made him an ideal agent for the future queen of Poland. However, when the Calvinist princess refused to convert to Catholicism, the marriage was off, and despite the best efforts of Dury and Sir Thomas Roe, that possibility came to naught.49 Over the years, Hartlib’s planned frameworks for an ideal house of learning had included a Pansophic college, as well as learned utopian communities named after mythical islands.50 They had also included a state-​sponsored office for the coordination of knowledge, called the Office of Address.51 The Office of Address was to be a place for the exchange of labor, goods, and services, reaching throughout the British Isles; and beyond these practical aims, the Office would have had an official role –​a paid role –​for the intelligencer: [T]‌his Office may be an Instrument, by being made a Common Intelligencer for All, not onely of things actually offered or desired by some to be communicated, but also of things by himself and others observable, which may be an occasion to raise matter of Communication for the Information to All.52 According to Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius, this would be a step toward the fulfillment of Bacon’s dream –​but it was not to be. For the entire span of Hartlib’s life and career in England, he was involved in a constant struggle for funds. Dury, who was often in the same straits, wrote countless letters trying to obtain support for Hartlib, avowing that without

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The early modern information factory 137 Hartlib’s help as conduit and intelligencer, his own ecumenical efforts were doomed to fail: I cannot but say the truth in this, that without this action and negotiation to second my meane endeavours, and correspond with mee whiles I am abroad, I know not how to proceed or worke any thing in my purpose of pacification. Therefore if he fall to the ground, and for want of charity be deserted, I must allso resolve to give over my negotiation, and sit downe in sadnes.53 Promises poured in from patrons and parliaments, but the flow of funding was never more than a trickle. However, that trickle was enough to keep Hartlib active as an intelligencer for nearly 25 years, from the late 1630s until his death in 1662. Throughout this long period, Hartlib continued to receive letters, manuscripts, and information from his web of contacts, and he continued to turn this raw material into new documents –​either letters or publications. The truth, however, is that Hartlib often did not obtain a writer’s permission to publish the letters or manuscripts they sent to him; and the reactions of these inadvertent authors in the following three examples enable us to see Hartlib’s information factory at work.

The information factory in action: “ex bibliotheca S. H.” In 1636, the educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius jotted down his ideas on universal knowledge, and sent a rough draft to a friend in order to get his advice.54 After that, he heard nothing for months, and thought the manuscript had been lost at sea. However, he had not counted on the drive and presumption of his London correspondent, and as he recalled later: I began to think either it had been lost on the journey or was slightly looked upon. But lo! there cometh back to me at length a certain large bundle of books which had been sent from Dantzic: the which on opening, I perceive to be Praeludia Conatuum Pansophicorum Comenii, copies printed at Oxford –​ with a preface setting forth the reasons for its publication.55 The man responsible for that preface was also the correspondent responsible for surprising Comenius with the publication itself; and that man was Samuel Hartlib. The full title of the work was in fact Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia ex bibliotheca S.  H.56 The “ex bibliotheca S.  H.” makes it clear that Hartlib produced the publication from his own copy of Comenius’s manuscript, and the “Ad Lectorem” was signed by Hartlib himself. In 1638, the mathematician John Pell was writing a treatise on the methodizing of mathematical knowledge. Pell (1611–​1685) was a mathematician, educator, and clergyman, and together with John Dury, he was one of Cromwell’s agents on the Continent from 1654 to 1658. He had finished with

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138 Carol Pal the treatise, but did not deem it ready for publication –​a situation that was not unusual for Pell. In fact, one of his mathematical colleagues had gone so far as to claim in frustration that “He hath been a man accounted incommunicable.”57 Pell was also the inventor of the division sign (÷), although the “Pell equation,” for which he is given credit, was not his.58 Nevertheless, the print barrier was one that was always difficult to cross for Pell, so he sent the treatise to a friend in order to get his advice. Suddenly, Pell’s tract began making the rounds anonymously as a broadsheet in the Republic of Letters –​and Father Marin Mersenne, a mathematician who admired it, was anxious to know who the author was. Pell was finally forced to reveal himself, and writing to Mersenne, he confessed: “I will not deny that the very letter On the Advancement of Mathematics, which has been hidden from you … was written by me the previous year for Mr. Samuel Hartlib, the patron and promoter of the Republic of Letters.” He then went on to explain how it had all worked: He, being anxious to have it published, yet unable to obtain my permission to have my name affixed to it, had it printed at his own expense in English and in Latin, for those of other nations; so in fact, insofar as I was concerned, it seemed there was nothing to be done.59 And here, in Pell’s resignation regarding the publishing engine that was his friend Hartlib, we see the acknowledgment of Hartlib’s role in learned Europe. The broadsheet had come out less than three months after Pell sent it to Hartlib in 1638, without a title or an author.60 It would eventually be published in 1650 as part of John Dury’s The Reformed Librarie-​Keeper, with the full title of An Idea of Mathematics Written by Mr. Joh. Pell to Samuel Hartlib, and Hartlib would be the one to write the preface “To the reader.”61 In 1645, an Anglo-​Irish reformer and Hebrew scholar named Dorothy Moore (c.1613–​1664) wrote a series of letters examining the implications of marriage for brothers and sisters in Christ.62 Moore was headstrong, devout, and opinionated; she was completely committed to godly reform, and completely impatient with whatever stood in the way of that goal. For Moore, these obstacles included cowardly theologians and ridiculous, outdated rules –​rules such as the ones that prevented her from realizing her goal of becoming a preacher. She also had strong opinions regarding her own regrettable education in the frivolous accomplishments appropriate to women of her class. Moore and her aunt, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, were two very active members of Hartlib’s network. Ranelagh was a medical expert, the center of an Anglo-​Irish network in London, and the elder sister of the scientist Sir Robert Boyle. As a participant in Hartlib’s ongoing project of educational reform, Moore had jotted down some ideas on “the Education of Girles” and sent her short treatise to Ranelagh, who had requested it “as the instrument of others” –​which presumably meant Hartlib.63 Moore complained in the letter that she had only ever been taught to

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The early modern information factory 139 master “dauncing and curious workes,” which did nothing but feed a girl’s fancy with “proud imaginations”: My experience as well as my reason tells me this; for my owne education was to learne both, and all I got by them was a great trouble to forget both, that so I might stand lesse in opposition to the simplicity of the Gospell in my affections and practice.64 For Moore, the goal was not educational reform per se. Moore wanted to make women’s education conformable to a godly reformation –​a goal toward which she and her colleagues in the Hartlib network were devoting their combined energies. Although Moore, a widow, had known John Dury when she lived in London, the relationship grew stronger when she moved to the Netherlands in 1641 to enroll her sons in a school run by the theologian Gisbertus Voët (Voëtius). When Dury was appointed chaplain to Princess Mary Stuart in 1642, both he and Moore would frequent the exile court of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia in The Hague.65 Moore’s position there was probably imperiled from the start by her inability to keep quiet –​ she had, for instance, referred to the queen’s chaplain as a “dumbe dogg” and “a barking kurr.”66 But it was finally the rumors regarding her relationship with Dury that resulted in both of them leaving. Moore and Dury had formerly been joined in a celibate spiritual partnership, “a Covenant of spirituall friendship, to be maintained for the Aimes of publike and mutuall Edification.”67 Now, however, this covenant was threatened by social restrictions. As unmarried spiritual partners, they could not live together in the same house, and this had begun to hinder God’s work. To Dury, the solution was clear: they had to get married. But Moore was reluctant. She enjoyed her independent status as a widow, and among the questions she need to answer was: would marriage constitute a betrayal of their godly mission? In order to move forward, Moore and Dury both wrote to Ranelagh with their questions, arguments, and justifications for taking the next step. Although Ranelagh’s permission was not required, her status as an ethical lodestone made her approval a crucial point. Taken together, their letters argued that a marriage between Moore and Dury would not invalidate their shared godly mission –​in fact, they constructed Moore’s and Dury’s case for the possibility of a communally beneficial earthly marriage for two committed members of the body of Christ. Ranelagh agreed, and Moore and Dury were married in February 1645. Moore then sent the letters to a friend to have his opinion on the case. He liked the letters very much. However, Moore’s friend failed to ask the newlyweds’ permission before deciding to put their case in print. Lo and behold, Moore saw her “undigested” words begin making the rounds as a published pamphlet entitled Madam, Although My Former Freedom.68 (See Figures 4.2 and 4.3.) Moore was furious. She immediately fired off a scathing response: “how doe you thincke I am able to beare your printing of that rude indigested paper written to the Lady Ranalaugh? which I profess I had not time to read once over before

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Figure 4.3 John Dury’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, December 14, 1644. HP 3/​2/​92A–​95B, here 92A. Copy from the Hartlib Papers in a scribal hand, with annotations in Hartlib’s hand, e.g., “To the Lady Ranalaugh” at the top of the page, and the date of purchase: the word “although” between “Madam” and “my”. Dury’s autograph letter does not appear to be extant. Credit: Courtesy of Sheffield University Library, Special Collections.

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Figure 4.4 Printed version of the same letter, which appeared as: John Dury [and Dorothy Moore], Madam, although my former freedom (London, 1645). First page, with annotations by George Thomason: “Mr Durys letter to ye Lady Ranalet”; and the date of purchase: “June 13 1645.” Thomason/​E.288[14]. Credit: British Library.

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142 Carol Pal I sent it.” Yet Moore’s objection was not to the airing of her private linen. Her real problem was that she had not been given the opportunity to craft her prose for maximum effect before publishing it. She continued: alass! it must needs discredit the matter which might convincingly and powerfully be handled concerning the intention of Christans in maryage … and this is the service you have done the publicke; Trewly mr Hartlib I have noe pardonne for you, that is the worst Languag I will give you.69 It is clear, then, that the hasty friend was Hartlib. It is also clear that Moore was not averse to having her work published via Hartlib’s small industry of scribal publication, nor was she apparently concerned about authorial attribution. She was, however, completely committed to their shared goal of reformation. And in her opinion, his “hastie printing” of the letters concerning Christian marriage –​ uncorrected and unedited  –​had constituted a missed opportunity to make an important public and educational point in that endeavor. Each of these scholars had sent their material to the same friend: the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib. And it comes as no surprise to learn that all three  –​ even the eventually delighted Comenius –​had initially been quite annoyed with him.70 However, this was not because they felt their work had been stolen, or misused. Instead, in Comenius’s surprise, Pell’s resignation, and Moore’s fury, we see scholars and reformers in the Republic of Letters who were annoyed because their work had been rushed into distribution without being fully perfected for maximum effect. Moreover, their annoyance would be temporary –​and all three, like so many others in the Republic of Letters, eventually resigned themselves to Hartlib’s propensity to act, rather than consult. They, along with scores of others, would continue sending their work to Hartlib, knowing that the fate of their words lay in his hands. And in whatever form their words took, they would most likely emerge with the name “Hartlib” as the most prominent or even the only identifier. In fact, many of those scholars who had initially been annoyed with Hartlib might have reconciled themselves quite quickly to the situation, because they realized that they really had no one to blame but themselves. As J. T. Young has put it, “Anyone writing to Hartlib was well aware  –​or at least ought to have been  –​that he or she was addressing not an individual but potentially the whole intellectual community of Europe and even beyond.”71 So why did scholars keep rolling the publication dice by sending their work to Hartlib, and abandoning all control over what would happen to it? In addressing this question, the alchemist George Starkey might serve as a useful example. Starkey had been furious when an alchemical tract he had sent to Hartlib –​Sir George Riplye’s Epistle to King Edward Unfolded –​had shown up in Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses Made to Samuel Hartlib, Esquire. However, Starkey also knew that Hartlib could not have published his tract if he had not chosen to send it to the intelligencer in the first place. Moreover, Starkey had sent his manuscript to Hartlib specifically in order to get the network engaged in

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The early modern information factory 143 promoting his work. The only problem was that the gambit had succeeded too well, and moved beyond Starkey’s control.72 Moreover, since the scribal publication of manuscripts was such an accepted and well-​known process in seventeenth-​century England, Hartlib might have seen himself as simply taking the next step. When he received a manuscript copy of someone’s work –​no matter what the author or sender might have thought of it –​Hartlib considered it to be a work that had already been scribally published.73 So if he deemed it appropriate for his aims, taking that work to the printer was just a logical progression. And since “everyone knew Hartlib,” his practice of gathering correspondence input, and then turning it into information output, could scarcely have come as a surprise. For instance, when the naturalist John Ray published his Catalogus Cantabrigiam in 1660, he was adapting the terminology first developed by Joachim Jungius; however, Jungius’s Isagoge Phytoscopica would not be published until 1662. Ray’s work was based instead on a copy of Jungius’s manuscript, which had been sent to him in the 1650s; and for that copy, Ray wrote that he was grateful to “the famous Samuel Hartlib.”74 In fact, “the famous” Hartlib’s work as a producer and publisher should be seen as a product of the ways in which he was a reader –​one who not only studied texts for action, but also caused new texts to be created as a result.75 And for these texts, I suggest that the author’s name should not be considered a name at all, but rather a shibboleth. Instead of naming the text’s producer, the author’s name here functioned as a form of synecdoche, standing in for a known set of ideas and processes of production. When readers saw “S. H.” or “Samuel Hartlib” on a pamphlet, they did not see the name of a person, but rather an intellectual brand. But if the name “Hartlib” functioned as a corporate intellectual brand in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters, what did that brand stand for? I would suggest here that the intellectual brand “S.  H.” on a publication stood for Hartlib’s judgment, and for his belief that the contents constituted reliable knowledge. I am defining knowledge as a set of ideas, observations, and interpretations that has passed some agreed-​upon tests:  for reform, the test of accordance with Scripture; and for science and erudition, the combination of empirical testing and the views of the learned. When information and ideas passed Hartlib’s testing in these ways, he could then construe them as knowledge. To that end, all the new information he received, as well as all the manuscripts he collected and cataloged, had to be managed. The focus here, therefore, is not on the what of the Hartlib network, but on the question of how. This was also a question that Hartlib himself struggled with, since there are a number of concerns that he returned to time and time again in Ephemerides, when he reflected on how to keep his network going –​and the most frequently mentioned obstacles were selfishness, money, and time. Given the possibility that the end of days might be rapidly approaching, time was of the essence –​there simply was not enough time to deal with the private or proprietary writer. Yet there were always those sectors within the Republic of Letters that had no interest in making knowledge a tool for global change. Hartlib, of course, was completely frustrated by the attitudes of these selfish

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144 Carol Pal scholars. As he wrote in 1638 in his typical style –​so hasty to get words on the page that he could not slow down to choose one language alone: it is indeed to be deplored that the Eruditi do not unite better against the crassam ignorantiam falsamque Scientiam generis humani, and communicate one to another truly and without deceit whatever each has found true and good in any parts of human science. This idealistic statement was then followed by a practical reflection that reveals some of the reasoning behind his web:  “For it is certainly quite impossible for each individual (and especially those burdened with other business) by personal observation and experience of all things to obtain certain knowledge.”76 Here, we get a glimpse of how Hartlib might have viewed his own role in learned Europe. He was a scholarly omnivore, but did not produce his own scholarship. Instead, he was there to facilitate the circulation of other people’s work –​to edit the letters, tracts, manuscripts, and snippets that they sent to him, and then distribute them in useful formats. He could mitigate the unavoidably solitary, isolated, and overburdened status of an individual scholar. He was “the patron and promoter of the Republic of Letters,” the person who could ensure  –​despite authorial fussiness, doctrinal conflicts, incomplete proposals, financial difficulties, or conflicting agendas  –​that ideas went into circulation. He found his own money and employed his own scribes, so that there would be no need for the ideas themselves to depend on publishers, patrons, or permissions. As Henry Dircks described Hartlib’s enterprise in the nineteenth century: He was in himself a kind of imaginary institution, of which he represented the proprietors, council, and all the officers; the funds, too, being wholly his own … he was rather the caterer for the advantage of the public, than the scholar himself producing the needful works of useful knowledge.77 And then, of course, there was the ever-​present problem of funding. We have already noted Dury’s constant efforts to make potential patrons aware of Hartlib’s need for support. It cost money to hire scribes, and to have texts printed, and to send correspondence to Europe and America. But Hartlib was not the only intelligencing “hub” in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters, so he took notes on how others took care of business (Figure 4.1 and 4.2): Hugens a great Correspondent in matters of Learning. Also Mersennus the whole Cloister maintaining the charges. Salmesius a mighty Correspondent writes all with his owne hands and no Amanuensis.78 Clearly, Hartlib was quite impressed by the productivity of Constantijn Huygens, and the ability of Claude Saumaise to do without an amanuensis –​but he was

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The early modern information factory 145 even more impressed with Mersenne’s economic finesse in having his religious order foot the bill for his intelligencing network. The monastic solution, of course, was not available for Hartlib –​although, as Dury pointed out, this was a shame. Indeed, this was one area in which Protestant intellectual culture trailed far behind that of the Catholic church, since “If he was amongst the Iesuites, they would find him both worke & meanes to follow it out, but wee are dead in things of such a nature.”79 And since he did not have that institutional support, Hartlib and his information factory would have to continue to lurch forward on a financially ad hoc basis. In making this comparison between his own network and those of Huygens, Saumaise, and Mersenne, Hartlib was implicitly acknowledging how much they had in common; for instance, they all knew multiple languages in addition to Latin, and possessed prodigious amounts of energy, such that they would sometimes wear out their correspondents. Mersenne, for example, would often fire off half-​a-​dozen letters in response to every communication he received from Descartes.80 And Hartlib’s own industry was such that John Dury needed two amanuenses in Frankfurt just to keep up with that one correspondence alone. As he wrote to Nathaniel Rich: From [Hartlib] you shall be able to know all that I have hitherto learned, or shall learn hereafter, for I have not only taken a course to have my letters addressed to him … but also have obliged at Frankfort two to keep correspondence with him, the one for common current news, and the other for matters of greater moment.81 At the same time, however, Hartlib was also acknowledging that these other intelligencers had reliable incomes, or patronage. Mersenne had his “cloister,” Peiresc had his patron, Huygens was secretary to two Princes of Orange, and Oldenburg was employed by the Royal Society. Hartlib had none of these:  no family money, no reliable patronage, and only occasional employment from the government –​which often went unpaid. It is difficult to see how Hartlib managed to keep himself and his network functioning for all those years; however, one can certainly trace the constant and never-​ending appeals for funds and funding.82 Hartlib also had to deal with what he saw as the perfidy of printers and booksellers. He wanted the information he produced to be spread widely and freely: “All is to bee published in the Vernacular Tongues and sold gratis. By this meanes it will mightily bee scattered. Also a permission is to bee granted to several Printers or book-​sellars to print those bookes as they please.”83 However, stationers appeared to be interested in profits, rather than promoting a cause. His solution was a plan to circumvent them by letting the publication trickle out in stages: To make bookes vendible in spight of the basenes of stationers no better strategem then to put out first a Treatise with the Summaria Operis with a most exact and attractive specimen. 2. To tell in it that the whole worke is likewise ready and shortly to follow. To give this the greedy stationer for

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146 Carol Pal a little which hee will disperse abundantly. Then to fall to printing and publishing the worke itself upon our owne charges and having given it to 2.  or 3.  obscure stationers to signifie their manner of dealing with good bookes and to intimate the price by them who are to sell it. This is like to disappoint their villanies.84 Thus Hartlib’s solutions –​involving publishing “upon our own charges” –​would ensure the distribution of knowledge. As the same time, however, these solutions would continue to ensure his ongoing financial problems. In addition to taking on the charges, Hartlib also took it upon himself to make all the decisions, since for all these overburdened scholars –​himself included –​ there was literally “too much to know.”85 With so much information available, so many books to read, so many conflicts to resolve, and so many new ideas being discussed every day, how was one to sort through them, choose the best, or know which ones were likely to be most useful? For many scholars in the seventeenth century, the answer was to look for the intellectual brand of “Samuel Hartlib.” Hartlib’s information factory had already done that work for them. If we are attentive to the “four S’s” of text management as identified by Ann Blair –​storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing –​then we must also acknowledge that Hartlib took care of all of these when performing the role of publisher for his network.86 Inevitably, not everyone was pleased by Hartlib’s rather global interpretation of this task. George Starkey, as we have already noted, felt that Hartlib had appropriated his work.87 But for the most part, the necessity of having someone in that role was acknowledged. The move from manuscript to print is always the crossing of a barrier, fraught with all the vulnerability that comes with the attendant lack of control over readership once a text is published –​thus it had to be worth the risk. Apparently, Hartlib did not consider authors to be the persons best situated to make that decision; instead, the decision would be made by Hartlib himself, putting risk and reward in the balance. Since the name or set of initials appearing on these publications was so often his own, Hartlib was also taking on much of the intellectual risk in public –​and this was something that was generally acknowledged by those participating in his network. For instance, in the same letter in which he had chastised Hartlib for rushing his Pansophic work into print, Comenius had gone on to admit that Hartlib’s initiative had been necessary: For in order that Pansophiola, this child of mine, might in any way with great pain and labor be happily brought out into the light of day by the doctor, it will in great part be due to your devoted midwifery.88 Then, having thanked Hartlib for his obstetrical expertise, Comenius went on to make a rather astounding request. Now that Hartlib had received so many positive responses to the Pansophic preview that he had rushed into print, Comenius wanted to reap the potential benefits:

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The early modern information factory 147 With respect to that hoard which you are reporting to me, gather together from those writings above 80 of the most select letters, books, and manuscripts suitable for bringing our Pansophic and didactic endeavors to fruition. I admire, and praise, and love, and warmly embrace, my H[artlib], with all my soul, your diligence in these matters.89 The plan proposed here is not the astounding part; in fact, this seems to be precisely what Hartlib’s information factory was supposed to do. He had identified a worthy effort –​in this case Comenius’s Pansophia –​and used his own funds and initiative to have it published, thus ensuring the widest possible distribution among the eruditi. Then, having thereby drummed up a great deal of interest, he could direct those parties back to the originator of the plan, and he would have done his part to make the good work go forward. This shows Hartlib’s network in good form. The astounding part of this request is in fact the number –​because Comenius has asked to Hartlib to look through the hoard of responses, and send on 80 of the best. There are two implications here: first, that Hartlib must have collected far more than 80 Pansophic responses, in order for there to be a large enough pool (perhaps hundreds) to choose from; and second, Hartlib would presumably have to pay to have these 80 items sent from London to Leszno, Poland. The scope of Hartlib’s network becomes clear, as does the financial burden that came with its success. Thus we return to the question of “Samuel Hartlib” as an intellectual brand, and what that brand stood for in the seventeenth-​century Republic of Letters. Despite his featured billing on over 65 publications, Hartlib does not appear to have ever written a single original work.90 In fact, it has been estimated that Hartlib himself generated less than 5 percent of the copy in his entire oeuvre.91 But this appears to have been a well-​known fact in the Republic of Letters, and no one thought that “S. H.” on a text would mean Hartlib had actually written it. The conclusion, then, is that the intellectual brand of “Samuel Hartlib” stood for Hartlib’s judgment. When a text or letter appeared with his name on it, no reader could know for certain where the contents had originated  –​everything had already disassembled and then reassembled by Hartlib’s information factory. However, that same reader could be certain that Hartlib had read, considered, and ultimately vetted the content. He had compared it with other texts, other theories, and other scholarly views on the subject at hand. It was something useful toward the overall goal of human improvement through piety, erudition, and cutting-​edge experimentation; and, having been weighed and found worthy by Hartlib, it could now be considered knowledge. That knowledge included a featured role for science  –​the inspiration was Baconian, and much of the content concerned advances in medicine, chemistry, alchemy, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Moreover, Hartlib’s friends and contacts included those who would later be included in the first generation of the Royal Society.92 But Hartlib’s intellectual brand did not stand for science alone. It was rather a brand that stood for Hartlib’s multivalent and non-​dogmatic approach, one that combined a Baconian dream of reliable empirical knowledge of the natural world with constant thought for how this knowledge fit with God’s

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148 Carol Pal plan. Thus Hartlib’s brand, in the end, also stood for knowledge that would never find its own institutional home.93 Yet the extent of Hartlib’s correspondence network also shows us that he certainly was not alone in his interpretation of that liminal moment when humanism was giving way to reason on one side, and empiricism on the other; when millenarian views were being expressed and investigated by scholars at every level of the Republic of Letters; and when science did not aim merely to investigate nature, but to undertake the reformation of the entire world. This was explained to Governor John Winthrop of Connecticut in a letter written to him by Henry Oldenburg in 1667. Oldenburg was reminding Winthrop of their mandate as scientists: “Sir, you will please to remember that we have taken to taske the whole Universe, and that we were obliged to doe so by the Nature of our Dessein.”94 The hopeless optimism and grandiosity of this “Dessein” plays no part in modern academic culture, nor is there a niche for it in intellectual history. Yet throughout his career, Hartlib had been an active and important part of that design, and those who saw “ex bibliotheca S. H.” on a publication had trusted to his judgment. And in the end, Hartlib’s work might best be summed up by what he wrote in his address “to the Reader” for Dury’s The Reformed Librarie-​ Keeper: “These Tracts are the fruits of som of my Solicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of learning.”95 Those “fruits” were the product of Hartlib’s information factory. There were many who would never know Samuel Hartlib the person –​but they nevertheless knew they could trust the products that came branded “ex bibliotheca S. H.”

Notes 1 “The 30 Iune came one to my house yet in Duks-​place who would by no meanes tell his name to acquaint mee with his Designe of Schooling. Hee read the Contents of the Draught to mee, which were very solid and excellent.” From The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (c.1600–​1662), 2nd ed. (Sheffield:  University of Sheffield, 2002)  (hereinafter “HP”), HP 28/​1/​23B. This episode is also mentioned in G.  H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius:  Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), 46–​48 (hereinafter HDC). Sources in English are cited in their original, unmodernized spelling. Exception is made in substituting “i” for “j,” “u” for “v,” and “the” for “ye.” I  have also expanded early modern contractions; for instance, “wch” is expanded to “which,” etc. 2 Ephemerides 1649, HP 28/​1/​24A. The term “advancement of learning” is being used here both in a general way, and as a reference to Sir Francis Bacon’s (1561–​1620) first publication on the reform of knowledge: The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon: Of the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, Diuine and Humane (London: Printed for Henrie Tomes, 1605). 3 The printed tract is dated 1649. In addition, however, George Thomason’s copy in the British Library bears the handwritten date on which he purchased it: “Aug: 30.” George Thomason (1602–​1666) collected pamphlets and other ephemera during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, and by 1661 had acquired over 22,000 items. His annotations on these pamphlets, many of which exist nowhere else, often included exact publication dates and authorial attributions. George Snell, The Right Teaching of useful knowledg, to fit scholars for som honest profession shewing so much skill as anie man needeth (that is not

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The early modern information factory 149 a teacher) in all knowledges, in one schole, in a shorter time in a more plain waie, and for so much less expens than ever hath been used, since of old the arts were so taught in the Greek and Romane empire (London: Printed by W. Du gard, 1649). Thomason E.1377[3]‌. 4 Ibid., n.p. There was no author listed on the title page of the tract, but the Epistle Dedicatorie was signed “in Grege Solus” (alone among the throng), an imperfect anagram of the name George Snell. John Dury was a Scottish Calvinist divine who worked throughout his life for educational reform and Pan-​Protestant union. 5 There is a large body of scholarship on the early modern Republic of Letters. Among the most important works are:  Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, La République des Lettres ([Paris]: Belin-​De Boek, 1997); Françoise Waquet, “Qu’est-​ce que la République des Lettres? Essai de sémantique historique,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 147 (1989):  473–​502. A  good recent survey is Anthony Grafton’s “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 2009): http://​rofl.stanford.edu/​node/​ 34. Anne Goldgar’s Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–​1750 (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1995)  demonstrates how much that later iteration differed from the networks of the preceding century. Recently, excellent work on the Republic of Letters is being done in collaborative projects whose open structures resonate happily with their subject matter. They are not only digitizing correspondence, but developing new ways to analyze it. See, for example, Early Modern Letters Online at the University of Oxford (http://​emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/​home) and Mapping the Republic of Letters at Stanford University (http://​republicofletters.stanford.edu). 6 Reflecting on the unimaginable extent of the universe in comparison with the infinitesimal existence of Man, Pascal wrote that Nature was:  “une sphere infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonférence nulle part.” Les Pensées de Blaise Pascal, ed. Auguste Molinier (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1877), vol. 1, 26. 7 On Nicolas-​Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–​1637), see especially: Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Peiresc’s first biographer was his friend, the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–​1655), who called Peiresc “le prince des curieux.” See Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc senatoris aquisextiensis Vita (Paris, 1641). Ismaël Boulliau (1605–​1694), known as Bullialdus in the Republic of Letters, was an astronomer and prolific correspondent. On Boulliau, see Robert Hatch, “Between Erudition and Science: The Archive and Correspondence Network of Ismaël Boulliau,” in Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-​Century Europe, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge:  Boydell Press, 1998), 49–​71. Henry Oldenburg (c.1619–​1677) was the first secretary of the Royal Society, and first editor of the Philosophical Transactions. On Oldenburg, see especially:  A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, eds., The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 13 vols. (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–​ 1986). Father Marin Mersenne (1588–​1648), was interested in mathematics and music. Sometimes known as “the letter-​box of Europe,” he managed the French correspondence for his friend René Descartes. On Mersenne, see especially Mme. Paul Tannery and Cornelis de Waard, eds., Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, Religieux Minime, 17 vols. ([Paris]: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1960–​1988). 8 Hatch, “Between Erudition and Science.” 9 There are 3,484 of Hartlib’s letters or letter extracts at the University of Sheffield, and 1,411 more in the British Library, Yale University, and elsewhere, for a total of

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150 Carol Pal 4,895  –​to which one can add various memoranda, enclosures, etc. See Mark Greengrass and Leigh Penman, “L’ombre des archives dans le cultures du savoir du XVIIe siècle:  Le cas des papiers de Samuel Hartlib (c.1600–​1662),” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 171 (2013): 51–64; Leigh Penman, “Omnium exposita rapinae: The Afterlives of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib,” Book History 19 (2016): 1–​65. 10 Mark Greengrass, “Archive Refractions:  Hartlib’s Papers and the Workings of an Intelligencer,” in Hunter, ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution, 35–​47, here 36–​38. 11 Leigh Penman made this calculation by working with a small representative sample from Hartlib’s papers. He mined that sample for all references to other letters, compared that total with what was extant, and developed an algorithm to express the result: L = S(x/​y). “L” represents all letters received by Hartlib, while “S” is the sample being used; “x” represents the number of references in the sample to letters no longer extant, and “y” the references to existing letters. See Greengrass and Penman, “L’ombre des archives.” 12 In his work on scribal publication, Love was among the first to dismantle the assumption that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the printing press had completely done away with manuscript culture. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1993), reprinted as The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 13 Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 180–​181. 14 See Mark Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib and Scribal Communication,” Acta Comeniana 12 (1997): 47–​61. 15 Writing in 1993, Love himself was aware that much work still needed to be done, and he looked forward to “the advances in our understanding of scribal publication that would accrue from further systematic study of individual communities, such as is currently being undertaken at the University of Sheffield for the Hartlib group.” Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 181–​183. 16 On this topic, see Michelle DiMeo, “Openness vs. Secrecy in the Hartlib Circle: Revisiting ‘Democratic Baconianism’ in Interregnum England,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–​1800, ed. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 105–​121. 17 Francisci de Verulamio, summi Angliae cancellarij, Instauratio magna (Londini:  Apud Joannem Billium, 1620). Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban, Baron Verulam, had a somewhat checkered political career as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. However, he was a scientific visionary, and while not a practitioner of science per se, his formulation of an empirical, methodical, observation-​based procedure would become the core of the scientific method. 18 Francis Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-​Mary Sargent (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing, 1999), 66. The six parts of the Great Instauration were: (1) The Divisions of the Sciences (or Advancement of Learning); (2) The New Organon; or Directions concerning the Interpretation of Nature; (3)  The Phenomena of the Universe; or a Natural and Experimental History for the Foundation of Philosophy; (4) The Ladder of the Intellect; (5) The Forerunners; or Anticipations of the New Philosophy; (6) The New Philosophy; or Active Science. 19 New Organon, Book 2, in Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, 189. 20 Daniel 12:4, KJV. On the frontispiece, these words are emblazoned below the ship that is depicted sailing through the Pillars of Hercules in pursuit of knowledge. These pillars were considered to be the boundary marks of the known world, marking the division between the Old World and the New. For a different reading of Bacon’s

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The early modern information factory 151 use of this imagery and quotation  –​one that sees Bacon as having “severed the connection” between the desired instauration and the impending end of time  –​ see Mordechai Feingold, “ ‘And Knowledge Shall Be Increased’:  Millenarianism and the Advancement of Learning Revisited,” The Seventeenth Century 28, no.  4 (2013): 363–​393. 21 Howard Hotson in fact locates the genesis of Hartlib’s commitment to the “instauratio imaginis Dei in homine” in the Reformed context of his early education, years before his introduction to the work of Francis Bacon. See Howard Hotson, “The Instauration of the Image of God in Man:  Humanist Anthropology, Encyclopaedic Pedagogy, Baconianism and Universal Reform,” in The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–​2000:  Essays for Charles Webster, ed. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1–​21. 22 Richard Popkin describes the efforts of Millenarians such as Joseph Mede, John Milton, Henry More, Samuel Hartlib, and John Dury, who “took seriously the injunction in Daniel that, as the end approaches, knowledge and understanding will increase, the wise will understand, while the wicked will not. They also took seriously the need to prepare, through reform, for the glorious days ahead. Their efforts to gain and encourage scientific knowledge, to build a new educational system, to transform political society, were all part of the Millenarian reading of events. They needed to understand, to construct a new theory of knowledge, a new metaphysics, for the new situation, the Thousand Year reign of Christ on earth, which was to be followed by a new heaven and a new earth.” Richard H. Popkin, ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–​1800, Clark Library Lectures 1981–​1982 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 5–​6. 23 New Atlantis was left unfinished, and published by Bacon’s chaplain, William Rawley, in: Sylva sylvarum: or A naturall historie In ten centuries. Written by the Right Honourable Francis Lo. Verulam Viscount St. Alban. Published after the authors death, by William Rawley Doctor of Diuinitie, late his Lordships chaplain (London, 1627). 24 This discussion is taken from:  New Atlantis, in Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, 261–​268 passim. 25 Ibid., 267. 26 Hartlib to [?]‌, HP 7/​26/​1A–​B. Cited in Penman, “Omnium exposita rapinae,” 1. This is a somewhat odd letter. While it is certainly in Hartlib’s hand, it also appears to be referring to him in the third person, and may be Hartlib’s own copy of a letter written on his behalf by someone else –​most likely John Dury. 27 The extant diary covers the years 1634 to 1660, with gaps from 1636 to 1638, and 1644 to 1648. On Hartlib’s Ephemerides, see especially ch. 4, “Taking Notes in Samuel Hartlib’s Circle,” in Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). See also Stephen Clucas, “Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides, 1635–​ 59, and the Pursuit of Scientific and Philosophical Manuscripts:  The Religious Ethos of an Intelligencer,” The Seventeenth Century 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 33–​55. 28 Eleven different scribal hands have been identified in the extant Hartlib Papers at Sheffield. See Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib and Scribal Communication,” 48. 29 “Lord Bacon,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1966), vol. 1, 335. 30 Englands Thankfulnesse, or An Humble Remembrance Presented to the Committee for Religion in the High Court of Parliament, with Thanksgiving for that happy Pacification betweene the two Kingdomes … As likewise, Three speciall Instruments of the publike good

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152 Carol Pal in the wayes of Religion, Learning, and the preparatives for the Conversion of the Jewes (London, 1642), 9. 31 A copy of the pact, dated London, March 3/​13, 1642, was written out in the hand of Jan Amos Comenius. Their solemn oath was followed by a list of ways in which the Hartlib network hoped to accomplish these goals. These included: “1. Through procuring a Religious Accord among warring parties. 2.  Through the education of Christian youth in a manner more nearly conformable with true Christianity. 3.  Through the Reformation of studies in true Knowledge …” On this pact, see Turnbull, HDC, 460–​461. [Foederis fraterni ad mutuam in publico Christianismi bono promovendo aedificationem sancte in conspectu Dei initi tabulae. Nos quorum hic infra subscripta sunt nomina … Vovemus itaque, et elata in coelum manu nostra juramus, atque Deo et nobis invicem coram ipso promittimus haec sequentia … 1. Per procurationem Pacis Religionae inter dissidentes. 2.  per educationem juventutis Christianae veri Christianismi scopo magis conformem. 3. per Reformationem studii verae …] 32 John Dury, A Motion Tending to the Publick Good of This Age, and of Posteritie: Published by Samuel Hartlib (London, 1642), 41–​42. 33 On female scholars in the seventeenth-​ century Republic of Letters, including Lady Ranelagh, Dorothy Moore, Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, Marie du Moulin, and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, see Carol Pal, Republic of Women:  Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 34 The best full-​length study of Dury is still J. Minton Batten’s John Dury: Advocate of Christian Reunion (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1944). Earlier sources include two eighteenth-​century dissertations written in Germany:  G.  H. Arnold, Historia Joannis Dvraei (Wittenberg, 1716); Carolus Iesper Benzelius, Dissertatio Historico-​Theologica de Johanne Dvraeo, Pacificatore Celeberrimo, maxime de actis eivs svecanis (Helmstadt, 1744). There is also valuable information in T. A. Fischer, The Scots in Germany: Being a Contribution Towards the History of the Scot Abroad (Edinburgh, [1902]), 174–​185; Gunnar Westin, Negotiations about Church Unity 1628–​1634: John Durie, Gustavus Adolphus, Axel Oxenstierna, Uppsala Universitets Ärsskrift, Teologi 3 (Uppsala, 1932). A more recent full-​length treatment is Thomas H. H. Rae, John Dury and the Royal Road to Piety (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1998). 35 Batten’s long list of Dury’s erstwhile supporters included scholars, churchmen, Continental divines, and heads of state. Batten, John Dury, 7. 36 “Comenius” was the Latin name given to Jan Amos Komenský (1592–​1670) in the Republic of Letters. The following discussion is taken largely from:  Dagmar Čapková, “Comenius and His Ideals: Escape from the Labyrinth,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75–​91; Turnbull, HDC, 342–​464; Robert Fitzgibbon Young, Comenius in England (London:  Oxford University Press, 1932); Matthew Spinka, John Amos Comenius, That Incomparable Moravian (1943; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967); David Masson, The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (London:  Macmillan and Co., 1873–​1894), vol. 3, 193–​231. 37 The Moravian Brethren were evangelical Christians, followers of the Bohemian priest Jan Hus (c.1369–​1415). The dispersed Moravian Brethren died out late in the seventeenth century, but the rediscovery in 1727 of Comenius’s 1633 Ratio disciplinae

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The early modern information factory 153 ordinisque ecclesiastici in Unitate Fratrum Bohemorum led to the founding of the Renewed Moravian Church, which is still active today, especially in North America. 38 J. H. Alsted (1588–​1638) was renowned as an encyclopedist. Alsted’s Encyclopaedia omnium scientiarum (1630) was regarded as the best general work of that kind in the seventeenth century; almost a century later, Leibniz drew up a memorandum to have it revised and reprinted. In his Pansophia, Comenius carried on Alsted’s encyclopedic approach, as well as his advocacy of learning for boys and girls alike. See Howard Hotson, “ ‘A Generall Reformation of Common Learning’ and Its Reception in the English-​Speaking World, 1560–​1642,” in The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, ed. Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson (Oxford:  The British Academy, 2010), 193–​228; The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius, translated by M.  W. Keatinge (London: A. & C. Black, 1923), vol. 2; Spinka, John Amos Comenius, 2009, 51; Young, Comenius in England, 15. 39 These included Didactica Magna (c.1628–​1643); Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631); Janua Rerum reserata sive Universalis Sapientiae Seminarium (1643); and Orbis pictus (1658). 40 Čapková, “Comenius and His Ideals,” 75. 41 John Winthrop Jr. (1606–​1676) was the governor of Connecticut, a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1663) and a friend of Hartlib and Dury. He had also met Comenius, and it was probably he who had informed Comenius that his book Janua Linguarum was being used as a textbook at Harvard. On Winthrop’s relations with Hartlib, see G. H. Turnbull, “Some Correspondence of John Winthrop, Jr. and Samuel Hartlib,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (3rd series) 72 (1957–​1960): 36–​67. 42 “Preface,” in Jan Amos Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light: or, A Synopsis of Physicks … Exposed to the Censure of Those That Are Lovers of Learning, and Desire to Be Taught of God … (London: Robert and William Leybourn, 1651), n.p. 43 See Masson, Life of John Milton, vol. 3, 193. 44 “Samuel Hartlib … est le Marin Mersenne de l’Angleterre protestante.” From Mark Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib:  ‘Intelligenceur’ Européen,” in Diffusion du savoir et affrontement des idées 1600–​ 1770 (Festival d’histoire de Montbrison, September 30–​ October 4, 1992). This discussion is taken largely from:  Turnbull, HDC; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration:  Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–​ 1660 (London:  Duckworth, 1975); Dorothy Stimson, “Hartlib, Haak and Oldenburg: Intelligencers,” Isis 31, no. 84 (April 1940): 309–​326; and the very useful introduction to Greengrass et al., eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation. 45 BL, Sloane Ms. 654, f. 250v. Sloane 654 contains a number of letters from John Dury to potential backers, all describing Hartlib’s excellent qualities, his world-​changing goals, and his perhaps excessive generosity. Clearly, at this early date, Dury is already positing Hartlib as a channel-​spanning intelligencer:  “God hath supported him by a way of intelligency, as it were fitting him in a speciall Providence with acquaintance every where; that hee might in due tyme bee able to disperse on all sides the best thinges and fittest to be communicated.” Dury to Messrs. Marshall and Baall, “ministers of God’s word,” June 30, 1635. These letters have also been printed as an Appendix in G.  H. Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib:  A Sketch of His Life and His Relations to J. A. Comenius (London: Oxford University Press, 1920): 74–​79. “Lord Brookes” likely refers to Robert Greville, the successor of his cousin Fulke Greville, first Baron Brooke. Turnbull, HDC, 20. 46 BL, Sloane Ms. 654, f. 350r.

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154 Carol Pal 47 “So that his too great zeale as it may be justly called to doe good to others, hath made him unfitt to subsist by himselfe. A  thing seldome seen in our age, that workes of charrity towards others should be performed with so great Zeale and affection, that one should exhaust himselfe, and spend his whole substance freely upon others.” BL, Sloane Ms. 654, f.  250v. This passage makes it clear why George Snell’s situation would have resonated so strongly with Hartlib. 48 From “To the right honourable the Commons of England assembled in Parliament, the humble petition of Samuel Hartlib senior” (n.d., probably late 1660). Scribal copy, BL, Add. Ms. 6269, f. 30v. Also in Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, 15. 49 On the proposed Polish match, see Dury to [?]‌, August 20, 1635, BL Sloane Ms. 654, ff. 345–​348; and Sir Thomas Roe to Dury, December 16, 1635, HP 14/​4/​40A–​44B. 50 Variously called Antilia or Macaria, these plans were for an intellectual commonwealth on the ground, a real place where real scholars could construct lives dedicated to learning and virtue in a Christian community untainted by war, corruption, and inter-​confessional conflict. Hartlib elaborated these plans based on models that had existed in the 1620s:  Joachim Jungius’s Societas Ereunetica in Rostock, Johannes Saubert’s Unio Christiana at Nuremberg, and Johann Pömer’s Antilia at Rostock. See [Gabriel Plattes], A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria: Shewing Its Excellent Government (London, 1641); Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution:  Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib, and “Macaria” (Research Publications of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, no. 11) (Oxford: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1979); and the fine study by Donald R. Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia:  Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 51 The idea was derived in part from the Bureau d’Adresse of Théophraste Renaudot, a physician and journalist from Montpellier; and like Renaudot’s Bureau, the Office of Address would have been sanctioned by the state, and inspired by one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, “Of a Defect in Our Policies” (in modern editions of the Essais, this is Book I:35). On Renaudot, see especially Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France: The Innovations of Théophraste Renaudot (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1972). See also Kathleen Wellman, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot 1633–​1642 (Norman, OK:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Simone Mazauric, Savoirs et philosophie à Paris dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle:  Les conférences du bureau d’adresse de Théophraste Renaudot (1633–​1642) (Paris:  Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997); Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France (1620–​ 1680) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1934), 17–​40. 52 A Further Discoverie of the Office of Publick Addresse (London, 1648), 5. 53 Dury, The Hague, to [?]‌, October 28, 1635. Because he was at this point on the Continent in the midst of the Thirty Years War, Dury uses pseudonyms; he writes under the name of “Daniel Rhaetus,” and Hartlib is referred to as “Albureth.” Two copies, both in scribal hands: HP 3/​4/​7A–​8B, and HP 3/​4/​3A–​6B. 54 According to a letter written by Comenius on January 16/​26, 1638, he and Hartlib had already been corresponding for six years. Hartlib had also been raising money in England to help Comenius publish his ideas, although it appears that in doing so he was treading on the toes of some members of the London-​Dutch church. A letter of 1634, to the Consistory of that church, accuses Hartlib of meddling in the business of the Moravian exiles. While Hartlib had attempted to excuse himself by saying that he “merely obtained a few pounds for printing one of Comenius’ books,” the complaint

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The early modern information factory 155 continues, “You might tell Hartlib to mind his own affairs, as there are here other Bohemians who could much better manage such collections than he.” [Poteritis quoque Hartlibium commonefacere, cum ille rerum Bohemicarum ignarus sit, ut potius sua et non aliena agat: esse alios hic Bohemos, qui, si opus esset, melius collectas, conscijs vobis, quam ille expedire possent.] Johannes Sictor to the Consistory of the London-​Dutch Church, September 13/​23, 1634. Letter no. 2311 in Ecclesiae Londino-​Batavae Archivum, vol. 3, part ii, 1660–​1663. See also Young, Comenius in England, 34. 55 From Comenius’s Continuatio, part 48. Translation in Young, Comenius in England, 35. 56 Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia ex bibliotheca S. H. (Oxford: William Turner, 1637). 57 Recent work, however, has emphasized the ways in which Pell’s relatively small output was more than offset by the extent of his correspondence, manuscripts, and scientific activities in the Republic of Letters. See Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611–​1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 243–​244. The “incommunicable” quotation is from a letter written by John Collins to John Beale, August 20, 1672. In Stephen J.  Rigaud, Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century (Hildesheim:  Georg Olms, 1965), vol. 1, 196–​197. On Pell, see John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Together with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers, ed. John Buchanan-​Brown (London:  Penguin Books, 2000), 375–​382; Robert Vaughan, The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and the State of Europe during the Early Part of the Reign of Louis XIV: Illustrated in a Series of Letters between Dr. John Pell … Mr. Secretary Thurloe, and Other Distinguished Men of the Time, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1839); Vivian Salmon, “The Story of Dr. John Pell,” Pelliana (n.s.) 1, no. 3 (privately printed, 1965): 1–​24. 58 The Pell equation is (x2 +  Ny2  =  1), where N, x, and y are integers. The person responsible for solving this equation was actually William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker (1620–​1684), an English mathematician and first President of the Royal Society. See Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 320. 59 [Epistolam istam de Augmentis Matheseos, quam a te tectam in tuis ad D. T. Haak scribis, non diffiteor a me anno superiore scriptam D. Samueli Hartlibio Reipublicæ literariæ fautori atque promotor … Eam ille suis sumtibus Anglice, et Latine propter exteros, imprimere cupiens, à me obtinere non potuit, ut nomen meum apponeret, quippe quod ad scopum meam nihil facere videbatur.] John Pell to Marin Mersenne, November 21, 1639. BL, Add. Ms. 4279, f. 99. Also printed in Mersenne, Correspondance, vol. 8, no. 783, 622–​ 634. In his letterbook, Pell identifies this letter as prima mea ad F. M. Mersennus. 60 In a letter to Hartlib in 1655, Pell reminded him that: “You printed it about 3 months after I  wrote it.” BL, Add. Ms. 4364, f.  139r. Cited in Malcolm and Stedall, John Pell, 69. 61 John Dury, The Reformed Librarie-​Keeper with a Supplement to The Reformed-​School, as Subordinate to Colleges in Universities … Whereunto Is Added, I. An Idea of Mathematicks … (London: Printed by William Du-​Gard, 1650). 62 On Moore, see The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612–​64:  The Friendships, Marriage, and Intellectual Life of a Seventeenth-​ Century Woman, ed. Lynette Hunter (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2004); and Pal, Republic of Women, ch. 4.  See also Turnbull, HDC, 219–​299 passim; and James G. Taafe, “Mrs. John Dury: A Sister of Lycidas,” Notes and Queries 207 (1962): 60–​61. 63 BL, Sloane Ms. 649, ff. 203–​205. These quotations come from the cover letter to Ranelagh; the treatise itself does not appear to be extant. 64 Ibid.

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156 Carol Pal 65 Princess Mary Stuart (1631–​1660) was the daughter of King Charles I of England, and thus the niece of Charles’s sister, Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. In 1641, at the age of ten, she was betrothed to William II in a union of two Protestant royal houses. 66 Moore was extremely offended by the politics and religion of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s chaplain, Samson Johnson. Moore to Hartlib, August 24, 1642. HP 21/​5/​1A–​2B. 67 Dury to Ranelagh, December 4/​14, 1644. HP 3/​2/​92A–​94B. 68 The pamphlet contained three letters written by Dury and two written by Moore. The title is the first line of Dury’s first letter:  Madam, although my former freedom [London, 1645]. 69 Moore to Hartlib, July 1645. HP 3/​2/​143A–​144B. 70 Comenius had been worried about possible theological objections to Pansophia, and had wanted to address these first: “I would never, in fact, have allowed it to be published in this version, without having strongly fortified it against those prejudices.” [nunquam enim permissem, eam formam prodire, sine firmiore adversus praejudicia munimine.] Comenius to Hartlib, January 26, 1638. Bibliotheca Philosopica Hermetica Amsterdam. BPH M 372, ff. 1r–​4v, here 1v. 71 J. T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 75. 72 The publication was: Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses Made to Samuel Hartlib, Esquire (London, 1655). On Starkey and Hartlib, see William Newman, “Prophecy and Alchemy:  The Origin of Eiranaeus Philalethes,” Ambix 37, no.  3 (November 1990): 97–​115, here 101–​102, 111. 73 Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib and Scribal Communication,” 59. 74 On this episode, see Clucas, “Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides,” 48–​49. 75 For this concept of productive reading, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’:  How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 30–​78. 76 Original in German and Latin. Hartlib to Tassius, August 10, 1638. BL Sloane Ms. 417, f. 213. Quoted in Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, 22. Adolf Tassius (1585–​1654) was Professor of Mathematics at the Johanneum in Hamburg, where he was an active promoter of Comenius’ Pansophia. 77 Henry Dircks, A Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib, Milton’s Familiar Friend (London: J. R. Smith, [1865]), 14–​16. 78 Ephemerides for 1639, HP 30/​4/​7A. See Figure 3.1, with a transcription in Table 3.1. 79 John Dury (writing as Daniel Rhaetus) to [?]‌, November 26, 1635. HP 3/​4/​33A–​38B, here 37B–​38A. 80 Charles Adam, Vie & Oeuvres de Descartes: Étude Historique (Paris, 1910), 233–​234. 81 John Dury to Nathaniel Rich, April 13, 1633. HMC VIII, Appendix II, 51a. Quoted in Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib, 15–​16. 82 Hartlib’s friend John Worthington wrote in 1660 that he was sending some money:  “What has been hinted to me concerning your difficulties in regard of the new scenes of affairs, has not been out of my thoughts … I have desired Mr Croon to deliver unto you the Schollars mite of Ten pounds sent you from some Friends at Cambridge.” Worthington to Hartlib, January 9, 1660. HP 34/​9/​1A. And in a letter to John Evelyn later that year, Hartlib had needed to include a request for the loan of five pounds. Hartlib to John Evelyn, October 3, 1660. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Pforz. Ms. 1.38. Cited in Penman, “Omnium exposita rapinae,” 53, fn. 17. 83 HP 30/​4/​7B.

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The early modern information factory 157 84 HP 30/​4/​70B–​71A. On Hartlib’s relationships with printers he did trust  –​such as William Dugard and Richard Wodenothe  –​see Mark Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Learning,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 4, 304–​322. 85 On the “information overload” of the early modern era, see Ann Blair’s fine study Too Much to Know:  Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2010). Chapter  2, “Note-​Taking as Information Management” is especially applicable to Hartlib’s Ephemerides. 86 Blair, Too Much to Know, 3. 87 William Newman and Lawrence Principe, in their study of alchemy and the relationship of George Starkey to Robert Boyle, have noted competitiveness and struggles for preeminence, and argue that:  “Factionalism, manipulation, and appropriation seem notable attributes of many of the Hartlibians … Driven by the seventeenth century’s passion for ‘projecting,’ the overheated world of the Hartlib circle was scarcely a model of harmony or disinterest.” See William R. Newman and Lawrence M.  Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire:  Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 268. 88 “Nam ut vel de medicam, si fœtus ille meus, quem cum dolore & labore multo parturio Pansophiola foeliciter aliquando in lucem edetur, bona ex parte id ope Tuae fidelis obstetricationis fiet.” Comenius to Hartlib, January 26, 1638. Bibliotheca Philosopica Hermetica Amsterdam. BPH M 372, ff. 1r–​4v, here 1v. 89 “Quod Thesaurum illum quem mihi nuncias, de selectissimis supra octoginta Epistolis, Librisque & Manuscriptis multis, ad faecundandos Pansophicos & didcaticos nostros Conatus, idoneis, collectum attinet: et miror, et laudo, & amo, & deosculor tantam in his diligentiam Tuam mi H. mi anime.” Comenius to Hartlib, January 26, 1638. Bibliotheca Philosopica Hermetica Amsterdam. BPH M 372, ff. 1r–​4v, here 2r. 90 Hartlib is still well-​represented in modern bibliographic databases, which might seem to support the conclusion that his had been a well-​run publishing operation. For instance, Early English Books Online lists 62 records with “Samuel Hartlib” listed as the author, although many of these are titles dedicated to or published by Hartlib. 91 The publications which are considered Hartlib’s own  –​Samuel Hartlib His Legacie (1651), Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses (1655), and The Reformed Common-​wealth of Bees (1655)  –​are actually collations of information and ideas gleaned from a multitude of sources. As Charles Webster has noted: “close investigation has shown that almost every work published by Hartlib was drafted by his colleagues.” Charles Webster, “The Authorship and Significance of Macaria,” in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London: Routledge, 1974), 373. The estimate of 5 percent comes from Mark Greengrass, “Samuel Hartlib,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a list of Hartlib’s publications, see Turnbull, HDC, 88–​109. 92 For instance, Hartlib was close with the young Robert Boyle, although he had a much more productive collaboration with Boyle’s sister, Lady Ranelagh. 93 Hartlib’s role in the development of the Royal Society has been debated, as some scholars saw his network as a precursor to that institution. This theory has since been corrected. See, for instance: G. H. Turnbull, “Samuel Hartlib’s Influence on the Early History of the Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 10 (1953):  101–​130; Richard H.  Popkin, “The Third Force in Seventeenth-​Century Philosophy:  Scepticism, Science and Biblical Prophecy,” Nouvelles de la République

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158 Carol Pal des Lettres (1983): 37–​63; Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-​ Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1983); Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy:  Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-​ Century Britain (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995). 94 Oldenburg to Winthrop, October 13, 1667. In Stimson, “Hartlib, Haak and Oldenburg,” 323. 95 Dury, The Reformed Librarie-​Keeper.

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Part II

Configuring scientific networks

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5  Letters and questionnaires The correspondence of Henry Oldenburg and the early Royal Society of London’s Inquiries for Natural History Iordan Avramov Epistolary networks flung far and wide were the backbone of the early modern knowledge empires. Yet, however numerous and versatile the carriers of information were, the letters did not do their job alone; inevitably, they had to interact with other texts, images, objects, and people in a complex game of exchanges. This happened in countless important ways, and to understand intellectual communication, we need to understand these interactions. In this chapter I concentrate on a particular interaction of this kind, found in the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, the dominant figure of scientific communication in the 1660s and 1670s. As a communicator of knowledge, Oldenburg was many things at once –​ secretary of the Royal Society of London and editor of his own learned journal, Philosophical Transactions –​but, most importantly, he was an intelligencer at the center of a huge epistolary network serving the advancement of the new natural philosophy. For that reason, his preserved correspondence is a treasure-​trove of information on almost all things scientific of that era.1 The printed edition of his letters reveal that certain specific texts, the so-​called “inquiries for natural history” of the Royal Society, often appeared side by side with the epistles.2 Apparently the editors felt compelled to include these texts, because Oldenburg and his correspondents themselves had seamlessly woven the inquiries into the fabric of their correspondence. While the reasons for such association are well-​ known, how exactly the inquiries interacted with the letters and, more precisely, how they contributed to Oldenburg’s practices as a communicator have not been described in sufficient detail. Accordingly, it is the task of this chapter. The inquiries for natural history were devices for the structured gathering of information; the Royal Society of London started to produce them almost immediately after its establishment in 1660. They took the form of questionnaires meant to guide those observing natural history when they were away from London and without direct assistance from the Society. These questionnaires focused on various specific topics  –​countries (Turkey, Japan, etc.), regions (Inquiries for the East Indies, Inquiries for the West Indies, etc.), human activities (e.g., agriculture), locations (e.g., mines), phenomena (e.g., damps in mines), particular events,3 and so forth. The topics were often complex and sometimes influenced each other. For example, a distinctive set of questions on cold temperatures featured, quite naturally and prominently, within the broader inquiries for the

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162  Iordan Avramov north sent to Johannes Hevelius in Danzig in March 1666.4 Similarly, inquiries about mines and mining dominated the list of questions sent to Edward Browne in Vienna at the end of 1668, when he was about to journey through Central and Eastern Europe.5 Moreover, a general inquiry was likely to generate more specific ones. The most important such case was “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country, Great or small,” designed by Robert Boyle, which provided both the thematic structure and the basic questions for all the inquiries focused on specific countries.6 As to the questions themselves, they were of two types: the first sought specific facts. Here are a couple of typical ones: “Whether Mists use to rise from Grounds stored with Minerals?”7 or “Whether in Candia there be be [sic] no poysonous Creatures, and whether those Serpents, that are there, are without poyson?”8 On the other hand, the second type of question demanded descriptions: for instance, “What are the best waies of Drayning Marshes, Boggs, Fenns, &c?”9or “What diseases are Epidemical, that are supposed to flow from the Air?”10 The two types could be naturally combined together:  for example, “Whether ye iron at Pegu or Japan be better yn ours? And if so, what is to be observed in ye melting, forging and tempering of it?”11 Furthermore, the questions could easily be turned into “directions.” For example, “Directions for Sea-​men,” designed by Laurence Rooke, a prominent Fellow of the Society, did not, in fact, have a single question mark in it; instead it was framed entirely in instructions like the following: “5. To sound and marke the Depths of Coast and Ports, and such other places near the shoar, as they shall think fit.”12 Since the Royal Society wanted to acquire objects as well as descriptions, what might have been a question on such occasions could also be turned into a direction: for example, “To send of the spiders, yt are said to spin webs so strong, as to catch and hold birds?”13 or “To get an ostrich dryed.”14 On the other hand, demanding knowledge sometimes required additional clarifications of method, and so the original questionnaires were often supplied with further instructions and even instruments on such occasions.15 The questions were usually numbered, but this was not always the case. Often the inquiries were structured in numbered or unnumbered paragraphs, each one containing more than one question. The lists of questions/​instructions were of different length:  for example, the above-​ mentioned “Directions for Sea-​men” had only nine short and numbered paragraphs, while the “Articles of Inquiries touching Mines” (also mentioned above) had 90 of them, followed by an appendix of a further 11, and represented the other extreme. Short or long, the inquiries were quite popular among the Fellows of the Society, many of whom took part in designing them. The Committee for Correspondence at the Society put some collective effort into this business,16 but most of the time individual Fellows, as noted above, composed many of the questionnaires. Their enthusiasm is easy to understand, because the inquiries for natural history were an ambitious project, which perfectly fit in the early Royal Society’s Baconian vision of how the new philosophy should be advanced. The systematic collection of information about nature was to be effected with persistence and care, so that it would eventually lead to establishing a firm basis upon which a solid natural philosophy could be erected.17

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Letters and questionnaires 163 Nowadays the bulk of original manuscripts are preserved at the Royal Society’s archive. Royal Society Classified Papers 19 contains 100 documents, such as questionnaires, replies, and other relevant documents (e.g., extracts from books meant to be used in the preparation of the queries). There are a few different items unrelated to the queries, likely placed in the collection by mistake.18 There are a few others which post-​date Oldenburg, but only by several years. It is likely that the collection, which is entitled “Questions and Answers” in a contemporary hand, was put together in the early eighteenth century.19 Otherwise, there are manuscripts with inquiries scattered in other collections at the Society as well as in the depositories beyond.20 Many of the inquiries have also been preserved in print. The earliest publications in Philosophical Transactions were produced by Oldenburg himself, but they naturally appear copied in other contemporary journals and books.21 One obvious place in which the inquiries (and/​or answers to them) were printed in great number were the official Histories of the Society; both Thomas Sprat and later, in the eighteenth century, Thomas Birch paid due attention to them when composing their books.22 Still later on, when the inquiries had largely lost their appeal as scientific tools, there were nonetheless occasional publications of separate items stretching all the way through the appearance of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg.23 The obvious significance of these documents for the history of the early Royal Society has already drawn scholars’ attention. First and foremost is Daniel Carey, who has been a leading expert in the field for the last 20 years. He has written on several important aspects, such as the connection between the inquiries and the Society’s interest in voyages and travels, and similar schemes for the collection of knowledge during Spanish expansion overseas and in the knowledge-​advancement visions of Francis Bacon and Samuel Hartlib.24 Jason Pearl has tried to pinpoint various functions of the queries –​to quantify space, locate objects of value, naturalize sites of work  –​in order to show how they served as tools in a budding colonial ambition.25 Michael Hunter has employed a different approach in an important article focused on a single query –​Robert Boyle’s “General Heads” –​to argue that Boyle did not create the text single-​handedly, but in close collaboration with the Society.26 In all of these major takes on the subject,27 the figure of Oldenburg is ubiquitous and inescapable; he is central for the arguments of Hunter and Pearl, especially. This is significant in itself, but when combined with the fact that the inquiries are the most numerous non-​epistolary items included in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, and that the Royal Society Classified Papers 19 are dominated by Oldenburg’s handwriting and those of his scribes, one is compelled to look closer into the relationship between the secretary of the Society and the questionnaires. Once designed, the inquiries had to be used, which meant distributed and diffused to people likely to answer them. Since he was in charge of the overall communication business of the Society, Oldenburg had to take on the lion’s share of this task as well.28 He had two main tools at his disposal for the purpose –​ Philosophical Transactions and his letters –​and he used both. Publications in the journal made sense as a way to reach a potentially broad circle of collaborators

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164  Iordan Avramov who could not otherwise be located; they also promised to elicit a good quantity of responses. These expectations were met, because there were numerous responses to the queries printed in this way in Oldenburg’s lifetime.29 However, this method had its shortcomings, too. For example, it was unlikely that many people would read the English-​language journal in far-​off lands, which were the prime targets of the inquiries. Moreover, sending queries via letters had the benefits of allowing modification of their content or even the creation of entirely new queries to suit specific occasions. Last but not least, a letter always had room for putting extra care into motivating the prospective respondents, which in many cases was crucial for the success of the whole operation. For that reason, Oldenburg had to use the epistles for dispatching inquiries, and he did so with vigor and gusto; throughout his whole career he would keep sending inquiries via letters, acting either according to a premeditated plan or whenever the occasion presented itself.30 Needless to say, both methods for communicating the queries –​print and manuscript letter –​could be and frequently were combined by the secretary of the Society. For instance, Oldenburg would write a letter with specific inquiries on a subject and then he would attach to it a printed copy of more general inquiries on the same or kindred topic from the journal.31 It is obvious that Oldenburg was very comfortable with the match between letters and queries. For one thing, it was natural that scientific epistles of the time could contain parts framed as a list of questions, and so the inquiries seemed less foreign when introduced to the letters.32 The inquiries were also a sort of circular or semi-​circular, which could be attached to or incorporated into the text of a letter in just the same way as any other circular. The very structures of Oldenburg letters were often created by a “cut-​and-​paste” technique, in which he combined his own sentences with extracts from letters to him and other pieces of texts. This also meant that including or attaching an inquiry could be done quite effortlessly.33 But once the inquiries were associated with the letters, other sorts of flexibility became important. Oldenburg was explicit about it in a letter to Joseph Glanvill, a Fellow of the Society and an important correspondent, when he spoke about certain inquiries concerning the mineral waters in Bath:34 “If ye Observations were made over again, and the later should agree wth those, wee already have, it would conduce not a little to establish their certainty.”35 Of course, here the secretary of the Society was speaking of a time-​honored device for verifying facts employed by intelligencers of all ages. In principle, this could happen by multiple answers to a printed query, but in practice it was more easily achieved and controlled by sending the query to various correspondents by letter (or giving it to them in person).36 This practice required keeping the questions more or less unchanged while sending them to different people, but, on the other hand, there was also a need to do the opposite  –​to change the questions or, rather, to add more, and keep sending them to one and the same person for further clarifications. For example, when in July 1664 the Society received answers to the Inquiries for the East Indies from Sir Philiberto Vernatti, resident of Batavia, their reaction was as follows:

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Letters and questionnaires 165 It was ordered, that the said answers to the inquiries being registered, should be communicated to such members of the society, as were willing from thence to take occasion to press for more particular answers upon these inquiries; such, for instance, as, how the oil drawn out of the roots of the cinnamon-​ tree, and resembling camphire, is extracted from thence? and what the birds are, which make the Cochinchina nests, and of what materials they make them, &.37 This was fairly typical, yet the letters as carriers of queries could be even more flexible, because they allowed the sending of questionnaires, which were at once partly changed and partly unchanged, to successive respondents. A good example is a letter of November 28, 1672 which Oldenburg sent to Sir John Finch, FRS and the newly appointed English ambassador to Turkey; it contained queries for that country as well as for Egypt. Therein Oldenburg listed questions –​most of which had already been sent to other correspondents.38 For instance, Oldenburg kept a specific question about the Turkish depilatory “Rusma,” although he had already had at least two precise answers to it.39 On the other hand, at the end of the letter he appended more queries about the meaning of certain Turkish words, which happened to be names of local narcotics. These were entirely new and had originated out of his recent correspondence with the German Martin Vogel in Hamburg, who had an interest in Oriental opiates.40 This shows how the subsequent waves of inquiries could gather strength not only from their own history, but from information streaming in from the rest of Oldenburg’s communications. With this letter, entirely devoted to the inquiries, Oldenburg also sent Finch two printed queries from Philosophical Transactions, Boyle’s “General Heads” and Rooke’s “Directions for Sea-​men.” The whole communication act was a forceful plea on behalf of the Society’s Baconian project. Yet, the irony is that no matter how carefully composed, the letter failed because Finch did not take an interest in the matter and never responded to the queries. This underlines the biggest challenge Oldenburg faced in this enterprise: how to persuade the likely respondents to spend their time on answering the questionnaires. His correspondence is rich with evidence of his constant effort in this direction. The first rule was not to miss out on any opportunity. For example, if time to catch a respondent was short, Oldenburg would act quickly no matter how tight the deadline. This was the case with one Captain Ernetly, who was bound to Constantinople only a few months after Finch. To him Oldenburg wrote the following: To give you a testimony of my hearty embraces of yr late favour in making so generous an offer to employ yrself in yr voyage to Constantinople for ye service of ye R. Society, as occasion should serve, by making Observations and Inquiries of Nature; I doe herewith send you two printed Tracts,41 containing many particulars both at Sea and Land, wch in our opinion, deserve to be accurately observed and curiously inquired after. I am very sorry, yt yr sudden departure left us no room to furnish you with some of those Instruments

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166  Iordan Avramov yt are annexed to these papers; wch would have served for giving a fuller Satisfaction, to you as well to us, in these curious and useful matters.42 Besides offering the printed instructions, Oldenburg also listed a series of specific questions on Turkey and Levant; it was, basically, the same material provided to Finch. This time, however, Oldenburg’s questions were not numbered in neat paragraphs coming calmly one after another, but were closely packed in a terse narrative as some of them were transformed into short instructions. It is evident that he was in a hurry and the end of the letter confirms it: “You see, Sir, what large use I make of ye liberty, you yesterday gave me. Yr own ingenuity will lead you to ye observations and search of more things, yt will occur in yr voyage.”43 This piece of evidence show how Oldenburg could react within 24 hours, when needed, when supplying the queries to suitable respondents. Oldenburg used different techniques to encourage likely respondents to provide answers to his queries. For instance, when Johann Christoph Beckman, professor at the University of Frankfurt on Oder who had visited the Royal Society in the 1660s, sent a letter with natural history observations in November 1667,44 Oldenburg’s response went as follows: What you wrote about osteocolla, the stones sprinkled with drops of blood, the columnar snow, and Manna-​Grass was very welcome to our Society, which particularly wishes that industrious and wise men (wherever they may be) should be aroused to collect accurately, compare faithfully, and make public each the history of his own region, as regards its natural and artificial productions. You seem to us, illustrious Sir, to be qualified in mind and temperament for making a start on what is to be done for the region where you live, and publishing it for the honor of Germany and the enriching of the philosophical stock. Come, then, continue what you have happily begun, and continue to impart to us whatever you may further elicit about the riches of your region. If your letter had been delivered sooner my reply would have taken cognizance of your journey into the forest that you mentioned. Yet in truth I have no doubt but that you will have observed many things by your unaided efforts which will be most acceptable to the Royal Society, especially concerning mines and minerals found in them.45 Oldenburg then continued with a list of questions, striving to structure Beckman’s observations of the Hartz mountains not in advance, as was the case with Finch and Ernetly, but post festum. At the end of the list, the secretary added: “You see, my dear Beckman, what a medley of suggestions I make; because of your kindness and zeal for the perfection of philosophy you will strive with all your might to answer these questions.”46 We see here an effort to mold a correspondent’s research experience into the matrix suggested by the queries –​to turn his “unaided” efforts into aided ones. Apparently, Oldenburg thought that on this occasion this would be the best way to make Beckman part of the queries project.

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Letters and questionnaires 167 The highest-​ranking Fellows of the Society were also not spared Oldenburg’s zeal in this matter. Here is how Oldenburg pressed none other than Robert Boyle, urging him to help with the inquiries for agriculture: Sir, there being severall of ye members of ye Society at Oxford, you would oblige ye Society, to sollicite every one of ym, as Dr Wallis, Dr Willis, Dr Wren, (wth my humble service to ym) to make use of ye interest they have either in Oxfordshire, or Buckinghamshire or Bedfordshire or Hartfordshire or Glocestershire or Wiltshire etc., to procure from their Georgicall friends there, a pertinent and full answer to these Inquiries, wch will much tend to ye compiling of a Good History of Agriculture, so farre; and encourage ye committee, set apart for yt argument, to proceed to ye other parts of the Employment.47 A similar plea was sent to Sir Robert Moray in September 1665, when he was about to travel to Wales: I am assured, yr Journey into Wales will be also of advantage to our Society, of wch you will, I know, remember yrself to be a Fellow, wherever you are. I wish, you might in that County meet wth an Acquaintance, yt could and would impart to you ye state and practice of their Husbandry, and answer our Queries; of wch if you have no Copy wth you, either Mr Boyle, or Dr Wallis, may furnish you wth a Copy of theirs, they having, each of ym, I am sure, had a Copy thereoff.48 Despite his constant efforts, Oldenburg often failed to achieve his goals. Ernetly and Beckman do not seem to have ever replied, and even Boyle and Moray, who were otherwise very active on the project, did not become consistent sources of answers to the agricultural queries. This must have been disappointing to Oldenburg, but there were even more egregious cases where the effort invested in them had been far greater. One such episode involved Joshua Childrey, a divine in Dorset, who was the first to contact Oldenburg,49 and, when invited to correspond further with the Society, displayed a remarkable self-​confidence in his abilities to do so: For Philosophicall Curiosities none I think I may say are more studious, & inquisitive after things of that kind, then my self, nor shall any be more ready to communicate, as they come to my knowledge, having for many years taken much pains that way.50 He had reason to be so self-​assured, because he was the author of Britannia Baconica (London, 1660)  and had a taste for natural history observations. However, when he got the inquiries concerning agriculture,51 he decided that other people could be better placed to secure answers to them and he informed Oldenburg that:

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168  Iordan Avramov I have already communicated ye Queries concerning Arable &c:  –​to an ingenious & knowing Neighbour, who hath promised me a particular answer to all that he knows peculiar to this Country; & at my return out of Wiltshire I  shall transcribe a douzen copies or more to send to my acquaintance in severall quarters of ye Shire; & return you ye speediest & amplest account of what can be picked up. Only I wonder Mr. John Newbury a known Virtuoso (if not one of ye R. Society) is not engaged in this enquiry, being a man of larger interest, & acquaintance then a poore new-​come Parson but I doubt not but to gleane up that, that will be worth threshing and winnowing.52 For all of his initial enthusiasm concerning the distribution of the queries, Childrey failed to get replies to them; he thought the excessive length of the questionnaire was the reason.53 Yet the person he recommended, Sir John Newburgh (actually, a Fellow of the Royal Society elected in 1664), received a letter from Oldenburg in September 1669.54 In response, Newburgh requested nothing less than a catalog of “such papers abt agriculture or other like (wch have bin given in to ye R.S),” so that he might choose from them a number to be fully copied and made at his disposal for future perusal and answer.55 Oldenburg must have been excited by such a promising beginning and sent back a catalog listing 26 items, many of them being inquiries and replies.56 Newburgh selected ten of those to be transcribed and promised payment for that.57 Oldenburg immediately instructed his amanuensis to make copies;58 eventually, it seems, Oldenburg recorded sending copies and receiving payment in a letter written to Newburgh in July 1670.59 Although Newburgh was willing to commission more copies of the inquiries for agriculture (presumably, to distribute further away to likely respondents),60 the subject of inquiries disappeared from the correspondence at about this point. As a whole, the Childrey/​Newburgh story is one of a tempest in a teacup; it must have been a huge blow to Oldenburg, given its initial promise and the lengths to which he had gone to bring it to a fruitful end. I mention these abortive attempts to procure answers to the inquiries in order to give some sense of the difficulty of Oldenburg’s task, his unwavering commitment to this method of information-​gathering, and some of the means he used in trying to sort out the problems of collecting answers to his queries. Yet, at this point one may ask: was all this effort worth it? The short answer is positive. It was worth it, especially for Oldenburg as a communicator, but to understand this we have to look at some examples of his success. The first episode involves Thomas Henshaw, Fellow of the Royal Society and Royal Envoy to Denmark, who found himself in Copenhagen in the summer of 1672. He was an active Fellow, with a record of participating in the inquiries project,61 and Oldenburg had solid reasons to expect much from Henshaw’s stay in Denmark. The region was extremely interesting for those keen on natural history and the Society already had a history of researching it by sending queries.62 Apparently, Henshaw came to Copenhagen unfurnished with any inquiries, but was soon reminded of the project by Oldenburg and, in response, requested to be sent “ye antient Queries” for Iceland in Latin.63 In this faithful letter he

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Letters and questionnaires 169 also mentioned that he had made acquaintance with one “Monsr Gabelli,” who was “proprietour of ye Island of Fero.”64 This immediately caught Oldenburg’s attention, who not only sent the requested inquiries, but also urged Henshaw to design specific ones for the Faroe islands.65 His correspondent was willing to do so, but found that the new inquiries would not be very different from the ones on Iceland and suggested adding just a couple of questions on “Eydder downe” and “Sea unicorne.”66 All this was fine, but at this point Henshaw began to realize that it would not be easy to find respondents in any locations away from the Danish capital. Apparently, “Monsr Gabelli” was not available to act in the role, and the bishops in Iceland to whom the inquiries were dispatched took their time in answering. Henshaw became increasingly frustrated with the situation and began to doubt the success of the enterprise. Indeed, a number of answers to the queries regarding Iceland came back only after he had left Denmark for London.67 The story would have become another abortive attempt in the history of the inquiries project had it not been for a sudden stroke of luck. It all started in February 1672/​1673 with Erasmus Bartholin telling his English friend the following piece of news: he told me farther that a priest living in ye Island of Fero had lately written a book in the Danish Toung concerning that Island, but because it was large and not written in a language the world was acquainted with, ye booksellers would not venture to print it, but to repaire that losse, I should shortly see in a book of his brother Thomas Bartholin now in ye presse called Acta Academica all that was worth remark in ye other, published there.68 This made Henshaw focus on the author of the book as a likely respondent to the queries, and this time his efforts were rewarded. By August 1673 he received the desired answers. Henshaw communicated them to Oldenburg, and further outlined his plans with regard to this matter: Concerning the Isles of Faroe I herewith send yu such an account as I had from Magister Lucas Jacobi Debes, a man ingenious and curious, who hath been many years ye chief Pastor there, and came hither this yeare to take his degree, and to print a vary large relation he hath made of those Islands but ye pitty is, it is written only in danish; if yu desire one I will send it yu, but at present it is under ye presse, however I resolve to bring one wth me, if ever it shall please God to send me safe into England: and I will try if by making this man some present I can prevale wth him to make some abridgement of it in Latin or high Dutch.69 The project was immediately encouraged by Oldenburg, who wanted to see the new book in Latin, and one can easily understand why the Royal Society Fellows were so excited about it.70 It was good to get answers to a query, but it was even better to have a whole book dealing with the subject in much greater detail. After all, it was precisely such books, like Christopher Merret’s Pinax rerum naturalium

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170  Iordan Avramov Britannicarum (London, 1666) or, especially, Robert Plot’s The Natural History of Oxfordshire (Oxford, 1677), that Oldenburg gave to his correspondents as examples to encourage further studies in natural history.71 With the help of John Sterpin, a Scotsman who also happened to be the first translator of Philosophical Translations in Latin, the book was translated not in High Dutch or Latin, but in English, and published in 1676.72 It got a quick review in Philosophical Transactions,73 and it is instructive to compare this text with the responses Debes had given to Henshaw a few years earlier: there were many points in the responses which were repeated in the review; however, there were even more relevant points in the review to suggest the richness of the book’s text for the purposes of natural history. In this way Oldenburg and Henshaw struck gold with Lucas Debes, because he turned out to be a knowledgeable source exceeding expectations. It was the queries that led to discovering him and his book. The second successful episode involved the famous Danzig astronomer Johannes Hevelius. The prolific correspondence between Hevelius and Oldenburg started in early 1663 and lasted until Oldenburg’s death.74 It dealt mainly with astronomical matters as dictated by the interest of the self-​centered Hevelius, but this changed in March 1666 when Oldenburg sent to Danzig a long list of questions on cold, amber, and other matters, which were thought to be relevant to the natural history of the Baltic region. The secretary of the Society added the following instruction: “we earnestly beg you either to prepare answers to these yourself or to procure them from friends with whom, perhaps, you correspond in Borussia, Poland, Sweden, and Muscovy.”75 Hevelius apparently felt it would be more useful to do the latter, and distributed the questionnaire to his friends and acquaintances as suggested. Some of his correspondents transferred the inquiries further on  –​for example, the classical scholar Hensius in Stockholm passed it on to his colleague Johann Scheffer in Uppsala76 –​and so the questions reached more and more potential respondents. In this way, when responses began to stream back through various scholarly networks, Oldenburg found himself receiving letters from people he had never been in touch with before; some of them might never have caught his notice, had it not been for Hevelius’s mediation. Yet those people turned out to be useful and their reports went on the pages of Philosophical Transactions.77 A few of them wrote repeatedly on the subject, and at least one became a correspondent of Oldenburg and Boyle on other matters as well.78 Even those who did not respond to the inquiry, like the Bartholin brothers in Copenhagen, were thus informed about the Society’s work, which must have paved the way for the exchanges between them and Oldenburg in subsequent years.79 I  want to underscore the fact that the allure of the inquiry as a specific kind of text designed to elicit a response must have been crucial. In fact, one of the respondents, Johann Fehr, another member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, directly referenced the effect of receiving Oldenburg’s queries. In one of his letters, having described the extreme effects of severe cold on men and beasts during the war campaigns of Prince Radziwill, he exclaimed: “I did not think that I should ever tell anyone of these incidents and should never have thought of them if these English gentlemen had not made

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Letters and questionnaires 171 me recollect them.”80 I would suggest this impact was fairly similar to the effect of the Philosophical Transactions on the country’s virtuosi –​by reading the journal they suddenly became aware that they could contribute to the new science by making simple observations of their surroundings. Similarly, the inquiries aroused correspondents’ curiosity and focused their vision; the inquiries also conveyed an acute impression of novelty as well as value, boosted by the authority and the flattering attention of the Royal Society. All of these things combined created a sense of empowerment, which piqued the correspondents’ willingness to participate in the project. Oldenburg the intelligencer had many other tricks designed to move and inspire, but it seems that in this case the inquiries, by their very structure, content and origin, were strong enough to act as a powerful motivator. In addition, this dovetailed neatly with the power of Hevelius’s network. While Henshaw was a foreigner newly arrived in Copenhagen, who had to build connections by “hit-​and-​miss” efforts, Hevelius could rely on an already-​existing mesh of contacts, which had carefully been constructed over the years; it was an intellectual space where his authority counted and he deployed it on Oldenburg’s behalf. He needed to pay just a little initial effort to start the diffusion of the inquiries, and the cultivated international community succumbed to their inherent lure to produce the great turnover of responses. In this way, by sending the inquiries to a key person like Hevelius, Oldenburg reached out widely to potential respondents (which was otherwise characteristic of journal publication through the diffusion of print rather than letters). He capitalized on the motivating power and personal appeal of the letter. For the third case of success in the communication history of Oldenburg’s inquiries, we return to the English countryside, the place where, we may recall, Childrey and Newburgh failed in the same task. This time, however, the person helping Oldenburg was Joseph Glanvill, a divine from Bath, whose commitment to the Royal Society was deep and fierce. He was best known for being a vigorous apologist on behalf of the Society and the new science, but his initial correspondence with Oldenburg was very much about the queries and was a prominent theme in the years thereafter. Here is how it unfolded: his first recorded letter to Oldenburg contained answers to the queries about mines from a person “living near Mendip-​Mines.”81 Furthermore, in a letter from Oldenburg to Boyle, dated March 17, 1667/​1668, Oldenburg wrote that Glanvill had asked Boyle for queries regarding the waters at Bath.82 And in a later letter to Boyle, Oldenburg picked up the theme again: Mr Glanvill hath solicited it several times (though I have, I think, mention’d it but once to you) that you would favor him wth some Queries for the Bath, he not judging himself to be Philosophicall enough to devise matter of his owne.83 Still further on, in the very first letter from Glanvill to Oldenburg which is preserved as text, we see the Bath physician offering a “more prefect Acct of ye Mines of Mendip,” which he procured from “an ingenious friend” who had

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172  Iordan Avramov contacts with “experienced Mine men.” Glanvill also pointed out that he took the trouble to send this account to the person who had first answered the queries, and he noted his informant’s comments on the differences between the old and the new observations. Finally, Glanvill declared that he was ready to do yet more on the topic: “What Defects yu find in this Acct, if yu intimate ym to mee, I shall inquire again for further satisfaction.”84 Only a few days after that we see him offer to serve as a mediator to a person who could be a good respondent to queries on a specific theme: I have this summer lighted on an inquisitive & ingenious Physitian, who lives at Nantwich, & hath been a very curious observer of ye salt workes, & tryed many experiments relating to those matters. I though him a fitt person for your correspondence, & ask’t him whether he would bee willing to communicate his observations of yt sort to ye R.S. he told mee he should bee very ready in such a service, & desired mee to inquire what thinges particularly they would desire information in. If yu want any notices of this kind, & shall bee willing to accept of his assistance, I Desire yu would transmitt ye Quieryes yu would have answer’d to mee, & I shall send ym to him.85 Oldenburg was immediately caught up in this proposal and wrote back to say that queries “concerning the salt-​works” are now being collected from “some of our members.”86 In about three weeks he delivered on his promise by sending a letter containing eight relevant questions, but he also urged Glanvill and the prospective respondent to add more as they thought fit (he may have worried that the hurriedly prepared list was a bit short and insufficient), and a couple of questions about Bath in Somerset were appended by way of a postscript.87 Glanvill passed on the questions to his contact,88 and the first answers on the salt springs were provided, with some delay, by one William Jackson, indeed a physician in Nantwich, the next year. The answers were published in Philosophical Transactions by Oldenburg, who also sent back a second group of elucidating questions to their author; the answers to those were also published in the journal.89 However, Jackson felt that he should supply even further comments and corrections to his initial input, and wrote two further letters within a week or so in December 1669; the second one even contained a drawing of the installation used by the workers to produce salt.90 In a strange communication twist, this last letter frequently referred to Jackson’s first account published in Philosophical Transactions,91 because, as he confessed, he had lost his own copy of the first manuscript and was forced to consult the printed publication directly.92 All this time Glanvill was not idle. As a responsible mediator, he monitored the results of his actions and reported to Oldenburg: Dr Jackson also writes mee yt he hath sent yu an Acct of ye salt mines; I hope yu had it. I have mist a Transactions or two lately, & so am not sure whether yu received it, or not.93

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Letters and questionnaires 173 Even before that, in June 1669, he also ventured to compose the long-​desired account on his local baths, which he declared to be “in answere to your Quaeryes” in the attached letter to Oldenburg.94 He also kept suggesting new country correspondents to Oldenburg, and was central in the design to organize a “Philosophicall Correspondence” in Somersetshire.95 Significantly, the virtuosi in this country circle were in a position to observe interesting phenomena, but what they badly needed was precise queries from the Royal Society, in order to provide themselves with guidance when studying them. For example, such instructions were necessary to do observations of “waters under ground” and in January 1669/​ 1670 Glanvill spared no words in urging Oldenburg to provide them: I am requested to bee earnest with yu for this favour, & therefore I humbly intreat yu to mind it seriously; I doubt not but yu may procure such inquiryes from Mr Boyle, or severall others of ye Society. If yu furnish us, wee shall bee ye better enabled to serve ye designe of ye R. S. in this Country; & wee know ye kindness will be very gratefully resented by diverse persons of Quality in our parts. And yet there is a greater argument, viz, ye consideration of ye public good; I  therefore earnestly intrest yu Sr, to use your endeavours to gratifye us; And perhaps yu might not doe amiss in proposing it to ye Society it self; I leave yt to yu. Yu know best what is proper for ye knowledge of yt Illustrious Company.96 Ultimately, the Somersetshire correspondence did not fare well,97 and Glanvill’s own correspondence with Oldenburg became virtually non-​existent in later years, but it is clear how vital the queries were for the Bath physician in the years 1667–​1670. Here was a person who would not dare to design a query himself, but when it came to distributing and answering them, he displayed the capabilities of an energetic and ambitious intelligencer. He searched for, found, and recommended knowledgeable respondents willing to write answers for Oldenburg; he secured second reports and compared the different versions; he made sure the respondents did accomplish their tasks, but also persistently reminded Oldenburg of the desired queries; finally, he apparently believed that the organized science in Somerset depended on these scientific instruments as much as on the microscopes, telescopes, and the subscriptions to the Philosophical Transactions.98 Once again, it is worth comparing his case with those of Hevelius and Henshaw. As we have seen, Hevelius achieved success via a well-​established segment of the international Republic of Letters, while the two Englishmen had to work with undiscovered sources on its fringes. Henshaw’s task seems to have been the hardest, because he was foreigner whose movements, both epistolary and otherwise, were restricted in regard to the distant islands which were of the greatest interest in terms of natural history. In contrast, Glanvill had closer and faster access to the phenomena under observation and to the prospective respondents. Unlike Henshaw, he even replied to a query himself. He also worked with a number of people more directly exposed to the motivating publications in Philosophical Transactions.

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174  Iordan Avramov Yet, ultimately, what made the difference between him and Childrey and Newburgh was his persistence and commitment, the constant effort to find sources, to cultivate them, to control them; the same things that Oldenburg did on a much grander scale. Perhaps enough has been said so far to make clear the role and importance of the queries in Oldenburg’s communication universe. Their primary aim by design was to bring new knowledge into the Society’s registers, but that was just one aspect. Because queries had to be distributed as circulars, their distribution was quick and easy; the answers returned were also easy to develop further and get back into circulation via publication in Philosophical Transactions and new letters. Their structure made comparison of the incoming accounts painless, but also had the potential to induce broader searches toward knowledge not specifically spelled out in the questions. The queries were also an effective tool to spread the Baconian ideology of the Society and to contribute to its public image and intellectual leadership, both at home and abroad. Perhaps most importantly, the inquiries could and did bring new correspondents into epistolary exchange, and this, for Oldenburg, was priceless. All this meant that the inquiries for natural history were not simply a knowledge-​generating instrument, but also a manageable practice impacting the Society’s communications in many positive and productive ways. Little wonder that Oldenburg, as secretary of the Royal Society, espoused the cause of the project so wholeheartedly and labored constantly on it, year after year. For him it was not only an obligation, but also a way to enhance and enrich his main business as a communicator. It is highly revealing that many inquiries were designed in the act of communication, so to speak, simply because Oldenburg or his associates came across a likely respondent whom they wished to address. We have seen the examples of the queries for the Faroes and those for the “salt-​works,” but there were many others. In many cases, Oldenburg had to design the specific ad hoc inquiry by himself.99 So perhaps we should conclude with that familiar turn of phrase:  if the Royal Society did not invent the inquiries for natural history, Henry Oldenburg would have done it anyway.

Acknowledgments The first draft of this chapter was given as a talk at the Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World workshop, which took place at the Stanford Humanities Center at the beginning of May 2014. Part of my further work on the topic was presented at a seminar at New Europe College, Bucharest, in October of that same year. A great deal of the research leading to the final draft was done while I was an International Fellow at New Europe College (October 2014–​February 2015)  and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest (February–​August 2015). The final touches to this text occurred while I was holding a Writing Fellowship at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (February–​May 2017). I am grateful to all of these institutions for their generous support of my work.

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Notes 1 For an intellectual biography of Oldenburg, see Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2 See, for example, “Inquiries for Brazil,” in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. Alfred Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 13 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London:  Mansell; London:  Taylor & Francis, 1965–​1986), vol. 8, 220–​251. Hereafter this edition will be referred to as CHO. For more examples, see the text below. 3 We shall meet with examples of many of these below, with the possible exception of the inquiries for specific events. As to that, see, for instance, an answered inquiry about the eruption of Etna in 1669: “Answer into certain inquiries concerning the burning of Mount Etna Ao 1669,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fols 95r–​98v. 4 Oldenburg to Hevelius, March 30, 1666, CHO, iii, 77–​78. 5 Oldenburg to Ed. Browne, December 18, 1668, CHO, v, 263. Apart from the general query for mines which was added to the list of questions for Browne, the list contained even more questions on mines, which were specific for the region; ibid., 261–​262. 6 “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country, Great or Small, Imparted Likewise by Mr Boyle,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 11 (April 2, 1666), 186–​189. 7 “Articles of Inquiries Touching Mines,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 19 (November 19, 1666), 330–​342, 333. 8 “Inquiries for Turkey,” Philosophical Transactions, no.  20 (December 17, 1667), 360–​362, 361. 9 “Enquiries Concerning Agriculture,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 5 (July 3, 1665), 91–​94, 94. 10 “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country,” 186–​189, 187. 11 “Mr Hoskins Inquiries for ye East-​Indies,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 4r. 12 “Directions for Sea-​men, Bound for Far Voyages,” Philosophical Transactions, no.  8 (January 8, 1665/​1666), 140–​143, 142. 13 “Inquiries for ye Antiles,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 124r. Note that Oldenburg, who penned this text, kept the question mark at the end of the sentence that is not a question per se. 14 “Inquiries for Tanger and Other Parts of Barbary,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 188v. 15 A good example is “An Appendix to the Directions for Seamen Bound for Far Voyages,” Philosophical Transactions, no.  9 (February 12, 1665/​1666), 147–​149, authored by Robert Hooke, who proposed two instruments –​one for sounding the depth of the sea without a cord and another for collecting water samples from the deep –​in order to complement the directions for seamen given by Rooke and published in the previous number of the journal. 16 For a brief account on the first meeting of the Committee for Correspondence dedicated to the queries, see Oldenburg to Boyle, August 25, 1664, CHO, ii, 209. 17 See how Oldenburg passionately elaborated on this Baconian notion in a letter to Stanisław Lubienietzki, a prominent citizen of the Republic of Letters living in Hamburg:  Oldenburg to Lubienietzki, March 14, 1666/​ 1667, CHO, iii, 362. Significantly, it was done in a letter of recommendation on behalf of a Transylvanian, one “Mr Marcus,” who had recently been furnished with inquiries about his native region and was expected to replied to them once back home from his European tour. On the identity of this person, who turns out to be Dániel Márkos Szentiványi, a Transylvanian Unitarian, see G.  Gömöri, “Henry Oldenburg and the Mines of

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176  Iordan Avramov Hungary,” in A Divided Hungary in Europe: Exchanges, Networks and Representations, 1541–​1699, Vol. 1: Study Tours and Intellectual-​Religious Relationships, ed. G. Almázi (Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 145–​156, 150–​151. 18 For an example, see “Commendata memoriae Domini Halticks, Saxo-​Lowenburgensis,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 30r. This was, in fact, a list of points Oldenburg wanted to bring to the attention of a foreigner, namely, one Haltick, who, apparently, was about to go for a journey into Central Europe. The points were about various epistolary dispatches into the region to which Oldenburg had not received any reply. The whole document had nothing to do with the inquiries for natural history. 19 I am grateful to Michael Hunter for this point of dating. 20 As for the former, see, for instance, Royal Society Manuscripts H3, no. 36 (inquiries about mines and damps); for the latter, see, for instance, University Library in Frankfurt, Senckenbergische Bibliothek, MSS Ludolf, no. 525a, fol. 965r–​v (“Inquiries for Egypt”), and ibid., no. 528, fol. 967r (“Inquiries Concerning Aethiopia”). 21 For example, “Directions for Sea-​men” was translated and printed in Journal des Savants:  “Extrait du journal d’Angleterre, contenant des instructions pour ceux qui ont a faire de long voyage sur mer,” Journal des Savants (Monday, April 19, 1666), 193–​196, and later appeared in S. Chappuzeau, L’Europe vivante ou relation nouvelle historique et politique de tous ses etats (Geneva, 1667), 196–​198. 22 For example, T.  Sprat, The History of the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 158 (answers to inquiries about the East-​Indies); Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge from Its First Rise, 4 vols. (London, 1756–​1757), vol. 1, 492–​494 (answers to inquiries about Iceland). 23 For an early-​twentieth-​century publication, see a summary of the inquiries for Turkey in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Allan George Finch Esq. of Burley-​on-​the-​Hill, Rutland (1922), vol. 2, 6–​8. 24 Daniel Carey, “Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society,” Annals of Science 54 (1997): 269–​292, and “Inquiries, Heads, and Directions: Orienting Early Modern Travel,” in Travel Narratives, the New Science and Literary Discourse, 1569–​1750, ed. Judy A. Hayden (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 25–​51. 25 Jason Pearl, “Geography and Authority in the Royal Society’s Instructions for Travelers,” in Hayden, ed., Travel Narratives, 71–​83. See, especially, p. 80. 26 Michael Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Early Royal Society: A Reciprocal Exchange in the Making of Baconian Science,” BJHS, 40, no. 1 (March 2007): 1–​23. 27 Of course, there are many other studies which have touched on the subject in more roundabout ways. For instance, when Geraldine Barnes discusses William Dampier’s ethnographic descriptions in his A New Voyage Round the World (1697), she notes that one influence on Dampier was provided precisely by Robert Boyle’s “General Heads”; see Geraldine Barnes, “Traditions of the Monstrous in William Dampier’s New Holland,” in Hayden, ed., Travel Narratives, 87–​101, 91. 28 Of course, there were other Fellows of the Society who procured answers to the queries. For instance, Sir Thomas Browne, the celebrated author of Religio Medici (London, 1643), who had had a long-​ time correspondence with one Theodore Jónsson, a Protestant minister in Iceland, was able to obtain from him an answer to the queries for that island, which was presented to the Society in January 1664. On this, see Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 1, 376; and Oldenburg to Thomas Browne, c.January 27, 1663/​1664, CHO, xiii, 399–​400. Sir Robert Moray and Viscount Brouncker, the President of the Society, also did their share on this front, but

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Letters and questionnaires 177 it was only Oldenburg who was involved in the business through a constant, systematic effort. 29 For an example of that, see Henry Hall to Oldenburg, March 18, 1675/​1676, CHO, xii, 224–​228, wherein Hall replies to “Articles of Inquiries Touching Mines,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 19 (November 19, 1666), 330–​342, 333. 30 As mentioned, he did it on such a scale that it was to become impossible for the editors of CHO not to include them in their edition. 31 For an instance of this combined use of letter and print, see Oldenburg to Winthrop, c. March 1, 1668/​1669, CHO, v, 422–​426, wherein Oldenburg listed numerous manuscript inquiries on the natural history of New England (John Winthrop was the first governor of Connecticut) to which he added “Queries Concerning Vegetables,” printed in Philosophical Transactions, no. 40 (October 19, 1668), 789–​801. For more examples of this sort, see the text below. 32 Witness, for instance, how Philipp Jacob Sachs, a leading member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, sends a list of questions on lobsters (the topic of his recent research) to the Society for perusal and answers; Sachs to Oldenburg, January 12, 1664/​1665, CHO, ii, 346. 33 For instance, one important such semi-​circular employed by Oldenburg was a type of letter which he called “invitation to a philosophicall correspondence.” Such a letter always had a part explaining the nature and aims of the Royal Society, which was kept unchanged in substance from one letter to another, while the part dealing with the specific correspondent to whom the letter was addressed was, quite naturally, redesigned anew each time. For an example of such a letter, see Oldenburg to Richard Norwood, 6 March 1663/4, CHO, ii, 146−147. 34 We shall deal with Glanvill in more detail. 35 Oldenburg to Glanvill, July 10, 1669, CHO, vi, 106. 36 A good example of this practice is recorded in Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fols 31r–​32v, where, after a copy of the “Inquiries for the North” sent to Hevelius in Danzig in October 1666, Oldenburg kept a record of the further persons to whom the inquiries were “recommended” later on. Those were one “Mr Chamberlain” “going into Sweden in November 1668,” and Sir Peter Wiche, FRS, “going to Muscovy in February 1668/​9,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 32v. 37 Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 1, 454. Oldenburg’s own effort in response to the Society’s order is recorded again in Royal Society Classified Papers 19, where he makes a note to press Vernatti on some of the unanswered original questions. See “Severall things to be further desired from Mr P. Vernatti. By H. Oldenburg,” Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fol. 5r. For original Vernatti’s answers, see Royal Society Classified Papers 19, fols 13r–​22v. For questions 17 and 21 with blank spaces left, which Oldenburg had in mind, see ibid., fol. 17r and fols. 18v–​19r. 38 Oldenburg to Finch, November 28, 1672, CHO, ix, 338–​340. 39 See Harpur to Oldenburg, c. August 5, 1667, CHO, iii, 470, as well as Rycaut to Oldenburg, November 23, 1667, CHO, iii, 603. 40 See Oldenburg to Finch, November 28, 1672, CHO, ix, 340, on the query for “Muslac” and compare to Vogel to Oldenburg, August 13, 1672, CHO, ix, 210. 41 Once again, these were Boyle’s “General Heads” and the directions for the observations at sea. 42 Oldenburg to Captain Ernetly, January 21, 1672/​1673, CHO, ix, 422. 43 Ibid., 423.

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178  Iordan Avramov 44 Beckman to Oldenburg, November 10, 1667, CHO, iii, 581–​588. 45 Oldenburg to Beckman, March 30, 1668, CHO, iv, 279. 46 Ibid., 280. 47 Oldenburg to Boyle, September 1, 1664, CHO, ii, 226. 48 Oldenburg to Moray, September 28, 1665, CHO, ii, 526. 49 Childrey to Oldenburg, February 9, 1668/​1689, CHO, v, 384–​386. 50 Childrey to Oldenburg, March 22, 1668/​1689, CHO, v, 454. 51 Oldenburg sent them in Oldenburg to Childrey, April 6, 1669, CHO, v, 477. 52 Childrey to Oldenburg, May 4, 1669, CHO, v, 513. 53 Childrey to Oldenburg, April 12 and 15, 1670, CHO, vi, 626. 54 Oldenburg to John Newburgh, September 11, 1669, CHO, vi, 225–​226. 55 Newburgh to Oldenburg, September 21, 1669, CHO, vi, 248. 56 Oldenburg to Newburgh, September 28, 1669, CHO, vi, 251–​252. 57 Newburgh to Oldenburg, October 30, 1669, CHO, vi, 302. 58 Oldenburg to Newburgh, November 9, 1669, CHO, vi, 309. 59 Oldenburg to Newburgh, July 22, 1670, CHO, vii, 94. 60 Newburgh to Oldenburg, August 9, 1670, CHO, vii, 106. 61 He was, actually, the author of the “Inquiries for Egypt” (see note 20). On this, see Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, vol. 1, 297–​299. 62 As early as in February 1663 the Society was presented with answers to their inquiries about Greenland by one Mr. Gray, who, it was said, “frequented those parts”; Oldenburg to Boyle, October 20, 1664, CHO, ii, 262. Then a series of accounts on Iceland followed, not only those mentioned above (see notes 22 and 28), but also those obtained by Oldenburg through direct communication with Páll Björnsson, a priest at Selardo in Iceland; Björnsson to Oldenburg, July 13, 1671, CHO, viii, 158–​163; see also Philosophical Transactions, no. 111 (February 22, 1674/​ 1675), 238–​240. 63 Henshaw to Oldenburg, July 6, 1672, CHO, ix, 144. 64 Ibid., 145. 65 Oldenburg to Henshaw, July 31, 1672, CHO, ix, 199. 66 Henshaw to Oldenburg, December 12, 1672, CHO, ix, 352–​353. 67 They were provided by Gísli Thorláksson, Bishop of Hólar in Iceland, and in the absence of Henshaw were transferred to London by Erasmus Bartholin, professor at the University of Copenhagen; Bartholin to Oldenburg, December 22, 1675, followed by “Gísli Thorláksson’s Replies to Queries about Iceland,” CHO, xii, 103–​109. 68 Henshaw to Oldenburg, February 4, 1672/​1673, CHO, ix, 451. 69 Henshaw to Oldenburg, August 9, 1673, CHO, x, 128. “Reply to Queries about the Faroes” was attached to this letter; see ibid., 131–​136. 70 Oldenburg to Henshaw, September 22, 1673, CHO, x, 246. 71 For example, Pinax was mentioned as a model to be followed when studying the natural history of Burgundy in Oldenburg to Lantin, April 15, 1669, CHO, v, 492–​493, while Plot’s book was referred to in the same vein in Oldenburg to Leibniz, July 12, 1677, CHO, xiii, 323. 72 The original edition, Færoæ & Færoa reserata (Copenhagen, 1673), came out from the press in London as:  Færoæ & Færoa Reserata, That Is Description of the Islands and Inhabitants of Faeroe, Being Seventeen Islands Subject to the King of Denmark, etc. (London, 1676). 73 “An account of some books,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 119 (November 22, 1675), 456–​461. Note that the review pre-​dates the book. Of course, Oldenburg had had an insider’s preview of the English translation, which was about to be published.

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Letters and questionnaires 179 74 For the first letter from Oldenburg to the astronomer (which is another example of an “invitation to a philosophicall correspondence” letter), see Oldenburg to Hevelius, February 18, 1662/​1663, CHO, ii, 25–​28. On Hevelius, see, for instance, Correspondence de Johannes Hevelius, Vol. 1: Prolégomènes critique, ed. Chantal Grell (Brepols: Turnhout, 2014). 75 Oldenburg to Hevelius, March 30, 1666, CHO, iii, 76. 76 See Hevelius to Oldenburg, October 19, 1666, CHO, iii, 255, and Sheffer to Hensius, May 29, 1666, CHO, iii, 259–​262. 77 “Promiscuous Inquiries, Chiefly about Cold, Formerly Sent and Recommended to Monsieur Hevelius, Together with His Answer Return’d to Some of Them,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 19 (November 19, 1666), 344–​352. 78 For example, Michael Behm, wealthy magistrate of Danzig, answered with two letters:  the first one was a reply to the inquiries, Behm to Hevelius, May 5, 1667, CHO, iii, 562–​571, while the second one, of several months later, was dedicated to various matters –​for example, the nature of gout –​with frequent references to the broader work of the Royal Society: Behm to Hevelius, November 1, 1667, CHO, iii, 572–​577. Later on, he became Robert Boyle’s correspondent as well; see Behm to Boyle, October 2, 1668, in The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence Principe, 6  vols. (London:  Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2002), vol. 4, 103–​116. 79 Hevelius reported that the Bartholin brothers in Copenhagen were about to answer the inquiries; see Hevelius to Oldenburg, October 19, 1666, CHO, iii, 255, but there is no evidence that they did. It was only in 1669 that Oldenburg wrote directly to Erasmus Bartholin, the mathematician: Oldenburg to Erasmus Bartholin, October 7, 1669, CHO, vi, 272–​ 275, but his offer of “philosophicall correspondence” was swiftly accepted and many years of fruitful communication ensued. Erasmus, together with his brother Thomas, the physician, were the chief source of information and jovial entertainment to Henshaw during his sojourn in Denmark. 80 Fehr to –​, May 18, 1666, CHO, iii, 267. 81 Glanvill to Oldenburg, c. October 1, 1667, CHO, iii, 502. The letter itself is now lost, but the answers to the queries were printed in Oldenburg’s journal; see “Answers to Some of the Inquiries Formerly Publish’d Concerning Mines,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 28 (October 21, 1667), 525–​527. 82 Oldenburg to Boyle, March 17, 1667/​1678, CHO, iv, 249. 83 Oldenburg to Boyle, March 24, 1667/​1678, CHO, iv, 275. 84 Glanvill to Oldenburg, September 15, 1668, CHO, v, 42. 85 Glanvill to Oldenburg, September 18, 1668, CHO, v, 46. 86 Oldenburg to Glanvill, October 3, 1668, CHO, v, 75. 87 Oldenburg to Glanvill, October 27, 1668, CHO, v, 108–​109. 88 Glanvill to Oldenburg, July 19, 1669, CHO, vi, 138. 89 Jackson’s first instalment of answers is “Some Inquiries Concerning the Salt-​Springs and the Way of Salt-​Making at Nantwich in Cheshire; Answer’d by the Learned and Observing William Jackson Dr.  of Physick,” Philosophical Transactions, no.  53 (November 15, 1669), 1060–​1067, while the second appeared as “An Appendix to the Discourse Concerning the Salt-​Work Publisht in Numb. 53, Communicated by the Same Doctor Jackson, in a Letter of Novemb. 20. 1669,” Philosophical Transactions, no.  54 (December 13, 1669), 1077–​1079. The letter wherein Oldenburg asks his additional questions to Jackson is now lost, but we know about them from Jackson’s response; William Jackson to Oldenburg, October 20, 1669, CHO, vi, 321–​323, where he first repeats Oldenburg’s questions before answering them.

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180  Iordan Avramov 90 Jackson to Oldenburg, December 11, 1669, CHO, vi, 366–​367; Jackson to Oldenburg, December 18, 1669, CHO, vi, 374–​376. 91 That is, “Some Inquiries Concerning the Salt-​Springs and the Way of Salt-​Making at Nantwich in Cheshire.” 92 Jackson to Oldenburg, December 18, 1669, CHO, vi, 374. 93 Glanvill to Oldenburg, December 17, 1669, CHO, vi, 373. 94 Glanvill to Oldenburg, June 16, 1669, CHO, vi, 47–​52, 47. 95 Andrew Paschall to Glanvill, June 18, 1669, CHO, vi, 140–​141. 96 See Glanvill to Oldenburg, January 31, 1669/​1670, CHO, vi, 456. 97 On this, see Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 81, 82. 98 See Glanvill to Oldenburg, December 17, 1669, CHO, vi, 375, on Oldenburg procuring microscopes for Glanvill’s friends; on a telescope commissioned for Jackson, see Glanvill to Oldenburg, January 31, 1669/​1670, CHO, vi, 457; and on the 24 copies of Philosophical Transactions Glanvill ordered to be delivered for Somerset on a monthly basis, see ibid., 457. 99 One such example is the already mentioned “Inquiries for Brazil,” see note 2.

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6  Ingenuous investigators Antonio Vallisneri’s regional network and the making of natural knowledge in eighteenth-​century Italy Ivano Dal Prete Global knowledge and regional networks One of the results of the recent historiographical shift toward global networks and cross-​cultural disseminations has been, perhaps not surprisingly, a renewed emphasis on local knowledge. In Relocating Modern Science, Kapil Raj notes the “negotiated, contingent, and situated nature of the propositions, skills and objects that constitute natural knowledge.”1 If so, the construction of modern science can no longer be conceived as the diffusion of theories and practices created in Europe, and consistently applied elsewhere on the globe. On the contrary, scientific knowledge could only spread through “processes of accommodation and negotiation” that were likewise contingent and local, required the participation of indigenous mediators, and led to the production of original knowledge.2 On the other hand, the processes that characterized intercultural “contact zones” in Africa, America, or southwest Asia were also at work on a different scale within Europe itself. As Alix Cooper argues, the confrontation with the “exotic” and with the larger world spurred a renewed interest in the European “indigenous” and in its largely neglected nature: “as they grappled with issues of geography, identity, and natural origins,” many early modern Europeans “began to look inwards as well as outwards. In short, they began to pay attention to an ‘indigenous’ located within Europe itself.”3 The very notion of “European science” fails to convey the cultural diversity of the continent, where different –​albeit interacting –​forms of natural knowledge were being pursued according to local traditions and agendas. Even the international and inter-​confessional space known as the “Republic of Letters” is no longer perceived as a relatively simple, uniform entity: Carol Pal suggests in fact that the Republic of Letters is best understood as a set of “smaller, overlapping subsets,” or a “palimpsest of translucent and permeable layers,” each one built around a particular project or identity and concerned “with its own particular agenda, as well as with the overall ethos of the Republic of Letters.”4 In this chapter, I argue that a particular variety of these overlapping subsets –​ namely, informal scientific networks active at a local and regional level –​were crucial elements in the production and circulation of natural knowledge in the early modern world. In order to illustrate this point, I focus on the northern Italian

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182  Ivano Dal Prete naturalistic network whose best-​known member was Antonio Vallisneri (1661–​ 1730), a celebrated naturalist and a professor of medicine at Padua University.5 His vast correspondence and the references to geographically close collaborators included in his works make it possible to outline a social and cultural anatomy of the scientific community he was part of, explore its outward connections and inner functioning, and assess its relevance to the making of natural knowledge in early-​eighteenth-​century Italy.6 I intend to show, in the first place, that Vallisneri’s research agendas and experimental practices were largely defined by his interactions with a regional web of mostly unknown, and often lower-​ class, amateurs and practitioners (some of whom he undoubtedly regarded as his scientific peers). To many of them, Vallisneri’s works represented an ideal venue in which to make their own observations, ideas, and writings known to the larger public. While it would be inappropriate to consider Vallisneri a “brand” for the publications of a naturalistic community, his books often incorporate an astonishing amount of materials he obtained from, or thoroughly discussed with, local collaborators. Second, I argue that the paucity of Vallisneri’s international correspondence would be a poor measure of his influence and long-​range connections. The metaphorical “surface” of such regional networks acted as a contact zone where exotic knowledge was locally appropriated, and vice versa. Like the permeable membrane of a cell, his network filtered and digested useful information and specimens from the outside, while at the same time diffusing in appropriate forms the knowledge elaborated within the community. Simply put, an early modern naturalist like Vallisneri may have found mediated contacts more efficient and convenient than direct ones.7 On the other hand, the analysis of the local trade of fossils and botanical specimens confirms how “exotic” and little-​known Europe itself continued to be. Naturalists and collectors needed local knowledge and skills as much as their colleagues in distant continents –​regardless of whether the “locals” lived in India or just a dozen miles away. Highly sought-​after fossil fishes were often excavated by shepherds or quarrymen in nearby, yet remote locations that most naturalists never saw. Afterwards, they had to pass through a chain of intermediaries before they could be exhibited in the most prestigious museums or discussed in influential books, assuming with each transaction different meanings and values. Vallisneri’s collaborators did not need high status in order to be awarded citizenship in the Republic of Letters: under certain circumstances, pharmacists or surgeons could rise “above their conditions” –​at least morally and culturally, if not socially –​and join the ranks of the “ingenuous investigators” on whose work the production of natural knowledge rested.

A community of naturalists Even a cursory glance at the inventory of Vallisneri’s scientific correspondence reveals its regional nature: while he exchanged specimens and letters with some of the best-​known naturalists of his time, well over 90 percent of his correspondence

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Ingenuous investigators 183 network encompassed an area no larger than northern Italy. Few of his letters traveled north of Zurich or south of Florence, and even fewer were composed in Latin, the international language of learning; almost all of them involve collaborators that never made it into the annals of the history of science. The naturalistic community that emerges from Vallisneri’s correspondence seems to have been highly interconnected, with little centralization or presence of privileged nodes; rather than dominate or control the web of his correspondents, Vallisneri appears to have been immersed into it. This is hardly surprising considering that he simply merged into a pre-​existing community, though he certainly strove (and largely succeeded) to become its most visible member. In spite of Italy’s diffused localism and political fragmentation, Vallisneri’s community featured a strong cultural identity cemented by a common language and cultural heritage. The defense of the Italian language and culture from foreign, and especially French, penetration was, for example, a widely shared goal within the network. The Paduan naturalist enthusiastically endorsed this program, to which he contributed by advocating the use of Italian instead of Latin in natural philosophy, by publishing most of his works in Italian, and by supervising the scientific part of literary journals that fostered those aims.8 From a social point of view, Vallisneri’s correspondence spanned a broad range of statuses and conditions; it included members of the nobility and even of the highest Italian aristocracy, many of whom numbered among his patients. Their role was often identified with patronage in various forms, with notable exceptions: the most prolific among Vallisneri’s correspondents was a count from Mantua, who for 20 years and through more than 700 letters provided him with a steady stream of medical cases and natural observations. The core of Vallisneri’s naturalistic community, however, was composed of physicians dispersed in large and small towns of the Venetian mainland and nearby areas, sometimes belonging to the minor aristocracy but more often to the so-​called condizione civile. This term (which does not have an obvious equivalent in English or in coeval British society) denoted educated members of the urban elite who were not patricians, but could frequently count on a substantial income from lands, financial rents, or real estate. The members of this social group tended to adopt aristocratic values and lifestyles; in many cases, the final goal of their families was the acquisition of a title of nobility.9 They had the option to practice notary or medicine, the only professions traditionally not regarded as degrading “mechanical arts.” Precisely for this reason, medicine could also be a means of social promotion for families who could afford a university education for at least one of their sons, or an appealing occupation for impoverished patricians who needed to boost their meager income. The status of the medical profession was nonetheless questioned in early-​ eighteenth-​ century Italy:  Veronese marquis Scipione Maffei (1675–​ 1755), a leading intellectual and one of Vallisneri’s closest collaborators, complained in 1732 that his peers increasingly considered medicine a “manual trade” which degraded those who practiced it.10 Maffei’s concerns are supported by the lists of his hometown’s physicians, in which the names of the great aristocratic families,

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184  Ivano Dal Prete once numerous, gradually disappear starting from the mid-​1600s.11 Even so, the importance of physicians of plebeian origin in Italian naturalistic research cannot be overstated: having received university training and education, they could read and write Latin, entertain international correspondence, and take part in public controversies  –​something unbecoming the dignity of a nobleman, and almost impossible for a lower-​class practitioner of little literary education.

“How to observe small things with a microscope” Physician Bernardino Bono from Brescia was a significant representative of the educated practitioners who made up the backbone of Italian naturalistic research. In the 1680s he numbered among the members of the academy of experimental philosophy founded in his hometown by the Jesuit polymath Francesco Lana Terzi.12 In those years, Bono developed a keen interest in microscopy, lens grinding, and instrument making, which served his inquiries into human and animal generation. Vallisneri’s collaboration with Bono and with other amateurs in northern Italy was indeed crucial to the former’s research on generation, and to the production of the influential History of Generation he published in 1721.13 As Dario Generali notes, before the beginning of his correspondence with Bono Vallisneri did not possess the required skills and instruments, especially in the field of high-​power microscopy.14 Vallisneri was introduced to microscopic observation in his college years by an undisputed master, Marcello Malpighi; indeed, he owed his fame (together with his chair at Padua University) to his early work on “insects” and the subsequent studies of parasites and other microscopic “worms.” Such researches could be conducted with low-​power instruments of mediocre workmanship or even with simple magnifying lenses; however, the examination of “eggs” and “spermatic worms” required a wholly different set of techniques and tools. For many years Vallisneri found it impossible with the technical means at his disposal to observe the “spermatic worms” discovered by Leeuwenhoek, to the extent that around 1710, he was still openly skeptical of their actual existence.15 While the reports of the most celebrated authors left Vallisneri unconvinced, it was the information, news, and instruments acquired primarily through local collaborators with whom he was familiar that prompted him to reconsider his stance. In early 1713 he came to know that one of his correspondents, the Venetian pharmacist Girolamo Zannichelli, had seen worms in the spermatic fluid of a cat; others assured Vallisneri that they were visible through an English microscope temporarily available in Venice, where he was finally able to witness their existence in person during a collective observation.16 The most important of the “compelling reasons”17 that led Vallisneri to change his mind, though, might have been Bernardino Bono’s observations. As their correspondence reveals, the physician from Brescia had observed “worms” in the human seed for quite a long time, as he confirmed to Vallisneri in February 1713:

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Figure 6.1 Front page of the letter sent by physician Bernardino Bono to Vallisneri in February 1713, with detailed instructions on how to use the microscopes he manufactured (upper right corner, in Vallisneri’s handwriting: “How to observe small things with the microscope”). Credit: Accademia dei Concordi.

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186  Ivano Dal Prete I have often observed the human seed, where I have sometimes glimpsed eel-​ like bodies similar to worms; but since they moved slowly, as if impelled by an external cause, I did not consider this evidence sufficient to declare them alive. On other occasions I have seen small worms darting around, and certainly alive, especially in the seed of a man infected with a venereal disease in whose sperm I have seen an indescribable amount of the said animals; on other occasions, I haven’t seen any.18 In the following months, Vallisneri was finally able to carry out similar observations continuously thanks to the instruments and to the technical assistance he received from his correspondent. He was especially fond of the microscope sent to him in April 1713:  “divinely crafted” and “much clearer” than the English instrument he used to see “spermatic worms” for the first time a few weeks earlier, it remained since then his “most efficient optical magnifying instrument.”19 The microscope came with two lenses: one adjusted to suit Vallisneri’s preferences, while the other provided the higher powers Bono was accustomed to using –​perhaps intended as a well-​mannered invitation to take further steps in the art of microscopy.20 Bono tried to improve the replicability of his own observations by sending the same microscopes he was using, in an attempt to standardize tools and practices. A number of Bono’s letters included sets of instructions on “how to observe small things with a microscope”:21 an indispensable complement to instruments Vallisneri was little accustomed to, and techniques he had rarely used up until then. It is clear that medical practice kept Bono extremely busy (to the point that he often had to make his observations at night), and his correspondence suggests that he could hardly do without the income from his profession. Yet he would not accept money in return for his work and services: when the Swiss naturalist Louis Bourguet tried to obtain one of Bono’s microscopes, Vallisneri reminded him that they could not be purchased because the “ingenuous, and most learned”22 maker was “a gentleman” who would only give them as gifts.23 He was grateful, though, for the books and journals that Vallisneri loaned to him, or bought on his behalf. Among many other titles, they included Newton’s complete works, in particular the Latin version of his Optiks;24 as a matter of fact, Bono’s understanding of mathematical, optical, and experimental issues far surpassed those of his more famous correspondent, whose scientific competence hardly stretched beyond medicine and natural history. Such contributions cannot be dismissed as mere material or technical support, rather than true intellectual stimuli. In the first place, it is hardly possible to draw sharp distinctions between the two spheres; this is especially true in light of the strong empiricism that characterized Vallisneri’s and, in general, early-​ eighteenth-​century Italian natural history. Furthermore, Bono’s exchanges with Vallisneri were not limited to the material tools and instructions that allowed him to observe objects like the “spermatic worms,” but extended to speculations on their nature and function. The existence of spermatic worms was potentially a serious threat to Vallisneri’s embryological views:  Leeuwenhoek and other

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Ingenuous investigators 187 “spermists” claimed that human embryos were carried by the “small animals” in the male seed, rather than by female eggs, as the Italian naturalist maintained.25 Fortunately for Vallisneri, Martin Lister had recently argued that spermatozoa were simple guests of the spermatic fluid, which did not perform any essential function.26 Vallisneri was informed of Lister’s works by members of his regional community, in particular those residing in the seaport of Leghorn;27 even before, though, Bono had shared with him his long-​held view that spermatic worms were just parasites of the seminal fluid: When human or animal seed contains the small animals, it is sick … exactly in the same way as worms are present in the intestine, as you pointed out in your glorious treatise … yet in many cases, such worms do not prevent a healthy life. For the same reason I am persuaded, that those whose seed is not animated by the little beasts produce a healthier and more vigorous offspring.28 Bono often saw them in the seed of sick individuals, but apparently they rarely showed up in the sperm of healthy and fecund men –​including himself, who fathered 13 strong children:29 “I reiterate that last week I have observed my own sperm, which I collected after licit coitus, and found it absolutely without animals.”30 Admittedly, he discovered some of those worms a few years later, while (“as usual”) he examined the last drops of sperm released after intercourse; but since he had not had any children in the preceding four years, he suspected that his “fecund age” was over. Moreover, he observed that such worms fed not only in the male sperm but even in the “female seed,” namely the “liquid produced by the vaginal glandules in the heat of coitus.”31 Bono tried to involve Vallisneri in his experimental program, asking him to confirm his findings on the female sperm  –​provided, of course, that he could conduct such observations “without sin.”32 Vallisneri’s (or his wife’s) reply has not come down to us, but he did not relate any such experiences of his own. In his treatise on generation, however, he included excerpts of Bono’s letters with complete confidence, and thoroughly adopted the views of his collaborator: If things are [as he reports], and I  completely trust the witnessing of this ingenuous and most learned man, it becomes increasingly clear that the existence or lack of these small animals neither adds, nor detracts any strength to the fecundating power of the seed.33 Vallisneri cared to inform the reader of the History of Generation that he had “always found this excellent microscopist to be entirely reliable.”34 The wording of the sentence and its context imply that Vallisneri repeatedly checked Bono’s observations to his complete satisfaction, so that he could trust and use them on the sole authority of the observer. In the opening pages of the book, the list of the authors who endorsed the existence of spermatozoa includes, along with international celebrities such as

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188  Ivano Dal Prete Leeuwenhoek, Wilhelm Homberg, or Marcello Malpighi, the names of Bono and of several other collaborators whose memory has long vanished.35 Yet their observations, ideas, agendas, instruments, and experiences became part of the work and writings of more celebrated authors like Vallisneri, who publicly acknowledged his debts. Maria Teresa Monti has pointed out that most of the History of Generation is an erudite discussion of the literature on the subject, and of the observational results he gathered from a number of authors.36 Vallisneri’s own experimental work constitutes only a minor part of the book, but after all, he had always maintained that the treatise was to be based on observations “carried out by me, and by others.”37

An apothecary who “overcomes his condition” Vallisneri’s regional network not only provided him with instruments, observations, information, and discussions, but also most of his contact with the rest of Europe and the larger world. Since he published mainly in Italian, he counted on well-​connected collaborators in order to make his works known and acclaimed in the international Republic of Letters. As a matter of fact, they made it possible for Vallisneri to pursue at the same time his defense of the Italian language, and a wide European renown. Furthermore, such intermediations enabled Vallisneri to appropriate knowledge that had already been elaborated and “translated” by correspondents who possessed specific expertise of subjects, places, and people. The relative paucity of his international correspondence may be seen as a sign of isolation and provincialism; on the contrary, I  would argue that in most cases he simply did not need to establish direct long-​range connections in order to exchange information, instruments, and specimens or to obtain academic affiliations. The project of the embryological treatise received the enthusiastic endorsement of Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, who showed considerable interest in Vallisneri’s researches on generation. However, the two natural philosophers never corresponded directly:  their exchanges were mediated by the above-​ mentioned Louis Bourguet, the Venetian philosopher Antonio Conti, or even by the Venetian pharmacist Zannichelli, who was part of Leibniz’s net of correspondents.38 Antonio Conti, one of the most outspoken Italian Newtonians, also updated him on the development of the great European philosophical controversies (such as the querelle between Newton and Leibniz on the invention of calculus). Conti was also the source of much of the philosophical framework backing the History of Generation, adopted by Vallisneri only after a lengthy hesitation.39 The treatise was dedicated to Emperor Charles VI, but once again this was not Vallisneri’s idea: he followed the suggestion of court physician Pio Nicolò Garelli, a colleague and fellow countryman who orchestrated the delicate operation and made sure his treatise would be well received in Vienna.40 Louis Bourguet (1678–​1742) played a crucial role in the spread of Vallisneri’s work, thanks to his collaboration with Jean Le Clerc’s Bibliothèque Choisie.41 While neither an Italian nor a co-​religionist, Bourguet was hardly a foreigner

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Figure 6.2 While championing anti-​Aristotelian and anti-​Galenic views, Vallisneri was careful not to alienate the (still numerous) conservative physicians of his network. One of them, Girolamo Cesare Fantasti, contributed medical and naturalistic observations such as this drawing of a “monstrous placenta” with “grapes of vesicles.” Credit: Accademia dei Concordi.

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190  Ivano Dal Prete to Vallisneri and other naturalists in the Veneto: a Huguenot refugee, between 1696 and 1715 he spent years in the area attending to the Italian branch of the family silk trade business and building strong personal ties with local savants. They certainly considered him a member of their community, and continued to do so after he finally settled in Neuchatel. Even before, he represented an invaluable bridge toward Switzerland and Great Britain, where other family members resided.42 Bourguet belonged to a well-​off family, and could eventually afford to quit trade for a career as a professor of natural history.43 This was not the case of other collaborators whose international relations Vallisneri relied on, like pharmacist Diacinto Cestoni (1637–​1718). Born in central Italy to “poor parents,” Cestoni worked as an apprentice at several apothecary shops in Italy, France, and Switzerland; in 1668 he finally settled in the Tuscan seaport of Leghorn, where he ran a pharmacy until his death.44 His lack of formal education and low status prevented him from publishing, but did not stop him from becoming a master of the experimental method in natural history, and a very close collaborator of outstanding “philosophers” such as Marcello Malpighi and Francesco Redi.45 When Cestoni got in touch with Vallisneri, soon after Redi’s death in 1697, the Paduan naturalist saluted him as “another Redi, a great man,”46 and he certainly meant it. Vallisneri used to write one or two lines on the first sheet of particularly interesting letters, in order to summarize their content; in Cestoni’s case, this happened for most of his nearly 600 letters. Indeed, Vallisneri did not hesitate to invoke his authority against that of Redi himself, the court physician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose position and prestige were unparalleled in late-​seventeenth-​century Italian natural history. Cestoni quickly pointed out the fallacies of Redi’s observations on the generation of certain insects, which were deftly exploited by the supporters of spontaneous generation.47 In 1685, Redi privately acknowledged that the observations of the Livornese apothecary had “put some doubts in my head, to the point that my previous opinion falters … I say, that I need to repeat a lot of experiments.”48 While Redi never publicly amended his position, Cestoni’s work was crucial in the many writings that Vallisneri dedicated to the subject, including the publication of the epistolary exchange between Redi and Cestoni in which he decidedly sided with the pharmacist.49 The correspondence between Vallisneri and Cestoni shows that the northern Italian network embraced an ideally efficient size: information could be exchanged within an area that was fundamentally homogeneous from a cultural point of view, but still large enough to benefit from Italy’s political and economic diversity. While the commercial decadence of Venice seemed unstoppable, Cestoni’s Leghorn quickly rose during the seventeenth century from a hamlet of fishermen to a Mediterranean emporium. Unburdened by the Venetian concern for the protection of local trade, the Medicis established in Leghorn a free port that allowed merchants of every nation and religion to do business on equal terms. Low duties and the immunity granted to merchants and ship captains against creditors

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Ingenuous investigators 191 contributed to turning Leghorn into “a perfect place for northerners to distribute their products as their markets in the Mediterranean expanded.”50 In Cestoni’s time, Leghorn was one of the most vibrant and diverse commercial towns in Europe. Home to the second largest Sephardic community in Europe after Amsterdam,51 it represented a favorite port of call for British trade in the Mediterranean. A  couple of centuries earlier, Paduan naturalists found plenty of exotic goods, specimens, and travel accounts in nearby Venice; around 1700, however, Leghorn had become a much more attractive and better-​supplied market. Apothecary shops like that of Cestoni harvested and redistributed specimens of medical and scientific interest, but they were also venues where local amateurs, Jewish scholars, and curious foreigners convened to observe and discuss natural productions.52 Vallisneri soon learned that Leghorn apothecaries could be men of far-​reaching connections, as well as of uncommon experimental skills. It was Cestoni who arranged for Vallisneri’s appointment to the Royal Society of London, thanks to his contacts with the secretary, Martin Lister (who could read Italian), whom he befriended through the British consul in Leghorn.53 Equally well-​connected southward, Cestoni obtained from his acquaintances in Tunis dozens of the chameleons that Vallisneri longed to study, in order to take them out of the domain of the marvelous and into that of the “holy and unchangeable” laws of nature.54 It is unquestionable that Vallisneri’s book on the History of the African Chameleon (1715)55 would never have been written without Cestoni’s input and the opportunities Leghorn could offer. The first live chameleons Vallisneri ever saw were sent to him in 1696 or 1697 by his “generous and faithful friend.”56 By that time, Cestoni had “toyed” with them for almost 30  years; having already accumulated an unparalleled amount of observations concerning their habits, behavior, and physical peculiarities, he was determined to say “something new” on the subject.57 It is possible that the beginning of his correspondence with the Paduan naturalist was occasioned (at least in part) by his desire to publish his observations under the aegis of Vallisneri, whom Cestoni recognized as the true heir to Malpighi and Redi. Years earlier, Cestoni had likewise published his discovery of the parasitic origin of scabies under the name of a younger collaborator of higher social status.58 In the following years he continued to supply Vallisneri with chameleons both dried and alive, and to stimulate the curiosity of his correspondent. In many cases, Cestoni outlined the experimental program and suggested to Vallisneri the observations that should be included in the forthcoming publication: I do not know if you intend to discuss in your work the issue of hearing in chameleons. This would be necessary though, because I find in Blaes, that he says they can hear. I disagree, and it can be definitely said that they do not have any hearing orifices.59

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192  Ivano Dal Prete Vallisneri’s contribution to the book, finally published in 1715, was no doubt extensive: he provided the indispensable historical and literary apparatus, as well as the most delicate anatomical dissections. Yet, Cestoni’s presence was pervasive:  apart from the frequent direct quotations from Cestoni’s letters (and the countless indirect ones), Vallisneri included the complete transcription of an 11-​ page journal of daily observations conducted by his Livornese correspondent. An even longer report on a different topic was also included in the volume.60 Bernardino Bono’s or Diacinto Cestoni’s relationships with Vallisneri illustrate how the research agendas of a celebrated naturalist were often negotiated at a local or regional level, through interactions with largely unknown (to us) collaborators who could obtain full credit for their work. It is also apparent why Vallisneri often refrained from cultivating long-​range connections, preferring instead the intermediation of his network. Bono’s microscopes proved as satisfying as the renowned but expensive and hard-​to-​get British instruments (which Bono certainly studied in detail). Likewise, a direct correspondent in Tunis could never have served him as efficiently as Cestoni: like Bono’s instruments, Cestoni’s chameleons came complete with sets of “directions,” specifically composed for a naturalist residing in northern Italy. How do chameleons fare in captivity? What is the best way to ship them? How do you feed them? What can they eat? How do you encourage them to mate? Above all, how do you keep them alive through a harsh European winter? The experience that Cestoni shared with Vallisneri saved him years, money, and dozens of uncooperative or dead chameleons. An agent in Africa could hardly have answered those questions: exotic objects or specimens had to be adapted to local specificities, in order to generate new knowledge.

The exotic round the corner: or, the social history of fossils In the early eighteenth century many parts of Europe, sometimes literally round the corner, continued to be almost as “exotic,” foreign, and even hostile as distant continents. New worlds and marvels were being discovered not only beyond the European borders, but also within, thanks in particular to the practice of naturalistic travel which was already well established by this time among Italian naturalists. The fact that the distances involved could be measured in tens of miles, rather than thousands, did not make these trips less significant, less rewarding, or, sometimes, less dangerous. Naturalistic travel remained a risky adventure into uncharted territories, regardless of whether they were located in the Americas or just a few dozen miles away. The exceptional paleontological site of Bolca (well known for its extremely well-​preserved fossil fish) is located at an elevation of just 2,000 feet, and less than 17 miles from Verona as the crow flies. In the early eighteenth century, however, it was a remote location with no suitable access roads, and few naturalists ever ventured to visit it  –​sometimes in spite of their claims to the contrary. When in 1725 Marquis Maffei finally resolved to see the place in person, he found that the extenuating trip required a “hardened soldier,” or at least a good “cowman.”61 Bolognese naturalist Ferdinando Bassi fell from a horse during one of

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Ingenuous investigators 193 his naturalistic travels, suffering permanent injuries to one of his legs.62 Vallisneri never went to the “mountain of fish,” but he also experienced the hazards of geological exploration as he tried to survey the cave known as “Devil’s Hollow,” not far from his hometown of Reggio Emilia.63 Nature was not the only hurdle its investigators had to face: their accounts are revealing indeed of the gulf of hostility and distrust that in the eighteenth century still separated the urban elites from the inhabitants of isolated mountain districts. On Monte Baldo, shepherds unceremoniously stoned Marquis Maffei and the French naturalist François Séguier (1703–​1784; Séguier was for many years Maffei’s main collaborator), whom the locals believed to be sorcerers intent on luring storms over their flocks.64 Having traveled to the Venetian Dalmatia to study its flora, botanist Vitaliano Donati “received many injuries from those barbarians and yokels” so that Séguier counted him among the “martyrs of botany.”65 Their very language was often strange and foreign: the inhabitants of the “mountain of fish” of Bolca and of the nearby valleys spoke what Maffei identified as a German dialect, but so archaic that “actual Germans can hardly understand it.”66 He readily accepted the humanistic tradition according to which they descended from a stock of northern barbarians, the “Cimbri” famously routed by Gaius Marius in 101 B C .67 Cultural and social differences notwithstanding, naturalists in Europe were in dire need of local knowledge as much as their colleagues exploring the farthest corners of the Earth. During a botanical trip, Séguier was poisoned by a mushroom he mistook for a harmless variety because of his ignorance of local flora. He only survived thanks to the traditional therapy suggested by the villagers: the miraculous oil that burned before an image of the Virgin, which instantly rid the botanist’s stomach of the “fateful mushroom.”68 Whether the healing was supernatural or due to the composition of the “heavy and rancid grease” (as Séguier firmly held) is beside the point: the oil worked, as the locals knew. Local knowledge and labor were also indispensable in the identification and excavation of well-​preserved fossil fish, which represented vital evidence in the controversy on the age of the earth and the role of the biblical Flood. Diluvialists and anti-​ diluvialists alike anxiously sought relics from the local past, in order to compare them with living species from distant oceans and different climates. Together with other kinds of specimens, fossils fueled an economy of trade and exchange that could hardly do without the embodied skills of quarrymen and shepherds, familiar with the area and the extraction techniques. The social and geographic otherness of those suppliers meant that naturalists often needed local agents of some sort. Crucial intermediation was thus provided by members of the only literate network that could reach every corner of Catholic Europe:  that of the parish priests, who would often buy specimens from their parishioners in order to resell them to other ecclesiastics in nearby towns. In 1710, Marquis Maffei’s secretary was negotiating on behalf of Louis Bourguet the purchase of a large number of fossils from a Veronese priest. The clergyman obtained such specimens from peasants or other ecclesiastics living in the countryside, in order to resell them wholesale to naturalists and collectors in town.

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194  Ivano Dal Prete Maffei’s secretary urged Bourguet to buy the whole lot, as such objects were in high demand in other countries (“especially in Holland”) and would constitute valuable exchange items. The alternative, namely to embark on a naturalistic trip, was judged impractical as they were “very rarely” organized and the outcome was by no means certain.69 As the debate on the Flood called for increasingly detailed and specific specimens, urban museums could even be bettered by collections in the countryside. According to Séguier, around 1740, the collection of fossil fish belonging to a parish priest in a valley north of Verona was “infinitely above any other in Europe.”70 As the owner himself acknowledged, he owed many of the best finds to his servant’s “memorable eye, and luck.”71 Tellingly, the booklets he published revealed his familiarity with local quarries and quarrymen, as well as their culture and language. Maffei’s secretary emphasized the role of parish priests in instructing local gatherers, because in his (perhaps questionable) opinion “the vulgar cannot tell stone from stone,” except for those used in construction works.72 Of course, naturalists regretted their dependence on what they regarded as greedy, unlearned suppliers. Their alleged ignorance, status, and mercenary attitude made them unreliable; dealing with them was annoying and unpleasant. Florentine naturalist Pier Antonio Micheli (himself an ecclesiastic) waited in vain for an expedition of botanical specimens from Monte Baldo, in the Venetian Alps: the local “gatherers” hired by a country physician who corresponded with him failed to fulfill their side of the agreement, citing poor health, unreasonable requests, and other “feeble excuses.”73 Yet, their competence and ability to procure the specimens Micheli coveted was never questioned. In their epistolary exchange, Micheli’s correspondent termed them “botanists” at first; they became simple “gatherers” only when they failed to deliver.74 Greed and unreliability, rather than learning or social status, set them apart from the “ingenuous” philosopher. Marquis Maffei’s scorn did not spare those Venetian noblemen who collected antiquities or natural curiosities just to resell them for a profit.75 On the other hand, he held in high esteem a merchant like Bourguet, whom he considered “a good man, honorable and reasonable, who recognizes truth when it is shown to him.”76 Apparently, Bourguet was able to draw a sharp line between silk trade and natural history, to the point that his profession did not affect his “ingenuousness.” Fossils could be bought and sold but not in transactions between naturalists, who otherwise would have degraded themselves to the condition of unreliable “merchants.” Lower-​class practitioners who were willing to conform to the etiquette of the Republic of Letters could indeed become recognized members of the naturalists’ community. Around 1710, Bartolomeo Martini (†1720) made a living as a village surgeon in the Alpine foothills between Verona and Vicenza. While he “did not meddle” with Latin, having studied only “some orthography, and little else,”77 he benefited from his geographical location and his familiarity with the locals in providing other collectors with fossils extracted in the area. A correspondent of

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Ingenuous investigators 195 Micheli, Zannichelli, and Bourguet as well as of Vallisneri, in 1710 he accompanied the Swiss merchant and the Venetian pharmacist on a naturalistic trip across the Venetian prealps, showing them “every site, where I knew there were petrifications of some sort.”78 Apart from such rare occasions, Martini periodically shipped marine fossils and whole herbals to each of them.79 He obtained in turn objects for his own collection, but he needed above all books, news, journals, and recognition; Vallisneri could readily provide all of them. Vallisneri’s support and encouragement were probably instrumental in the publications of Martini’s botanical works,80 and the credit he received emboldened him to establish a naturalistic academy under the patronage of a local patrician.81 Yet he always remained a manual worker of limited means, who struggled to pay for the books and journals he bought through Vallisneri;82 when he died prematurely, his correspondents regretted the fate of his children, who were left to face a future of economic hardship.83 The Veronese physician Sebastiano Rotari (1667–​1742) seems to have been another key supplier of fossils for Vallisneri’s museum, but unlike Martini he belonged to the educated urban classes. Apart from receiving regular expeditions, Vallisneri took advantage of visits to aristocratic patients in nearby cities to explore and “loot” local collections. On one of these occasions, Maffei’s secretary handed over to the Paduan physician a “heavy basket full of petrified shellfish,” and complained that not much of notice was left in Rotari’s cabinet after Vallisneri stopped by.84 Not satisfied yet, Vallisneri spent the next couple of days sifting through Count Moscardo’s natural curiosities.85 Verona was a favorite destination for this peculiar kind of “naturalistic travel,” as the town (the second largest in the Venetian state) combined the paleontological and botanical richness of its territory with local traditions in natural history which dated back to the Renaissance. Rotari was similarly obliging to Louis Bourguet, the Bolognese naturalist Giacinto Vogli, and even the famous Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch, with whom he exchanged letters and specimens.86 While, according to his own accounts, Rotari undertook expeditions in the countryside every fall, there is little doubt that he received many of his most remarkable specimens from intermediaries. In particular, it seems unlikely that he ever visited the site of Bolca, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding.87 In exchange for such generosity, Rotari expected recognition and cultural prestige that he could use in his professional disputes with the local Galenists, or in the social ascent of his family, who were ennobled shortly after his death. Vallisneri certainly repaid him well when he published Rotari’s description of the “mountain of fish” as an introduction to his influential treatise on the history of the earth and the origin of marine fossils (On Marine Petrifications Found on Mountains, 1721).88 It is telling that Vallisneri’s book was conceived of as an epistolary conversation between the author and other members of his community; while its bulk was written by Vallisneri himself in the form of epistolary “responses” to Rotari and others, it also includes letters from a number of both named and unnamed correspondents.89 Not unlike his work on generation, Vallisneri’s geological

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196  Ivano Dal Prete treatise was hardly conceivable outside the regional network that contributed observations, materials, discussions, and whole chapters. With these considerations I do not aim to diminish Vallisneri’s own originality, as if the “network” watered down personalities, differing opinions, and controversies into an undifferentiated blend where individual contributions were no longer discernible. I  would argue, on the contrary, that under the aegis of Vallisneri’s “brand” similarly strong and original voices found expression and visibility. By publishing his correspondents’ views, Vallisneri let other naturalists tackle problems he was unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, or that his public position did not allow him to discuss openly. Their opinions did not necessarily coincide with his, thus reproducing the plurality that existed within the community and contributing to the ambiguity and “conflicting inputs”90 that often characterize Vallisneri’s major works. Nonetheless, the final product reflected, in general, the author’s own view of a certain issue, thanks to the firm control he retained over the publication. In his 1721 geological work, for example, Vallisneri gave room to Rotari’s allusions to the antiquity of the world, or to mathematician Riccati’s conjectures that the “useless miracle” (as Vallisneri called it) of the Flood might have been limited to parts of the earth.91 Conversely, he did not invite any contributions from avowed diluvialists such as Scheuchzer, Bourguet, or Zannichelli, who figured otherwise among his closest correspondents. A  staunch anti-​diluvialist and an anti-​scripturalist, Vallisneri was witnessing the alarming rise of diluvialism in Italian natural history, which had traditionally been reluctant to conform to the letter of Genesis.92 His correspondence still echoes the perceived dichotomy between a Protestant natural history permeated by scripturalism, and a less literalist Catholic tradition; in practice, though, this distinction was becoming less and less meaningful. Among Vallisneri’s Italian correspondents, even those who downplayed the role of the Flood seemed increasingly willing to accept the short chronology of the Bible, at least for the creation of the earth if not of the whole universe.93 The pursuit of a leading role in such a diversified community, and the preservation of his position at Padua University, required skillful diplomacy and the use of different languages to different people. This strategy represented, of course, a common trait of the European Republic of Letters;94 in Vallisneri’s case, however, it was further complicated by the need to conceal his lukewarm religiosity and his heterodox beliefs –​which makes his success all the more remarkable.95

Conclusions Antonio Vallisneri’s correspondence provides rare insights into the composition and functioning of an early-​eighteenth-​century regional scientific community.96 If the northern Italian case is representative of broader tendencies, such networks based on cultural and geographical closeness and a thick web of short-​ range exchanges could have been essential to the elaboration of early modern

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Ingenuous investigators 197 natural knowledge. Models based on long-​range interactions between highly visible scholars could hardly explain Vallisneri’s scientific production. The ideas, instances, and agendas it represented were those of the author, and he greatly contributed to their development; but he drew them upon, and exchanged them with, the surrounding scientific environment in which he was immersed like a fish in water. Moreover, members of his regional network acted as the indispensable mediators that allowed him to appropriate what was produced in other parts of the world  –​be it British Newtonianism, African chameleons, or Alpine fossils –​and make his own work known in geographically and culturally different contexts. In this sense, the metaphorical surface of Vallisneri’s naturalistic community represented one of the “intercultural contact zones” through which, according to Kapil Raj, scientific knowledge could be “translated” into local terms and appropriated. Rather than by the actions of a few individuals, the world was being explored, explained, and transformed by myriad negotiations among a large number of mostly unknown, and often lower-​class, agents, each one contributing to the major works that too often we regard as the production of a single “author.” The case of Vallisneri’s network shows that those lower-​class contributors could be integrated into a “Republic of Letters” still informed by aristocratic values. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer famously characterized the new experimental science as a business for gentlemen of independent means, in which only status could guarantee the credibility of the observer.97 While this model has been undermined by recent scholarship,98 it often remains unclear whether and how naturalists involved in the “mechanical arts” could be regarded as reliable collaborators by acknowledged “philosophers.” This study has shown that gentlemanly rhetoric was, in fact, pervasive even in Italian natural history. Bernardino Bono would never sell his microscopes for money; trading fossils for a profit clearly signaled that the collector was not interested in being part of the naturalists’ community. Cestoni (who could not lay the slightest claim to gentlemanly status) emphasized that, not having children, he did not need to accumulate money and was thus free to pursue “philosophy.”99 In spite of that, low status never prevented Vallisneri from trusting and crediting the observations of collaborators who had proved their “virtue” and shown themselves to be “ingenuous investigators” of nature. Indeed, the connection between social status and trustworthiness was more flexible (in the Italian context at least) than assumed in Shapin’s analysis. Gentlemanly condition was not a strict requirement, as members of the naturalistic community only needed to share in some of the gentlemanly values that characterized the true “philosopher.” Apothecaries, surgeons, and, exceptionally, even women100 could thus gain for themselves a status of credibility thanks to the practice of virtue. This quality allowed a practitioner to raise himself “above his condition” (as Vallisneri wrote of Cestoni), an elevation that was regarded as moral as well as cultural.

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198  Ivano Dal Prete Excessively high social status could in fact endanger, rather than guarantee, one’s “ingenuity.” As Cestoni wrote, Redi the philosopher ingenuously “acknowledged that he was wrong” about the generation of certain insects, but Redi the courtier refused to make his confession public. Unlike Malpighi, Redi, or Galileo, Vallisneri did not pursue a position at court; in spite of the heavy burden of teaching, he considered his chair at Padua University to be better suited to the exercise of “philosophical freedom.”101 The idea that “virtue” does not coincide with status alone is consistent with early modern representations of gentlemanship. Baldassare Castiglione’s immensely influential Book of the Courtier, and much of later literature, established that virtue was the truest mark of nobility, but also that no one was born a “virtuoso.” On the contrary, virtue can and must be learned: I am of the firm opinion then, that moral Virtues are not in us altogether from Nature … That Virtues may be acquired … is a certain Truth; because we are born as apt to receive them, as we are Vices. And therefore of both we gain a Habit, through repeated Acts or Customs; so that first of all we put in Practice Virtue or vice, and afterwards become virtuous or vicious accordingly. The contrary we find in things natural.102 In practice, knowing and achieving virtue required proper education, so that it could rarely go without birth and wealth. Nonetheless, natural history was one of those spaces where a virtuous plebeian could, to some extent, attain gentlemanly qualities and be entrusted with an active part in the production of knowledge.

Acknowledgments I conducted the research for this chapter during my fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, New  York, in 2012–​2013. I  am grateful to David Freedberg for his suggestions and advice. I learned a lot from my exchanges with Al Coppola occasioned by the panel on “Reassessing the Modest Witness,” NEASECS 2012. Dario Generali, Maria Teresa Monti, and Francesco Luzzini have generously helped my research with their expertise on Vallisneri’s correspondence and his embryological and geological work.

List of abbreviations: ASRE = Archivio di Stato, Reggio Emilia BAC = Biblioteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi, Rovigo BCV = Biblioteca Civica, Verona BLL = Biblioteca Labronica, Leghorn BMF = Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence BPUN = Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Neuchâtel BMN = Bibliothèque Municipale, Nimes

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Notes 1 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science:  Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–​ 1800 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (2007)), 8–​9. 2 Ibid., 9–​13. 3 Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous:  Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3. 4 Carol Pal, Republic of Women:  Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11. 5 A considerable amount of scholarship on Vallisneri and primary sources have become available in recent years, thanks in particular to the efforts of the “Edizione Nazionale” of Vallisneri’s works led by Dario Generali and Maria Teresa Monti. Rather than provide a list of essential literature, I cite relevant works in the course of this chapter as appropriate. For a general outline of Vallisneri’s background and early research, see Dario Generali, Antonio Vallisneri:  Gli anni della formazione e le prime ricerche (Florence: Olschki, 2007). 6 Most of the letters in Vallisneri’s correspondence that I cite in this chapter have been retrieved from the online inventory available at: www.vallisneri.it/​inventario. shtml. While still incomplete, it includes over 12,000 letters (almost 2,900 transcribed) from about 800 correspondents. The availability of an electronic inventory has been crucial to this research. See also D.  Generali, ed., Antonio Vallisneri: Epistolario, 3 vols. (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1991, 1998; Florence: Olschki, 2005 (on CD)). 7 This chapter is partly an answer to the much-​debated problem of whether and how detailed case studies can still be relevant in the “Age of Global History.” With particular reference to the Italian tradition of microhistory, see the brilliant discussion in Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2011). 8 D. Generali, ed., Antonio Vallisneri:  Che ogni Italiano debba scrivere in lingua purgata Italiana (Florence: Olschki, 2013); idem, “Il ‘Giornale De’ Letterati d’Italia’ e la cultura veneta del primo Settecento,” Rivista Di Storia Della Filosofia 39, no. 2 (1984): 243–​ 281; Massimo Rinaldi and Andrea Castellani, eds., A. Vallisneri:  Saggio d’istoria medica, e naturale, colla spiegazione de’nomi, alla medesima spettanti, posti per alfabeto (Florence: Olschki, 2012). It should be noted that thoughts of political reunification were entirely alien to this cultural program. In Vallisneri’s mind, Italy’s borders seem to have more or less coincided with those of his regional network. 9 On issues of “citizenship” and social distinctions among urban elites in early modern Italy, see Leonida Tedoldi, Cittadini minori: Cittadinanza, integrazione e diritti reali nella Brescia veneta (sec. XVI–​XVIII) (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004). 10 Scipione Maffei, Verona Illustrata (Verona:  Jacopo Vallarsi and Pierantonio Berno, 1732), vol. 3, 18. 11 Ivano Dal Prete, Scienza e Società nel Settecento Veneto:  il caso veronese, 1680–​1796 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2008), 174. 12 Bono’s only known publications are five letters included in a volume of academic proceedings:  Acta Novae Academiae Philexoticorum Naturae, et Artis (Brescia:  Maria Ricciardi, 1687), 29–​30, 91–​97, 170–​176, 200–​206, 214–​232. On Lana Terzi and his short-​lived academy, see Clelia Pighetti, ed., L’opera scientifica di Francesco Lana terzi S. I. 1631–​1687 (Brescia: Comune di Brescia, 1989).

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200  Ivano Dal Prete 13 Maria Teresa Monti and François Duchesneau, eds., Antonio Vallisneri:  Istoria della Generazione dell’uomo, e degli animali, 2  vols. (Florence:  Olschki, 2009), vol. 1.  On Vallisneri’s History of Generation in the cultural, social, and political context of eighteenth-​century Italy, see Ivano Dal Prete, “Cultures and Politics of Preformism in Eighteenth-​Century Italy,” in The Secrets of Generation:  Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Ray Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 59–​78. 14 D. Generali, “L’uso del microscopio in Vallisneri,” in From Makers to Users: Microscopes, Markets and Scientific Practices in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Generali and Marc J. Ratcliff (Florence: Olschki, 2007), 231–​270. 15 Ibid., 253. 16 For a detailed analysis and reconstruction of Vallisneri’s observations of spermatozoa with a Wilson microscope, see Francesco Luzzini, “Antonio Vallisneri e la questione dei vermicelli spermatici:  un’indagine storico-​naturalistica,” in Generali and Ratcliff, eds., From Makers to Users, 73–​89. 17 M.  T. Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” in Monti and Duchesneau, eds., Antonio Vallisneri: Istoria della Generazione, p. L. 18 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, Brescia, February 23, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 1. Bono’s description is consistent with observations carried out on sperm of different ages. 19 Generali, “L’uso del microscopio in Vallisneri,” 232. 20 B. Bono to Vallisneri, Brescia, March 30, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 3. 21 Vallisneri’s note on a letter from B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, Brescia, February 23, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 1. 22 Monti and Duchesneau, eds., Antonio Vallisneri:  Istoria della Generazione, vol. 1, 126–​127. 23 A. Vallisneri to L.  Bourguet, Padua, April 28, 1713. Generali, ed., Antonio Vallisneri: Epistolario, vol. 2, 300–​301. 24 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, Brescia, June 9, 1713. BAC, 323/​8, n. 5. 25 Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” xxiii–​xxxi. 26 Luzzini, “Antonio Vallisneri e la questione dei vermicelli spermatici,” 77. 27 Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” lvi. 28 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, Brescia, March 16, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 2. 29 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, March 16, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 2. 30 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, June 9, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 5. 31 B. Bono to A. Vallisneri, February 23, 1713. BAC, Conc. 323/​8, n. 1. 32 Ibid. 33 Duchesneau and Monti, eds., Antonio Vallisneri:  Istoria della Generazione, vol. 1, 126–​127. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 13–​29. 36 Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” xxiii–​xxviii. 37 A. Vallisneri to L. Bourguet, Padua, March 6, 1718. BPU, Ms. 1282, cc. 227–​228. 38 D. Generali, “Antonio Vallisneri ‘corrispondente’ leibniziano,” in Rapporti di scienziati europei con lo studio bolognese tra ’600 e ’700: Studi e memorie per la storia dell’Università di Bologna, ed. Marta Cavazza (Bologna: Istituto per la storia dell’Università, 1987), vol. 6, 125–​140. On Zannichelli, see Italo Novelli, La curiosita e l’ingegno: collezionismo scientifico e metodo sperimentale a Padova nel settecento (Padua: Università degli Studi di Padova, Centro Musei scientifici, 2000), 78–​83. 39 Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” liii–​lxxvii.

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Ingenuous investigators 201 40 Duchesneau and Monti, eds., Antonio Vallisneri: Istoria della Generazione, vol. 1, 13, n. 1, n. 2. 41 See Lydia Barnett, “Strategies of Toleration: Talking across Confessions in the Alpine Republic of Letters,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 48, no. 2 (winter 2015): 141–​157. 42 On Bourguet’s relations with naturalists in the Veneto, see Dal Prete, Scienza e Società nel Settecento Veneto, 218–​219. The 1710–​1720 correspondence between Bourguet and Ottavio Alecchi, for many years Marquis Maffei’s secretary, is every bit as fascinating and instructive as Bourguet’s exchanges with Vallisneri. See also: Francesca Bianca Crucitti Ullrich, “Scipione Maffei e la sua corrispondenza inedita con Louis Bourguet,” Memorie dell’Accademia di Scienze, lettere ed arti di Venezia, Classe di Scienze morali, lettere ed arti, vol. XXXIV –​fasc. IV, (Venezia, 1969), 5–​101. 43 See François Ellenberger, “Bourguet, Louis,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, Scribner, 1978), vol. 15, suppl. I, 52–​59. 44 On Cestoni and his relationship with Vallisneri, see D. Generali, “Uno speziale che ‘superava la sua condizione’: Il caso dell’invisibilità postuma di Diacinto Cestoni,” in Figure dell’invisibilità: Le scienze della vita nell’Italia d’Antico Regime, ed. M. T. Monti and M. Ratcliff (Florence: Olschki, 2004), 83–​118; Mario Tanga, Giacinto Cestoni, i rapporti con Redi e le scienze della vita nel XVIII secolo, PhD dissertation, University of Pisa, 2008. 45 Cestoni expanded on his friendships with Redi in a letter to Vallisneri dated Leghorn, Sept. 16, 1697. BMF, Mss. Redi-​Cestoni, 73, n. 5. 46 A. Vallisneri to D. Cestoni, Mantua, June 27, 1697. BMF, Mss. Redi-​Cestoni, 74, n. 247. 47 In particular, the Jesuit naturalist Filippo Buonanni. See Michela Fazzari, “Filippo Buonanni:  un caso di invisibilità creata dai contemporani, ovvero come si diventa invisibili,” in Monti and Ratcliff, eds., Figure dell’invisibilità, 21–​82. 48 “La Galleria di Minerva,” 1708, 69. See also I.  Dal Prete, ed., Antonio Vallisneri: Miglioramenti, e correzioni d’alcune esperienze ed osservazioni del Signor Redi (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 5–​16. 49 See on this subject I.  Dal Prete, “Introduzione,” in Dal Prete, ed., Antonio Vallisneri, 5–​16. 50 Corey Tazzara, “Managing Free Trade in Early Modern Europe:  Institutions, Information, and the Free Port of Livorno,” The Journal of Modern History 86 (September 2014): 493–​529, 502. 51 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers:  The Sephardic Diaspora, Leghorn, and Cross-​Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 5. 52 Tanga, Giacinto Cestoni, 18. According to Cestoni himself, in 1698 Leghorn was home to 22 apothecaries, 14 physicians, and as many surgeons. D. Cestoni to A. Vallisneri, Leghorn, Feb. 3, 1698; BMF, Mss. Redi-​Cestoni, 73, n. 25. 53 Generali, “Uno speziale che ‘superava la sua condizione’,” 108–​111. 54 A. Vallisneri, Nuova Giunta di Osservazioni, e di Esperienze intorno all’Istoria Medica, e Naturale (Padua: Manfrè, 1726), 43–​45. 55 A. Vallisneri, Istoria del camaleonte affricano, e di vari animali d’Italia (Venice:  G. Hertz, 1715). 56 Ibid., 3. Vallisneri wrote that he received them in November 1696, but Cestoni’s first letter to Vallisneri (apparently, the first ever written rather the earliest surviving one) is dated June 14, 1697. 57 D. Cestoni to A. Vallisneri, Leghorn, September 16, 1697. BMF, Mss. Redi-​Cestoni, 73, n. 5.

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202  Ivano Dal Prete 58 Cosimo Bonomo, Osservazioni intorno a’ pellicelli del corpo umano, fatte dal dottor Gio. Cosimo Bonomo ecc. (Florence: Piero Matini, 1687). For a detailed study of the genesis and reception of this work, see Tanga, Giacinto Cestoni, 90–​111. It should be noted that Cestoni could certainly read Latin (though not write it) and that this kind of reading skill must have been rather common among low-​class naturalists. 59 D. Cestoni to A.  Vallisneri, Leghorn, July 9, 1700. BMF, Mss. Redi-​Cestoni, 74, n.  148. Cestoni referred to G.  Blaes (or Blasius), Anatome animalium (Amsterdam, Joannis à Someren, 1681). 60 Vallisneri, Istoria del camaleonte affricano, 35–​46; D.  Cestoni, Istoria della Grana del Kermes, ec. del Sig. Diacinto Cestoni, esposta in una lettera al Sig. Vallisneri, 161–​179. 61 S. Maffei to A. Vallisneri, Verona, April 11, 1725; BLL, Autografoteca Bastogi, cass. 67, ins. 62, n. 63. 62 Jean François Séguier to Carlo Allioni, Verona, September 30, 1753. BMN, ms. 309, f. 150r. 63 F. Luzzini, Il miracolo inutile: Antonio Vallisneri e le scienze della Terra in Europa tra XVII e XVIII secolo (Florence: Olschki, 2013), 95–​96. 64 Agostino Goiran, “Il marchese Scipione Maffei:  Giovanni Francesco Séguier,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia di Agricoltura, Commercio ed Arti di Verona (4th series) 11 (1910): 1–​41, 35–​36. 65 J. F. Séguier to C. Allioni, Verona, August 22, 1751. BMN, ms. 309, f. 72r. 66 S. Maffei, Verona Illustrata (Verona:  Jacopo Vallarsi and Pierantonio Berno, 1732), vol. 1, 107. 67 Ibid., 107–​109. 68 Quoted in Goiran, “Il marchese Scipione Maffei,” 29. 69 Ottavio Alecchi to Louis Bourguet, Verona, November 5, 1710. BPUN, ms. 1265. 70 F. Séguier, Petrifications du Veronoise. BMN, ms. 90, f. 44r. 71 Giovanni Giacomo Spada, Dissertazione Ove si prova, che li Petrificati Corpi Marini, che nei Monti adiacenti a Verona si trovano, non sono Scherzi di Natura, né Diluviani; ma Antidiluviani (Verona: Dionigi Ramanzini, 1737), 10. 72 O. Alecchi to L. Bourguet, Verona, Jan. 30, 1712; BPUN, ms. 1265. 73 Carlo Costanzi to Pier Antonio Micheli, Verona, Dec. 4, 1734. BNCF, Targ. Tozz. 162. Retrieved from: www.vallisneri.it/​inventario.shtml. 74 “Botanici” and “Collettori” in Italian. 75 See Dal Prete, Scienza e Società nel Settecento Veneto, 232. 76 S. Maffei to Antonio Olivieri, Verona, Feb. 6, 1743; Celestino Garibotto, Scipione Maffei. Epistolario (Milan: Giuffré, 1955), 1061. 77 Bartolomeo Martini to A.  Vallisneri, Monteforte, March 10, 1710; ASRE, Fondo Brunelli, X, c. 502. 78 B. Martini to A. Vallisneri, Monteforte, October 13, 1711. ASRE, Fondo Brunelli, X, c. 505. 79 On the herbals Martini donated to Zannichelli and Micheli, see Novelli, La curiosità e l’ingegno, 175–​178. 80 An unpublished botanical manuscript, composed by Martini in 1707, is still preserved among Vallisneri’s papers. BAC, Autografi, conc. 342/​349bis. 81 Dal Prete, Scienza e Società nel Settecento Veneto, 242. 82 B. Martini to A. Vallisneri, Monteforte, March 10, 1710; ASRE, Fondo Brunelli, X, c. 502. 83 G. G. Zannichelli to P. A. Micheli, Venice, May 18, 1720. BNCF, Targ. Tozz. 177. Retrieved from: www.vallisneri.it/​inventario.shtml.

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Ingenuous investigators 203 84 85 86 87

O. Alecchi to L. Bourguet, Verona, November 23, 1711. BPUN, ms. 1265. A. Vallisneri to L. Bourguet, Padua, November 25, 1711. Ibid.; Generali, Antonio Vallisneri: Epistolario, vol. 1, 82–​83, n. 307. On his own copy of Vallisneri’s De Corpi Marini, Maffei annotated that Rotari “was never there, nor he ever thought of going”; BCV, POST.249, p. 2. See also: S. Maffei to A. Vallisneri, Verona, April 11, 1725; BLL, Autografoteca Bastogi, cass. 67, ins. 62, n. 63. 88 Sebastiano Rotari, “Decrizione di vari Crostacei e produzioni di Mare, che si trovano su’Monti di Verona etc.,” in A. Vallisneri, De’ corpi marini, che su’ Monti si trovano (Venice: Lovisa, 1721), 1–​4. 89 See Luzzini, Il miracolo inutile, 212–​213, 215–​216. 90 Monti, “La scrittura e i gesti dell’Istoria,” lxix. 91 In private, Vallisneri criticized even this milder diluvialism. See A. Vallisneri to Jacopo Riccati, Padua, July 13, 1719; private archive of the family Degli Azzoni-​Avogadro, Ms. Ric., II, cc. 309–​316. 92 For a detailed discussion, see I. Dal Prete, “ ‘Being the World Eternal…’: The Age of the Earth in Renaissance Italy,” Isis 105 (2014): 292–​317; Luzzini, Il miracolo inutile, 212–​213. 93 See, for example, O.  Alecchi to L.  Bourguet, Verona, August 19, 2014. BPUN, ms. 1265. 94 Barnett, “Strategies of Toleration,” 143. 95 Even modern scholars have described Vallisneri as a devout Catholic, engaged in interfaith dialogue with his Calvinist correspondents. See Barnett, “Strategies of Toleration.” I  would argue that Vallisneri’s religiosity is in fact a complex issue: parts of his correspondence (in particular, that with Antonio Conti) strongly suggest that he paid only lip service to Catholic beliefs and practices, especially in the late part of his life. While he certainly believed in a creator deity, it is debatable whether he identified his God with that of the Catholic tradition. According to Massimo Mazzotti, “Enlightened Catholics believed that Vallisneri’s work might provide a framework for harmonizing religious orthodoxy with the modern natural sciences”; M. Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 103. The ambiguity and flexibility built in most of Vallisneri’s works certainly made such an operation possible, regardless of whether Vallisneri himself can be considered an “enlightened Catholic.” 96 Among comparable works, Mary Terrall’s recent book has investigated (but with a different focus) the role of Parisian and provincial correspondents in René de Réaumur’s (1683–​1757) scientific research. 97 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump:  Boyle, Hobbes and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 98 Among the essential literature, see Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004); Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2008); Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels:  Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002). 99 Silvestro Baglioni, ed., Giacinto Cestoni: Epistolario, 2 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1940–​1941), vol. 1, 105–​106.

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204  Ivano Dal Prete 100 Clelia Grillo Borromeo, born and married into the highest Italian aristocracy, benefited from her close relationship to Vallisneri to become one of the most celebrated “femmes savantes” in eighteenth-​century Italy. Clelia herself accepted the rhetoric that tied natural philosophy to (male) gentlemanly values, and to the need for her to overcome the limitations inherent to her sex. The inscription she chose for the frame of her most famous portrait, published in the 1728 edition of Vallisneri’s De’ Corpi Marini, was the Latin verse “Contemptrix Cloelia Sexus” (“Clelia, scornful of her sex”). On Clelia Borromeo, see the essays published in D.  Generali (ed.), Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese: Un salotto letterario settecentesco tra arte, scienza e politica (Florence: Olschki, 2011), vol. 1. 101 “In, Modena, my uncle is the court physician of that most serene [Duke], one of my cousins is his first secretary. They keep calling me there to more prestigious and more lucrative positions, but my austere and philosophical freedom always prevents me from going.” A. Vallisneri to D. Cestoni, Mantua, June 28, 1697; in Baglioni, Giacinto Cestoni: Epistolario, vol. 1, 44–​45. 102 Robert Samber, ed. and trans., The Courtier:  Written in Italian by Balthasar, Count Castiglione (London: A. Bettesworth et al., 1724), 256–​257.

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7  Corresponding in war and peace The challenge of rebooting Anglo-​French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens Elise Lipkowitz On March 31, 1802, a mere six days after the signing of the long-​awaited Anglo-​ French peace treaty in Amiens, the French cleric, naturalist, and antiquarian Gervais de la Rue (1751–​1835) wrote to Sir Joseph Banks (1743–​1820), a fellow antiquarian and President of Britain’s Royal Society. De la Rue’s letter began on a hopeful note: “Finally peace will give men of letters the means of corresponding for the progress of knowledge.”1 De la Rue, whose correspondence with Banks had been ruptured because of Anglo-​French hostilities, lost no time in getting his British correspondent up to speed. De la Rue recounted his whereabouts since his return to France in 1797. He listed several publications related to plants that he wished to send Banks and inquired about the best way to forward them. He also shared the news of Banks’s honorary election to the Society of Agriculture and Commerce in de la Rue’s hometown of Caen. De la Rue’s relief at the return of peace and his eagerness to revive his correspondence with Banks are understandable since Banks had been a generous host during the French cleric’s exile in London in the early 1790s.2 De la Rue’s letter highlights the toll that the French Revolution and ensuing international war had taken on Anglo-​French scientific communication. As de la Rue knew from first-​hand experience, the Revolution had upended the vocational world of French savants in its attempt to eliminate vestiges of the Ancien Régime and to construct a Revolutionary nation rooted in scientific principles. Following the outbreak of Anglo-​French hostilities in 1793, logistical challenges and legal prohibitions associated with correspondence and travel had prevented most French and British savants from engaging directly in the formerly routine activities of data sharing, correspondence, and international travel. During these difficult years, savants in both countries dreamed of the voyages they would take, of the conversations they would have, and of the research and collaborative projects they would undertake when peace returned.3 De la Rue was far from alone in the spring of 1802 in hoping that the return of peace would lead to a resumption of Anglo-​French scientific exchange and a revival of the scientific commerce characteristic of the 1780s. This chapter explores the story of Anglo-​ French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens (March 1802–​ May 1803). This fourteen-​ month period marked the only hiatus in Europe-​wide hostilities between the French Revolution’s escalation into an international war in April 1792

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206  Elise Lipkowitz and Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814. For Revolutionary-​era savants, the Peace of Amiens created an opportunity to try to reconstitute their correspondence networks and their community. Contact between the French and British scientific communities increased as learned Englishmen flocked to Paris and, to a lesser degree, learned Frenchmen visited London.4 With the relaxation of restrictions on travel and correspondence, the volume of letters moving throughout Europe also rose substantially. The many letters savants sent during the Peace, as well as the contents of their diaries, offer a window into the state of Anglo-​French scientific relations at the near mid-​point of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As we will see, Anglo-​French scientific relations were affected by develop­ ments in both politics and science during the preceding nine years and by the circumstances of the Peace itself. The French Revolution and the international conflict it spawned were distinctive, even for a Continent that had experienced its share of war. As numerous historians have observed, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars exceeded prior European wars in their scope and intensity, and stand apart for how they engaged entire societies.5 The wars, which began as a contest between competing and irreconcilable political ideologies, were sustained by propaganda, popular pressure, and by the mobilization of civilians, including savants. And, as historian David Bell has shown, the wars were propelled by the belief that war was not the default condition, but rather the exceptional state of humankind; if carried out properly, “total war” would ultimately usher in an era of “perpetual peace.”6 Within this framework, the long-​negotiated but highly unpopular terms of the Peace of Amiens were bound to disappoint.7 Despite war-​weariness in both France and Britain, challenges to the peace treaty emerged almost as soon as the ink was dry. By June 1802, the French were complaining that His Majesty’s Government was offering protection and favor to former French princes and bishops.8 To the displeasure of Britons, Bonaparte’s government in turn made a series of territorial grabs in Continental Europe in violation of the Peace of Amiens and the separate treaties that the French government had signed with Continental powers.9 Anti-​French tracts in British newspapers and passages in the French official newspaper  –​Le Moniteur  –​that attacked King George III compounded matters by continuing to fan the flames of popular resentment.10 By early 1803, many Britons were resigned to the likelihood of renewed hostilities. As Banks observed in April 1803, The Peace which has been made with France has proved merely an armed Truce & a very troublesome one. France & England are still pitted; till the one has much more materially weakened the other than is yet the case, no solid peace can exist between us.11

Methodology and protagonists This chapter was inspired, in part, by my observation of an outsized peak in Banks’s correspondence with France during the Peace of Amiens. It uses qualitative and

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Corresponding in war and peace 207 quantitative approaches to elucidate French and British savants’ experiences during the Peace, and to situate the Peace in the story of changes to scientific networks during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For contemporary historians of scholarly communities, digital methods have opened up new lines of inquiry, providing insight into the composition and reach of various scholarly networks, the spatial geography of the Republic of Letters, and the ebbs and flows over time of an individual’s correspondence. However, this chapter, like others in this volume, also highlights the importance of supplementing data that can be “counted and graphed” with qualitative analysis of savants’ letters and diaries. As the story of the Peace of Amiens shows, the graphs themselves only tell part of the story. As we will see, the re-​establishment of Anglo-​French epistolary communication was not synonymous with the normalization of scientific ties. Savants’ letters and diaries, replete with information on the knowledge transmitted and clues about the character of savants’ relationships, reveal subtle yet important attributes of scientific interaction, including openness and reserve, trust and suspicion. These details are as essential to understanding scientific life and the history of the Republic of Letters as the map of the Republic of Letters itself. The main protagonists of this chapter are Sir Joseph Banks, then in his twenty-​ third year as President of the Royal Society, and Charles Blagden (1749–​1820), a former Secretary of the Royal Society. Banks’s and Blagden’s extant correspondence from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period is far larger and more complete than that of their French counterparts.12 On the eve of the French Revolution, Banks and Blagden were established Republicans of Letters. They boasted membership in multiple domestic and foreign scientific societies and academies and possessed expansive domestic and foreign epistolary networks. In the immediate years before 1789, few contemporary British savants possessed a parallel depth of scientific ties with France or were more respected by their French counterparts. Remarkably, for the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Banks’s robust correspondence with French savants developed even though he never set foot in France.13 Instead, Banks nurtured these ties by welcoming French savants visiting London, using his position as Royal Society President to perpetuate the Republic of Letters’ culture of reciprocal obligation and favors, and being an indefatigable and informative correspondent. Between 1779 and 1820  –​a period that roughly corresponded with Banks’s presidency of the Royal Society –​France was the leading destination for his foreign scientific correspondence. Banks’s correspondence with individuals in France accounted for 36 percent of his total foreign scientific correspondence.14 By contrast, Blagden owed his close ties with French savants to his extensive travels on the Continent, to which he made annual trips in the 1780s and another trip in 1792.15 Paris was a frequent destination; there, Blagden forged friendships with prominent French savants. Between visits and after 1793, when the geopolitical circumstances permitted, Blagden exchanged letters with his French correspondents. At the time of the Peace, nearly ten years had passed since his most recent visit to France. Eager to observe the many changes that had

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Figure 7.1 Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. Engraving on wove paper. Engraved by N. Schiavonetti after the painting by Thos. Phillips R.  A. Published 1812 in London by N. Schiavonetti, No. 12, Michael’s Place, Brompton. Credit: Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Gift of Fisher Scientific International, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collection.

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Corresponding in war and peace 209 occurred in French science, Blagden capitalized on the imminent signing of the Peace to cross the Channel. Excepting a brief sojourn in the German lands and some travel in the Loire with Marie-​Anne Paulze (the widow of the famed French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier), Blagden spent almost the entire period of the Peace in Paris.

Mapping the peacetime rebound Data on Banks’s scientific correspondence show that the Peace of Amiens was the high watermark in terms of the volume of letters Banks received from France. As Figure  7.2 shows, in the decade between 1779 and 1789, which roughly corresponded with his first decade as President of the Royal Society, Banks received on average 16 scientific letters per year from savants in France.16 This volume of correspondence remained steady following the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. However, after the commencement of Anglo-​French hostilities in 1793, Banks’s correspondence with savants in France plummeted; the collections have no letters in 1794  –​a year that coincided with the apex of the Terror –​and only a handful of letters in 1795, 1796, and 1797. The year 1800 marked an uptick in letter volume, resulting, in part, from a campaign by French savants to urge Banks to intercede on behalf of the French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu (1750–​1801), then imprisoned in Messina. With the return of peace in 1802, Banks’s correspondence with savants in France soared to a sample high. During that critical 14-​month period, Banks received 58 letters from France, which is about four letters per month on average. This frequency of correspondence was roughly double that between 1785 and 1792, the previous apogee of Banks’s correspondence with France. It also vastly exceeded that of the preceding nine years when Banks received an average of four letters per year from France. The scale of the increase is striking; during the Peace of Amiens, Banks received, on average, about the same number of letters from France in a month that he had been receiving in a year during the period of Anglo-​French hostilities. As can also be seen from Figure 7.2, this effervescence was short-​lived. With the return of hostilities in 1803, the number of letters received from France fell slightly below the 1793–​1802 levels. Blagden’s penchant for travel on the Continent and the correlate that so much of his scientific business with Continental savants was carried out face-​to-​ face makes constructing and interpreting a comparable chart of his foreign scientific correspondence much more difficult.17 However, given Blagden’s inability to travel on the Continent between the declaration of Anglo-​French hostilities and the Peace of Amiens, it is reasonable to rely on the catalog to his papers at the Royal Society as a proxy for his engagement with French savants during this critical period. Both the catalog and his diary suggest that between early 1793 and the return of peace in March 1802, Blagden had minimal contact with his numerous correspondents in France. The declaration of Anglo-​French hostilities, coupled with Parliament’s enactment of the Traitorous Correspondence Act,

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210  Elise Lipkowitz 60

50

Letters per year

40

30

20

10

0 Pre-French Revolution

French Internationalization Peace of Revolution of French Revolution Amiens United Kingdom

France

Napoleonic Wars

Other

Figure 7.2 Banks’s scientific letters received from the United Kingdom, France, and other countries by major time period. Credit: Sources include the Warren Dawson, A calendar of the manuscript correspondence of Joseph Banks, Neil Chambers, ed., The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, and Neil Chambers, ed., Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks.

which rendered disloyal certain interactions with France, appears to have posed significant barriers to Banks’s and Blagden’s communication with French savants. The peak in Banks’s correspondence with France during the Peace, however, tells only part of the story of Anglo-​French scientific relations in 1802–​1803. Further examination of the data on the letters Banks received from France during the Peace adds two important caveats:  the first is that Banks’s correspondence from France during the Peace was considerably less “French” than it had been before the Revolution. No fewer than 23 of the 58 letters that, according to various calendars of correspondence, Banks received from France during the Peace came from one individual, his compatriot Charles Blagden. Perusal of additional manuscript sources for the period of the Peace revealed at least four other letters from Blagden to Banks and a handful of additional letters to Banks penned in Paris by the British natural philosopher Count Rumford (1753–​1814). The finding that a significant portion of Banks’s letters during the Peace came from

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Corresponding in war and peace 211 British savants in France tempers the extent of the “recovery” of Anglo-​French scientific correspondence. Second, a comparison of the roster of French nationals who wrote to Banks during the Peace with his pre-​1793 roster suggests a considerable shift in Banks’s network of French contacts. Only seven of the 17 French savants who wrote to Banks during the Peace were holdovers from the pre-​war period. This shift in network composition underscores that, during the Peace, Banks was dealing with a significant number of new correspondents. In fact, newcomers accounted for approximately half of the letters Banks received from French savants during the Peace. These changes to Banks’s network most likely reflected the metamorphosis of the French scientific community during the 1790s. As certain of Banks’s pre-​war correspondents perished or fell from political favor, a new generation of French savants filled the ranks of the reconstituted institutions of state science. Banks’s relationships with these newcomers were not based on years of trust, exchange, and reciprocal obligation, and therefore were vulnerable to the effects of the fragile Peace. With this network shift in mind, let us consider what the qualitative evidence reveals about Anglo-​French relations during the Peace.

The challenge of rebuilding Anglo-​French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens In November 1801, as peace negotiations continued in Amiens, L’abbé Gaspard Michel dit Leblond (1738–​1809), a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, wrote Banks of his hopes for the forthcoming Peace. Leblond wrote, “May this new political relationship established between two nations, which Europe views as supreme, at last, be the base of that philosophical union that must be solidified through the sciences, letters, and the arts.”18 This statement is noteworthy, for it inverts a leitmotif of Banks’s scientific correspondence during the war years. Throughout the 1790s, Banks, in his infrequent letters to French savants and even in letters to British government officials, had articulated that goodwill among savants of different nationalities served as a model for cultivating peace among the warring nations.19 However Leblond’s statement that peace was a requisite precursor to the advent of philosophical union spoke volumes about the condition of scientific relations on the eve of the Peace. As Leblond acknowledged, geopolitical events had taken a toll on scientific relations –​a toll that could not be remedied without resolving the broader geopolitical tensions. Blagden’s letters and diaries from Paris, penned during the Peace, highlight the time he spent becoming reacquainted with French contacts, learning about the state of French science, and identifying means to improve Anglo-​ French scientific relations. These writings emphasized the extent to which these relations required rebuilding and revealed his activities as a broker and translator. Describing his efforts to explicate British actions and perspective to the French savants, Blagden wrote,

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212  Elise Lipkowitz All of my efforts have been directed to the establishment of mutual good will & confidence between the two nations, at least so far as the men of letters are concerned. I have found an opportunity of explaining some of the things that were misunderstood, and on the whole, have reason to hope, that my journey thus far has not been wholly useless.20 Throughout his time in Paris, Blagden sought opportunities to collaborate with French savants. His letters to Banks are replete with suggestions for promoting goodwill and cordial relations. Blagden even went so far as to suggest how to win the First Consul’s favor. Acknowledging that “more is often gained by trifling personal civilities than by great sacrifices,” Blagden proposed to Banks that King George III gift Napoleon a kangaroo, and that the Royal Society elect Bonaparte as a foreign member.21 The content of the letters from Banks’s French and British correspondents in France –​particularly the different information they revealed –​also illustrate the challenging circumstances savants faced during the Peace and the lackluster results of efforts to normalize scientific relations. At first glance, the letters Banks received from French savants during the Peace appear reminiscent of the epistolary genres that had long been the hallmark of communication within the scientific Republic of Letters. For example, there were letters of introduction, letters signaling a publication, as well as letters requesting specimens or assistance.22 While the letter types remained consistent, the letters’ substance revealed a dramatic shift. The letters from French savants during the Peace, while cordial, tended to be terse. Absent were detailed descriptions of scientific activities and experiments that had characterized the letters that Banks had received from French savants before the Revolution. Banks, cognizant of the work necessary to restore relations, did not critique the dearth of content in his French correspondence. Noting the gracious tone of the letters he received from France, his election as a foreign member of the Institut on the eve of the Peace, and the respect that Napoleon accorded to him, Banks commented in late 1803, “During the short Peace I found I had more Friends in France than an Englishman ought to have.”23 It was instead via the several letters that Blagden wrote each month and the occasional letter that Banks received from Count Rumford that Banks obtained knowledge of the state of French science and of the new institutions, such as the Institut. From Blagden’s letters, Banks learned of the content of papers delivered at the Institut’s meetings.24 He received observations on the condition of French industry and agriculture, and garnered intelligence about materials that the French savants had brought back from Egypt.25 From Blagden, Banks also obtained a sense of the rapport between Napoleon and various French savants, information about new scientific discoveries and astronomical measurements, as well as insights into French perceptions of foreign savants.26 Via Blagden, Banks also learned of Napoleon’s intent to produce publications from the Egyptian expedition and to eliminate the Revolutionary calendar. Rumford reported to Banks on the process of electing foreign savants to the Institut, on the content of the Institut’s meetings, and on Napoleon’s engagement with the Institut’s

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Corresponding in war and peace 213 workings.27 Blagden’s and Rumford’s letters, which supplemented the limited portrait of French science that Banks received from his French correspondents, provided him with crucial information that French savants did not or perhaps could not divulge. Amid this tense atmosphere, guarded communication with a foreign national was deemed warranted. Blagden’s letters and diaries suggest that the circumstances of the Peace promoted reticence on the part of British and French savants. Blagden, aware that certain technical and scientific information might not be appropriate for French consumption, sought to balance the dual imperatives of safeguarding British industrial and strategic interests while fostering a rapport with French savants through information exchange. Blagden’s focus on maintaining this delicate balance is apparent in a letter composed after his visit to the famed Parisian Oberkampf cotton manufacture. Writing to Banks to seek help in responding to questions posed by the son of the French chemist Claude Berthollet, Blagden wrote, “Any of them which do not involve secrets that may be kept I should be much obliged to you if you could get answered; it would be a pleasing return on my part for the father’s kindness.”28 The French also exercised similar caution in knowledge exchange; Blagden’s diary entries reveal that, at various times, he encountered reserve and even coldness not only from Napoleon and the chemist Antoine Fourcroy (1755–​1809), but also from his pre-​war confidants Pierre-​ Simon Laplace (1749–​1827) and Claude Berthollet (1748–​1822).29 Moreover, as the two nations inched closer to a return to war in spring 1803, Blagden stated that he was receiving less detailed information. Of the French astronomer André Méchain’s (1744–​1804) departure for Spain, Blagden wrote, “I do not hear these matters quite so exactly as I  did formerly.”30 Despite Blagden’s stated desire to avoid arousing the suspicion of the French savants, his letters and diaries reveal a lack of awareness of how his queries about industrial processes and his intermingling of scientific and political talk might have contributed to the French savants’ reticence.31 While the fragile Peace clearly posed significant challenges to Anglo-​French scientific relations, the failure of Anglo-​ French savants to achieve a true rapprochement cannot be attributed uniquely to the circumstances of the Peace. As Banks’s letters reveal, developments that preceded the Peace –​including the increasingly national cast to French science during the 1790s, growing anxiety in both countries about the fine line between information gathering and spying, and intense public pressure on both sides of the Channel for savants to exhibit national over cosmopolitan loyalty  –​continued to affect scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens. Concerns about French motives were manifest in the topics that Banks was willing to discuss and in the courtesies that he was willing to extend to French savants. And, as we will see, Banks’s overtures during the Peace were also constrained by the British press’s scrutiny of his actions. During the Peace, Banks at times articulated to his French correspondents his unhappiness with the increasingly national orientation of French science. For example, in the same letter in which Leblond had called for the creation of a philosophical union of Europe’s savants, he also proposed commencing a

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214  Elise Lipkowitz correspondence about weights and measures.32 Banks, in a polite but belated reply, rebuffed the suggestion by alluding to the fact that the French had, during the war years, unilaterally pursued weight and measurement reform. As Banks wrote, I beg you to be assured that the Royal Society is well aware of the great importance of a universal measure and perfectly ready to adopt such a one whether it is discovered in France or England or elsewhere on condition, however, that the principles on which it is founded are simple and sufficiently correct to allow it, in case of need, to be reconstructed with rigorous aptitude in every part of the globe. I fear, however, that the adoption of novel terms in all measures & weights by your nation, which renders the perusal of books of science in your language far more difficult to other nations … will not tend to conciliate that disposition to a general concordance so much to be wished for.33 For Banks, who still saw value in the mores and practices of the pre-​war scientific Republic of Letters, the national turn in French science –​which the metric system represented –​was deeply troubling. During the Peace, Banks also proved more reluctant than he had been before the Revolution to provide letters of recommendation to French savants. Replying to the French chemist Fourcroy’s request of letters of recommendation for the French naturalist Godon who was traveling to India, Banks denied the request.34 Banks stated that the practice of French engineers doubling as spies coupled with Napoleon’s violation of the Treaty of Amiens had made obtaining the British government’s assent in his furnishing such letters impossible. As Banks wrote, The publication of [François-​Horace-​Sébastien] Sébastiani’s account of his Mission in the East and the appointment of engineers under the character of commercial agents has destroyed all confidence in the recommendation of a Frenchman. I was in the hopes that I should have been attended to when I professed I could procure the testimony of my literary friends at Paris … but I found I was in no degree attended to, and you may be sure, Sir, that the conduct of your Chief Consul in continuing to violate the spirit of the treaty of Amiens, while he so furiously complains of England for delaying to carry the Letter of it into execution … has not rendered my hopes of success more sanguine.35 Although in subsequent paragraphs, Banks expressed the cosmopolitan shibboleth that political conflict ought not compromise relations among literary men, Banks’s letter nonetheless went well beyond conveying that French actions had placed him in an untenable position with the British government. Engaging in sabre rattling that was foreign to his pre-​1789 correspondence, Banks commented on the imminent return to war. As Banks wrote,

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Corresponding in war and peace 215 We [the British] wait the contest without a fear of being subdued: your chief Consul has seen us act on the defensive in Syria, and your Generals have seen us act on the offensive in Egypt and neither, I think, will hold in contempt our military character; and for numbers we can certainly bring forward more upon on our soil than the Chief Consul can land upon it; and we are now convinced that, until a Descent upon England has been tried, Europe cannot hope to enjoy any degree of tranquility or England a general and satisfactory peace.36 Banks’s expression of national bravado and cosmopolitan rhetoric in the same letter illustrates the challenge that savants faced amid the Peace as they attempted to balance transnational engagement and national interest. Lastly, a more robust rapprochement between French and British savants was precluded because certain practices associated with the scientific Republic of Letters were, by 1802, filtered through a nationalist lens. The story of Banks’s letter acknowledging his election as a foreign member of the French Institut is a case in point. The content of Banks’s letter, while reminiscent of “thank you” letters written in the pre-​war scientific Republic of Letters, was ill-​suited to the spirit of the times. In Banks’s letter of January 21, 1802 (a date that coincided with the ninth anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution), he referred to the Institut as an “esteemed and distinguished body” and to his election as “the most dignified Literary honor I possibly can receive. To be the first elected to the first class of the first literary society in the world is more than my utmost ambition ever permitted me to hope.”37 Banks’s cosmopolitan overture –​made in the run-​up to the Peace agreement –​ soon fell victim to the triumph of nationalist considerations on both sides of the English Channel. Banks’s letter to the Institut appeared on the pages of Le Moniteur on March 18, 1802; Institut members likely forwarded the letter, construing publication of this flattering epistle from Britain’s foremost savant as a vehicle for projecting French scientific and national prowess. Nine days later, the text of the letter appeared in England on the pages of Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, where Banks was attacked for writing a letter full of “filthy adulation” that had “brought disgrace upon your country and discredit on the Royal Society.”38 Public rebuke of Banks’s letter to the Institut persisted through 1802. In April, the critique from Cobbett’s Weekly resurfaced as a pamphlet, and in the same month, an article in the Aberdeen Journal concluded that “either the letter is not genuine or Sir Joseph is a wag.”39 In November, prior to the Royal Society’s annual election of officers, “an anonymous fellow of the Royal Society” argued on the pages of Cobbett’s Weekly that if Banks viewed membership in the French Institut as the honor he most esteemed, he ought not be re-​elected as Royal Society President.40 As the Moniteur’s publication of Banks’s letter and as the British press’s response to the letter show, the resumption of peace failed to alter the reality during the 1790s that science and the larger geopolitical struggle had become intertwined in the public imagination. Even Blagden privately acknowledged that Banks’s letter was an uncharacteristic misstep; he recorded in his diary that the letter

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216  Elise Lipkowitz “was much too flattering, gross and … on the whole not drawn up with his usual judgment as he must have known it would be made public one way or another.”41 While the fallout from Banks’s letter did not cost him the Royal Society presidency, it constrained his ability during the Peace to collaborate with Blagden to improve Anglo-​ French scientific relations. Due to the public discourse surrounding Banks’s letter, he was understandably unable to intercede with British officials on behalf of French scientific interests. Blagden realized this. In a letter to Banks in April 1802, Blagden expressed the wish that the British would return the Rosetta Stone and other curiosities seized from the French in Egypt. Blagden then continued, writing, I am truly sorry that a clamour has been raised in England against your letter to the Institut, and comprehend fully that under those circumstances you cannot make an application for the [Rosetta] stone or other curiosities to be returned.42 Unsurprisingly, many of Blagden’s other requests that required Banks’s coordination in London did not come to fruition. Given the watchful eyes of Banks’s compatriots, there would be no kangaroo gifted to Napoleon and no foreign membership for Napoleon in the Royal Society. The resumption of Anglo-​French hostilities in May 1803 put an end to the limited recovery in Anglo-​French relations that the Peace of Amiens had permitted. The Peace, while falling short of de la Rue’s and Leblond’s vision of a full restoration of Anglo-​French scientific ties, nonetheless proved valuable. After nearly a decade of war, the Peace provided both French and British savants the opportunity to learn about specific scientific developments in the other country, even if these details were more forthcoming in letters from their compatriots in situ than in letters from their foreign counterparts. The resumption of hostilities foreclosed this important vector of communication. Blagden returned to Britain in early May 1803, just weeks before war resumed.43 Following the resumption of conflict, Anglo-​French scientific relations deteriorated. Many of the British savants who did not leave France before hostilities resumed were arrested as détenus in compliance with Napoleon’s edict of 2 prairial an 11 (May 22, 1803).44 Mail and other means of communication also became more difficult. And much to Blagden’s and Banks’s dismay, their peacetime efforts at building goodwill were “rewarded” in September 1803 by accusations in France of their having acted as spies during the Peace.45

Contextualizing peacetime scientific communication in the history of scientific networks The Peace of Amiens ushered in a rapid restoration of direct communication channels between England and France, spurring a jump in savants’ cross-​Channel correspondence volumes and travels. Yet, as this chapter has shown, the Peace did not lead to a full restoration of pre-​war Anglo-​French ties. As Banks and his

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Corresponding in war and peace 217 colleagues on both sides of the Channel would eventually recognize, the end of hostilities and the restoration of reliable means of communication were not a panacea. The gulf between what savants had hoped for and what materialized can be explained both by the relatively short and tense nature of the Peace and by deeper changes to the scientific landscape that the French Revolution had catalyzed. The 14-​month Peace was too short to undo the adverse effects of nearly a decade of war. Under any circumstances, one would anticipate some turnover in network composition over the course of a decade as new savants became active and as other savants became inactive due to age, illness, or changing interests. The political turmoil in France during the Revolution increased this natural turnover of French correspondents. These developments meant that, at the onset of the Peace, British and French savants faced the considerable task of needing to forge new relationships and restore those relationships that had been attenuated by reduced contact. Compounding this challenge was the tense nature of the Peace. Nearly a decade of propaganda had fostered deep public hostility toward the other nation, feelings that did not dissipate quickly. The uneasy peace, and the perception that the other nation stood ready to violate its terms, fed a sense of mistrust and suspicion. These factors may well have contributed to Banks’s ultimate reliance on the scientific intelligence provided by Blagden and other British savants in France. This lingering sense of mistrust –​shared by savants and their compatriots writ large  –​shaped Anglo-​French scientific interactions in the form of diminished transparency, as observed in French savants’ letters to Banks and French savants’ discretion in their disclosures to Blagden. Additionally, as the reaction in Britain to Banks’s letter to the Institut illustrated, the public continued to treat savants’ expressions of scientific cosmopolitanism with suspicion. Banks, in the wake of the public outcry over his letter to the Institut, had little choice but to approach his interactions with French savants in more measured ways. However, bubbling beneath the national animosity, public pressure, and lingering suspicion were deeper currents that were changing savants’ relationships. In France, the French Revolution had upended savants’ personal and vocational worlds, ushering in generational change and –​as the state became the dominant patron of the French scientific community –​a growing national orientation among French savants.46 The result was the intertwining of savants and the scientific enterprise with the ambitions of the Revolutionary state and its ideology. In this environment, French savants increasingly looked to their compatriots for collaboration and to the international scene to project national glory.47 While scientific vocation itself did not undergo a parallel transformation in Britain, science in its own right became deeply intertwined with the defense of Church and Crown. Additionally, wartime public scrutiny of British savants’ loyalties, heightened anxiety about savants’ cosmopolitan ties, and the sheer challenge of Anglo-​French communication effectively made British science more inward-​looking, too.

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218  Elise Lipkowitz The story of Anglo-​French scientific relations during the Peace of Amiens reveals several ways that scientific networks changed in the era of the French Revolution. Despite Banks’s and Blagden’s desire to share information, provide and receive assistance, and nurture ties with their foreign counterparts, the world of the pre-​war scientific Republic of Letters could not be reinstated in 1802. The pre-​war system had operated on savants’ mutual trust and implicit understanding of knowledge as a goal that transcended political interest. This is not to say that political and national interests did not feature in that world; after all, science in the eighteenth century was often organized in national academies and Banks’s entire career provides a case study of the savant’s rise within the national context.48 But such interests were managed in a pre-​Revolutionary world thanks to the presence of multiple types of particularist interests and a reliance on the transnational community as the savant’s ultimate source of intellectual and communal legitimation.49 By 1802, new forces were shaping scientific interaction. In France, the reorganization of science during the Revolution enabled French savants to find legitimation closer to home. And on both sides of the Channel, the intertwining of science with distinctive national visions during the international phase of the Revolution elevated the political/​national emphasis and intensified pressure on savants to satisfy their governments and their compatriots. Indeed, the irony of this era is that at a time when savants identified the need for scientific diplomacy, the very tools of such diplomacy –​neutrality, disinterestedness, and trust –​were slipping from savants’ grasp.

Notes 1 Gervais de la Rue to Joseph Banks, 10 germinal an 10 (March 31, 1802), British Library (BL) Add Ms 8099, f. 197. 2 De la Rue went into exile after refusing to take the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which demanded that clerics recognize the legislature’s authority over the Catholic Church. 3 For a sample of letters that encapsulate this theme, see Banks to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, October 15, 1791, British Museum Natural History (BMNH) Dawson Turner Copies (DTC) 7 #263–​264 and August 10, 1796, BMNH DTC X (1) #63–​64; Jussieu to Banks, January 16, 1792, BL Add Ms 8098, f. 150; Jussieu to Banks, February 3, 1800, BL Add Ms 8099, ff. 173–​174; René Desfontaines to James Edward Smith, March 5, 1793, Linnean Society (LS) James Edward Smith Papers, JES 4.103; Desfontaines to Smith, September 5, 1800, LS James Edward Smith Papers, JES 4.104. 4 As Renaud Morieux has noted, amid the French Revolution “symbolic, juridical, and political frontiers started to converge,” resulting in the “restriction of passengers authorized between England and the Continent.” Renaud Morieux, “ ‘An Inundation from Our Shores’:  Travelling across the Channel around the Peace of Amiens,” in Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–​1815, ed. Mark Philip (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 217. Among the British savants who traveled to Paris during the Peace were the physician Charles Blagden, the astronomer William Herschel, the inventor Count Rumford, and the industrialist James Watt. Among the French savants who traveled to England was the pharmacist Antoine-​Augustin Parmentier.

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Corresponding in war and peace 219 5 David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 7; William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 6 Bell, The First Total War, 3. 7 For discussion of expectations raised by the peace preliminaries and ensuing disappointment with the treaty, see John Grainger, The Amiens Truce: Britain and Bonaparte 1801–​1803 (Martlesham: Boydell Press, 2004). 8 Anthony Merry to Lord Hawkesbury, June 17, 1802, in The Papers and Correspondence between Great Britain and France on the Subject of the Late Negotiation Presented by His Majesty’s Command to Both Houses of Parliament, May 13, 1803 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1803), 17–​18. 9 The French had been violating aspects of the Treaty of Lunéville, which settled territorial control in Italy and Switzerland. In June 1802, Liguria effectively became a French puppet and in August 1803 the French annexed Elba from Spain. Treaty violations also occurred in the Netherlands and Switzerland. Malta, which had been a sticking point in the treaty negotiations, also remained a flashpoint. David Andress, The Savage Storm: Britain at War in the Age of Napoleon (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2013), 96–​97; Grainger, The Amiens Truce, 115–​124. 10 Lord Hawkesbury to Anthony Merry, August 28, 1802, in The Papers and Correspondence between Great Britain and France, 24–​31. For discussion of the so-​called Peltier Affair, see Andress, The Savage Storm, 91–​96. 11 Banks to Matthew Flinders, April 10, 1803, BMNH DTC 14 #55–​57. 12 The precarious situations of many French savants during the frequent regime changes in France in 1790s render it nearly impossible to find extant runs of French savants’ foreign and domestic correspondence that can rival in volume and scope the correspondence of Banks and Blagden. Given how incomplete the extant French scientific correspondence is from the Revolutionary period, and therefore the high probability that a digital representation would be unrepresentative, I have opted for the purpose of this chapter not to do a digital analysis of the extant correspondence of the French savants. 13 Banks spent remarkably little time on the Continent, opting instead for his own variant on the “grand tour” that took him around the world with Captain Cook from 1768 to 1771. 14 This percentage is based on Banks’s foreign correspondence between 1779 and 1820. 15 For more on Blagden’s travels on the Continent, see F.  H. Getman, “Sir Charles Blagden, F.R.S.,” Osiris 3 (1937): 69–​87. 16 These numbers are based on a dataset that the author constructed. The dataset includes letters received and sent by Joseph Banks between 1779 and Banks’s death in 1820. This dataset was created using the following sources:  Warren Dawson’s A Calendar of the Manuscript Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, Preserved in the British Museum, The British Museum (Natural History) and Other Collections in Great Britain (London:  British Museum, 1958); Neil Chambers, ed., The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection, 1768–​1820 (River Edge, NJ: Imperial College Press, 2000); and Neil Chambers, ed., Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765–​1820, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). None of these printed calendars and catalogs reflect all of the known extant Banks letters. The author’s work with Banks’s manuscript letter collections reveals that there are manuscript letters sent between France and Britain during the Peace of Amiens that are not included in the printed catalogs.

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220  Elise Lipkowitz As such the numbers listed –​which are based on the printed catalogs in order to have consistency across all periods –​reflect a lower bound. 17 Banks, following his famed voyage around the world on HMS Endeavour, led the first British scientific expedition to Iceland in 1772. Thereafter, he spent the rest of his life in Britain, making it relatively easy to trace his correspondence patterns. 18 Leblond to Banks, 26 brumaire an 10 (November 17, 1801), BL Add MS 8099, ff. 139–​140. 19 Banks to J. J. Houtou de Labillardière, June 9, 1796, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum GAB/​2; Banks to Wyndham Grenville, July 20, 1796, in Chambers, ed., The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks, 174. 20 Blagden to Banks, May 25, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 187–​188. 21 Ibid. 22 For an example of a letter of introduction, see Bernard Germain de Lacépède to Banks, 10 messidor an 10 (June 29, 1802), BL Add Ms 8099, f. 268. For letters signaling publications, see Lacépède to Banks, 17 ventôse an 11 (March 8, 1803), BL Add Ms 8099, f. 267, and Louis Valentin to Banks, April 30, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 212. For examples of letters requesting specimens or assistance, see Louis Dufrense to Banks, January 12, 1803, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 238; André Méchain to Banks, April 17, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 188; Méchain to Banks, June 4, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, ff. 280–​281. 23 Banks to Thomas Coutts, December 24, 1803, in Chambers, ed., The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks, 251. 24 Blagden to Banks, April 1, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 172–​173; Blagden to Banks, April 24, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 176–​177; Blagden to Banks, May 13, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 183–​184; Blagden to Banks, June 28, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, f. 195; Blagden to Banks, November 26, 1802, BL Add MS 33272, ff. 210–​211. 25 Blagden to Banks, April 1, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 172–​173; Blagden to Banks, April 12, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 174–​175; Blagden to Banks, April 24, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 176–​177; Blagden to Banks, May 3, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 178–​179; Blagden to Banks, May 4, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, f. 180. 26 Blagden to Banks, April 12, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 174–​175; Blagden to Banks, May 8, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 181–​182. 27 Rumford to Banks, November 11, 1801, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 105; Rumford to Banks, November 22, 1801, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 115; Rumford to Banks, July 19, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, ff. 199–​201; Rumford to Banks, July 24, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, ff. 215. 28 Blagden to Banks, April 24, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 176–​177. 29 In a diary entry of May 9, 1802, Blagden stated, “Not the same cordiality with Laplace and the Chaptal family as formerly.” Blagden Diary, May 9, 1802, Royal Society (RS) CB/​3/​4. 30 Blagden to Banks, April 20, 1803, in Chambers, ed., The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, vol. 5, 297–​299. 31 For Blagden’s reference to the need to avoid arousing suspicion, see Blagden to Banks, May 3, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 178–​179. Blagden’s diaries and letters reveal that he spoke extensively with French savants about political and scientific matters, met with government ministers, visited industrial facilities, and pressed French savants on topics, including tanning, that may well have approached the line between information gathering and industrial espionage.

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Corresponding in war and peace 221 32 Leblond to Banks, 26 brumaire an 10 (November 17, 1801), BL Add Ms 8099, ff. 139–​140. 33 Banks to Leblond, June 30, 1802, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 140. As early as 1791, Blagden had shared with Banks his assessment that the French wished “to divert the attention of the European public from the true amount of the [weights and measures] proposal, which in fact is that their measurement of 9 or 10 degrees of a meridian in France shall be adopted as the universal standard.” Blagden to Banks, September 8, 1791, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 97–​98. 34 Antoine Fourcroy to Banks, January 7, 1803, BL Add Ms 8099, f. 250. 35 Banks to Fourcroy, May 4, 1803, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (RBGK) Joseph Banks Papers #274. 36 Banks to Fourcroy, May 4, 1803, RBGK Joseph Banks Papers #274. 37 Banks to the Institut National, January 21, 1802, in the Archives de l’Académie des Sciences (AAS), Paris, Dossier Biographique Banks. 38 “To Sir Joseph Banks,” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, Saturday, March 27, 1802. 39 “Foreign Intelligence,” Aberdeen Journal, Wednesday, April 7, 1802. 40 “To the Fellows of the Royal Society,” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, Saturday, November 6, 1802. 41 Blagden Diary, April 16, 1802, in RS CB/​3/​4. 42 Blagden to Banks, April 24, 1802, BL Add Ms 33272, ff. 176–​177. 43 Blagden Diary, May 2, 1803, RS CB/​3/​4. 44 This edict ordered the arrest of all British male citizens between the ages of 18 and 60 who remained on French soil. 45 Richard Chenevix to Banks, September 25, 1803, BMNH DTC 14 #141–​149; Blagden to Banks, September 29, 1803, BMNH DTC 4 #150; Blagden to Banks, October 6, 1803, BMNH DTC 14 #157–​159. 46 For discussion of the effects of the Reign of Terror on the French scientific community and on the strikingly different composition of the members of the Paris Academy of Science and its successor, the National Institute, see Dorinda Outram, “The Ordeal of Vocation: The Paris Academy of Sciences and the Terror, 1793–​1795,” History of Science 21 (1983): 250–​273. 47 Lorraine Daston argues that as French science “became of the state,” the “international purview of science was increasingly used for nationalist ends.” Lorraine Daston, “Nationalism and Scientific Neutrality under Napoleon,” in Solomon’s House Revisited:  The Organization and Institutionalization of Science, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1990), 95–​99. 48 On the national dimensions of the organization of pre-​Revolutionary science, see Daston, “Nationalism and Scientific Neutrality under Napoleon,” 97; Sverker Sörlin, “National and International Aspects of Cross-​Boundary Science: Scientific Travel in the 18th Century,” in Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, ed. Elisabeth Crawford et  al. (Dordrecht:  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 43–​57; and James McClellan, “Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), vol. 4, 87–​106. On the role of the state in the scientific career of Joseph Banks, see John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire:  Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the many particularist forces that challenged the world of the pre-​war scientific Republic

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222  Elise Lipkowitz of Letters, see James McClellan, “L’Europe des Academies,” Dix-​huitième siècle 25 (1993): 153–​165. 49 I take the term legitimation from Irène Passeron, who identifies three functions that scientific exchange via letter served in the eighteenth century –​legitimation, mediation, and information. Irène Passeron, “La République des Sciences:  réseaux des correspondances, des académies, et des livres scientifiques,” Dix-​huitième siècle 40 (2008): 15.

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Part III

How knowledge travels

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8  Giant bones and the Taunton Stone American antiquities, world history, and the Protestant International Lydia Barnett

Two sets of strange mineral objects were discovered in British North America at the turn of the eighteenth century. The first was a collection of giant fossils, consisting of several teeth and bone fragments, unearthed in a field in Claverack, New  York, which suggested the existence of an ancient, humanlike creature of gargantuan size.1 The second was a large boulder perched on a riverbank in Taunton, Massachusetts, with characters from an unknown language carved into one side.2 Reports of the giant bones and the Taunton stone circulated within greater New England before reaching London, from where they spread across Britain and Continental Europe.3 While the stony heft of the objects limited their mobility, words and images relating to these American curiosities traveled in various media –​journals, books, and letters as well as by word of mouth –​which enabled their circulation within local communities and across long distances.4 The long-​distance exchange of news, ideas, and illustrations surrounding the bones and the stone forged connections across the Protestant Atlantic world even as it revealed divisions between local communities. Scholars on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that the mysterious objects might supply some of the missing links connecting the ancient history of the New World to that of the Old World, but they disagreed about the meaning and relative importance of these mineral finds. The Boston scholar and minister Cotton Mather (1663–​1728), who sent news of both the fossils and the boulder to the Royal Society in London, promoted the giant teeth and bones as key to understanding America’s ancient history.5 His colleagues in Europe more or less ignored Mather’s giant bones in favor of the Taunton stone, which they found infinitely more revealing of the secrets of America’s past. In this chapter, I trace the differential circulation of these American antiquities in order to reconstruct the inner workings of the networks that set them in motion. Both the materiality of the objects and the sociability of the networks mattered crucially to the exchange of knowledge in the transatlantic Republic of Letters. So too did the different meanings assigned to the objects in diverse places, which determined whether and how they would continue to circulate and what intellectual, religious, and political agendas they might support. Scholars in New England and Protestant Europe were eager to read into these objects histories of migration and displacement in America’s ancient past, to see these

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226  Lydia Barnett historical processes mirrored in contemporary events, and to regard both past and present migrations in providential terms.6 But they constructed these historical accounts of mobility and violence differently, and consequently drew quite different lessons from them. As interpreted by Protestant savants on either side of the North Atlantic, the giant bones and the Taunton stone offered substantially different accounts of the peopling of the Americas in ancient history, which in turn offered significantly different guides to colonizing the Americas in the present. Just as the Jesuits had earlier carved out a confessionalized sphere within the Republic of Letters, these early Enlightenment exchanges about world history and contemporary geopolitics formed a conversation among co-​ religionists.7 Protestants of different countries and denominations found these mineral antiquities useful to argue with as they debated how best to counter Catholic empires and Catholic missionaries in Europe and beyond. The world histories they built on the foundation of these rocks and fossils offered relatively more violent and more benign visions of what Protestant dominance in North America might look like. The contrasting circulation of the giant bones and the Taunton stone thus reveals the existence of shared commitments and also significant divisions within the transatlantic Protestant networks of the early eighteenth century.

The giant’s bones In 1712, Cotton Mather began composing a series of letters to send to the Royal Society in London. These letters, which he collectively titled Curiosa Americana, or “American Curiosities,” gathered together natural and human phenomena from “America” (mostly from greater New England) that Mather thought would interest the gentlemen of the Royal Society.8 The first (and by far the longest) letter was entirely devoted to a description and interpretation of a pair of enormous fossils –​a tooth weighing nearly five pounds, and a 17-​foot-​long thighbone –​which were found accidentally by agricultural laborers in Claverack, a town 30 miles from Albany, seven years previously. After a brief account of the discovery and physical properties of the fossils, Mather moved quickly to foreground their broader significance for biblical history. As he triumphantly proclaimed to the Royal Society: There has lately been brought into our Light from the Subterranean World, in our Neighbourhood, a Rarity, which appears to me worthy of a consideration with all mankind … One whom I  verily take to have been an Inhabitant of the Antediluvian World, has had, not a Resurrection, tis true, but yet has been pulled out of the Bed, in which he had lain, doubtless ever since that wondrous Revolution, which made the wicked children of Man to groan under the waters.9 The bones, he claimed, belonged to one of the nephelim, the “wicked children of Man” who, according to the Book of Genesis, roamed the earth before the

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 227 Flood. The particular giant to whom the tooth and thighbone once belonged had doubtless been killed by the Flood itself, along with the rest of his fearsome brethren. For Mather, the significance of the giant bones was twofold: not only did they constitute material evidence of Scripture’s truth, but they also proved that key episodes of biblical history had unfolded on American soil. Well aware that giant bones had already been found in Europe, Mather underscored that similar bones “being found in America, makes it yett the more curious and marvellous.” Based on the size of the fragments, Mather calculated that this American giant must have been significantly taller than better-​known biblical giants like Goliath. The recent discovery of nephelim bones in New York proved that America occupied a special place in the drama of sacred history. As he concluded with evident glee: “The Giants themselves have come over to America!”10 The overt patriotism of Mather’s presentation of the giant bones was designed not to alienate his British colleagues but to force them to acknowledge America as an important scholarly subject. It was also a form of self-​presentation and self-​promotion. The Curiosa Americana were Mather’s opening gambit in his bid for membership in the Royal Society and for recognition as a serious scholar by his metropolitan counterparts. He sought to achieve these goals by leveraging his emplacement in a territory that remained largely unknown to Europeans; positioning himself as an authoritative source of knowledge about that unknown place; and finally by demonstrating that the knowledge about America he had to offer could advance European research agendas. Mather made a concerted effort to show how his signature American curiosity could align with the projects and interests of his colleagues in London. He addressed the letter to one member of the Society, John Woodward (1665/​ 1668–​1728), whose Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) advocated gathering fossils from all four corners of the earth in order to prove the universality of Noah’s Flood. As Mather told Woodward: Your Excellent Essay towards the Natural History of the Earth has obliged and even commanded, the true Friends of Religion, and Philosophy, to serve you with as many communications as they can, that may be subservious unto your Noble Intention. Mather offered the “Dead Bones” as “lively proofs of the Mosaic History,” eager to demonstrate how his specimens fit into Woodward’s research program. Even as he used the Claverack fossils to write a patriotic history of ancient America, Mather presented them as furthering a project already under way by a famous London naturalist; a project which depended, at least rhetorically, on a global dataset of fossil specimens.11 But Mather misjudged his would-​be colleagues in Britain. The Royal Society did not particularly care about the giant bones, and they were openly contemptuous of Mather’s interpretation of them. His first 13 letters, all dated November 1712 and sent together as a packet, were read aloud at a meeting of the Royal Society in July 1713, and a summary of the letters composed by the Society’s

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228  Lydia Barnett secretary Richard Waller (c.1660–​ 1715) was published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714. Waller, an active and well-​connected natural philosopher, gave the first letter short shrift in his published summary. Moreover, he summarily dismissed Mather’s interpretation of the fossils as the teeth and bones of a biblical giant, blithely describing them as “the Bones and Teeth of some large Animal … which, for some Reasons, he judges to be Human.”12 Waller’s public condescension was mild compared to some of the comments he made on Mather’s letters in his private notes, such as “nothing very observable,” “in this little of Philosophical information,” and “these accounts relate little to Natural Philosophy.”13 In his reply to Mather, Waller expressed a polite desire to enter into a “Philosophical Correspondence,” but he made clear that what the Society really wanted was a steady supply of information and especially specimens. Waller spoke of his surprise (and implicitly conveyed his dismay) that the Curiosa Americana were mere descriptions of objects and not the objects themselves.14 Indeed, the Society was so hungry for American curiosities that Fellows often competed with one another for access to the most diligent suppliers with the best specimens. Woodward was locked in a fierce competition with two other famous naturalists and collectors, Hans Sloane and James Petiver, for control of the flow of fossils from the American colonies.15 He appears to have sent Mather no more than a handful of terse dispatches over the decades in response to Mather’s dozens of long-​winded letters, and their purpose was mainly to exhort his Boston correspondent to send him more fossils.16 “I hear so little of Marine Bodyes [i.e., marine fossils], Remains of the Deluge, digd up in New England,” Woodward complained to Mather in a letter of 1721. “Pray be more inquisitive on all Occasions of Digging, Mineing, &c.”17 Woodward pointedly did not solicit Mather’s opinion about “Marine Bodyes,” which remained a hot topic of debate in the Republic of Letters well into the 1720s.18 Instead, Woodward directed his colonial correspondent to attend to the various forms of manual labor –​mining, digging –​associated with the excavation of fossils. (This demand came only a few short years after Mather sent Woodward a box containing between 20 and 30 fossil shells, a sizeable collection, gathered from across New England.19) Woodward thereby implied that Mather was capable of performing only the lowliest task in the hierarchy of scientific labor: gathering the raw material of knowledge in order to pass it on to those who were better equipped to transform it into pure philosophy. The response to Mather’s Curiosa Americana makes clear that the Royal Society did not regard Mather as their intellectual equal, but rather as their creole informant. While his British interlocutors were indeed eager for American curiosities, they refused to acknowledge Mather’s authority as an interpreter of those curiosities, preferring to reserve that right for themselves.20 Even Mather’s eventual election to the Royal Society, his hoped-​for goal, was complicated by his colonial status in a highly significant way:  Waller nominated Mather, and the Society approved the nomination, but Mather’s name failed to appear in the published lists of the Fellows of the Society. In response to Mather’s plaintive query about the omission, Waller explained that, “being a Natural born subject,”

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 229 Mather could not be listed among the foreign members, but neither could he be listed among the British members because “being Beyond sea” prevented him from attending the official induction ceremony.21 Mather’s paradoxical exclusion from the rolls for being both British and not-​British reflects the fraught and tenuous position occupied by colonial savants in British networks of knowledge more generally. While the Royal Society might regard Mather as a mere informant and supplier from across the Atlantic, Mather stood at the apex of a regional hierarchy of knowledge-​making. Mather claimed to have seen the giant fossils in person, but his description of them in the Curiosa Americana drew heavily from two earlier eyewitness accounts:  the first, an item published in the Boston News-​Letter in July 1705 and written by an unnamed observer in New  York; and the second, a 1706 letter written to Mather by Joseph Dudley (1647–​1720), the governor of Massachusetts, who was presented with similar specimens by the Dutch farmworkers who unearthed them. Clearly there existed a fairly robust system for the circulation of news and specimens within the colonies into which Mather could easily tap. Mather was also able to enlist others in the hunt for the additional fossils that Woodward demanded.22 The circulation of fossil news and specimens reveals the asymmetrical relationships between actors of differential status in Britain’s colonies and also between elites in New England and Britain.

Giants versus elephants As the Society worked to mold Mather into their obedient supply-​man, a transatlantic debate arose over the interpretation of the giant teeth and bones that further reveals the disconnect between colonial and metropolitan visions of America. A chorus of voices from New England joined Mather’s in reading the bones as those of an antediluvian giant; meanwhile, several British members of the Society insisted that all giant fossils like those from Claverack must surely be the remains of ancient elephants.23 Waller’s condescending dismissal of Mather’s interpretation of the Claverack fossils was echoed in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions the following year, when the Anglo-​Irish physician Thomas Molyneux identified several large fossil teeth discovered in Ireland as an elephant’s and ridiculed the idea that they might be “human or gigantick,” a notion he rejected as “so contradictory to comparative Anatomy and all Natural History, it does not deserve our Consideration.”24 This sentiment was echoed by Hans Sloane in two letters published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1728, in which he discussed a dozen “Fossile Teeth in my own Collection, which unquestionably once belonged to Elephants.”25 Sloane poured scorn on the “antient and modern Authors” who interpreted such specimens as the “fabulous Skeletons of Giants.”26 The certainty of British observers like Sloane and Molyneux that all large fossil teeth must be elephantine stands in stark contrast to the attitude expressed by colonial observers who, after having seen the Claverack teeth in person, flatly denied that they could have come from an elephant. “Very

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230  Lydia Barnett many gentlemen, and I myself also, have had the Satisfaction, of Seeing, and Handling, and Weighing” the tooth, Mather told Woodward. “All that I have ever yett conversed withal, are compelled to Beleeve, That it must be an HUMANE TOOTH” and certainly not “the Remains of an Elephant.”27 Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the governor of New York who came into possession of the first fossil tooth and thighbone excavated at Claverack in 1705, told his father in England that he “was of the opinion that it was the tooth of a giant.”28 Dudley, who obtained the second dental specimen found at the Claverack site in 1706 as well as additional bone fragments, agreed with Hyde’s assessment. “All the surgeons in town have seen it,” Dudley wrote Mather from Roxbury, Massachusetts, and they decided it could not be “any remains of an elephant, the shape of the tooth and admeasurement of the body will not allow that.” Moreover, New England savants were quick to affirm that the fossils belonged not just to any giant person but specifically to a biblical giant who died in Noah’s Flood. Dudley claimed that the tooth will agree only to a human body, for whom the flood only could prepare a funeral; and without doubt he waded as long as he could to keep his head above the clouds, but must at length be confounded with all the other creatures, and the new sediment after the flood gave him the depth we now find.29 It should be noted that the fossil teeth unearthed in New England were anatomically much closer to human teeth than to elephant teeth. We now know that the Claverack fossils belonged to a mastodon, whose teeth do not resemble the ridged grinders of elephants at all but do resemble human molars, with parallel rows of upward-​pointing prongs (Figure 8.1).30 In the complete absence of knowledge about this extinct species, the colonists’ belief that the tooth belonged to a giant person was in this respect better grounded in the available evidence than the metropolitan conviction that it belonged to an elephant. While Sloane and Molyneux were indeed correct that the European fossils they had personally observed were elephant grinders, their presumption that all large fossil teeth must belong to elephants suggests a hostile attitude toward colonial knowledge-​claims in general and to the biblical gloss given the giant bones in particular. What, then, was really at stake in this controversy over the meaning of a pile of bones found on a farm in the Hudson Valley? Why was it so important to the American colonists that the bones were a giant’s, and why were their British interlocutors so insistent that they were an elephant’s? In rejecting the nephelim hypothesis, the Royal Society rejected Mather’s bid for recognition as a fellow scholar and colleague. They also thereby rejected his efforts to carve out a special place for America in both biblical and natural history. If all Mather had found were elephant bones, and if elephant bones were now being unearthed in England and Ireland, then there was nothing particularly special about the specimens from New England. Meanwhile, the giant hypothesis may have appealed to New England colonists because of its political and theological significance. Nephelim

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 231

Figure 8.1 A fossil mastodon molar from the Royal Society’s collections, incorrectly identified as belonging to “a Sea Animal.” Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis (London, 1681), table 19. Credit: Courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library Special Collections, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

bones testified not only to ancient history but also to events unfolding in the modern world. As Amy Morris has recently argued, Mather seems to have understood the nephelim as biblical types for the modern-​day Indians of New England, or at least for the ones who waged war against the British colonists or refused to convert to the Christian faith. In Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather explicitly linked Metacom, the Algonkian leader of King Philip’s War, to the biblical giant Og, King of Bashan, and referred to Indians more generally as “Ogs” and “Giants.”31 Mather’s typology suggested that modern Indians were, like the giants of the Old Testament, a savage and evil race of people threatened with divine judgment and rightful extinction. In his missive to the Royal Society, Mather claimed that God sent the Flood with the specific intent of wiping the nephelim off the face of the earth. This was a rather bold re-​reading of a Scriptural passage that was traditionally read as describing God’s punishment of all of humanity, not just the exceptionally tall ones. The giants, he wrote, “were such a plague unto the World, that if a Flood had not exterminated all the rest … unto Them alone the Earth had been given, and no Stranger or Common Man, had passed among them.”32 Giants would have eventually overrun the planet if God had not sent Noah’s Flood to eradicate them, clearing the way for humans of regular size and superior moral fiber to

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232  Lydia Barnett establish their dominance on the earth. If the nephelim prefigured the Indians, then the extinction of the nephelim during Noah’s Flood prefigured at least the displacement, if not also the extinction, of the Indians in modern America. There are other reasons why colonial governors like Hyde and Dudley might have preferred the giant hypothesis to the elephant hypothesis. Perhaps they were simply convinced by the human-​like morphology of the fossil teeth, or liked the idea of sacred history unfolding on American soil, without necessarily sharing Mather’s vision of colonization as a form of providential genocide. But the violence lurking behind Mather’s fantasy of ancient and modern American history may be part of the reason why savants in Britain pushed back against the giant hypothesis. In other words, the Royal Society’s rejection of Mather’s nephelim theory may have been more than just a function of their desire to turn him into their docile creole informant, offering theory-​free facts and specimens. They may also have been unwilling to endorse the violent vision of settler colonialism contained in his narration of the Flood wiping the nephelim off the face of the earth.

The Taunton stone As a stratagem to win the regard of the Royal Society, Mather’s giant bones were a failure. However, another one of Mather’s American curiosities had far greater appeal in the Old World than he ever anticipated. The Taunton stone, the rock in Massachusetts with the mysterious characters carved into one side, captured the attention of several Protestant scholars in Continental Europe, an audience he had not hoped to reach with his Curiosa Americana (Figure 8.2). While the circulation of news about the fossil bones reveals the uneven transit of knowledge between New England and Britain, the circulation of words and images around the Taunton stone shows how knowledge traveled from New England to Continental Europe via Britain. Continental savants showed less inclination than their British counterparts to establish direct relationships with American colonists, but they capitalized on the flow of information from America via London in order to write their own histories of the ancient migrations of people from the Old World to the New. Like Mather, they believed that these histories offered guidance for the contemporary wave of immigration to the Americas across the Atlantic. Unlike Mather, they envisioned this second wave unfolding in a far more peaceful manner, centered on conversion rather than violent conquest. Mather did not regard the Taunton stone as very significant, which makes its eager reception in Europe all the more striking. His brief description of the rock appeared almost as an afterthought, buried deep on the last page of the twelfth letter he sent to the Royal Society, following a long-​winded relation of thunderstorms and other forms of freak New England weather. Mather framed his brief description of the stone as an amusing trifle, something “that shall a Little Entertain you.” In contrast to the lengthy interpretation he provided for the giant’s bones, Mather barely speculated about the meaning and larger significance of the Taunton stone. “It is generally taken for granted; that they are

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 233

Figure 8.2 The Taunton Stone in situ, photographed in 1902. Edmund Delabarre, “Recent History of Dighton Rock,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 20 (1917–​1919): 402, plate xliv. Credit: Courtesy of Northwestern University Library.

Artificial,” he wrote, meaning they were made by human hands, “but no man as yett know any more what to make of them, than who it was that graved them.” The careful rhetoric of reportage coupled with the total absence of an interpretive gloss distinguished Mather’s presentation of the Taunton stone sharply from his earlier presentation of the giant bones.33 The lack of an interpretation and the presence of an illustration may be part of the reason why the Royal Society –​and later, their Continental colleagues –​ showed considerably more interest in the Taunton stone than they had in the fossil bones. Waller reproduced Mather’s description of the rock in its entirety in the Philosophical Transactions and printed the illustration Mather had enclosed of the first two “lines” of writing on the rock’s face (Figure 8.3).34 In publishing the image, and in publicly complaining about Mather’s failure to provide “an exact Figure of these Teeth and Bones,” Waller revealed the Society’s desire for graphic representations of objects of knowledge if the objects themselves could not travel.35 Armed with an image, European scholars may have felt empowered to decide for themselves what the mysterious Taunton stone might be.36 Waller confidently described the markings as “Indian Characters,” an interpretation presumably based on the illustration, since Mather had nowhere identified them as such in words.37

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Figure 8.3 Mather’s transcription of two “lines” of writing on the Taunton Stone. Richard Waller, “An Extract of Several Letters from Cotton Mather, D. D. to John Woodward, M.  D.  and Richard Waller, Esq; S.  R. Secr.,” Philosophical Transactions 29, no. 339 (1714): ­figure 8. Credit: Courtesy Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Where Waller saw Indian writing, several Continental scholars examining the image saw Oriental characters. A scholar in Berlin caught wind of it and breathlessly recorded these words: Before long I will receive a wondrous thing: an inscription of several lines found near Boston in New England. It has already been printed in the Philosophical Transactions of England in the year 1714, but I have not yet seen it. A friend of mine, a learned man, told me that he observed Tangut letters in it, which, if true, would open a vast field for revealing the origins of the Americans.38 The person writing this letter was Mathurin Veyssière La Croze (1661–​1739), a French scholar of Oriental languages and librarian to the king of Prussia. La Croze’s interest in the “wondrous” Taunton stone was stimulated by the possibility that it might connect the history of the American Indians to the history of the Asian peoples who formed the object of his antiquarian study. Tangut was one of the many central Asian languages discussed by La Croze in his widely read Histoire du christianisme des Indes (History of Christianity in the Indies, 1724). If the letters on the stone were truly Tangut, as La Croze’s unnamed friend had claimed,

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 235 that would strongly suggest that the Indians of New England were descendants of immigrants from somewhere in central Asia: people who had migrated eastward across Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, and across North America till they finally reached the shores of the Atlantic.39 Elsewhere in Europe, other scholars came to similar conclusions. The Zurich naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer saw the article in the Philosophical Transactions and alerted one of his correspondents, Louis Bourguet (1678–​1742), a Huguenot scholar living in western Switzerland. Bourguet, who corresponded with La Croze and shared his interest in the study of languages and antiquities, was more direct in proclaiming the unequivocal significance of the Taunton stone. In an article published in the Mercure Suisse in 1735, Bourguet declared the boulder in Massachusetts “incontestable proof” of the ancient links between Asia and America.40 Instead of Tangut, he identified the language on the rock as Tartar, again based entirely on the image in the Philosophical Transactions. Bourguet then used these two scanty “lines” of “Tartar” as evidence for a grand historical theory of the peopling of the Americas across a land bridge in the northern Pacific. The confidence with which these European scholars identified the rock’s language stands in stark contrast to the soundness of the evidence on which they based their assertions. The writing on the Taunton stone was, of course, neither Tangut nor Tartar.41 Recent archaeological research finds that the markings on the rock are probably Algonkian petroglyphs, a finding supported by Wampanoag oral traditions which record the original crafting of the inscription by their ancestors.42 Moreover, the illustration in the Philosophical Transactions was very poor. Mather probably never saw the Taunton stone in person. The illustration he included in his letter to the Royal Society was almost certainly based on a transcription done 30  years earlier by the Massachusetts minister John Danforth.43 It was then sent to the Royal Society’s printer to be engraved by yet a third person unfamiliar with the language. The engraving that appeared in the Philosophical Transactions and circulated across Europe was thus a copy three times over, reproduced each time by a person with no knowledge whatsoever of what they were copying.44 Unlike the teeth and bones, which were light enough to travel, the Taunton stone was firmly embedded in the landscape of New England. Scholars in Europe only had Mather’s words and images to rely on –​or, rather, the summary of Mather’s letters produced by Waller and the poorly reproduced image done by the Society’s printers. The Taunton stone was in this respect much like the Nestorian stele unearthed in China in 1625, another hefty and immobile mineral artifact whose mysterious inscription circulated in imperfect printed copies in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.45 The Taunton stone was multiply mediated by the time its likeness began to circulate across Europe. The confident identification of the rock’s language as central Asian in spite of the poverty of the illustration reveals the political, religious, and ideological motives that powered the circulation of words and images relating to the Taunton

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236  Lydia Barnett stone among European scholars. Identifying its writing as Tartar or Tangut allowed this New England curiosity to intervene in ongoing scholarly debates about the genealogy of the Native Americans, which in turn responded to larger questions about race and religion in ancient world history and also in the early modern Atlantic. The origins of the Native Americans had been sought with great urgency in Europe ever since Columbus returned from the Caribbean.46 Native American claims to autochthony were theologically problematic for European Christians, who felt that bringing them into the fold of biblical history was necessary to make them suitable targets for Christian evangelism.47 In order to do that, it would have to be proven that the Indians were descended from both Adam and Noah. A satisfactory solution was found in the sixteenth century, when scholars proposed that a land bridge used to connect the Old World to the New in the age after Noah’s Flood. Immediately, however, a new problem arose: did the land bridge stretch across the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific? The question of which ocean the Indians’ ancestors had traversed became a source of fierce contention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because the answer had profound stakes for the relationship between colonizers and colonized in the contemporary Atlantic world. Were Native Americans the direct descendants of Europeans, having made a transatlantic crossing at some point in the misty past? Or were they instead descended from the modern peoples of Asia, having gotten to America by way of a land bridge across the Pacific?48 At the turn of the eighteenth century, when the illustration of the Taunton stone began to circulate across Europe, the pendulum was swinging decisively in favor of a Pacific land bridge. In this age of aggressive imperial expansion, Europeans might very well have wanted to resist the notion that the Indians were their own descendants, as was implied by the theory of an Atlantic land bridge. Oriental characters on a rock in Massachusetts strongly supported the Pacific land bridge theory. Misidentifying the language on the Taunton stone as Asian thus gave enormous credibility to the notion that the American Indians were not Euro-​Americans but Asian-​Americans. Bourguet used the Taunton stone as the key piece of evidence for his speculative history of successive waves of Asian-​American migration across the Pacific land bridge in the wake of Noah’s Flood. He claimed that the inscription in Massachusetts had been carved by “a little Colony of Tartars” who tried and failed to establish themselves in a corner of America already occupied by the descendants of earlier Asian immigrants. The Tartar colonists etched their language onto a boulder before being “massacred by the Iroquois or some other Barbarians in the area.” This imagined history implied that the present-​day Indians of New England, descended from the perpetrators of this massacre, were an even more barbaric and blood-​thirsty race than the Tartars they had victimized, and Tartars already had a fearsome reputation among western Europeans. Bourguet used the Taunton stone to construct a historical narrative of migration, displacement, and violence in ancient America, just as Mather

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 237 had done with the giant fossils from Claverack. Bourguet’s history of ancient America was also like Mather’s in that it identified Native Americans, especially the natives of New England, as a violent and uncivilized racial group. In seeking to prove that Native Americans were Asian-​Americans and not Euro-​ Americans, Bourguet located them in a global racial hierarchy which worked to justify European conquest in the Americas.49 La Croze co-​opted the Taunton stone into his own narrative of world history. In addition to constructing a racial genealogy for the Native Americans, La Croze sought to place them in a religious genealogy of ancient Christianity. In Histoire du christianisme des Indes, La Croze devoted several pages to a discussion of the religion of the Tibetans and of their neighbors, the Tangut and the Tartars. (According to La Croze, the people of the “Kingdom of Tangut” also followed the Tibetan faith.) He was concerned to demonstrate that the closely related religions of these central Asian groups bore “evident traces of Christianity.” La Croze speculated that these traces were the result of Nestorianism, an early Christian sect that spread across the Middle East and South, Central, and East Asia in the fifth through tenth centuries. La Croze discussed several pieces of evidence which he believed proved that the Tibetan religion preserved several key aspects of this older form of Christianity. One was a book of prayers “written in the Language of Tangut,” in which “I believe I have caught a glimpse of Liturgical Fragments of the Ancient Christians of Grand Tartary.” Further evidence lay in the several striking commonalities between Christian and Tibetan beliefs and rituals. The Tibetan religion also holds that God is three people, La Croze declared; the second of the three gave his blood for the benefit (salut) of the human race; the Lama celebrates a sacrifice using bread and wine; and he has a tonsure like the priests of the Roman Catholic Church. All of this evidence pointed toward a single conclusion:  the religion of Tibet and Tangut preserved many ancient Christian traditions and beliefs.50 For La Croze, the discovery of a rock in Massachusetts with Tangut writing on its face strongly suggested a historical kinship between the North American Indians and the Asian peoples whose Christian-​inflected religion he described in the Histoire. If the Americans were indeed émigrés from Tangut, and the Tibetan religion which the Tangut shared was a warped form of ancient Christianity, so too must be the religion of the modern Native Americans. Such a genealogy implied that converting them to Christianity would be both morally justified and relatively easy. If their religion was simply a degraded descendant of Christianity, then it could simply be updated to the Protestant faith. As Protestant missions overseas became better organized and more numerous in the early eighteenth century, Protestant scholars crafted scholarship that would support their evangelical efforts. La Croze’s interpretation of the Taunton stone helped paper over the violence of conversion by casting it as a process of simply reminding the Indians of their ancient, forgotten faith. One of La Croze’s main scholarly goals was to document the spread of early Christianity across the globe, a historical process which he believed anticipated the spread of the Protestant

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238  Lydia Barnett faith, the heir to the “universal Christianity” that reigned in antiquity, around the world in the eighteenth century. Bourguet, too, was keenly invested in propagating the Protestant faith worldwide, engaging actively with two British evangelical groups, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Their enthusiasm for global evangelism may have been rooted in their personal experience of religious persecution and migration. Both La Croze and Bourguet were French Protestants in exile, one living in Switzerland and the other in Germany. Bourguet’s Protestant mercantile family fled Nîmes for Zürich after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. La Croze, born to a wealthy family of Catholic merchants in Nantes, left France as a young adult in 1696 after having felt the call to conversion. The similarities in their biographies suggests a connection between personal experience of religious persecution and diaspora, on the one hand, and a penchant for writing world histories that resonated with contemporary processes of migration, colonization, and evangelism, on the other.

Mobilizing world history in the Protestant International A broader sense of the religious and political contexts of world-​historical knowledge helps us understand why and how Mather’s report of the Taunton stone appealed to Protestant scholars in Europe. Bourguet and La Croze were part of the transnational Republic of Letters and also of the overlapping Protestant International, which brought scholars, merchants, missionaries, and political actors of different denominations into league with one another against the common threat of Catholicism.51 The persecution of Protestants in Catholic Europe, represented most vividly by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, combined with Protestant victories over Catholic powers such as in England’s Revolution of 1688–​1689, energized Protestants across the Atlantic world and formed the basis for collaboration, if not quite reconciliation. Like the Jesuit order which served as both its model and its main competitor, the Protestant International was a long-​ distance network whose devotion to the production and circulation of knowledge was not entirely divorced from its work as an agent of commerce, empire, and evangelism.52 Unlike the Jesuits, it lacked a strong, central organization. Far from being a single global network, the Protestant International was constituted from multiple interlocking communities of disparate (and in some cases rival) Protestant groups. Moravians, Huguenots, Anglicans, and Quakers, to name just a few, worked together strategically, occasionally, and toward the only goal they could all agree upon: the global triumph of the Protestant faith over the Catholic Church. This goal could be furthered in a variety of ways, such as by orchestrating evangelical missions and coordinating aid for Protestant refugees. In many cases refugees were offered assistance in resettling in Britain’s American colonies, which had the happy effect of bolstering both the Protestant faith and Protestant empire in the Americas –​a counterweight to the secular power of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and to the evangelical triumphs of the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries in the New World.53

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 239 Knowledge-​making played a key role in the success of the enterprise. In the networks described in this chapter, we see French Calvinists, British Anglicans, and New England Puritans converging on a scholarly subject of common interest:  world history. Whether African elephants or biblical giants roamed America before the Flood, whether Tartar or Tangut people established colonies there after the Flood, the Protestant International sought to link the history of ancient America to world history and often to biblical history as well. Words and images relating to the giant bones and the Taunton stone circulated widely across Protestant networks because they could be pressed into the service of confessionalized visions of world history and of modern geopolitics. Mather, La Croze, and Bourguet interpreted these mineral artifacts through the lens of their faith, using them to write histories of ancient America that spoke to deep questions about the contemporary projects of colonization and conversion. They strove to locate the second wave of migration to the Americas in the continuing drama of sacred history. At the same time, the historical narratives these scholars constructed, and the lessons these histories were supposed to offer to the present, varied according to the location and allegiances of the individual scholar. The giant bones and the Taunton stone, as interpreted by American and European scholars respectively, offered two distinct historical accounts of the peopling of the Americas and thus two different guides for the colonization of the Americas in the present. Mather’s nephelim story suggested that God would eradicate the Indians to make way for Europeans, just as God had previously killed off the giants in order to make way for the Indians. Bourguet and La Croze’s Asian-​American migration story suggested that the Indians should be converted, leaving open the question of their sovereignty and long-​term survival.54 Where the bones were imagined as a memento and a prophecy of divinely mandated genocide in colonial New England, the Taunton stone was employed by Protestants in Europe as evidence for the rightness of the effort to convert the inhabitants of the New World. Even if all of these scholars shared a vision of Protestant dominance in the New World, over Catholic empires and indigenous pagans alike, there was no consensus about what specific form that dominance would take. Assumptions about world history and global politics were shared across transatlantic Protestant networks even as they were shaped by local imperatives in Boston, London, Neuchatel, and Berlin. The giant bones, heavily promoted by Mather, were dismissed and ignored by his European counterparts, who nevertheless seized on his passing reference to the Taunton stone and used it to support theories with opposite intentions to his own. The meanings of these objects changed as the words and images used to represent them left the objects behind, in their voyage from the British colonies to London to the capitals of Continental Europe. Their meaning also changed because people in different places wanted different things from them. The circulation of news about these mineral artifacts in the early modern Atlantic world shows how historical knowledge about global connections in the past was used to build global connections in the present. But

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240  Lydia Barnett it also suggests that the networks devoted to circulating that knowledge were shaped by conflicting fantasies about what America had been in the past, and would, in the future, become.

Coda: the Taunton stone revisited Knowledge flowed both ways across the Atlantic, though not always in an even exchange. Eventually, European ideas about the giant bones and the Taunton stone made their way back to British North America, where they were greeted with considerable warmth by a new generation of colonists who identified more strongly with Britain even as they continued to articulate a sense of living in a new land with a distinctive historical trajectory. As the eighteenth century wore on, colonists in British North America abandoned the giant hypothesis and came to regard giant fossil bones and teeth as belonging to an elephant or perhaps to some other kind of enormous quadruped. While colonial opinion converged with the views of the scientific elite in Britain, it did not entirely merge with the interpretation articulated by Sloane and other naturalists in London. Giant fossils like the Claverack specimens, which continued to be found in colonial North America, gradually came to be seen as relics of the mammoth or the “incognitum,” as it was sometimes called, which was mobilized as an early Federalist symbol of patriotic pride.55 This new interpretation carried much of the patriotic significance of Mather’s nephelim bones while largely leaving their religious significance behind. Meanwhile, colonial perceptions of the Taunton stone also responded to ideas flowing from Europe. One of Mather’s own protégés supplied further information about the Taunton stone to colleagues in Britain and –​unlike his mentor –​ deferred to European interpretations of its mysterious engraving. Sometime in the early 1720s, a British scholar living in Berlin named John Villa met La Croze, who was by then working in the royal Prussian library. Together they worked on deciphering the illustration of the Taunton stone that had been published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1714, but they found their progress stymied by the poor and incomplete transcription. In 1725, Villa wrote to James Jurin, then serving as the Royal Society’s secretary, to ask whether a better one might be produced. Jurin wrote to Mather to commission a new transcription but did not receive a response, at which point another Fellow, John Eames, contacted a scholar of his acquaintance in Boston named Isaac Greenwood. Greenwood (1702–​1745) was the first Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard and a major promoter of Newtonian experimental science in New England. He spent several years in London as a young man, where he met Newton and many other members of the Royal Society, presumably including Eames.56 Greenwood was also a member of Mather’s church in Boston, and Mather helped grease the wheels of his introduction to the Royal Society, and later, on his return to the colonies, into a professorship at Harvard.57 After receiving the letter from Eames in London, Greenwood obligingly visited the Taunton stone and produced a new transcription. In the letter that accompanied the illustration, dated December 1730, Greenwood

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 241 confidently asserted that the rock’s markings were human-​made and ventured to identify them further as “Oriental Characters.” However, he did not try to offer the Royal Society a definitive theory about the Taunton stone as Mather had done apropos of the giant bones. Instead, Greenwood concluded his letter by deferring to that great European scholar of Oriental languages, Mathurin Veyssière La Croze. But for the further Discovery of this, our Hopes being placed upon the extraordinary Skill and Ingenuity of Mr La Croze, in the Alphabets, both ancient and Modern, of the Oriental Tongues, it is with pleasure I now take Leave of this Subject.58 Greenwood’s willingness to supply the Society with information, his careful refusal of interpretation, and his corresponding denial of epistemic authority derived from his emplacement in a local landscape –​the very kind of authority that Mather had tried and failed to leverage in his Curiosa Americana  –​ speak to a very different attitude and strategy than the one previously adopted by his patron: less oppositional, more deferential, perhaps more cheerfully “British.”59 The flow of information from New England to England to the Continent had come full circle, as a New England colonist patiently awaited the scholarly pronouncements of a Continental scholar based on the evidence supplied to him by American observers. The most celebrated of Mather’s Curiosa Americana was now being used by European scholars to write American history for a new generation of Americans.

Notes 1 Colonial interest in these fossils has been widely discussed. See David Levin, “Giants in the Earth:  Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather’s Letters to the Royal Society,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no.  4 (October 1988):  751–​770; and Amy Morris, “Geomythology on the Colonial Frontier: Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, and the Claverack Giant,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2013):  701–​724. In fact, there were multiple similar teeth and bone fragments unearthed at several proximate sites. Consequently, there was (and remains) confusion about the exact number of specimens in circulation. Levin, “Giants in the Earth,” 755. 2 Although there has been continuous fascination with the Taunton stone, commonly called Dighton Rock or Dighton Writing Rock, since its discovery by Euro-​Americans in 1680, little contemporary historical scholarship exists to contextualize this fascination. The most comprehensive account of colonial reactions to the artifact is Edmund Delabarre, “Early Interest in Dighton Rock,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 18 (March 1916): 235–​299. 3 On “Greater New England” as a region of scientific exchange in the eighteenth century, see Anya Zilberstein, “Making and Unmaking Knowledge in Greater New England,” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 36, no.  4 (2013):  559–​569. On science in the British Atlantic World more generally, see James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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242  Lydia Barnett 4 The materiality of different genera of objects of knowledge profoundly affected their circulation and, hence, the production of knowledge about them. See Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), ch. 2. 5 The literature on Mather is vast, though only recently has his work as a serious scholar been given the attention and the reappraisal it deserves. The recent trend away from seeing Mather as a benighted Puritan minister and toward seeing him as a full participant in the transatlantic Enlightenment is well-​represented in the essays collected in Reiner Smolinksi and Jan Stievermann, eds., Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana: America’s First Bible Commentary (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). 6 In so doing, they joined a long humanistic tradition of writing American history (as they understood it) into the history of the Old World, a tradition that has been well-​documented in Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World:  Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-​Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). At the same time, this was not a wholly bookish endeavor; the use of fossils, coins, and mineral artifacts to reconstruct human and natural history became ever more important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G.  Cochrane (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1984). 7 Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 8 Mather’s Curiosa Americana are the subject of Levin, “Giants in the Earth”; and Otho T. Beall, “Cotton Mather’s Early ‘Curiosa Americana’ and the Boston Philosophical Society of 1683,” William and Mary Quarterly 18, no.  3 (July 1961):  360–​372. The Royal Society’s relationship to Mather, and to British North America more generally, is explored in detail in Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970); and Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity:  Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 9 Cotton Mather to John Woodward, November 17, 1712, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​21. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Richard Waller, “An Extract of Several Letters from Cotton Mather, D. D. to John Woodward, M. D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S. R. Secr.,” Philosophical Transactions 29 (1714): 62. 13 Waller, Notes on Mather’s letters, n.d., Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​34. 14 “I apprehended, at first, that they were some Collections of natural Raritys of new-​ England designed for the Royal Societys Repository.” Waller to Mather, July 22, 1713, Royal Society MS EL/​W3/​75. 15 Joseph M.  Levine, Dr.  Woodward’s Shield:  History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 99. 16 Woodward may have been the one to initiate correspondence with Mather –​if so, the letter has been lost –​and Petiver certainly made first contact with Mather, at the Society’s urging. Previous scholars have interpreted this as a sign of respect for Mather, and indeed, it was typical in the Republic of Letters for contact to be initiated by the lower-​status member of the pair. However, given the rivalry between Woodward

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 243 and Petiver, initiating correspondence was not necessarily a deferential gesture and just as easily might have been a deliberate move to capture one conduit of the flow of information and specimens coming out of British North America. See Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, 101; and George Lyman Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications to the Royal Society,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (1916): 92. 17 Woodward to Mather, April 3, 1721, printed in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 13 (November 1873): 111. 18 An excellent introduction to the fossil debate that raged from the 1660s to the 1730s is Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), ch. 2. 19 Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications,” 43. 20 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists in the Americas were frequently treated by their metropolitan counterparts as mere suppliers of specimens and raw data rather than theorists or philosophers in their own right, suggesting that colonists held a subordinate status in British hierarchies of knowledge-​making. See Parrish, American Curiosity; and Joyce Chaplin, “Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context,” in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge:  Natural History in North America, 1730–​1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia, PA:  American Philosophical Society, 2003), 75–​95. 21 Waller to Mather, December 23, 1713, Royal Society MS EL/​W3/​76. Mather’s name finally appeared in the official rolls in 1723, after Mather petitioned James Jurin, the Society’s next secretary, to include it. Mather to James Jurin, May 21, 1723, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​36. The convoluted route by which Mather became an official member of the Royal Society –​not fully concluded until 1723 –​is detailed in George Lyman Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Election into the Royal Society,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 14 (1913): 81–​114. The Society finally changed its bylaws to accommodate British subjects living abroad in 1727. 22 See, for example, Mather to John Winthrop, October 15, 1716, in Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1871), 219–​220. 23 The giants versus elephants debate pre-​dated the discovery of the Claverack fossils by at least several decades. Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–​ 1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 112–​118. The giant hypothesis is discussed more fully in Antoine Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne, La Tulipe: Collections françaises au XVIIieme siècle (Paris:  Flammarion, 1988), ch. 2, while the elephant hypothesis is discussed in Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 4. 24 Thomas Molyneux, “Remarks upon the Aforesaid Letter and Teeth,” Philosophical Transactions 29 (1714): 374. 25 Hans Sloane, “An Account of Elephants Teeth and Bones Found under Ground,” Philosophical Transactions 35 (1728): 458. 26 Sloane, “Of Fossile Teeth and Bones of Elephants:  Part the Second,” Philosophical Transactions 35 (1728): 497–​498. 27 Mather to Woodward, November 17, 1712, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​21. 28 Edward Hyde to Henry Hyde, November 30, 1705, British Library Sloane MS 4064, f.  93. The tooth to which Hyde referred was probably the first one excavated at Claverack, in 1705; he sent it to Gresham College, where Woodward was a professor. Both the Royal Society and Mather seemed unaware, in 1712, that one of the giant

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244  Lydia Barnett teeth was already in England. The tooth Mather and Dudley saw was probably the second such specimen unearthed at Claverack, which was subsequently brought to Boston. 29 Joseph Dudley to Cotton Mather, July 10, 1706. Printed in Donald E. Stanford, “The Giant Bones of Claverack, New  York, 1705,” New  York History 40, no.  1 (January 1959): 49–​50. 30 Morris, “Geomythology,” 704–​705. 31 Ibid., 717–​718. 32 Mather to Woodward, November 17, 1712, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​21. 33 Mather to Woodward, November 28, 1712, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​32. 34 Mather’s use of the word “lines” reflected Eurocentric assumptions about writing that further obscured the true nature of the carvings on the Taunton stone. 35 Waller, “An Extract of Several Letters,” 63. 36 The growing tendency to privilege images over words as a medium for communicating accurate scientific knowledge is discussed in Paula Findlen, “Agostino Scilla: A Baroque Painter in Pursuit of Science,” in Science in the Age of Baroque, ed. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-​Morris (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 119–​160. 37 Richard Waller, “Some Notes and Querys drawn up by Mr Waller Upon the Reverend Dr Cotton Mathers Letters,” Royal Society MS EL/​W3/​77. 38 Mathurin Veyssière La Croze to Theophilus (Gottlieb) Siegfried Bayer, November 1724, in Thesaurus Epistolicus Lacrozianus, ed. Johann Ludwig Uhl and Charles Jordan (Leipzig, 1746), vol. 3, 62. 39 I have so far been unable to determine the identity of the scholar who first alerted La Croze to the summary of Mather’s letters in the Philosophical Transactions, but it is at least possible that it was Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, a correspondent of Woodward, La Croze, and Bourguet. 40 Louis Bourguet, “Lettre … sur la Jonction de l’Amérique à l’Asie,” Mercure Suisse (July 1735): 84. 41 The writing on the Taunton stone “looks nothing like Tibetan, or Tangut for that matter.” Donald S.  Lopez, Jr., “Tibetology in the United States of America:  A Brief History,” in Images of Tibet in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Monica Esposito (Paris: EFEO, 2008), vol. 1, 180. 42 Edward J. Lenik, Picture Rocks: American Indian Rock Art in the Northeast Woodlands (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), 129–​134. 43 Delabarre, “Dighton Rock,” 256–​259. 44 Making matters worse, Mather produced several copies of his own, with fidelity to Danforth’s “original” degrading each time. According to Delabarre, Mather “allowed himself almost unbelievable liberties in the details of his copying.” Delabarre, “Dighton Rock,” 258. For a visual demonstration of the challenges that Euro-​Americans faced in trying to produce an accurate rendering, see Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 72–​73. 45 The stele, which was engraved in Chinese and Syriac, was also subject to competing narratives of world history, debates which took place largely along confessional lines. Michael Keevak, The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–​1916 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). 46 On European debates about the origins of the Native Americans, see Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–​1729 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1967); and David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race,

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Giant bones and the Taunton Stone 245 Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 47 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races:  Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61. 48 The land bridge debates are well-​ documented in Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il Nuovo Mondo: la nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977). 49 Bourguet, “Lettre … sur la Jonction,” 84–​85. He elaborated on his speculative history in a subsequent article, “Lettre à Mr. Engel … servant de Réponse à celle qu’il avoit écrite, sur la Jonction de l’Amérique avec l’Asie,” Mercure Suisse (February 1736): 53–​62. 50 M. V. La Croze, Histoire du christianisme des Indes (The Hague, 1724), 513–​518. 51 On the Protestant International in relation to the Republic of Letters, see Mark A.  Peterson, “Theopolis Americana:  The City-​State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–​1739,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–​1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 329–​ 347. The key role of Huguenots (like Bourguet) within the Protestant International is discussed in J. F. Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no.  1 (January 1995): 77–​102. 52 Peterson, “Theopolis Americana,” 364; Steven J. Harris, “Confession-​Building, Long-​ Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Modern Science and Medicine 1, no. 3 (October 1996): 287–​318. 53 Many early modern Europeans viewed empire as a project laden with religious meaning. See Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); and Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors:  Iberianizing the Atlantic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). The role of transatlantic Protestant networks in resettling European Protestant refugees is discussed in Rosalind J. Beiler, “Dissenting Religious Communication Networks and European Migration, 1660–​1710,” in Bailyn and Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History, 210–​236. 54 It is important to note that Mather, in other contexts, actively endorsed the conversion of the Indians, as in his India Christiana: A Discourse, Delivered unto the Commissioners, for the Propagation of the Gospel among the American Indians (Boston, 1721). 55 Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 56 Stearns, Science, 446–​455. 57 Greenwood traveled to London with a letter of introduction to the Royal Society from Mather. Mather to James Jurin, June 10, 1723, Royal Society MS EL/​M2/​44. 58 Isaac Greenwood to John Eames [?]‌, December 8, 1730. Printed in Delabarre, “Dighton Rock,” 290. 59 In this sense, Greenwood may be representative of “a more fully provincial generation –​one less committed to an inherited American identity and mission, such as Mather represented, and thus freer to attempt an escape … into the less demanding identity of provincial Englishness.” John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 236.

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9  The tarot of Yu the Great The search for civilization’s origins between France and China in the Age of Enlightenment Alexander Statman Introduction Did the ancient Chinese know the occult secrets of the tarot? At the North Church in Beijing, a stone’s throw from the Forbidden City, the ex-​ Jesuit missionary Joseph-​Marie Amiot considered this question, put to him in a letter written from Paris in 1779. Its author, the Protestant pastor and savant Antoine Court de Gébelin, certainly thought so. The proof was an object that Amiot had sent a few years earlier, a rubbing taken from an ancient Chinese monument, the Stele of Yu. “I cannot stop myself from admiring the surprising rapport with a game known in Europe,” wrote Court de Gébelin:  “It’s the game called the Tarots.” According to him, the symbols on the tarot cards used in popular games across Europe expressed the “philosophical and theological knowledge of the ancient Egyptians,” just as the Stele of Yu displayed “the most useful knowledge for the entire nation of the Chinese.” Both the deck and the stele contained 77 figures, divided into four sets of 14 and one set of 21. The similarities could not be mere coincidence; they reflected “a different application of a single formula, anterior perhaps to the existence of the Chinese and the Egyptians.”1 This esoteric knowledge bore testament to an ancient and advanced people whose traces were almost lost –​but could hopefully be recovered, with the help of the Chinese tradition and its French interpreter, Amiot. European orientalism had been associated since the Renaissance with the search for a prisca scientia, or ancient knowledge, a supposedly long-​lost tradition of great value. By the late eighteenth century, such quests were beginning to seem quixotic.2 French thinkers such as Diderot and Condorcet were increasingly confident in the achievements of their own times. The historical narrative about the successes of the scientific revolution and the promise of more to come was a defining contribution of the French Enlightenment.3 The idea of historical progress –​that human society had improved and would continue to improve –​placed the golden age in a distant future, not a mythic past. For Leibniz and Voltaire, the civilization of China could serve as a model for Europe because it seemed ancient and stable. By the 1770s, most of the philosophes rejected it because it seemed static and stuck in the past. But others came to praise it for just the same reasons.

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The tarot of Yu the Great 247 Toward the end of the Enlightenment, French savants such as Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725–​1784) and the astronomer Jean-​Sylvain Bailly (1736–​1793) used China to articulate an alternative to the emerging view of progress. Meeting at the center of French intellectual life in a Masonic lodge on the Left Bank of the Seine, they looked to traditions far away in time and space in search of human origins. What they thought they found was an advanced ancestor civilization spread throughout ancient Eurasia. Though its knowledge was mostly lost, vestiges remained in the arts and sciences of all the peoples of the ancient world. Mysterious and esoteric traditions, from the tarot cards to the legend of Atlantis, bore testament to its nearly forgotten grandeur. For Court de Gébelin and Bailly, the apogee of human achievement was in the past, not the future –​and everyone agreed that China was the place where the past was best preserved. Yet, China was far away, and its culture largely inaccessible. To tap its well they sought help from Henri-​Léonard Bertin (1720–​1792), Secrétaire d’état under Louis XV and Europe’s most powerful sinophile. After the global suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Bertin became the chief liaison for the still-​functioning network of the French ex-​Jesuits in China. He acted as a sort of financier and communications director on behalf of the missionaries and promoted their scholarly endeavors. So when Court de Gébelin and Bailly, who shared his social and intellectual affiliations, sought to enter the tiny circle of China correspondents, Bertin was happy to pass along their inquiries. He helped to bring the networks of Parisian esotericism and ex-​Jesuit sinology together, to the benefit of both. French scholars found an enthusiastic collaborator half a world away in the ex-​ Jesuit missionary Joseph-​Marie Amiot (1718–​1793). Amiot had arrived in Beijing in 1751, when the mission was still flourishing. He became the pre-​eminent Jesuit scholar of China just in time to see its prestige in Europe evaporate. During the 1770s, institutional support began to dry up when the Society of Jesus was suppressed and the missionaries fell further out of favor in the Qing court. Amiot had to reinvent himself as a cultural “go-​between” in this new post-​Jesuit order.4 He aligned himself with French scholars working on the prisca scientia because their project valorized his own life’s labor. Discussing their ideas in Beijing with friends associated with the evidential studies movement, he found confirmation in an indigenous Chinese tradition. He became a self-​described “disciple” of Bailly and Court de Gébelin and offered evidence from China for their work. A new intellectual community emerged, brought together by a commitment to the value of the past. The network connecting thinkers between China and France was remarkably thin. In Beijing, Amiot was the only French missionary left with the expertise to carry out serious scholarship on the Chinese tradition, and in Paris, Bertin exercised nearly complete control over who had access to it. Bertin gave savants privileged access to new works on China because they were willing to promote it, and Amiot drew on particular currents in Chinese scholarship in order to help them do so. They were two gatekeepers who ensured that ideas flowed selectively, in both directions. A shared motivation thus held the network together and shaped the work that came out of it. The result was a truly

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248  Alexander Statman cross-​cultural conversation that drew on European and Chinese learning to formulate an alternative narrative of historical progress.

The late Enlightenment looks to China If all eighteenth-​century Europeans could agree on one thing about Chinese civilization, it was this: it was very old. For Amiot and the missionaries, China possessed simply “the most ancient, as the most complete of the histories of the world.”5 Even the philosophes, who were beginning to cast a disparaging eye on Chinese history, had to concede its antiquity. In the words of one writing in 1773, “all that can be truthfully said is that the Chinese are an extremely ancient people.”6 This was where agreement on the matter ended. Yet it was enough to encourage French savants on all sides of the ideological spectrum to debate two interrelated questions: just how old were the records of the Chinese people, and where had they come from? At the beginning of Chinese history sat the question of origins, and by the 1770s, three basic answers were available.7 The first, held true by most of the Jesuits in China, traced the ancient Chinese to the immediate descendants of Noah.8 The second, argued by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century and revived by Joseph de Guignes almost 100 years later, considered them to be a colony of ancient Egyptians.9 The third, phrased in the 1770s as a criticism of the Egyptian origins theory, declared them to be an offshoot of the “Tartars” or “Scyths” who inhabited all the lands of central Asia.10 Notably, no one in Europe advocated an indigenous origin for the Chinese people. But none of the three main theories really seemed satisfactory either, and Voltaire rejected them all.11 The problem of origins was compounded by a growing feeling in France that the indigenous historical records of the Chinese were not entirely reliable. Its first ages were held in suspicion as an accretion of spurious stories that even Chinese scholars did not believe. Nevertheless, many held that the myths and fables of the early ages should be studied anyway because of the deeper truths they might conceal. In France, experts on ancient China believed that it could clarify the facts of history.12 From China, the missionaries encouraged the view: “we strip them of all they have that is fabulous, we undertake to explicate what they contain that is allegorical, and we can approach the truth,” wrote Amiot in 1769.13 The missionaries held the records of China to the same standards as their own. In 1771, the Qianlong emperor asked the Jesuit Michel Benoist why the ancient Chinese classics did not mention the strange events of Genesis. They had become corrupted, Benoist replied, but “among these fables, we recognize facts conforming to the truth.”14 With this approach in mind, French scholars like Court de Gébelin were then developing new methods for the comparative study of mythology and allegorical interpretation. At the same time, they also suggested a new solution to the problem of Chinese origins. In 1773, Court de Gébelin set out in search of the origins of the arts and sciences. His eight-​volume book project, the Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, or “Primeval world, analyzed and compared with the modern

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The tarot of Yu the Great 249 world,” was guided by two interpretive principles: that true history underlay the myth of antiquity, but shrouded behind a veil of allegory.15 He excavated ancient records piece by piece in order to reconstruct “the antique Edifice that was the cradle of the human species and the accrescences that it received during the first centuries of the World.”16 What he found was a single prehistoric progenitor, a civilization that had long since disappeared, but which left traces in the literary and scientific traditions of all the peoples of the ancient world. Court de Gébelin thought that he had just the techniques required to reveal them. And because it was both foreign and fragmentary, the Chinese case was an excellent testing ground for his new analytical arsenal. The historical perspective of the Monde primitif was conservative. The ancients were in no important way inferior to the moderns, nor even all that different. According to Court de Gébelin, human civilization had “undergone no other alteration but for extensions and developments.”17 The world of men was like the world of nature: “always the same.”18 The achievements of modern Europe were impressive, but they were not unprecedented: “the more we search through Antiquity, the more we find there numerous and surprising proofs that the most precious discoveries, the most rare, are nothing but a return to this Antiquity, itself so surprising.”19 There was value in the past. The historical investigations of Condorcet and to some degree Voltaire were motivated by a desire to show change through time, to suggest the possibility of perfectibility in the human condition. Not so for Court de Gébelin: the Monde primitif showed that there was after all no such thing as discovery, only recovery. Court de Gébelin’s message found an enthusiastic audience. He became a fixture of Parisian intellectual life, and in the secret societies that abounded at the end of the Enlightenment he found himself most at home. His feeling of outsidership and yearning for ecumenicism as a leader of French Protestantism set him on the road to Freemasonry. Its rhetoric about tolerance, fraternity, the power of reason, and the dignity of man provided a learned solution to the problem of religious schism.20 He became the secretary of the Masonic Loge des Neuf Soeurs, which included such renowned members as Bailly, Benjamin Franklin, and Jacques-​Étienne Montgolfier.21 In 1778, Court de Gébelin presided over the initiation of Voltaire; the ceremony took place in the Latin Quarter at the site of the old Jesuit novitiate.22 Court de Gébelin seems to have broken with the Neuf Soeurs a few years later,23 but this did not dampen his enthusiasm for such societies. In 1780, he and a few like-​minded apostates formed a splinter organization which met just down the street at the Rue Dauphine. They called it the Société Appolonienne, later the Musée de Paris.24 It became a premier location for a particular kind of Parisian savant to meet and discuss learned topics, particularly the sentimental epistemology then in fashion.25 Court de Gébelin was the “Président honoraire.”26 He promoted the works of fellow members, including a treatise on the Egyptian origins of the sciences27 and a physiocrat utopia called l’Isle Inconnue,28 and gave regular lectures. Court de Gébelin used his pulpit to preach the mysteries of the Monde primitif, which had over 1,200 subscribers by 1780.29 Their dedication to the man and his work extended even beyond his

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250  Alexander Statman death, when a number of supporters pooled together their money so that publication could continue.30 It was through one of them, Henri-​Léonard Bertin, that Court de Gébelin gained access to the most recent works on China then entering Europe. When the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, a handful of French missionaries still in residence in Beijing found themselves suddenly without the support of the institution that had sustained European sinology for over 100 years, not to mention their livelihoods. Yet as the old Jesuit network connecting Europe and China closed off, a new one opened. These now ex-​Jesuits turned to the French state.31 They found a patron in the sinophile minister Bertin, who saw the Qianlong emperor’s administration as a model for the revival of the Bourbon monarchy.32 Bertin secured them a yearly allowance from the royal treasury on the condition that they continue to write about China for the king of France.33 The suppression of the Jesuits thus created an opportunity for the missionaries to produce still more knowledge. Bertin dubbed this his correspondance littéraire, and he ran it like a dictator. For almost 20 years, nearly all correspondence between Paris and the North Church passed first under his eyes. Many of the letters from China were published under his direction between 1776 and 1793 as the Mémoires concernant … les Chinois, the last great early modern European work on China. An even greater portion of the correspondence was deemed too abstruse, too sensitive, too contentious, or just too weird to print. Yet it circulated among those who had reason to seek it out, or with whom Bertin chose to share it. Bertin artfully positioned himself at the center of an international post-​Jesuit network that linked his office in Paris to his “Chinese office” in the suburbs, the Jesuits in China, and scholars and aristocrats in France and beyond. He was the one indispensable node in the network of French sinology. Court de Gébelin and Bertin discussed each other’s scholarly projects from an early date. They were brought together by religious difference, with Court de Gébelin advising Bertin on the treatment of French Protestants,34 yet they shared a certain intellectual affinity. In 1774, Bertin introduced the Monde primitif to his acolytes in China, describing its author as passionate and determined.35 For his part, Court de Gébelin worked as a sort of sales agent for the Mémoires, forwarding copies to mutual friends.36 He borrowed copies of the missionaries’ letters directly from Bertin, in some cases many years before they were published. He also had connections with the editors of the Mémoires, who were basically working under Bertin’s direction. The first, Jérôme-​Frédéric Bignon, was Court de Gébelin’s confrère at the Loge des Neuf Soeurs,37 and the second, Louis-​George de Bréquigny, was a fellow member of the Académie des Incriptions et Belles-​ Lettres. Socially connected with all of the people involved in its publication, Court de Gébelin had privileged access to the China correspondence and was soon invited to participate in it. As Court de Gébelin’s studies of antiquity intensified over the course of the 1770s, so too did his interest in China. With Bertin’s endorsement, he first wrote to the missionaries in Beijing in 1774, just after he published the

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The tarot of Yu the Great 251 first volume of the Monde primitif.38 He believed the Chinese to have “a quick and penetrating spirit” and a compelling system of moral philosophy worthy of further study.39 More letters to Beijing soon followed. Court de Gébelin hoped that the history of China might fill the gaps in other ancient and classical historical sources, and particularly that it might prove his thesis about how alphabetic writing evolved from pictorial forms. New discoveries about Chinese antiquity would “shed light on origins and fortify the faith.” Among his various inquiries, he also sent to Beijing a copy of the first volume of his Monde primitif.40

The tarot of Yu the Great Reading the Monde primitif in Beijing in 1777, Amiot felt a “great desire to be in correspondence” with its author. In order that he might “help to penetrate the thick darkness” enshrouding the ancient world, Amiot compiled a package on ancient China for Bertin to forward to Court de Gébelin in response. The starring item was an ink rubbing of an ancient stele, the Yu Bei,41 or “Stele of Yu” (Figure 9.1).42 Chinese legend held that the sage-​king Yu the Great, founder of the Xia dynasty, had inscribed the stele almost 4,000 years earlier and ordered it placed high in the Heng Mountains43 of Hunan. The 77-​character inscription, carved in a strange style called “tadpole script,” told the story of how Yu the Great controlled the waters of a catastrophic flood and restored the Chinese people to prosperity. As a supplement to the rubbing, Amiot also included a modern character version of the ancient script, as well as his own French translation of the text. These materials, he believed, would be useful for European savants who were interested in mythology and the origins of language. In particular, he hoped that Court de Gébelin might use the inscription to decipher the “primeval language” of the Monde primitif.44 There was a caveat. Amiot wanted more than just an explanation of the monument; he also wanted proof of Court de Gébelin’s interpretive technique. He therefore proposed to Bertin that they should arrange a test. Court de Gébelin would first receive only the rubbing of the ancient stele, with no mention of the modern Chinese version or Amiot’s original French translation. Court de Gébelin would be invited to attempt the best interpretation he could come up with on his own. Amiot would then be the judge: “if he manages to decode the true sense, I declare myself from that moment the most ardent defender of his system and … count myself among his disciples.”45 Bertin agreed to the scheme. He had the rubbing forwarded to Court de Gébelin so that he could be asked “to research and guess the sense, if this is possible by the principles of his system.”46 Amiot must have been quite impressed by the Monde primitif if he expected that its author had any chance at all of meeting this challenge, for the Stele of Yu had been a difficult problem for Chinese historians as well. It was composed in an archaic style and inscribed in an arcane script called kedou wen,47 or “tadpole script.” Several versions of the stele existed in Qing times, each varying to a greater or lesser extent from a supposed original.48 In combination, the recondite

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Figure 9.1 Ink rubbing of the Stele of Yu (Yu bei 禹碑, or Goulou feng bei 岣嶁峰碑). Credit: China Guardian Auctions.

language, the weird script, and the murky provenance of the text had left the inscription open to interpretation by generations of Chinese scholars. One of the leading experts on such ancient steles during the late Qianlong period was the scholar Wang Chang (1724–​1806),49 a prominent exponent of the kaozheng50 or “evidential studies” movement in philology and textual criticism, and an acquaintance of the greatest thinkers of his day.51 He was particularly

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The tarot of Yu the Great 253 noted for his foundational study of epigraphy, and in this connection he had become something of a Stele of Yu enthusiast. Wang traveled across the empire to collect rubbings from the exempla at Changsha, Kunming, Chengdu, and Xi’an. He concluded that their antiquity was spurious. How could anyone have written the elaborate tadpole script so soon after the invention of writing, when people had recently been using knotted cords for records? And if the inscription was so ancient, why had the legendary scholars of the Song in the eleventh century had nothing to say about it? Although the existence of a stele was mentioned during the Eastern Han, no records of the actual text pre-​dated the Southern Song. Therefore, the inscription was probably no more than 500 or 600  years old. Those who had accepted a dating to the beginning of the Xia were simply credulous:  they “deeply believed and did not doubt; the rest all rejected it as spurious.” The sophisticated techniques of evidential scholarship demanded more circumspection:  “now still there is no definite evidence.”52 Modern historians have pointed out that Chinese evidential studies and European Enlightenment scholarship shared certain priorities, including a shared focus on empirical evidence and rigorous proof as well as a willingness to reject old opinions.53 For Wang Chang as for Court de Gébelin, new techniques could help make sense of ancient evidence. It is impossible to say for sure how Amiot learned about the stele, but if it was not from Wang, it was probably from someone in the same circle. The only source on the stele that Amiot cited by name was Mao Huijian,54 who wrote about it at the end of the seventeenth century. But his writings from the time show that he was also interested in contemporary antiquarianism.55 His best non-​Christian friend and main interlocutor on the topic was an acquaintance of Wang’s, the Manchu prince Hongwu.56 A  cousin of the Qianlong emperor with literati ambitions, Hongwu was a frequent visitor to the North Church and became very close with Amiot. He was especially interested in French science, from air-​pumps to gas balloons. Just as Bertin maintained a cabinet of curiosities from China, Hongwu kept a cabinet of curiosities from France, which he adorned “as best he could in the French style,” filled with artwork, mirrors, machines, and other gifts from the missionaries.57 Amiot taught Hongwu how to pronounce written French, which he learned to do “better and more distinctly than our Germans and our Portuguese”  –​although the prince could not apparently understand a word he spoke.58 By 1789, when Hongwu came to see Amiot, it was “a visit that one could call a veritable visit of a friend.”59 Meanwhile, Hongwu and Wang were painting together, writing poetry for one another, and appearing in each other’s collected writings.60 Thus if Amiot had discussed the Stele of Yu with Hongwu, Wang would have been an obvious authority on the matter. Circumstantial evidence also suggests that Amiot may have discussed the stele with Wang himself. The two were relatively close in age and lived in Beijing together for many years. In the 1770s, Amiot was researching the Qing campaign against the Jinchuan61 rebels in Sichuan, for which Wang was an official chronicler.62 And it was not long after Wang returned to Beijing with the victorious armies in 1776 that Amiot had a breakthrough in his investigation of the Stele

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254  Alexander Statman of Yu. In 1777, he explained that although he had already sent two versions of the stele, he was sending another one because he had recently come to better understand the meaning of the inscription.63 In the end, Amiot followed Wang in refusing to rule definitively on the authenticity of the monument. It was not important whether or not it really dated to the time of the Xia: “if the monument did not truly belong to Yu the Great, it was nevertheless the most ancient that existed in all the Empire.” It was therefore worthy of the attention of “savant antiquarians,” such as Court de Gébelin.64 Perhaps the French scholar might even return some new insight that would impress those in China. Court de Gébelin agreed: the “beautiful monument” was “so precious” that it should be published and “placed under the eyes of savants.”65 In the 1781 volume of the Monde primitif, at the end of the first known essay on tarot-​card fortune-​ telling, was a short section on “the relationship between this game and a Chinese Monument.” Its exposition required some impressive mental gymnastics. The tarot cards were organized into 4 suits of 14 cards each, ace through king, much like a normal pack of playing cards but with an extra face card. There was also an additional fifth suit of 21 trump cards, known today as the “Major Arcana.” Now, the 77 Chinese characters on the Stele of Yu were arranged in 5 vertical columns of 14 characters each and a sixth column of 7. Court de Gébelin’s trick was to argue that the sixth column of the monument should be taken as an extension of the fifth. Now it was clear: both the tarot and the stele were composed of 77 figures divided into 4 sets of 14 and a fifth set of 21, expressing their esoteric meanings in multiples of 7, a number whose mystical symbolism was known to all the ancient peoples (Figure 9.2). The similarity could hardly be coincidental.66 In a letter to Amiot written in 1779, Court de Gébelin ventured a still more thorough reading of the tarot of Yu the Great. Though it was never published, it circulated among those involved with the Monde primitif and the Mémoires concernant les Chinois. The wisdom of Yu the Great pertained to both individual and collective human affairs. On the one hand, it was a “tableau describing human life from the point of existence all the way to death.” On the other, it was also linked with a conception of “the civil,” through the ancient symbolism of the number seven. The meaning of the characters themselves, however, remained a mystery that Court de Gébelin could not decipher. With information on China quite limited in Paris, he could find no other examples of the tadpole script. Since there was nothing available for comparison, his analytical method would not work: “I have never presented myself as a diviner,” he wrote in his own defense, “but purely and simply as a comparer of words and monuments.” But Court de Gébelin cleverly turned his ignorance into an argument. The tadpole script was so dissimilar from contemporary Chinese characters that it suggested a more distant origin even than the ancient Chinese –​the people of the Monde primitif. If he could not determine the actual meaning of the characters, it was only because modern scholars on both sides of Eurasia knew so little about them.67 At this point, it was time for the reveal. After Court de Gébelin gave Bertin the draft of his letter to forward on to Amiot in China, Bertin showed him Amiot’s French translation of the monument, which described a legendary flood

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The tarot of Yu the Great 255

Figure 9.2 Rider-​Waite tarot deck, arranged in conformity with the Stele of Yu.

and King Yu’s heroic accomplishment. “Since all this will probably make him change his letter,” Bertin figured, the gentlemanly thing to do was to allow him an opportunity to revise it. Court de Gébelin hardly changed a word. After all, his interpretation of the monument was based on the arrangement of the characters, not their content. What little he could say about the knowledge they concealed was inferred only from its similarity to the tarot, not from the tadpole script. The actual meaning of the monument’s text was hardly relevant to the point that Court de Gébelin wanted it to make.68 The Stele of Yu was important to Court de Gébelin primarily as proof of the existence of the people of the Monde primitif, a Eurasian ur-​civilization whose esoteric knowledge had almost been lost –​but not quite. The tarot cards and the Stele of Yu were but small portions of a universal inheritance, a tradition “born among the common mother of the Chinese, the Egyptians, and all the peoples.” Although that tradition had “faded away in the passage of time,”69 its debris was preserved in all the ancient civilizations, including the Indians, Tibetans, and other inhabitants of Asia. Court de Gébelin’s project was to uncover it. As he explained to Amiot, “Antiquity was infinitely more knowledgeable and more enlightened than we imagine.” The moderns had “lost the traces of the origins of a multitude of things” known to the ancients.70 Those traces could be recovered,

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256  Alexander Statman but only through painstaking etymological and mythological analyses of whatever ancient sources could be found. Amiot received Court de Gébelin’s letter explaining the connection between the stele and the tarot in 1781. He was completely unconvinced. The main problem was that the distribution of the characters into columns based on multiples of seven was irrelevant to the meaning of the stele.71 In fact, there were many different versions of the stele with the same inscription, and the six-​column organization was not even the most common.72 With this alone, Amiot pulled the foundation out from under the entire interpretation. Court de Gébelin’s claim was “wonderful” indeed, but it would never pass muster under the penetrating criticism of Chinese scholars: “it might well suffice among you; but it is not the same here,” Amiot wrote.73 What is surprising, though, is that Court de Gébelin’s fabulous interpretation of the Stele of Yu hardly seems to have altered Amiot’s respect for him. If the missionary was convinced of the “profundity and the vast extent of his imagination,” it is unclear whether this was meant as a critique or a compliment. He was certainly delighted to have received “a very nice letter from this amiable and very estimable savant.”74 While he rejected the identity of the tarot cards and the Stele of Yu, he continued to inquire about the idea years later, and he insisted that Bertin take special care to inform him of “any other discovery of this kind.”75 Court de Gébelin deserved “a place of highest distinction among those who make up the small number of creative geniuses” for his work on the Monde primitif.76 He was “one of those profound and grave men, who by their application and their constancy digging in the almost arid hiding place of antiquity, come finally in the end to bring forth a clear and brilliant water.”77 On the most important thing Amiot and Court de Gébelin agreed:  valuable truths were known to the ancients, and it was the task of modern scholars to dig them up them –​to exhume their debris and to reconstruct their monuments. Likewise, Court de Gébelin was hardly discouraged by Amiot’s response, and it was too late anyway; by the time it arrived in 1782, his essay on the tarot cards, with its section on the Chinese monument, had already gone to press. Before then, the tarot cards had not been ascribed an esoteric meaning, and were used primarily for a card game like bridge.78 The Stele of Yu thus sits at the real origins of the invented tradition of tarot-​card fortune-​telling. It is not clear whether Court de Gébelin changed his mind following Amiot’s critique, but it hardly mattered for the purposes of his studies. He continued his investigations of China79 and wrote more letters to Amiot, inquiring about subjects from the legacy of the ancient community of Jews in Kaifeng to the alchemical doctrine of the Daoist adepts.80 His death in 1783 cut his investigations short, but they were soon taken up by another. As a repository of wonderful and lost things, China was only gaining appeal.

Jean-​Sylvain Bailly and the Enlightenment idea of progress The astronomer, historian, and revolutionary mayor of Paris, Jean-​Sylvain Bailly, was a fitting intellectual heir to Court de Gébelin, working also at the intersection

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The tarot of Yu the Great 257 of history and mythology, science and pseudo-​science, both lumière and illuminé.81 They were creatures of the same social world of late-​eighteenth-​century Paris and shared many friends, including Bertin and Louis-​George de Bréquigny, the publisher of the Mémoires concernant … les Chinois.82 As much a figure of the establishment as it was possible to be  –​the first since Fontenelle to belong to all three French academies –​Bailly later became a leading figure of the French Revolution. Essentially, Bailly was a philosophe. But his rival Condorcet derided him as a “frère illuminé,”83 and Bailly’s scholarly career was spent in part arguing against a unifying belief of most philosophes of the late Enlightenment: the idea of historical progress. Bailly came to confront the idea of progress in his work on the history of science, written during the 1770s as a series of letters addressed to Voltaire, a conceit he continued even after the death of his friend and confrère. Bailly noticed remarkable similarities between the astronomical traditions of the most ancient peoples. The Chinese, the Egyptians, the Indians, and the Chaldeans seemed to share an entire cultural edifice in common, including ideas of a golden age, memories of a universal flood, theories of metempsychosis, and wild Saturnalian parties.84 The explanation for these similarities, he concluded, must be genetic. In prehistoric times, there had to have existed an advanced civilization that gave birth to all the others:  “this ancient people had sciences that were perfected, a philosophy sage and sublime.”85 Emerging in the far north of Eurasia, they left their hyperborean homelands and established colonies that would go on to become the great civilizations of the ancient world, whose “beautiful institutions are the work of a people who disappeared from the face of the earth, a people the name of which is lost, and of which the histories make no mention.”86 Yet this people lived on, if not in history, then in myth and fable –​they were none other than the ur-​civilization described in Plato’s Atlantis. Bailly expounded his theory as an implicit argument against a particular version of the theory of progress, outlined around the same time by his personal rival at the Académie des sciences, the Marquis de Condorcet. The idea of progress emerged in Condorcet’s thought also during the mid-​1770s, and in the context of the history of science.87 At its core was a belief in the perfectibility of human society, ensured by cumulative developments in the understanding of the human and natural world.88 Instead, Bailly aimed to show that progress was neither regular nor inevitable, and that history was not linear, but circular. Himself an astronomer of considerable renown, Bailly acknowledged the remarkable achievements of his contemporaries in the sciences, but he was concerned that they had become too self-​satisfied. It was myopic to think that there was anything particular about modern times:  “all that will happen in the future could have happened in the past.”89 Champions of progress like Condorcet, who believed in a unidirectional upward trajectory, were not only intellectually wrong, but morally so. Their sin was hubris: Our esteem for ourselves fools us; we believe ourselves at the top of the ladder; we are not there: we believe likewise that none have climbed there

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258  Alexander Statman before us, because time, which makes humans disappear, also effaces their transient traces.90 In three books published between 1775 and 1779, Bailly set out to recover them. He took as his starting point the work of Court de Gébelin. He praised the “most ingenious and most enlightened (éclairé)”91 scholar whose investigation of allegories had first revealed the unifying thread connecting all the civilizations of antiquity92 and whose comparative study of languages “advanced this science” more than anyone else had.93 Court de Gébelin’s “primitive language” promised to be nothing less than “a great discovery of our century.”94 According to Bailly, this language was probably monosyllabic, since its speakers would have wanted to express each idea as concisely as possible. The language of Monde primitif, which was the language of the Atlanteans, was long lost, but there was one still living that preserved this most essential feature: Chinese. Bailly for the most part agreed with his contemporaries in his evaluation of Chinese civilization; he praised its advanced understanding of ethics while condemning its retrograde knowledge of nature. But, because Bailly rejected Condorcet’s view in which natural science and moral progress were necessarily tied together, he was able to reconcile the apparent paradox of China’s unequal achievements. Insofar as they lived in peace and virtue, the Chinese “have attained this final term of human sagacity.”95 They were, in fact, “the most enlightened [éclairés] of the people of Asia.”96 On the other hand, Confucian ethics was also responsible for China’s scientific backwardness: as “men made for ethics [la morale], they are children in the sciences.”97 Filial piety in particular was to blame. In China, knowledge of the order of nature was held back by the very same respect for custom that successfully maintained the order of society.98 Bailly maintained that progress in morality and in the sciences depends on very different kinds of virtues. The study of ethics is “tranquil,” since it requires only inward reflection; the study of nature, on the other hand, requires “movement, genius and activity,” which the Chinese lacked by nature.99 Conservatism was an inextricable feature of Chinese culture:  “Nature made them patient, from indolence a friend of repose, incapable of this inquietude that creates a need for change.”100 Bailly concluded that the Chinese “never had at any time the veritable esprit of the sciences.”101 The passivity that made them a wise people also made them an uninventive one. Because of his view that progress in science was decoupled from progress in morality, Bailly departed from most of the philosophes in his belief that the conservatism of Chinese civilization, which for many was reason enough to ignore it, was actually just what made it interesting. The Chinese were “the most ancient people in the world, if one uniquely trusts authentic monuments; the most jealous of their antiquity and the most careful to conserve its memory.”102 They preserved their historical record as a matter of national importance and delegated it to an office of state. Their monuments were authentic, their

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The tarot of Yu the Great 259 history and chronology verifiable. So, though China’s contributions to modern astronomy was insignificant, its ancient astronomical records were also the most pristine. Even the “fables of the Daoists,”103 roundly rejected by most European scholars, were worthy of investigation, since Bailly agreed with all the others that “fables sometimes contain debris of history.”104 The irony of Bailly’s condescension toward the supposed Chinese lack of ingenuity was that this was a warrant for him to study it further. He took the conservatism of Chinese civilization also as proof that it could not be aboriginal. The Chinese were not just scientifically backwards in modern times, but had always been. The dual influences of “climate” and “national character” saw to that.105 Yet somehow, the ancient Chinese had possessed a sophisticated understanding of nature. Therefore, the ancient Chinese were not really Chinese at all. According to Bailly, modern Chinese scholars themselves maintained that the sage kings such as Yu the Great had been more learned than they, and that the principles of their own astronomy were hidden behind the ancient riddles of the Yijing, or Classic of Changes.106 The classics in all their detail could hardly have been the work of one man, or even one century.107 According to legend, it was Fuxi, the fabled founder of Chinese civilization, who “brought the first lights to China” 3,000 years before Christ, and who first charted the movement of the stars and described the progression of the equinox.108 But already, Fuxi’s astronomy was puzzlingly advanced, reflecting many generations of observation and analysis.109 He therefore must have gotten his knowledge from somewhere else. But where? According to Bailly, the Chinese owed their civilization to the Atlanteans. In fact, he thought, all of the civilizations of the ancient world were built on foundations laid down by this Hyperborean people in prehistoric times. Setting out from the far north, they established their first colonies on the Central Asian Plateau, or “Tartary.” Thousands of years ago, he argued, those lands were warm, wet, and fertile, able to support thriving cities and powerful empires110  –​the immediate ancestors of the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese.111 Since all of the first civilizations descended from them, “it is the spirit of Asia that animates Europe.”112 This made Asian history particularly important, and many of Bailly’s scholarly publications took it to some degree as their subject. This is also why Bailly’s interest in China developed over the course of his investigations of the Hyperborean Atlantis. China was close to the Atlanteans, both geographically, because of its location near Tartary, and temporally, because of the great antiquity of its record. Bailly accepted that, as Amiot had put it, the Chinese “possessed debris of ancient knowledge in the greatest number and the most well-​preserved.”113 In the 1770s, he purchased both of the Chinese histories newly available in French translation, the Chou-​king and the Histoire générale de la Chine.114 By the 1780s, he was also plugged in directly to the Paris–​Beijing network, receiving items on personal loan from Bertin and probably discussing them with Court de Gébelin.115

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A Chinese Atlantis Meanwhile, Bertin was also forwarding Bailly’s works to Amiot; where the missionary had already found the Monde primitif suggestive, he found the Atlantide convincing. The decisive argument came from the history of science. According to Amiot, the “astronomical, meteorological, and rural calendar” already known to the Chinese at the time of Fuxi must have required many observations performed over multiple generations. It was therefore necessary to conclude, “along with the amiable and very learned author of the Ancient Astronomy,” that the Chinese could not possibly have developed such an advanced culture in such a short amount of time, “except with the debris of knowledge already acquired by an anterior people.”116 Amiot had formerly believed that the earliest culture of China had been transplanted directly from the Holy Land; now, it was “necessary to conclude with M. Bailly that they took them from an anterior people, a lost people, in a word an Antediluvian people who were probably more advanced in the sciences than we are now.”117 Amiot saw too that Bailly’s point was an argument against progress, which made his own study of Chinese traditions more important. He agreed that the Chinese had “not taken a single step past the limits placed by their elders in the most remote times,” but he meant this as a high praise.118 What most of the philosophes had not realized was that the limits attained by the Chinese in ancient times were not so different from those reached by the French in modern ones. Bailly’s historical view was all the more convincing to Amiot because Chinese scholars themselves seemed to agree with it. The literati had always believed “that supposed modern inventions are really nothing but reminiscences.”119 Indeed, since the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries and Chinese scholars alike had argued that much of European mathematics and astronomy had been known in ancient China. This was part of a broader strategy for making Western science more palatable to conservative Chinese elites.120 The idea that “Western studies originated in China”121 became a slogan of the evidential studies movement.122 For example, Ruan Yuan, who oversaw a major Chinese history of science publication at the turn of the nineteenth century, believed that mechanical clocks were invented in China, “only failed to be transmitted.”123 Social connections suggest some participation in the missionaries’ network: in 1793, Hongwu invited Ruan Yuan to join a retreat he organized to drink and write poetry at a nearby Buddhist temple, and by 1801 Ruan Yuan and Wang Chang were also collaborators.124 Just as the belief in the prisca scientia encouraged French scholars to study China, it had also encouraged Chinese scholars to study France –​in both cases with the goal of claiming the other’s knowledge traditions as their own. The theory of an ancient ancestor civilization that pre-​dated both may have seemed to some like a reasonable compromise. Amiot, Bailly, and the evidential scholars could all agree in praising the achievements of the past. According to the evidential scholars, the ancient Chinese knowledge upon which modern Western knowledge was based had been corrupted with the passing of time. Wang Chang cited a common formula to this

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The tarot of Yu the Great 261 effect: “the ancients are strong, the moderns are weak.”125 Some historians point to a resonance between Enlightenment and evidential scholarship in the context of a search for empirically verifiable knowledge.126 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the evidential scholars also shared a much more specific belief with certain French scholars that the foundations of modern science were not built up from cumulative observation but rather constructed on the ruins of an ancient edifice, the original height of which had not yet been surpassed. Thanks to Amiot’s correspondence, during the 1780s Western and Chinese scholars were in fact somewhat aware of each other’s congruent investigations. Amiot discussed the possible Chinese priority of Western science with his friend, Prince Hongwu. Upon entering Amiot’s study one day, Hongwu noticed some prints of the Robert brothers’ first gas balloon flight. He was reminded of a Chinese myth, in which another sage-​king, the Yellow Emperor, ascended to heaven on the back of a dragon. Hongwu asked Amiot if perhaps the Yellow Emperor, initiated in the secrets of alchemy, had discovered how to isolate gasses lighter than air and used them to fill a dragon-​shaped balloon to fly thousands of years before the Robert brothers’ globe aérostatique. Amiot checked for evidence in a commentary on the Shujing, or Classic of Documents, and concluded that this was possible, though not likely.127 Still, he reported the story back to Bertin, and short extracts were published in the Mémoires. Bailly’s last work on Asian astronomy suggests that he knew about Chinese attempts to recover Western science as their own: “it was this science that was lost, and that in all the centuries the Chinese have attempted to recover.”128 This knowledge, the prisca scientia, was exactly what Amiot hoped to recover by putting French and Chinese scholars into conversation. If civilization had arrived in China from Tartary, then that was the logical place to begin the search. Fortunately, Chinese scholarship, guided by the strong arm of Qing imperialism, had recently made this possible. The Manchus ruled over a diverse empire stretching from modern-​day Korea to Kazakhstan, and understanding the many peoples it contained was a political necessity.129 Both Amiot and Wang Chang were actively involved in imperially sponsored studies of the western frontier. Wang participated in the compilation of a dictionary of Buddhist incantations in Mongolian, Manchu, and Tibetan in 1773, and there is some evidence that Amiot occasionally worked for the court as a translator in the Mongolian bureau of the Grand Secretariat.130 In Europe, however, the region was still very poorly known. In order “to make known some peoples heretofore very little known,” Amiot sent a long essay to Paris in 1786 entitled “Introduction to the knowledge of the peoples who were or are not tributaries of China.”131 This was in fact a partial translation of a fairly obscure 1696 work that had just been republished in the Siku quanshu encyclopedia, the Siyiguan kao, or Investigations of the Translation Bureau.132 The introduction explained how, after the Qing conquest, the Manchus set out to learn about the border regions now under their hegemony. They established the Siyiguan, or Translation Bureau, under the Board of Rites and sent agents to the far corners of the empire to investigate. Their observations

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262  Alexander Statman were published by the Bureau chief Jiang Fan under orders of the Kangxi emperor, “to serve as a monument to the glory of his reign.”133 The book described the history, location, and languages of China’s frontier, including chapters on the Muslim Hui peoples of Xinjiang, the Silk Road city of Samarkand, and places as far flung as India and Arabia. According to Amiot, his French translation should be useful to geographers, naturalists, and natural philosophers (physiciens) alike –​ particularly to Bailly, who would “perhaps find there a station of his Atlantic people.”134 There was one story that Amiot thought particularly promising. In 1415, the Ming emperor Yongle dispatched an emissary to Turfan in Xinjiang to negotiate terms of submission with the native peoples. The diplomatic mission failed, but it did produce a curious report on the nearby regions. About 100 li northwest of Turfan was a mountain called Lingshan,135 where local legend had it that 100,000 arhats (lohan in Chinese136) achieved Buddhahood. At the base of the mountain was a lake, in the middle of which rose an island of small rocks. Viewed from afar, the island cast a shadow on the water that resembled a mass of human hair, in the very place where the arhats shaved their heads to become monks. Nearby was a hillock covered with mounds of stones shaped like hands and feet, believed to be their mortal remains. This was a holy place. Some locals claimed that it was where the Buddha himself had cast off his earthly chains.137 At first, Amiot had thought that Lingshan was a monument of Noah’s flood. What else could have left such a swath of destruction?138 But reconsidering after having read Bailly’s works, he had a new solution: perhaps it was “one of the stations of the lost ancient people,” its field of countless petrified bones a testament to their forgotten glory.139 In 1789, Amiot wrote to inquire whether Bailly agreed. He had already read the manuscript of Amiot’s translation on the tributary peoples of China.140 But by the time the letter arrived, Bailly had other things on his mind: on June 17 of that year, he was elected as the first president of the National Assembly.141 Even though Amiot never received the response he was looking for regarding the Atlantic station of Lingshan, Bailly’s influence on his thinking was profound. Looking back on a lifetime of work on China, he saw traces of the ancient people everywhere. He described a series of his most important essays –​one on ancient history and philosophy, another on music, and the first Western translation of Sunzi’s Art of War –​as forming a unified account of the remotest antiquity, which I could not glimpse, so to speak, but with the aid of a torch whose light, too bright for my weak eyes, could not but dazzle me in the first moments, but is sure to enlighten me when I am able to withstand the bright day.142 That torch was the work of Bailly, and Amiot now considered all the ancient myths and legends of China under its powerful light.

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Conclusion The Chinese evidence for the occult tarot and the lost wisdom of Atlantis was encouraging to Court de Gébelin and Bailly, even though their intellectual projects were broadly possible without it. China lent an ancient imprimatur to their view of a prisca scientia and the story of the ancestor civilization that had possessed it. They therefore continued to study China even after the majority of the philosophes had rejected it, using it to argue against the particular view of progress that emerged in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Their careers were cut short  –​the former by illness, the latter by the guillotine  –​but both scholars played an important part in the resurrection of interest in mythology and the re-​enchantment of the Enlightenment world, which continued after the end of the Ancien Régime. For Amiot, the legacy of the conversation was still more important. Inspired by Bailly and Court de Gébelin, he wrote some of the most generous studies of religious Daoism and Chinese mythology then known in the West. He became convinced of the identity of the prisca scientia with Chinese natural philosophy –​ and its recovery in the form of Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism. The purpose of his scholarship in a post-​Jesuit world was now clear. He learned what China was good for in late-​Enlightenment France: its ancient civilization was a repository of wonderful and lost things. This gave guidance and purpose to his studies of ancient China. When the late Enlightenment came to Beijing, Amiot found a particular role that only he could play, an opportunity to advocate on behalf of the French mission, and a new sense of belonging. Through the network maintained by Bertin and Amiot, masonic savants and Chinese scholars were brought into a cross-​cultural conversation. Their access to each other’s work was always indirect, and the network that carried it along it was always thin. Yet for the two decades following the suppression of the Society of Jesus, it constituted the most productive scholarly exchange between China and the West. Historians date the beginning of academic Sinology to the establishment of a chair in Chinese and Manchu at the Collège de France in 1814. When the first European professionals began to re-​examine the Chinese tradition, the products of the ex-​Jesuit network were the newest and often the best resources available. It is no surprise then that the image of China as ancient and unchanging is still a powerful trope today.

Notes 1 “Extrait de la lettre de M. Court de Gébelin a M. Amiot, 1 January 1780,” Institut de France (IF), MS 1518, 204–​205. 2 For treatments of the prisca scientia in mid-​eighteenth-​century historiography of Asia, see Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism: Encounters with Asia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 254–​266; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 4:  Barbarians, Savages and Empires (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), 99–​132.

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264  Alexander Statman 3 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2–​3. 4 On cultural “go-​betweens” at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World:  Go-​ Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), Introduction. 5 Joseph-​ Marie Amiot, “Antiquité des Chinois, prouvée par les monuments,” in Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois (MCC) II (Paris: Nyon, 1777), 8. 6 Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les égyptiens et les chinois (Berlin: C. J. Decker, 1773), vol. 1, 12. 7 The search for origins was a guiding concern of Enlightenment orientalism more generally; App, Birth of Orientalism, 6–​8. 8 Anon., “Idée générale de la Chine et de ses relations avec l’Europe sur le nom de Chine,” MCC V (1780), 53. 9 For recent treatment, see App, Birth of Orientalism, 207–​233; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, 105–​110; Janine Hartman, “Ideograms and Hieroglyphs: The Egypto-​ Chinese Origins Controversy in the Enlightenment,” Dalhousie French Studies 43 (1998): 101–​118. 10 De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 1, xiv. 11 Voltaire, “Fragments sur l’histoire générale, Article II: de la Chine,” (1773), in Oeuvres completes, Mélanges VIII (Paris: Garnier frères, 1877), 230–​233. 12 For example, “Deshauterayes to Anquetil-​Duperron, 8 October 1755,” Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Nouvelles acquisitions françaises MS 8872, “Correspondance d’Anquetil-​Duperron,” 70–​73. 13 “Amiot to Bignon, 20 December 1769,” BnF Bréquigny 7, “Manuscrits du P. Amiot,” 30. 14 “Lettre du Père Benoit” [1772], Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères: Mémoires de la China, ed. Charles le Gobien (Paris: J. G. Merigot le jeune, 1781), 215. 15 Antoine Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, considéré dans l’histoire civile, religieuse et allégorique du calendrier ou almanac (Paris: Court de Gébelin, 1776), 365–​366. 16 Antoine Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne; Plan général, Allégories orientales, Génie allégorique des anciens (Paris:  Chez l’auteur, Boudet,Valleyre l’aîné, Veuve Duchesne, Saugrain, Rualt, 1773), 2. 17 Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, Plan général, 4. 18 Ibid., 6. 19 Antoine Court de Gébelin, Lettre de l’auteur du monde primitif, à ses souscripteurs, sur le magnétisme animal (Paris: Gastelier, 1784), 45. 20 Anne Marie Mercier Faivre, Un supplément à L“Encyclopédie”:  Le “Monde primitif” d’Antoine Court de Gébelin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 102. 21 Louis Amiable and Charles Porset, La Loge des Neuf soeurs (Paris: Edimaf, 1989). 22 Bruno Belhoste, Paris savant:  parcours et rencontres au temps des Lumières (Paris:  A. Colin, 2011), 103. 23 Charles Porset, Franc-​maçonnerie et religions dans l’Europe des Lumières (Paris:  H. Champion, 2006), 61. 24 Belhoste, Paris savant, 125. 25 Ibid., 121; Amiable and Porset, La Loge des Neuf soeurs, 185.

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The tarot of Yu the Great 265 26 “Catalogue des Livres de Feu M.  Court de Gébelin, de la Société Économique de Berne, de l’Académie Royale de la Rochelle, Président honoraire du Musée de Paris, etc” (Paris: M. Didot l’aîné, 1786), BnF MS DELTA 11947. 27 “Court de Gébelin to Macquer, 20 February 1782,” BnF, Français MS 12305, “Correspondence Macquer,” 217–​218. 28 “Court de Gébelin to Bréquigny, 22 December 1783,” BnF, Bréquigny MS 158, “Correspondance de Bréquigny I.” 29 Amiable and Porset, La Loge des Neuf soeurs, 101. 30 “Lettre de M. l’Abbé de Beaulieu, Président du Musée de Paris,” Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme français (BSHPF), MS 367. 31 The most thorough account of this dramatic story remains Camille de Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot et Les Derniers Survivants de La Mission Française À Pékin (1750–​1795) (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1915). 32 Gwynne Lewis, “Henri-​Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy: The ‘Chinese Connection’,” in Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, ed. Norman Hampson et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 33 “Bertin to Bourgeois, 27 November 1776,” IF, MS 1522, “36 Lettres de Mr. Bertin aux Missionaires en Chine, 1773–​1778,” 114–​123. 34 BnF, Bréquigny MS 158, “Correspondance de Bréquigny I.” 35 “Bertin to Gao and Yang, 31 December 1774,” IF, MS 1522, “36 Lettres de Mr. Bertin aux Missionaires en Chine, 1773–​1778,” 74–​83. 36 “Court de Gébelin to Bertin, 1779,” IF, MS 1518, 202. 37 Amiable and Porset, La Loge des Neuf soeurs, 273. 38 “Bertin to Gao and Yang, 31 December 1774,” IF, MS 1522, “36 Lettres de Mr. Bertin aux Missionaires en Chine, 1773–​1778,” 74–​83. 39 “Fragment sur la Chine,” BSHPF MS 622, “Papiers Court de Gébelin, Recueil de pièces et extraits divers,” 251. 40 “Bertin to Cibot, 20 December 1778,” IF, MS 1522, “36 Lettres de Mr. Bertin aux Missionaires en Chine, 1773–​1778,” 173–​183. 41 Yu bei 禹碑; also called the Goulou feng bei岣嶁峰碑 after the peak on which it was placed. 42 On the Stele of Yu, see Jonathan Chaves, “Still Hidden by Spirits and Immortals: The Quest for the Elusive ‘Stele of Yu the Great’,” Asia Major (3rd series) 26, no.  1 (2013): 1–​22; Bruce Rusk, Goulou Feng Bei: Stele of Goulou Peak, Ink Squeeze of Mao Huijian’s Stele of Yu of 1666 (Melbourne: Quirin Press, 2016). 43 Hengshan衡山. 44 “Amiot to Bertin, 28 September 1777,” IF, MS 1515, “80 lettres du P. Amiot à Bertin,” 108–​195. 45 Ibid. 46 “Bertin to Chompré [1779?],” IF, MS 1518, 189–​200. 47 Kedou wen 蝌蚪文. 48 Wang Chang 王昶, Jinshi cuibian 金石萃編 [Compendium of seals and stones], ed. Qian Baofu 錢寶傅 (1805), juan 2. 49 Wang Chang 王昶. 50 Kaozheng 考證. 51 Qian Mu錢穆, Zhongguo jin sanbai nian xueshushi 中國近三百年學術史 [Chinese intellectual history of the last three centuries] (1937) (Reprint:  Beijing:  Jiuzhou Chubanshe, 2011), 332. 52 Wang, juan 2.

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266  Alexander Statman 53 Benjamin A.  Elman, From Philosophy to Philology:  Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA:  Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), 80–​83. 54 Mao Huijian 毛会建. 55 For example, Amiot, “Antiquité des Chinois,” 341–​343. 56 Hongwu 弘旿. 57 “Amiot to Bertin, 16 October 1790,” IF, MS 1517, 139–​144. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 94–​95. 60 Yang Danxia 楊丹霞, “Hongwu de shuhua jiaoliu yu chuangzuo” 弘旿的書畫交流與創作 [The exchange and creation of Hongwu’s painting and calligraphy], Forbidden City 紫禁 (Beijing: Palace Museum), no. 133 (2005), 184. For Wang’s poems mentioning Hongwu (art name:  Yaohua Daoren 瑤華道人), see, for example, Wang Chang, Chunrongtang ji 春融堂集 (Shunan shushe 塾南書舍, 1808), juan 22. 61 Jinchuan 金川. 62 Amiot, “Lettre sur la réduction des Miao-​tsée en 1775,” MCC III, 387–​411. 63 “Amiot to Bertin, 28 September 1777,” 108–​195. 64 Ibid. 65 “Extrait de la lettre de M. Court de Gébelin a M. Amiot, 1 January 1780,” 204–​205. 66 Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde modern, considéré Dans divers Objets concernant l’Histoire, le Blason, les Monnoies, les Jeux, les Voyages des Phéniciens autour du Monde, les Langues Américaines, &c. ou Dissertations Mêlées (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, Valleyre l’aîné, Sorin, 1781), 387–​388. 67 “Extrait de la lettre de M. Court de Gébelin a M. Amiot, 1 January 1780,” 204–​205. 68 “Bertin to Chompré [1779?],” IF, MS 1518, 189–​200. 69 Court de Gébelin, Monde primitif (1781), 365–​367. 70 “Extrait de la lettre de M. Court de Gébelin a M. Amiot, 1 January 1780,” 204–​205. 71 “Amiot to Bertin, 17 August 1781,” IF, MS 1516, “80 lettres du P. Amiot à Bertin,” 271–​280. 72 The particular rubbing Amiot sent was probably taken from the Stele inscribed by Mao Huijian 毛會建 in the Xi’an Stele Forest (西安碑林), the only one I am aware of that demonstrates the six-​column layout (Chen Zhongkai 陳忠凱 et al., ed., Xi’an beilin bowuguan cang beike zongmu tiyao 西安碑林博物館藏碑刻總目提要 [Annotated Catalog of the Stele Inscriptions in the Collection of the Xi’an Stele Forest Museum] (Beijing: Xian Zhuang Shuju, 2006), 36. 73 “Amiot to Bertin, 17 August 1781,” 271–​280. 74 Ibid. 75 “Amiot to Bertin, 15 November 1784,” IF, MS 1516, “80 lettres du P. Amiot à Bertin,” 283–​307; “Amiot to Bertin, 20 October 1782,” Archives des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP), MS 438, “Chine, Lettres 1780–​1787),” 326. 76 “Amiot to Bertin, 17 August 1781,” 271–​280. 77 “Amiot to Bertin, 20 October 1782,” 327. 78 Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (London: Duckworth, 1996), 23–​34, 50–​51. 79 “Court de Gébelin to Paul Rabaut, 6 January 1780.” 80 “Court de Gébelin to Bertin, April 1780,” IF, MS 1518, 203. 81 Dan Edelstein, “Introduction to the Super-​ Enlightenment,” in The Super-​ Enlightenment:  Daring to Know Too Much, ed. Dan Edelstein (Oxford:  Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 26–​27. 82 “Bailly to Bréquigny,” BnF, Bréquigny MS 163, “Correspondence de Bréquigny VI.”

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The tarot of Yu the Great 267 83 Dan Edelstein, “Jean-​Sylvain Bailly (1736–​1793),” in The Super-​Enlightenment, ed. Dan Edelstein (The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, 2009). Available at:  http://​collections.stanford.edu/​supere/​page.action?forward=author_​ jean_​sylvain_​bailly§ion=authors. 84 Jean-​Sylvain Bailly, Lettres sur l’origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l’Asie:  Addressees à M.  de Voltaire Par M.  Bailly, & précédées de quelques lettres de M. de Voltaire à l’auteur (London: M. Elmesly; Paris: de Bure l’aîné, 1777), 96–​131. 85 Ibid., 205. 86 Jean-​Sylvain Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon et sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Asie: pour servir de suite aux Lettres sur l’origine des sciences, adressées à M. de Voltaire par M. Bailly (London: M. Elmesly; Paris: les frères de Bure, 1779), 417. 87 Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet:  From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 343–​345. 88 Morris Ginsberg, “Progress in the Modern Era,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), vol. 3, 664. 89 Ibid., 205. 90 Ibid., 206. 91 Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, 70. 92 Ibid., 14. 93 Ibid., 272. 94 Ibid., 273. 95 Bailly, Lettres sur l’origine des sciences, 189. 96 Ibid., 191. 97 Ibid., 189. 98 Ibid., 169–​172. 99 Ibid., 190. 100 Ibid., 39. 101 Ibid., 30. 102 Jean-​Sylvain Bailly, Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne:  depuis son origine jusqu’à l’éstablissement de l’ecole d’Alexandrie (Paris: les frères de Bure, 1775), 118. 103 Jean-​Sylvain Bailly, Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale (Paris: de Bure l’aîné, 1787), 244. 104 Ibid., cx. 105 Bailly, Lettres sur l’origine des sciences, 20. 106 Ibid., 32. 107 Ibid., 35. 108 Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, 436. 109 Bailly, Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, 119. 110 Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, 227–​230; Bailly, Lettres sur l’origine des sciences, 230–​231. 111 Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, 278. 112 Ibid., 239. 113 Amiot, “Extrait d’une lettre écrite de Péking le 2 oct. 1784,” MCC XI, 528. 114 “Listes des souscripteurs à l’Histoire de la Chine du P.  de Mailla en 1777–​1783,” AJPF, Joseph Bernard Maître MS 84. 115 Bailly, Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale, lxxviii. 116 Amiot, “Suite du mémoire sur les danses religieuses, politiques, et civiles des anciens chinois,” June 1, 1789, in Les Danses rituelles chinoises d’après Joseph-​Marie Amiot:  Aux sources de l’ethnochorégraphie, ed. Yves Lenoir and Nicolas Standaert (Namur, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2005), 250.

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268  Alexander Statman 117 Amiot to Comte de Mellet, “Lettre du 18 octobre 1784,” Archives et manuscrits de la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (AMBIUS), MS 2446, “Copies de lettres à sujet médical rédigés à Pékin adressées à M. Desvoyes pseudonyme de l’abbé Louis-​ Augustin Bertin” [actually sent to Comte de Mellet]. 118 “Amiot to Bertin, 25 January 1787,” IF, MS 1516, “80 lettres du P. Amiot à Bertin,” 408–​425. 119 “Amiot to Bertin, 25 January 1787,” 408–​425. 120 John B.  Henderson, “Ch’ing Scholars’ Views of Western Astronomy,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 1 (1986): 141. 121 “Xixue zhong yuan” 西學中源. 122 Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 80–​83. 123 “Shi qi chuan er” 失其傳耳. Ruan Yuan 阮元, Yanjingshi ji 揅經室集 (Early nineteenth century), ji 3, juan 5. 124 First-​hand accounts of the visits were recorded by Shen Chu and Ruan Yuan; Shen Chu 沈初, Lanyuntang shiwen Ji 蘭韻堂詩文集 (Qianlong Period), shiji 詩集 juan 11; Ruan Yuan 阮元, Xiaocanglang bitan 小滄浪筆談 (1795), juan 2. 125 “Gu qiang er jin ruo” 古強而今弱. Wang Chang 王昶, ed., Huhaiwen zhuan 湖海文傳 [Collected works of lakes and seas] (Jingxun Tang, 1837), juan 43. 126 Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 38. 127 “Amiot to Bertin, 15 November 1784,” 283–​307. 128 Bailly, Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale, 244. 129 This has been a major focus of the “New Qing History.” See, for example, Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 130 Man Han Menggu Xifan hebi dazang quanzhou 滿漢蒙古西番合璧大藏全咒 (Beijing, 1773); Qing zhongqianqi Xiyang Tianzhujiao zai Hua huodong dang’an shiliao 清中前期西洋天主教在華活動檔案史料 [Archival documents on the activity of Western Catholicism during the early and mid-​Qing] (Beijing:  Zhonghua Shuju, 2003), vol. 4, 579. 131 “Amiot to Bréquigny, 25 September 1786,” BnF, Bréquigny MS 2, Cote H. 132 Jiang Fan 江繁, Siyiguan kao 四譯館考[Investigations of the Translation Bureau] (1696; rpt. Beijing:  Beijing tushuguan guji zhenben congkan 北京圖書館古籍珍 本叢刊), vol. 59, shibu史部, zhengshulei 政書類. My thanks to Wesley Cheney for helping to identify the Chinese source, which is incorrectly identified in the standard bibliography by Aloys Pfister (Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les jésuites de l’ancienne mission de Chine (1552–​1773), Tome I, XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1932), 12). 133 Amiot, “Introduction à la connaissance des peuples qui ont été ou qui sont actuellement tributaires de la Chine,” MCC XIV, 7. 134 “Amiot to Bréquigny, 25 September 1786,” BnF, Bréquigny MS 2, Cote H. 135 Lingshan 靈山. 136 Luohan 羅漢. 137 Amiot, “Peuples tributaires de la chine,” 21–​22. 138 Ibid., 22. 139 “Amiot to Bréquigny, 26 June 1789,” BnF, Bréquigny MS 2. 140 Ibid. 141 Edelstein, “Jean-​Sylvain Bailly.” 142 Amiot, “Suite du mémoire sur les danses religieuses,” 246; Lenoir and Standaert, Les Danses rituelles chinoises, 246.

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10  Spaces of circulation and empires of knowledge Ethnolinguistics and cartography in early colonial India Kapil Raj On a cold and wet day in November 1766, the stagecoach from London came to a halt in Oxford’s Market Square. The banal happening would have gone unnoticed, had it not been for the fact that there emerged from the coach a passenger not quite like the others. Sporting a long, dense black beard and draped in a long blue robe with a vermillion sash, a multi-​colored turban and a fine cashmere shawl, this man was Mirza Shaikh I’tesam ud-​Din (c.1730–​c.1800), envoy of the Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II (r.1759–​1806). He had been sent to George III of Great Britain and Ireland to protest the exactions of the employees of the English East India Company in the conquest of the erstwhile Mughal provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1757 (at the start of the Seven Years War) and to request that he send his troops in order to re-​establish law and order. This member of the Bengali literati had been selected for his diplomatic acumen acquired as an agent of the East India Company during negotiations with the kingdoms west of their newly acquired Indian territories. Having arrived in London in September 1766 after a seven-​month sea voyage from Calcutta on an English East India Company ship, disembarking in Nantes and traveling to Calais overland, the Mirza expressed the desire to visit the “great Madrassah” of Oxford of which he had always heard so much. He was hosted, among others, by Thomas Hunt (1696–​1774), the Laudian Professor of Arabic and Regius Professor of Hebrew. Hunt in turn introduced the Mughal dignitary to his student, William Jones (1746–​1794), who gained fame later in life as the foremost orientalist of the eighteenth century, earning the sobriquet of “father of scientific linguistics and comparative philology.” During his month-​long stay at Oxford, I’tesam ud-​Din was shown the observatory, its collection of astrolabes, orreries, “and a large telescope [to] contemplate the seven heavens and twelve signs of the zodiac, and investigate the influences of the fixed stars and the planets, and of every sign.” He also visited the “college of medicine, in which are suspended from the roof human bones, from the head to the foot, and the limbs and joints of the dead are connected with iron wires.”1 In spite of his fascination with the minutiae of instrument-​based practices –​his travelogue contains one of the few detailed accounts of the use of instruments, tables, and logbooks in European long-​distance navigation –​it was the university’s numerous libraries that truly captured his attention, especially

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Figure 10.1 Portrait of Mirza Shaikh I’tesam ud-​Din from James Edward Alexander, Shigurf Namah-​I-​Velaët, or, Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe: Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen in Great Britain and France (London, 1827). Credit: Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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Spaces of circulation 271 the oriental treasures they held. Since many of these writings were inaccessible to the local orientalists, the Mirza translated a number of Arabic, Turkish, and particularly Persian texts (mainly diplomatic missives), as [a]‌t that time there was nobody in England who could read [the latter language] fluently; for this reason the purport and meaning of these papers were not properly understood, and in every place there was the mark of doubt. They shewed them to me, and I read them with facility. They likewise, in order to examine me and try my abilities, put different books into my hand, and according to my capacity I explained their meaning and sense.2 At William Jones’s request, he also translated the 12 rules of Persian grammar from the university’s copy of the Farhang-​e Jahangiri, a dictionary of classical Persian written by the renowned Mughal linguist, Hosayn Enju (d. 1626), at the turn of the seventeenth century.3 For all his shrewdness, I’tesam ud-​Din was nonetheless taken by surprise when Jones lost no time in transforming his translation into a Persian grammar book for the use of employees of the English East India Company  –​Persian being the principal language of the Mughal Empire and thus of the newly acquired territories in the Indian subcontinent, thus “ma[king] a good deal of money by it.” “The Grammar,” he added wryly, “is a very celebrated one.”4 Although Jones for his part did not cite the Mirza by name, he did seemingly acknowledge his debt to the latter: “I take a singular pleasure in confessing,” he stated in the Preface to the Grammar, that I  am indebted to a foreign nobleman for the little knowledge which I have happened to acquire of the Persian language; and that my zeal for the poetry and philology of the Asiaticks were owing to his conversation and to the agreeable correspondence with which he still honours me. This experience undoubtedly played a role in his recommendation to his readers to have a “native” speaker of the language by their side, from whose mouth they could “learn the true pronunciation of every letter,” and “who will explain to him in common words the refined expressions that occur in reading, and will point out the beauties of learned allusions, and local images.”5 This account quite neatly sums up a number of aspects of the relationship between the British and South Asians, especially concerning knowledge-​related matters. Through the circumstances and material means that brought I’tesam ud-​Din to Britain, and prompted William Jones’s decision to write a Persian grammar for the East India Company, we see the close links between scholarship (or knowledge), trade, and empire. In addition, this account puts paid to the notion that Europe was the only producer of knowledge that was subsequently diffused to the rest of the world.6 Instead, this anecdote brings out the complexity of knowledge flows, the nature of which can only be understood within a long-​ term context: the Mughal aristocrat I’tesam ud-​Din had already worked with, or

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272 Kapil Raj for, the Firangis, like many other South Asians for over two centuries before him ever since they entered the Indian Ocean world.7 They interacted as navigators, financiers, business partners, diplomats, negotiators, translators, jurists, and store-​ and account-​keepers, building bridges between disparate ways of doing across diverse cultures of practice. Cross-​cultural interaction itself, on the other hand, was a constitutive condition for the very possibility of sustained European presence in new and unfamiliar spaces. Having originally come into the Indian Ocean to participate in the lucrative spice and luxury-​commodity trade, the Europeans initially represented no more than a few hundred civilians and a couple of thousand troops. In the case of the British, even at the apogee of their empire in the twentieth century, their presence in India never exceeded some tens of thousand civilians, a number at all times too small not to rely heavily upon autochthonous populations for most commercial, administrative, and technical tasks as well as those involving manpower.8 The Indian Ocean was criss-​crossed with dense trade networks long before the Portuguese (the first European nation) entered the region. The latter thus had to first find and then negotiate their way into these networks in a region that spanned from West Asia and East Africa to Southeast Asia and China –​the Indian subcontinent being, both geographically and economically, an obligatory passage point.9 In fact, ever since their arrival in the subcontinent, a collaboration was established between the Portuguese –​and the other European nations that followed –​and a section of the region’s population. Over the centuries, this collaboration extended in scope to include munshis (interpreter-​secretaries), harkaras (intelligence agents), and skilled workmen like weavers, jewelers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and sailors. In the face of inter-​European rivalries in the mid eighteenth century, especially between the English and the French, this collaboration extended to the establishment of armies that included indigenous troops, artificers, and gunsmiths. More significantly, however, than this rather straightforward mathematical asymmetry and the term “collaboration” suggest, Jones’s recommendation to his readers points to the inevitable condition of Europeans  –​and of all strangers, for that matter –​of being epistemologically dependent on indigenous populations in order to access the knowledges and practices of the cultures they initially interacted with and progressively colonized, thus making the latter indispensable intermediaries, or “go-​betweens.”10 Indeed, the modernist dogma of European solipsism has by now taken such a substantial battering that only the most recalcitrant would argue that Europeans, or indeed any strangers, can acquire knowledge of the larger world without the active participation of, and negotiation with, local populations and their knowledges, skills, practices, and symbolic and material culture. In the circumstances under discussion here, this dependence was further compounded by the fact that the vast majority of British recruits arrived in India between the ages of 14 and 17 with the aim of making a quick fortune. The only prerequisite for recruitment to the Company, as shown by the surviving

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Spaces of circulation 273 educational testimonials of aspiring candidates, was “the rule of three [cross-​ multiplication] and merchants’ accounts.”11 Few had been to university, a costly affair normally reserved for the eldest son or for those seeking academic or clerical careers. Their real training in the procedures and practices of colonial and commercial administration, as well as the ways and customs of the land, took place at the hands of local agents, bankers, business partners, or indigenous administrators from the erstwhile regimes (such as the Mughal and Maratha empires, or the smaller kingdoms) that the British were able to conquer  –​and significantly, thanks to their local “wives,” or búbús. The latter are described with characteristic irony by the famous orientalist, geographer, poet, and diplomat, Sir Richard Burton (1821–​1890): The “walking dictionary” [the búbú] is all but indispensible to the Student, and she teaches him not only Hindostani grammar, but the syntaxes of native Life. She keeps house for him, never allowing him to save money, or, if possible, to waste it. She keeps the servants in order. She has an infallible recipe to prevent maternity, especially if her tenure of office depends on such compact. She looks after him in sickness, and is one of the best of nurses, and, as it is not good for man to live alone, she makes him a manner of home.12 This “promiscuity” between the actors of the different cultures translated into a permeability of practices, ideas, and discourses which significantly influenced ways of doing on both sides of the cultural divide while not resulting in a flattening of differences between them.13 Furthermore, this interaction and porosity was a wellspring for innovations that had no precursors in either culture. Also, as we shall see later in this chapter, the nature and locus of this intercultural encounter was transformed between the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in 1498 and the beginnings of British colonization in the second half of the eighteenth century, from individual contacts to denser and more permanent interactions within the more formal institutional and hierarchical structures of the burgeoning colonial administration. This process of colonial institutionalization also contributed to magnifying and fixing asymmetries in favor of the colonial masters, as much with regard to working conditions as to salaries and, often, to the decision-​making process.14 The story of this process is normally told within the familiar framework of network theory. The network metaphor is indeed widely used by historians when alluding to relational configurations, as it has an intuitive, commonsensical appeal and strong descriptive and visual power.15 For historians of science in particular, thanks to actor-​network theory, the deployment of the network concept has the definite advantage of finding oneself on familiar and, if not well-​theorized, at least well-​trodden ground.16 The great merit lies in the network concept’s ability to include human, material, and semiotic elements and deal with them in a symmetrical manner. Also, the novel use of “translation” as principally outlined in the writings of Michel Callon makes it a very powerful methodological approach

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274 Kapil Raj to describe constructive intercultural encounters, typical of the global situations that are the focus of the studies in the present collective work.17 To be sure, actor-​network theory is not uncontested and a number of other social network theories vie with it to offer alternative methodological tools to analyze complex social configurations. However, network analysis has a number of inherent problems, the foremost among these being that the inter-​linkages are perceived as being linear, with no regard to the physical distance between actors, or the number of intermediaries it takes to establish and sustain a given relationship; nor does it allow one to perceive the hierarchical and/​or power relationships between them, except in terms of the twin functions of centrality and density. In particular, the fluidity or direction of knowledge flows along the conduits cannot be easily problematized, giving the impression that knowledge circulates freely within a network. Networks also pose no inherent limits as to their size and extension. Not only are they two-​dimensional, they can also theoretically cover the whole planet, and are resonant with contemporary visions of the globalized world as a fluid, seamless movement of people, ideas, and goods through and across space. The only constraint network theory posits is the capacity of the actors themselves to reach out and enroll other persons, objects, or immaterial entities to expand the network. The individual, their agency, and their initiative are thus privileged in this form of analysis over, say, the effects of group allegiances, organic solidarities, education, and norms and canons of civility, which tend on the contrary to restrain network membership to those who share these values. As a counterpoint, this chapter is framed within the perspective of what I have referred to as the circulation of knowledge: an analysis of the processes of encounter, negotiation, and reconfiguration of knowledge that occur in cross-​ cultural interaction, but one that is sensitive to the asymmetries of power in such processes and the resistances that might ensue. As we shall see, circulation occurs within bounded and unevenly landscaped spaces, which I have elsewhere called “spaces of circulation.”18 In contrast to networks (which suggest point-​to-​point connections), these spaces of circulation suggest a fabric with topographical unevenness, asymmetries, and also the possibility of tapping into a continuum of relations, rather than building individual linkages. This latter notion takes as a starting point the finitude or potential limits of the extent within which objects (in our case, knowledge-​related ones) move. Also, circulation does not entail the smooth flow of knowledge between individuals, communities, civilities, and institutions, implying a synonymy between circulation and fluidity. Undeniably, these spaces are not clearly delineated: their frontiers can be fuzzy and porous, a function of these constraints and propensities to link with other groups based on common interests or goals that their frontiers become porous, at times reciprocally, as we saw in the process of negotiations exemplified through the case of I’tesam ud-​Din. It is important to note that in the immediate aftermath of the British conquests in South Asia in the mid eighteenth century, both the British and Indian elites selectively sought each other out in order to build new relationships for sustained governance. It was in this context that I’tesam

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Spaces of circulation 275 ud-​Din constructed relationships in Britain and Europe during his three-​year-​ long visit. At the same time, British literate elites in the subcontinent too looked for local literati and their forms of knowledge. Alexander Dow (1735–​1779), an officer of the East India Company’s army in India, who translated a number of historical works on South Asia from Persian-​language sources, admonished his fellow countrymen and other Europeans for their naivety in choosing their indigenous collaborators thus: “Some writers,” he observed, have very lately given to the world, an intelligible system of the Brahmin religion; and they affirm, that they derived their information from the Hindoos themselves. This may be the case, but they certainly conversed upon that subject only with the inferior tribes, or with the unlearned part of the Brahmins: and it would be as ridiculous to hope for a true state of the religion and philosophy of the Hindoos from those illiterate casts, as it would be in a Mahommedan in London, to rely upon the accounts of a parish beadle, concerning the most abstruse points of the Christian faith; or to form his opinion of the principles of the Newtonian philosophy from a conversation with an English carman.19 The message was clear: one had to choose one’s interlocutors from select groups, and only from those groups, at the risk of going astray. These spaces, as we shall see, are both social and physical. They are social inasmuch as different forms of knowledge are the preserve of specific social groups or institutions inside given societies, that draw specific advantages from them and invest substantially to keep them –​and insure their transmission –​within their bounds.20 These spaces are constituted of communities that share a hodgepodge of material and immaterial entities: knowledges, ideas, and theories and their attendant practices and materials (instruments, gestures, books, etc.), but also training, education, values, beliefs, ideals, canons of civility, loyalties, and norms, whose circulation is controlled by these communities (to the best of their abilities), and often also by their attendant religious, political, and educational institutions.21 These communities may be connected to certain others in a given space at any one time –​say, for instance, merchants, medics, and apothecaries in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, western Asian, and Indian Ocean worlds.22 Knowledges and their meanings and values are thus made and perpetuated within the relationships of social groups. These spaces are physical in that they pertain to specific places or regions, and are at times identified by geographical, religious, or linguistic epithets:  for example, the English aristocracy, Parisian intellectuals, Gujarati merchants, Jewish merchants, Latinized literati, etc. This physical geography of circulation can, of course, be discontinuous, where the group maintains kinship links with other groups that do not occupy contiguous spaces, as is the case of diasporic communities that maintain very close familial links with each other; the Armenian merchant diaspora is a good example of this, as is Islamic Persianate elites in early modern South Asia who maintained close family ties with their Iranian

276

276 Kapil Raj counterparts.23 The foregoing implies that the geography and topography of spaces of circulation change historically. This happens as a function of the density and wider social, political, and cultural influence and dispersion of the interacting milieus in question, as well as changes in polity. Likewise, the morphology of spaces of circulation tends to change over time. In the case of South Asia, from one closely linked to trade and commercial networks, as well as the ambient political regimes in the early modern period, it gradually became more intimately related to state-​governed institutions in the context of rising British imperial power in the course of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In what follows, I  shall illustrate the concept of spaces of circulation and examine their evolution more closely in the South Asian context, to bring out the manner in which they shaped the emergence of new knowledges during this period, as well as the role of intermediaries, or go-​betweens, in bringing together previously autonomous spaces of circulation. This chapter is based on two examples of knowledge production taken from the early decades of British colonialism in India in the late eighteenth century that were crucial to the sustained existence of early modern and modern empires, namely the organization and interrelationship of colonized societies and the spatial and historical nature of the colonized territories –​ethnology and cartography.24 We shall follow the projects of two British imperial agents in late-​eighteenth-​ century India, Sir William Jones, and James Rennell (1742–​1830), to uncover the wider relationships they constructed with their Asian interlocutors. Far from being a purely one-​to-​one connection of individuals from each culture in the shape of a network, this interaction will be understood as the result of the meeting and reconfiguration, or realignment, of pre-​existing social and physical spaces of circulation operating within the various political and imperial regimes of South and Central Asia. And although the account will place Jones and Rennell at its center, it is obvious that they are a shorthand for the respective spaces within which they circulated: for Jones, the Newtonian environment, Oxford (including its orientalist context), the Royal Society, the English legal professions, the English aristocracy and gentry toward which he aspired, etc.; for Rennell, the lower echelons of the Anglican Church, the navy, the East India Company, European freebooters and coastal traders in the Indian Ocean, hydrographers and navigators, the army, etc.

Linguistics as imperial political theory Let us begin by briefly recalling the historical circumstances in South Asia in the mid eighteenth century, in particular two major events that were to dramatically overturn the course of the Subcontinent’s history. First, the invasion of north India and the sack of Delhi in 1739 by the Persian emperor, Nadir Shah (1688–​1747), rang the death knell of the declining Mughal Empire, accelerating its collapse and the rise of myriad successor polities vying with each other to fill the power vacuum thus created. Second, the victory of the East India Company’s armies over those of Siraj-​ud-​Daula, the Nawab of Bengal in 1757 –​in the first

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Spaces of circulation 277 months of the Seven Years War which started in Europe but soon spread across almost the whole globe –​radically transformed the geopolitical complexion of the region, making Britain a major political actor in South Asia for the next two centuries, and as a consequence overturning the administrative organization of the Company.25 However, the consciousness of this new role was slow in coming, for in the years that followed the conquest of Bengal, Company officials devoted all their attention to ruthlessly plundering and devastating the land.26 But, after ten million lives, or a third of the population of Bengal (almost all peasants and artisans), had been lost in the space of three years –​victims of a famine compounded with the ruthless policies of the Company’s servants –​attention was turned to stabilizing the internal order of the province.27 Under growing pressure from the British parliament, which culminated in the Regulating Act of 1773 and the institution in Calcutta of the Supreme Court of Judicature for the administration of justice in the newly acquired territories, the Company and its agents grudgingly shifted from commercial plunder to more orderly and permanent forms of exploitation and government. It is important to note that, in one of his first orders to his staff, the newly appointed Governor General of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732–​1818), wrote: “Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.”28 The Regulating Act thus also constituted the first step in the transformation of the emerging British Empire in South Asia from one held mainly by force of arms to one also held –​at least in theory –​by information. The collaboration between Britons and South Asians progressively broadened to include tax collection, administration of justice, and, finally, education. It also broadened toward the sciences, such as linguistics, land surveying, and cartography, domains we address below, as well as archaeology, astronomy, and botany.29 And, although the British set up a variety of new intermediary relationships with native South Asians, they had to maintain many of the existing local administrative structures, and most of the “under civil servants” inherited from the Mughal and other princely administrations.30 Thus, the various revenue and judicial officials continued to act in their official capacity as intermediaries between the British and local populations. The upper echelons of the administration were, however, entrusted exclusively to senior servants of the Company, or else to individuals nominated by the British parliament in London and under their strict surveillance. It was thus as a parliament-​ appointed judge in the newly constituted Supreme Court in Calcutta, the capital of the East India Company’s expanding empire in the Subcontinent, that William Jones arrived there in 1783. He was born in 1746 in London where his father, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an acolyte of Sir Isaac Newton, taught practical mathematics and authored books on navigation and gunnery theory. Steeped in the Newtonian world of the city, the young William showed a strong talent for classical languages and was admitted to Oxford in 1764 to study Classics. In addition to Greek and

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278 Kapil Raj Latin, it was here that he also learned Arabic, and, with I’tesam ud-​Din’s help, modern Persian. The knowledge of oriental languages turned out to be very useful and timely: the king of Denmark who was looking to have a recently acquired Persian manuscript, the Ta’rikh-​i Nadiri (a biography of Persian emperor, Nadir Shah), translated into French, was directed to Jones. The translation published in London in 1770 was to establish the latter’s renown as an orientalist and put him firmly on the road to fame and glory: in 1773, at the age of 26, he was elected to the Royal Society and the following year to Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club, becoming its president in 1780. In the meanwhile, he also studied law and established himself as a barrister in London, counseling the government on the administration of justice in India. Finally, in March 1783, thanks to his influential connections, notably the Spencer family, Jones was knighted and sent to Calcutta with an annual salary of 6,000 pounds sterling –​almost ten times his average earnings as a lawyer in London. Soon after landing in Calcutta, he was instrumental in establishing the Asiatic Society of Bengal with himself as president.31 As a judge working in a complex context of multiple religious and penal jurisdictions, Jones had to depend on the advice of Muslim and Hindu jurisconsults. Although he had a working knowledge of Arabic and Persian, his unfamiliarity with their South Asian variants was an impediment to understanding the fine points of juridical sources of the region written in these two languages.32 And not only did he not have any Sanskrit, the language of the sources where the British sought Hindu law, he initially showed no interest in acquiring it.33 Instead, he relied heavily on a vast complex of Persianate and Sanskrit scholars whom he referred to as “my private establishment of readers and writers,” alluding to the fact that many of them were not dependent upon British colonial institutions.34 And, although not all were directly part of the Mughal imperial administration either, his entourage was in fact largely made up of Hindu and Muslim literati who formed part of an intricate and heterogeneous landscape of interconnected persons on the one hand, with similar education, social backgrounds, material practices, and common texts, and institutions and places on the other, often linked or associated with the Mughals or their successor regimes.35 They included Pundits Radhakant Sarman and Radhakanta Tarkavagisa as well as a number of Islamic scholars, such as Ghulam Hussain Khan Taba’tabai, author of the famous history of the eighteenth century, Siyar-​al Muta’akhkhirin; Mir Muhammad Hussain Isfahani, the “Aristotle of Islam” who had spent many years in Europe in a quest for European learning; the musicologist Ali Ibrahim Khan Bahadur; the paleographer Muhammad Ghaus; Tafazzul Hussain Khan, translator of Newton’s Principia Mathematica; ’Abd al-​Latif Shushtari, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s representative in Calcutta; and I’tesam ud-​Din himself.36 It is important to note that Jones did not recruit these persons on the basis of individual encounters, but through the fabric of pre-​existing relationships. For example, he appointed his Hindu jurisconsult, a Kashmiri named Goverdhan Kaul, on the recommendation of his colleague and friend Charles Wilkins’s pandit, Kashinath Bhattacharya, himself a member of Benares’s Sanskritist community.37

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Spaces of circulation 279 Within a year of Jones’s arrival in India, however, he was confronted with the question of perjury. How was one to legitimize the testimony of people of a different culture, let alone that of a conquered one? The problem was of crucial importance in an age when the overwhelming majority of English men of science, as already noted, came from the very homogeneous and gendered milieu of gentlemen: women –​along with men of low birth, servants, children, and the insane –​were rigorously excluded from the world of reliable witnesses. It was primarily his quest to seek a solution to the question of producing reliability in an intercultural context that led him to change his mind and learn Sanskrit within a couple of years of arriving in India. For this, he sought the services of Ramlochan, a scholar of the vaidya (medic) caste from Navadwip (or Nuddea, as it was then known to the British), a renowned center of political power and learning, especially in Sanskrit and legal philosophy, about 70 miles upstream of Calcutta.38 By the time he delivered his third presidential address entitled “On the Hindus” to the Asiatic Society on February 2, 1786, William Jones had learnt enough Sanskrit using the characteristic traditional method, through verb roots and their derivative forms, to declare:39 “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity,” he declaimed, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia.40 On the basis of this single sentence, commonly called the philologer’s passage and perhaps the best known of all his writings, Jones is held to be a lone genius, a polymath who identified the relationship between the world’s different language groups, and in the same stroke founded “scientific linguistics” and comparative philology. The reality is somewhat more nuanced and complex. Without going into the fraught question of the factual validity of Jones’s argument, anyone familiar with political and linguistic theories current in Mughal India would be struck by the similarity between them and those of Jones.41 Both mainly used philology and linguistic analysis as a means to vindicate a higher end: the legitimation of empire based on a large-​scale collaboration between imperial and indigenous elites. As the historian of medieval and early modern India, Muzaffar Alam, has argued, ever since the sixteenth century, many Sufi traditions sought to provide a doctrinal basis for a religious, cultural, and political synthesis between Islam and Hinduism. These currents gained in strength during and after the reign

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280 Kapil Raj of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–​1602) and worked toward a legitimation of syncretic forms of government and society.42 Their theories relied heavily on the Koranic versions of biblical chronologies and Mosaic ethnology –​the Deluge (Toufan-​i Nuh) and the global dispersion of the descendants of Noah’s sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet –​which in turn were compared with Hindu diluvial mythologies.43 Strikingly, they were also based on comparative linguistic analysis. In the mid eighteenth century, the poet, lexicographer, and linguist, Siraj al-​Din ‘Ali Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), wrote Muthmir, a treatise on Persian in which he analyzed its similarities to Sanskrit based precisely on the same reasoning as Jones’s. This text was widely circulated among the Persianate literati of the Subcontinent, including Jones’s immediate collaborators, and there is serious and credible textual evidence to show that Jones himself was aware of it.44 However, this is not to suggest that Jones simply lifted philological theories current in the Subcontinent in his time to apply them to constructing his own theory of an Indo-​European family of languages. On the contrary, he followed the linguistic analysis by a detailed account of the Hindus based on three other criteria for characterizing a people: philosophy and religion, sculpture and architecture, and sciences and arts. With respect to the last set of criteria, Jones claimed That the Hindus were in early ages a commercial people, we have many reasons to believe; and in the first of their sacred law-​tracts, which they suppose to have been revealed by ME N U many millions [sic] of years ago, we find a curious passage on the legal interest of money, and the limited rate of it in different cases, with an exception in regard to adventures at sea; an exception, which the sense of mankind approves, and which commerce absolutely requires, though it was not before the reign of CH A R LES I. that our own jurisprudence fully admitted it in respect of maritime contracts.45 The kinship established was now clear:  the Hindus and the English were not only of common descent but they were both a commercial people with similar laws. Already in his Essay on the Law of Bailments of 1781, two years before he embarked for India, Jones had written: [A]‌nd although the rules of the Pundits concerning succession to property, the punishment of offences, and the ceremonies of religion, are widely different from ours, yet, in the great system of contracts and the common intercourse between man and man, the PO O TE E of the Indians and the DI G EST of the Romans are by no means dissimilar.46 Having thus shown common cultural and juridical traits, the conquest and colonization of South Asia based on a large-​scale institutionalized collaboration between the English and the Hindus could be legitimately founded. In successive annual discourses addressed to the Asiatic Society between 1786 and his death in 1794, Jones analyzed each of the world’s nations according to the

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Spaces of circulation 281

Figure 10.2 William Jones, “Discourse the Ninth:  On the Origin and Families of Nations …” (February 23, 1792), Asiatick Researches 3 (1794). Credit: Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

same cultural and linguistic criteria in an attempt to re-​establish the links between the different families of a monogenetic mankind following the postdiluvian dispersal of the descendants of Ham, Shem, and Japhet. Jones used his newly acquired philological skills and Koranic readings of Mosaic ethnology to confront and correct Newton’s last great posthumous work on biblical chronology, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), and the modifications Jacob Bryant had proposed in his recently published New System, or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology.47 The “map” of mankind that emerged showed that the Persians, Indians, Romans, Greeks, Goths, Africans, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps the Incas and Aztecs, had a common origin from Ham; the Jews, Arabs, Assyrians, and Abyssinians descend from Shem; while the Tartars and other nomadic peoples including the Amerindians could be traced to Japhet. All three branches of the human family had their origins in a single place, somewhere in Iran. It is tempting to see this map not only as that of linguistic families, but, perhaps more

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282 Kapil Raj crucially, as one delineating the theoretical extent of British global conquest; by extending Jones’s reasoning for India, the English could dominate all the societies descended from Ham by establishing syncretic imperial rule and sustainable commercial links; they could perhaps also enter into long-​term intercourse with the descendants of Shem, but those of Japhet (being nomadic and not given to writing and urban forms of social organization) would be resistant to any form of institutionalized, sedentary government. Before moving on to the next section, let us sum up the key features of this narrative of William Jones’s work in India. As can be clearly seen, it differs from a simple network approach where Jones would be shown as the central figure building individual relationships with his English and Indian interlocutors. Instead, we see him in India, and I’tesam ud-​Din in Oxford, more as key intermediaries, constructing the meeting and sustained interaction of at least two distinct spaces of circulation each made up of social collectives. They both thus emerge as go-​betweens who are instrumental in bringing these disparate worlds of people, social meanings, values, texts, sociabilities, and solidarities together, and constructing commensurabilities between them. Indeed, the ability to connect these social worlds contributed in no small measure to Jones’s success as a judge, orientalist, linguist, and original contributor to global ethnology and imperial theory.

The Indian detour of English cartography In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English, like other Europeans trading with the East, charted the seas and coasts between western Europe and Asia. But, while rutters were an indispensable tool for navigation and formed an essential part of the mariner’s wherewithal since at least the thirteenth century, Europeans did not map the Asian hinterlands, partly because their settlements were situated either on the sea coast or up the mouths of rivers, but also because maps were not culturally part of the European land traveler’s vade mecum until well into the nineteenth century. For the mainland European mapmakers (who hardly ever left their drawing boards) relied mainly on information garnered from travelers and missionaries who themselves found their way through constant enquiry, or, more commonly, by hiring local guides. An eighteenth-​century French traveler in India left us this account of the manner in which Europeans gathered terrestrial information: I have travelled in the interior of India alone, in a group, and with the [French] army. The commanding officer spends the better part of the day sleeping in his palanquin. At dinner he asks his Dubash [interpreter] … what distance they have travelled and which places they have passed. The latter in turn asks the porters or else he himself replies, for reply one must; and the distances and place names are inscribed on the itinerary, on the map … which, by the way, I found perfectly well made.48

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Spaces of circulation 283 Territorial acquisition in South Asia changed needs. Surveys of new possessions were ordered to defend frontiers, chart inland, and river, trade routes, ascertain the extent and revenue potentials of cultivated lands, and ensure the safety and regularity of communications. However, not only were the British too few to undertake surveys, but those few had little or no experience in terrestrial surveying. It is important to note that in the 1760s, when large-​scale survey work was first undertaken in India, there was no unified detailed map of the British Isles –​the first such map appearing only in 1801. As in the case of England, there were no detailed maps of the whole of South Asia, although, according to one recent survey, there exist over 200 maps prior to the nineteenth century, mainly of the northwestern, central, and western parts of the subcontinent.49 As in the British Isles and most parts of Europe, detailed cadastral and route surveys were commonly undertaken all over the subcontinent, and by the early modern period, there was some system under which a record was kept of the area and ownership of cultivated land, and a tradition of land measurement almost throughout the subcontinent for the purposes of establishing proprietary rights and fiscal dues. In the Mughal Empire, the data collected were stored in the records of the patwari, or village accountant, and regularly checked by other state officials. The chronicler Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, who served under the Mughal emperor Shah Alam I (reigned 1707–​1712), recorded appointments of surveyors (Khush-​manzil) and their surveying activities (mushakhkhas) during one of the emperor’s early campaigns.50 The distances measured were mainly expressed in tabular form –​sometimes in the form of maps (naqsha), suggesting a degree of map literacy among the Mughal bureaucracy  –​and included in gazetteers and manuals used for administration, revenue collection, and other purposes. These gazetteers provided systematic descriptions of provinces and their sub-​divisions, noting their general location and territorial extent. The most famous of these was the A’in-​i Akbari, compiled by the publicist ‘Abu ‘al-​Fazl ibn Mubarak (1551–​ 1602) at the end of the sixteenth century.51 In the same way, then, as for other colonial activities, the British were led to rely on indigenous staff, their skills and reckoning methods for survey operations in India. The English mapping of India started by mobilizing available resources within the institutions where the encounter between South Asians and Europeans took place  –​mainly the army, judiciary, and revenue services –​and also through individual relationships. James Rennell (1742–​1830), “undoubtedly the first great English geographer,” can be considered the first Englishman to systematize the use of these disparate traditions together with those of European terrestrial and coastal surveying in an on-​site project.52 Born in Devonshire and orphaned at an early age, Rennell was taken charge of by Gilbert Burrington, the vicar of his native town of Chudleigh. The latter ensured that the boy got an elementary education locally, securing him a job at the age of 14 as an ensign on a British naval vessel at the start of the Seven Years War (1756–​1763). Operating off the coast of Brittany, the young James picked up the art of coastal and harbor surveying. Seeing greater opportunities for a more lucrative career, he provided himself with a quadrant and some drawing

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Figure 10.3 James Rennell, 1782 map of the Indian subcontinent, in author’s possession.

instruments and volunteered for service in the East Indies. During the following years, he perfected his competencies as a harbor surveyor on the Coromandel coast of India and in 1762 found employment as “Companion and Assistant Draughtsman or Surveyor” with the hydrographer and, at the time, East India Company employee, Alexander Dalrymple (1737–​ 1808), on his exploratory voyage to the Sulu Islands and China. In the course of this voyage, Rennell was able not only to sound the sea but also map the lucrative coastal trade and the increasing importance of opium in the commerce with China.53 It was these skills, contacts, and social and economic knowledge of the region that Rennell used to great advantage from 1764 to 1777 when he managed to procure himself a place in India in the service of the East India Company as

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Spaces of circulation 285 probationer engineer, and later as Surveyor-​General of Bengal. The first major task he was given was to make a survey of the Ganges delta in order to find “the shortest and safest Channel leading from the great River to Channel Creek or Rangafulla.”54 In fact, the newly instituted colonial administration saw the survey of navigable rivers as of prime importance. Since the Ganges–​Brahmaputra delta formed a large part of this territory, Rennell used the navigable distributaries in the same way as one would a sea coast, thereby tracing an outline of the myriad islands that made up the delta. In order to do this, he used the traditional methods of the coastal surveyor he had learnt during his service in the Royal Navy, informing himself in addition from the local people as to the navigability of the various channels and creeks he surveyed.55 After his return to England in 1777, Rennell published an atlas of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1780, using all the material from his fluvial surveys.56 A couple of years later, he published a map of the whole subcontinent for which he relied mainly on the route marches of soldiers and surveyors, both Asian and European. Interestingly, he acknowledged all his sources in the Memoir that accompanied the map, which was published in a number of versions and editions from 1783 onwards. Foremost among these peripatetics was a “Sepoy officer,” Golam Mohamed, sent by one Colonel Camac “to explore the roads and country between Bengal and the Deccan.” In the 1793 edition, Rennell eulogized Sadanand, “a Bramin of uncommon genius and knowledge,” for the “accuracy” of his map of “Guzerat” which, he remarked, “contains more matter within it, than any other map of the tract.” For the Punjab, a region in the northwest of the Subcontinent, he derived considerable assistance from the Persian MS map … drawn by a native, and preserved in the archives of government in Hindoostan. The place names were obligingly translated from the Persian by the late Major [William] Davy [d. 1784]. The tract … includes the whole soubah of Lahore and a great part of Multan proper [and] conveys a distinct general idea of the courses and names of the five rivers.57 And, Rennell extensively used the tables of the A’in-​i Akbari. In the Preface to the first edition of the Memoir, he wrote: In the division of Hindoostan into Soubahs, &c. I have followed the mode adopted by the Emperor Acbar, as it appeared to me to be the most permanent one: for the ideas of the boundaries are not only impressed on the minds of the natives by tradition, but are also ascertained in the AYEN EH A C BA R EE ; a register of the highest authority.58 The contents of the A’in-​i Akbari were rendered accessible to him by his contemporary, the Company official Charles Boughton Rouse, “who obligingly translated for me from the AYE N E H A CB A RE E , an account of the boundaries and divisions of the western soubahs, together with a variety of other Geographical matter.”59

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286 Kapil Raj The allegorical cartouche in the lower right-​hand side of the first edition of the map of the peninsula is an acknowledgment of the deeply hierarchized interaction between South Asian and British elites:  a Brahman giving an envelope containing sacred manuscripts (“Shasters”) to Britannia protected by armed Indian soldiers who point to a list of recent British conquests, while other Brahmans (each carrying packets of knowledge) patiently await their turn.60 For a delineation of the maritime contours of the subcontinent, he relied on earlier European maps of India and Asia, mainly on Jean Baptiste d’Anville’s map of India of 1752, and Jean-​Baptiste-​Nicolas-​Denis d’Après de Mannevillette’s Neptune oriental, which he used as a template to construct his own, using the coastal surveys made by his close friend and mentor, Alexander Dalrymple.61 His other European informants consisted notably of the Jesuits Monserrate and Tieffenthaler, and Frenchmen in India like the Marquis de Bussy, Jean Law de Lauriston, Antoine Polier, and Claude Martin  –​who themselves, as noted above, relied heavily on indigenous surveying skills.62 Indeed, he successfully made inroads into the French space of circulation in the peninsula: Bussy’s marches in the Deccan afford data for fixing the positions of many capitals there; particularly Hydrabad [sic], Aurangabad, Bisnagur, and Sanore. But still there are plans of some of his marches wanting, which, could they be procured, would throw much light on the Geography of the peninsula, and the Deccan.63 As this quotation suggests, all spaces were not easily accessible to Rennell, and some were even totally closed to him: The public records at Goa, I am informed, contain a vast fund of Geographical knowledge; and yet we are more in the dark, concerning the country on that side of the peninsula, than we are with respect to the center of the Deccan.64 Be that as it may, Rennell’s map was far denser with information than any thus far made of Britain or of its overseas territories, and was to serve as a model of detail and accuracy for the future mapping of Britain itself. In recognition of his achievements, Rennell was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1791. On the occasion, Sir Joseph Banks, the Society’s president, proclaimed: Would I  could say that England, proud as she is of being esteemed by surrounding nations the Queen of Scientific improvement, could boast of a general map as well executed as the Majors [Rennell’s] delineation of Bengal and Bahar, a tract of Country considerably larger in extent than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland … the accuracy of his particular surveys stands unrivaled [sic] by the most laboured County Maps this nation has hitherto been able to produce.65

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Spaces of circulation 287 Indeed, Rennell and his friend William Roy (famed for his map of Scotland) had for some years already been egging public opinion on pressuring the government to undertake a uniform survey of the British Isles by ridiculing the current state of maps of Britain and its seas.66 Now joined by Banks, their rhetorical pleas paid off that very year with the founding of the Ordnance Survey. In addition to bringing to light once more the social and professional milieus within which geographical knowledge circulates, Rennell’s example also shows how even within the context of cartography, the world of hydrographers and marine surveyors rarely communicated with that of terrestrial cartographers until Rennell brought them together. Finally, this narrative also brings to light the physically bounded nature of spaces of circulation, the social and political interests that maintain these frontiers, and the difficulties in getting knowledge to circulate beyond them.

Conclusion The foregoing account provides us with concrete examples enabling us to better compare networks and spaces of circulation for understanding the workings and spread of knowledge in the early modern world, and also to evaluate their relative analytical purchase. Although there seems to be little difference between the two approaches upon a cursory reading of the above narrative, the network perspective focuses on the enrollment of elements to expand the web, while the circulation problematic seeks to examine the way in which the process of cross-​cultural encounter, negotiation, and interaction itself results in the making and reconfiguration of knowledge. In doing so, it brings to the fore the bounded and uneven nature of the social and physical spaces which are brought together in these encounters. These spaces of circulation structure the way in which knowledge flows within closely knit social groups whose internal solidarity is based on shared weltanschauungen, values, places or institutions of learning, material and immaterial resources (ways of thinking and doing), and institutions or means of transmission and exchange of knowledge (for example, madrassas, learned societies, etc.). This is easily seen in the case of Jones himself as well of his Indian interlocutors; it is equally visible for Rennell, who had to rely on the conventionalized practices of Indian sepoys, revenue officials, and mapmakers for the various indigenous courts and foreign agencies present in the Indian subcontinent. More importantly, however, the linking of these spaces of circulation does not in any way imply a free flow of knowledge, materials, and practices between them. On the contrary, the overall direction of flow is toward Britain, determined by the increasing domination of the latter in South Asia, in the case of Jones; in Rennell’s case, as I  have shown elsewhere, the knowhow of mapmaking for India stays mainly within the subcontinent, it is only the values of precision and detail that travel to Britain.67 Finally, although spaces, and communities, are connected, they do not merge into a single network with a putative European center; on the contrary, they maintain their identities in historically evolving

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288 Kapil Raj morphologies, albeit globally connected, in a largely asymmetric and lopsided world. In the case of the Persianate elites of north India, they in fact collapse in the first decades of the nineteenth century. As my Parisian radio station gleefully reminds us every morning: “[Avec soixante kilomètres cumulés d’embouteillages] la circulation n’est décidément pas fluide!”

Notes 1 This description is based on I’tesam ud-​Din’s own account of his travels to Europe and Britain, written in Persian in 1784–​1785 and published for the first time four decades later in English translation: James Edward Alexander [and Munshi Shumsher Khan], Shigurf namah-​i-​velaët:  Or Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe; Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen, Translated from the Original Persian Manuscripts into Hindostanee, with an English Version and Notes (London, 1827), ch. 7 (pp.  63–​71); these quotations, 70–​71. 2 Ibid., 65. 3 For Hosayn Enju, see Solomon Bayevsky, “Farang-​e Jahangiri,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, available at:  www.iranicaonline.org/​articles/​farhang-​e-​jahangiri (accessed February 21, 2016). 4 Alexander, Shigurf namah-​i-​velaët, 66. The book in question is William Jones [alias Yūnus Ūksfurdī], A Grammar of the Persian Language [Kitāb-​i Shakaristān dar nah￱vī-​i zabān-​i Pārsī] (London, 1771). 5 Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language, xvi–​xvii and xix–​xx respectively. Although Jones does not name I’tesam ud-​Din, he is reported to have acknowledged his debt to another Mirza, a Syrian from Aleppo he purportedly met at around the same time, for teaching him Arabic: see John Shore, Lord Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 2  vols. (London, 1806), vol. 1, 65 et seq. However, this is not attested by any written source from Jones himself. 6 For one of the most eloquent formulations of the diffusionist model, see George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156, no. 3775 (1967): 611–​622. For a critique of this schema, see Michael Adas, “Testing Paradigms with Comparative Perspectives: British India and Patterns of Scientific and Technology Transfer in the Age of European Global Hegemony,” in Modes of Comparison: Theory and Practice, ed. Aram A. Yengoyan (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 285–​318; and S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, eds., Social History of Science in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), Introduction. 7 Of Persian origin, the word firangi literally means “Francs,” and was used all over the Persian-​speaking world (Iran and South Asia mainly) to refer to all Europeans. 8 One estimate, for the Madras Presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century, puts the proportion of Britons to South Asians directly serving the Company’s civil administration alone at 1 to 180. See Robert E.  Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–​ 1848:  A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 7. 9 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–​ 1700:  A Political and Economic History (London:  Longman, 1993); Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais: Essai d’histoire globale, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1990). 10 On the significance of intermediaries in the history of science, see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-​Betweens

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Spaces of circulation 289 and Global Intelligence (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009); and Kapil Raj, “Go-​Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators,” in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chichester:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2016), 39–​57. 11 Anthony J.  Farrington, The Records of the East India College Hayleybury and Other Institutions (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1976), 4. 12 Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 2 vols. (London: D. Chapman, 1893), vol. 1, 135. 13 This phenomenon is akin to the one addressed in Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1969). For South Asian responses to the interaction with Europe, see Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture (A.D. 1498–​1707), 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj:  1857–​ 1905 (New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1995). 15 See, for instance, Lombard, Le carrefour javanais; Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, “Estrutura político-​administrativa do Estado da Índia no século XVI,” in idem, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Dífel, 1994), 207–​245, in particular, pp. 207–​210. 16 See, among others, John Law and Peter Lodge, Science for Social Scientists (London: Macmillan Press, 1984); John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford and Keele: Blackwell and the Sociological Review, 1999); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​ Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 17 For the sociology of translation, see Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation:  Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action and Belief:  A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 196–​223. 18 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science:  Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–​1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and idem, “Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism:  Circulation and the Global History of Science,” Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 337–​347. 19 Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, 2 vols. (London, 1768), vol. 1, xxxvii–​xxxviii. 20 As the historian of merchant networks, Claude Markovits, argues: “Most crucial [for the sustained existence of merchant networks] is probably the circulation of information … This means two things: first, that ‘leaks’ have to be avoided as much as possible to the outside world, secondly, that information must circulate smoothly within the network, both spatially and temporally, as it gets transmitted from one generation to another.” See Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–​1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25. 21 On the education of Persianate elites in early modern South Asia, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshi,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 61–​72; and Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-​Persian State Secretary (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). For English gentlemen, see George Charles Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman:  Theories of Gentlemanly Education, 1660–​1775 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1959). 22 See, for instance, Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), vol. 1, xviii–​ lxxi; Norman Stillman, “The Eleventh Century Merchant House of Ibn ‘Awkal (A Geniza Study),” Journal of the Economic and Social

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290 Kapil Raj History of the Orient 16, no.  1 (1973):  15–​88; Olivia Remi Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain:  The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–​ 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev, “The Significance of the Geniza’s Medical Documents for the Study of Medieval Mediterranean Trade,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007): 524–​541; Shelomo Dov Goitein and Mordechai Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza –​India Book, Part One (Leiden: Brill, 2007), esp. 90 et seq., for Maimonides. 23 Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean:  The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); and Maria Szuppe, “Circulation des lettrés et cercles littéraires:  Entre Asie centrale, Iran et Inde de Nord (XVe–​XVIIIe siècle),” Annales HSS 59, no. 5–​6 (2004): 997–​1018. 24 For the crucial importance of these two domains for early modern empires, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 25 Kapil Raj, “From Merchants to Imperial Bureaucrats? Commerce, Territorial Administration, and the East India Company, Seventeenth-​Nineteenth Centuries,” in Serve the Power(s), Serve the State: America and Eurasia, ed. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Gregory Raddick, and Christian Lamouroux (Newcastle-​ upon-​ Tyne:  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 244–​274. 26 A comprehensive list of these “most atrocious abuses that ever stained the name of civil government” may be found in “Reports from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature, State and Condition of the East India Company and of the British Affairs in East India,” Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 1772–​ 1773 (London, 1803), vol. 3. 27 Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India (Cambridge, 1982), vol. 2, 299. 28 Warren Hastings, letter dated October 4, 1784 to Nathaniel Smith, Chairman of the East India Company, reprinted in Peter Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 189. 29 For these latter domains, see Anne-​Julie Etter, “Les antiquités de l’Inde: Monuments, collections et administration colonial (1750–​ 1835),” unpublished PhD thesis, Université Paris Diderot –​Paris 7, 2012; Simon Schaffer, “Astrophysics, Anthropology and Other Imperial Pursuits,” in Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice, ed. Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey, and Peter Wade (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 19–​38; idem, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy,” in Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World, 49–​104; Henry J. Noltie, Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah and Govindoo, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, 2008). For a general history of the sciences in India during the colonial period, see David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Habib and Raina, eds., Social History of Science in Colonial India. 30 I have borrowed this term from Bernard S.  Cohn, “The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region,” The Journal of Asian Studies 19, no. 4 (1960): 418–​431, on p. 424. See also idem, “The British in Benares: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Society,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no.  2 (1962): 169–​199. 31 For more biographical details on Jones, see Kapil Raj, “Refashioning Civilities, Engineering Trust:  William Jones, Indian Intermediaries and the Production of

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Spaces of circulation 291 Reliable Legal Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-​Century Bengal,” Studies in History 17 (2001): 175–​209. 32 In fact, Jones seems to have had only reading skills in oriental languages: a near contemporary review of Indian affairs noted, “The celebrated Sir William Jones, after several years intense study of the oriental languages in Europe, went to India, and when he reached that Country, was as unintelligible to the natives, in the Persian and Hindostanee languages, as if he had never opened a book upon the subject. This incapacity of colloquial communication, continued for a considerable time and when Sir William visited Benares, the sacred City of the Hindoos, several months after his arrival in India, he was indebted for the information he so eagerly sought, by conversing with the learned natives, to the assistance of Mr. Fowke, the British Minister at Benares, who politely acted as interpreter to him. This is a convincing proof, if any proof were wanted, to how much more effect a language may be studied in a country were [sic] it is generally used in writing and in speaking.” (Review of the Affairs of India, from the Year 1798, to the Year 1806; Comprehending a Summary Account of the Principal Transactions during That Eventful Period (London, 1807), 43–​44, fn). 33 William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society for Inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia,” Asiatick Researches 1 (1788): xiv. 34 William Jones, The Letters of William Jones, 2  vols., ed. Garland Hampton Cannon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), vol. 2, 798. 35 See M. Khair-​ud-​Din Muhammad, Tazkirat-​ul-​Ulama, or a Memoir of the Learned Men of Jaunpur, trans. and ed. M. S. Ullah (Calcutta: Abul Faiz & Co., 1934). 36 For Jones’s relationship with Hindu literati, see Abhijit Mukerji, “European Jones and Asian Pandits,” Journal of the Asiatic Society 27, no. 1 (1985): 43–​58; Rosane Rocher, “The Career of Radhakanta Tarkavagisa, an Eighteenth-​Century Pandit in British Employ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109 (1989):  627–​633; Kumkum Chatterjee, “Scribal Elites in Sultanate and Mughal Bengal,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, no. 4 (2010): 445–​472. On Tafazzul Hussain Khan, see Schaffer, “The Asiatic Enlightenments of British Astronomy.” For the education of the indigenous literati, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshi.” For a more detailed analysis of Jones in India, see Raj, “Refashioning Civilities, Engineering Trust.” 37 Jones, Letters, vol. 2, 666. 38 For the intellectual history of Navadwip, see Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–​1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17–​20. 39 For the probable pedagogical methods used by Ramlochan, see Murray B. Emeneau, “The Letters of William Jones ed. G. H. Cannon,” Language 47, no. 4 (1971): 959–​964, on p. 960. As Emeneau remarks, this method of teaching was very different from that used at the time for Latin and Greek. 40 William Jones, “On the Hindus,” Asiatick Researches 1 (1788): 415–​431, quotation on pp. 422–​423. 41 For a critique of Jones’s linguistic methodology, see Lyle Campbell, “Why Sir William Jones Got It All Wrong, or Jones’ Role in How to Establish Language Families,” Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio de Urquijo” 40 (2006): 245–​264. 42 Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam:  India 1200–​ 1800 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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292 Kapil Raj 43 See, for example, Mir Khwand, Rawzat as-​Safa, 7  vols. (c.1497); Muhammad Qasim Hindushah Firishta, Tarikh-​i Firishta (c.1595); and Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Witnesses and Agents of Empire:  Eighteenth-​ Century Historiography and the World of the Mughal Munshi,” Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient 53 (2010): 393–​423. 44 Mohamad Tavakoli-​Targhi, Refashioning Iran:  Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 26–​28. 45 Jones, “On the Hindus,” 428. 46 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London, 1781), 114. 47 Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended to Which Is Prefixed a Short Chronicle from the First Memory of Things in Europe, to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great (London, 1728); Jacob Bryant, A New System, Or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 3 vols. (London, 1774–​1776). 48 Jean Bernoulli, ed., Description historique et géographique de l’Inde, 3 vols. (Berlin: Pierre Bourdeaux, 1786–​1788), vol. 2:  “Des Recherches historiques & chronologiques sur l’Inde …, par M. Anquetil Du Perron de l’Acad. des Insc, & B. L. & Interpréte du Roi pour les langues orientales, à Paris,” 466–​467. 49 Susan Gole, Indian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys (Delhi: Manohar, 1989); and Reginald Henry Phillimore, “Three Indian Maps,” Imago Mundi 9 (1952):  111–​114. For a general overview of South Asian maps and cartographic representations, see Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “South Asian Cartography,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. 2, Book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. John Brian Harley and David Woodward (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 400 et seq. 50 Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, Tazkirat al-​Salatin-​i Chaghata, ed. Muzaffar Alam (Bombay and New  York:  Asia Publishing House, 1980), 19, 84, 90, 94, 101, 102. I thank Muzaffar Alam for bringing this text to my knowledge and for providing me with the translations of the relevant passages. 51 ‘Abu ‘al-​Fazl ibn Mubarak, Ain-​i Akbari, trans. H.  Blochmann (vol. 1)  and H.  S. Jarrrett (vols. 2 and 3) (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873–​1894). 52 The eloge is from Clements Robert Markham, Major James Rennell and the Rise of Modern English Geography (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1895), 9. 53 James Rennell, “Journal of a Voyage to the Sooloo Islands and the North West Coast of Borneo,” British Library, Add. MSS. 19299. For Rennell’s biography, see Andrew S.  Cook, “Rennell, James (1742–​1830),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), available at: www.oxforddnb.com.janus.biu. sorbonne.fr/​view/​article/​23369 (accessed December 15, 2015). 54 Orders from the Hon’ble Henry VanSittart Esq., Governor of Fort William, dated May 6, 1764, to James Rennell, reprinted in Thomas Henry Digges La Touche, ed., The Journals of Major James Rennell Written for the Information for the Governors of Bengal during His Surveys of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers 1764 to 1767 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1910), 9. 55 Ibid. See also Rennell’s correspondence with his guardian Rev. Gilbert Burrington, BL, IOR, Mss Eur/​D1073, and his manuscript maps held at the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, London. 56 James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul’s Empire, 1st ed. (London, 1783), Section II: “The Surveyed Tract on the Side of Bengal; or That Occupied by the Course of the Ganges, and Its Principal Branches,” 36–​45.

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Spaces of circulation 293 57 Rennell, Memoir (1793), 103. For Golam Mohamed, see Rennell, Memoir (1783), vi, 66 fn, 69; for Sadanand, see the 1793 edition of the Memoir, 186 fn; and for the Persian map, ibid., 103. Rennell obtained the map from General Sir Robert Barker (c.1732–​1789), FRS, commander-​in-​chief of the Bengal Army who no doubt had himself obtained it during the period when his brigade was put in charge of the protection of the Nawab of Oudh between 1765 and 1772 and he personally acted as mediator between the Nawab and the Mughal emperor. 58 Rennell, Memoir (1783), iii. 59 Charles Boughton Rouse (1747–​1821), later knighted, served as an employee of the East India Company in Bengal from 1764 to 1778, during which period he learnt Persian and studied the system of land ownership and taxation and its history in the new colony, which he published as Dissertation Concerning the Landed Property of Bengal (London, 1791). This book is still considered an important contribution to the history of property rights and accounting in India and to political economy in general. Boughton Rouse’s knowledge of “public accounts, different departments of science, and particularly … oriental literature” earned him a fellowship in the Royal Society in 1814. See Royal Society Archives, Past Fellows, Certificates of Election and Candidature, EC/​1814/​03. 60 See “Explanation of the Emblematical Frontispiece to the Map,” in Rennell, Memoir (1783), xii. 61 Jean Baptiste Bourguignon D’Anville:  “Carte de l’Inde Dressee pour la Compagnie des Indes par le Sr. d’Anville, Secretaire de S.A.S.Mgr. le Duc d’Orléans,” November 1752; Jean-​Baptiste-​Nicolas-​Denis d’Après de Mannevillette’s Neptune oriental (Paris, various editions between 1745 and 1775). 62 Bernoulli, ed., Description historique et géographique, vol. 1, ix. 63 Rennell, Memoir (1783), viii. 64 Ibid., ix. 65 Joseph Banks’s eulogy for James Rennell, on November 30, 1791, Royal Society Journal, Book 34 (November 19, 1789 to November 30, 1792):  JBO/​34/​63, pp.  437–​442. I  thank Joanna Corden, archivist at the Royal Society, for providing me with the exact reference and the entire transcript of the eulogy. 66 See the Preface to the second edition (1788) of Rennell’s Memoir, iv–​v, n. Roy had already tried twice, in 1763 and again in 1766, to persuade the government to make an official survey of the whole of Britain: see Catherine Delano-​Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London: British Library, 1999), 218. 67 Kapil Raj, “Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities:  Great Britain and India, 1760–​1850,” Osiris (2nd series) 15 (2000): 119–​134.

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Part IV

The local and the global

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11  Recentering centers of calculation Reconfiguring knowledge networks within global empires of trade Matthew Sargent

With the formation of Europe’s global trading enterprises during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commerce underwent an organizational revolution. Set against a backdrop of small, family-​run businesses that seldom extended beyond the household, the trading companies and mercantile empires that emerged to manage long-​distance trade were organizations of unprecedented scope and complexity. While the largest of the medieval “supercompanies,” the Florentine Bardi Company, had few more than 100 individuals on its payrolls at the height of its power in 1330, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)) employed 22,000 in 1690.1 Moreover, these commercial behemoths operated on a truly global stage. In Spanish America, 60,000 miners labored in silver mines at Potesi in modern Bolivia, and beginning in 1571, Spanish fleets carried tons of this treasure across the Pacific to deliver it to the markets of Asia.2 On the other side of the globe, the Dutch Company operated as a “nation unto itself,” whose private army, navy, and judicial system supported a trading network that stretched from the Netherlands to Japan.3 Within these vast mercantile operations, management, communication, and the sharing of accumulated technical knowledge was a continual challenge. Whether they operated as royal monopolies or as private firms, trading on a global scale introduced unprecedented logistical and organizational challenges. Unlike smaller ventures which could rely on direct, personal contact or local correspondence to gather information and resolve problems, the workers of geographically dispersed organizations might never meet and who could only communicate with great delay and difficulty.4 Given that the roundtrip voyage between the capitals of Europe and the entrepôt of Asia took 20 months and traversed 27,000 nautical miles, traditional models of management and decision making that depended on the guidance of a centralized control apparatus were impractical. Indeed, as Jan de Vries has observed, trading with Asia during the Age of Sail was a feat comparable in modern terms to the establishment of communications with the nearest star in our galaxy.5 The impact of this organizational revolution extended beyond the boundaries of commerce. As their business models and overseas operations grew more complex, the development of new forms of knowledge was often central to the survival and financial success of these organizations. Economic and medicinal

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298  Matthew Sargent botany were particularly valuable. Spices were one of the primary trade goods that Europeans sought abroad, and once merchants arrived in foreign ports, they attempted to locate the sources of the botanical products they purchased in order to discover new trade goods and find cures for the numerous shipboard and tropical diseases that they encountered. In addition to the business demand for such information, the enormous size of these empires of trade as well as their ability to coordinate and integrate the activities of large numbers of employees enabled them to conduct research in fields such as botany which required the acquisition and aggregation of large volumes of data. In contrast to laboratory sciences such as chemistry and physics in which individual experimenters could probe the mysteries of nature at a workbench, medicine and botany required the accumulation of numerous samples and observations that were gathered in the field. The global reach and complex logistical apparatus of global trading firms created a fertile matrix for this type of geographically dispersed research.6 However, while their vast shipping networks were well-​suited to the transport of commercial cargoes, I argue that the long-​distance communications networks that supported research in the natural sciences across the globe were beset by frictions and inefficiencies. To overcome these obstacles, I demonstrate that knowledge production within these organizations was relocated to limit reliance on ephemeral and inefficient communication networks. The result was that the production of natural knowledge was not confined to botanical gardens and academic circles in European capitals; rather it flourished abroad, where indigenous experts and botanical specimens were most accessible.

Long-​distance networks In his account of the ways in which trading companies facilitated the development of scientific knowledge, Steven Harris offers a thought-​provoking image. “Imagine,” he urges us, “having attached a long piece of thread to each object in all the curiosity cabinets that existed in Europe … [as well as] the instruments, texts, and graphical representations that enabled the motion of these objects in the first place.”7 The vast network of imagined threads resulting from this exercise highlights the importance of geography and travel in the construction of knowledge. By visualizing the vast meshworks that brought these assemblages to Europe, we can begin to understand the vast spatial distances and networks of travel and exchange that were required to bring together these collections. Building on Harris’s metaphor, my interest in these networks is not simply in the vast webs required to assemble scientific knowledge, but rather the geography and topology of the network’s structure. In particular, my focus is on the knotted intersections at which sets of these threads of objects and observations were woven together and synthesized into new, mobile collections of natural knowledge. Whenever these observational, natural, and instrumental threads were collected and synthesized into a new account of nature, a new, thicker strand of plaited threads would emerge representing this newly constructed synthesis of knowledge. Within these global networks of knowledge collection

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Recentering centers of calculation 299 and commercial exchange, my concern is the points within spatial and human networks at which these aggregations took place. Scholars in the actor-​network tradition have argued that these points of synthesis occurred primarily within “centers of calculation.”8 From this perspective, immutable, mobile specimens and observations were gathered abroad and passed through various networks until they arrived at a central location in which experts assembled them into comprehensive and authoritative knowledge about the natural world. Latour’s framing of this process –​and our discipline’s focus on European sites of practice such as scientific societies, museums, collections of rarities, and botanical gardens  –​has reinforced the assumption that this process occurred primarily within European metropoles. As a result, scholarship has often interpreted these emerging empires of trade as engines that transported specimens collected abroad back to Europe for collection and analysis. Understood from this perspective, trade and colonization spun a broader and denser web connecting Europe with the wider world, but the center of activity was still in Europe. While accepting this notion that there are central nodes of knowledge aggregation and creation within networks, I  argue that these centers of calculation need not be geographically, socially, or politically central. Indeed, as global trading companies developed complex organizational structures to overcome the managerial and commercial challenges they faced, their business and decision-​ making activities were not always centered in Europe. In fact, Europe was often on the periphery of these organizations’ commercial activities. The commercial operations of the Dutch East India Company provides a clear, though by no means unique, example of this. Unable to fund its trading ventures in Asia with precious metals from the Americas as the Spanish and Portuguese had, the Dutch actively sought out trade opportunities within Asia to generate a profit that could pay for the cargoes of spices and luxury goods that would be sent back to Europe on the return fleets. This inter-​Asian country trade (het Indisch Bedrijf) consumed the bulk of the manpower and shipping resources of the Company, and was so successful that the Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen predicted that “matters can be brought to the point that [the European Directors] would not be obliged to send any money whatever from Holland.”9 Indeed, as Coen had envisioned, the Company grew to dominate European–​Asian trade during the seventeenth century, funding its spice purchases in large part with silver purchased in Japan with cloth and other goods imported from India. The products imported for the European market were largely funded from the profits of this inter-​Asian country trade. The bulk of the Dutch shipping fleet operated within Asia throughout the year, carrying goods between Asian ports and returning periodically to regional headquarters in Batavia in modern Jakarta. The yearly fleet from the Netherlands sailed for Batavia and delivered orders, men, supplies, and some trade goods, and then returned with export products purchased with the profits of the inter-​Asian country trade. Viewed from this perspective, the large, heavily armed return ships that made the long journey around the Cape were only minor players compared

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300  Matthew Sargent to the dense web of activity within Asia. It was, in effect, an Asian company with a sales office in Europe. What was true of the structure of Dutch commercial operations was also true of its contributions to the development of knowledge. By widening the scope of inquiry to take in the production of knowledge on a global scale, I demonstrate that within the fertile matrix of these global trading institutions, multiple centers of scientific activity were emerging outside Europe which allowed research in natural history, geography, and botany to be completed abroad. Rather than carrying only the observations, specimens, and the raw materials of science, these networks transported finished works and completed research that had been assembled abroad and traveled to Europe for printing and circulation. The organizational revolution did not simply create broader networks that more efficiently fed data into European nerve centers, the creation of global empires of trade enabled these centers of calculation to be relocated abroad.

Stationary scholars: Nicolas Monardes as an information nexus The centralized aggregation of indigenous medical knowledge within Europe economized on the initial scarcity of trained botanists willing to travel to distant lands and on the limited research infrastructure and publication resources available once they arrived. The Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes (c.1508–​ 1588), who authored the sixteenth century’s most widely circulated book on American materia medica, Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (A Medical History of the Things Brought from Our West Indies that are Useful for Medicine) adopted this strategy, positioning himself as a “center of calculation” as he compiled his book in Seville, the hub of Spanish trade activities with the Americas. Rather than traveling abroad, he relied on the testimonies and reports of returning travelers and informants who sent him plant specimens and letters from the New World.10 This approach had its limitations, however. Despite his clear interest in American botanical products, Monardes’s writings reveal the range of barriers and communication frictions that inhibited his access to valuable indigenous knowledge. He discusses, for example, the power of an emetic plant root known as Mecheocan (likely Ipomaea jalapa) that had gained popularity in both Europe and the colonies of the New World. It was imported “in great quantitie,” he wrote, and “it is solde for great sommes of money.”11 Yet despite its utility as a medicine and its promise as a trade good, the root could only be purchased as a prepared commodity from the local population, and while his factors could supply him with samples of the root, he was unable to discover what plant produced it or where it grew. As he complained, his suppliers “knowe no more thereof, but that the Indians … doesth sell it theim, the rootes beyng drie and cleane … and the Spaniardes doe buye them, as a kind of Merchandise, [and] sende them to Spaine.”12 It is unclear whether this valuable commercial knowledge was intentionally kept secret by the local population, or if the different stages in the supply chain

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Recentering centers of calculation 301 harvesting, preparation, and sale of the product were sufficiently decoupled from one another that the suppliers with whom the Spanish dealt simply did not know the source of their product. Whatever the reason, the commercial networks that carried these commodities from harvest to port were not configured to facilitate the flow of information relating to the products they supplied. Monardes’s informants lacked access to alternative information channels which would have allowed them to bypass these barriers, and without a more substantial on-​the-​ ground presence, neither he nor his factors abroad could develop networks that would enable them to discover the secrets of these upstream operations. Like the information flow within these commercial networks, a persistent problem that plagued Monardes’s centralized aggregation strategy was the fact that the network that delivered these New World observations to Seville operated in only one direction. When Monardes received reports from the Americas, he could not always reply to the letters he received to ask for clarification or elaboration. Informants could not always be relied upon to correct ambiguities and silences, and, at this early stage of knowledge development, there was no existing framework of botanical nomenclature, libraries of specimens, or guides to indigenous knowledge to consult to shed light on these problems.13 Without the ability to iteratively refine the reports he received, it proved impossible to combine the observations he received with other data to synthesize a new, more comprehensive body of knowledge. These issues are apparent in a letter that Monardes reprinted in his treatise that he had received from a Spanish soldier named Pedro de Osma (dates unknown) who had written to him from his post in Lima, Peru in December 1568. Detailing his encounter with a powerful local medicine, Pedro described the way in which the Indian doctor had cured the skin disease of one of his slaves using medicine made from “a fruite, which is common in that countrie … which is of the greatnesse of an Orenge, and it hath a stone like unto a Peache.”14 Aside from noting the general appearance of the plant and remarking on the efficacy of the treatment, he was unable to provide the plant’s name or any additional information which might aid others wishing to use the medicine. Instead, his description remained a singular, inert immutable mobile, a fact that could travel but which could not be integrated with other reports to improve existing bodies of knowledge. As Pedro’s difficulties reveal, plants were vexingly difficult to describe to distant collaborators prior to the development of an established vocabulary of botanical nomenclature or classification. The nuances of appearance and smell, coupled with descriptions of leaves, bark, and flowers that would allow unambiguous identification of (what would later be known as) a particular species, were difficult to commit to writing. Botanical expertise was, to use Polanyi’s term, a type of tacit knowledge.15 While the identities of these plants could be conveyed experientially, by showing another party the plant in question so that they could gather the sense experience of these plants and fruits directly, they could not easily be articulated in writing, sketches, or other readily transmissible form. Thus, the ephemeral long-​distance networks that linked Monardes with his

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302  Matthew Sargent collaborators were ill-​suited to the transfer of the detailed descriptions his subject matter required.16 The tacit character of botanical knowledge rendered it difficult to communicate to distant collaborators. While shipments of specimens and crews of expert observers could alleviate these problems, the experiential nature of botanical observations impeded their transmission through long-​ distance networks. Latour’s conception of the centers of calculation relies on the idea that facts and objects could flow easily through networks where they could be analyzed and assembled by experts in a centralized location. Rather than the immutable mobiles that passed through Latour’s imagined networks, early observations were not simply incomplete and inexact, but critically, they often resisted aggregation with other observations. At the same time, the networks themselves were short-​lived; contacts with informants were brief due to cross-​cultural acrimony or simply because of the tyranny of space and time. Hampered by these limitations, the long-​distance networks that carried observations to Monardes in Europe were ill-​suited to the development of more comprehensive knowledge of indigenous botanical practices. While his treatise was an important and valuable source that gave Europe its first extensive description of the economic botany of the New World, updating, expanding, and refining its contents required a different knowledge aggregation strategy. The construction of accurate knowledge required closer, more sustained contacts that would allow direct observation and iterative correction and refinement.

Knowledge aggregation abroad In the decades following the publication of Monardes’s text, demand for accurate knowledge about botanical products continued to grow, as did the scale of the European mercantile presence abroad. In the Americas, colonial administrators sought out botanical products as a source of valuable medicines and merchandise.17 Meanwhile, merchant companies founded by the English (1600) and the Dutch (1602) challenged the Portuguese Empire in Asia, seeking to control the import trade in spices and other botanical products. As the scale of European operations abroad intensified and the organizations structuring these expansion grew in size and sophistication, new strategies emerged for the collection and aggregation of botanical knowledge. The following paired case studies explore the ways in which Europeans accessed indigenous knowledge in seventeenth-​century India. Even with the growing presence of European trained experts abroad, the communication and aggregation of expert knowledge was a continual challenge. Illness and tropical disease were constant problems for Europeans in the tropics. Mortality on the nine-​month voyage from Europe to Asia could be as high as 10  percent, and after arrival, travelers encountered a host of tropical diseases which they initially tried to combat with chests of medicines shipped from Europe –​which if anything survived the journey to Asia even less reliably than the sailors they were sent to cure.18 Hoping to make the supply of medicines

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Recentering centers of calculation 303 cheaper and more effective, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, the Governor of Malabar (an important trading enclave on the west coast of India) under the Dutch East India Company, advocated for a Company-​sponsored research effort to survey the medicinally and economically useful botanical resources of the region. Knowledge of indigenous plants, he argued, “Would involve great profit for the Illustrious East India Company, which indeed would be able to save those expenses it spends on transporting medicaments to India.”19 The Dutch, he explained, imported medicines from around the world and then shipped them to India, often spoiling during the long journey.20 There was a better alternative, van Rheede argued; the local peoples were “cared for by native physicians, who [did] not fetch medicaments from other regions,” he explained. Nor was information concerning potential medicines hard to come by. “When I asked the natives who accompanied me,” he wrote, “whether they [knew] anything about these plants, they not only disclosed the names, but also knew very well their curative properties and use,” despite their lack of formal medical training.21 While eager to solve the problems of medical supply for Dutch employees abroad and eager to learn more about the virtues and values of the plants of the region, van Rheede was not himself an expert in either medicine or botany. Having no particular expertise of his own, van Rheede began by seeking a knowledgeable expert to guide him. The project began well; as van Rheede later recalled, there lived a certain man endowed with the greatest possible knowledge of Indian plants … when he understood my purpose, viz., that a list and descriptions of the plants of Malabar had to be made … he very kindly and promptly offered me his services.22

Fr. Matteo di San Giuseppe and the immobility of knowledge Van Rheede’s collaborator was an unlikely one. The Governor, a Protestant in the Dutch Reformed Church, partnered with an Italian, Catholic priest in the Order of the Discalced Carmelites named Father Matteo di San Giuseppe, born Pietro Foglia (1617–​1691).23 Despite their confessional differences, Fr. Matteo had much to offer van Rheede. He held a medical degree from the University of Naples, and a mission to develop ties with local communities to spread Christianity. As one of Matteo’s fellow priests described, “Before entering religion Fr. Matthew of St Joseph [i.e., Matteo di San Giuseppe] held a degree in medicine on which account, [he was] held the most renowned and celebrated physician in the East.”24 During his extensive missionary work, he had become an expert on the medical uses of local plants; a virtual necessity since he was unable to rely on a supply of European medicines while abroad. Fr. Matteo’s training and direct access to local communities enabled him to cross social boundaries and make friendships which crossed numerous social and ethnic divides. The range of his social access is evident in the complaint of one of his Dutch detractors, Gelmer Vosberg (dates

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304  Matthew Sargent unknown), the second-​in-​command in Malabar, who wrote to the Company’s Board of Governors (the Heren XVII) to lament van Rheede’s reckless partnership with Fr. Matteo. “This crafty Italian,” he wrote, “… is said to be an expert doctor of medicine and a good herbalist … That is why he has all the more opportunity to ransack every hole, to call on the sick, and visit their houses.” Vosberg was furious not only with Fr. Matteo’s comings and goings, it seems, but also with his inability to do anything about it. “[He] has managed to worm himself so much into the good graces of the Commander van Rheede,” Vosberg fumed, “that he is almost considered a saint.”25 Despite these misgivings by members of the Dutch establishment, the collaboration between these unlikely partners began well. Van Rheede later recalled that Fr. Matteo had a collection of “rough sketches … which he had formerly drawn to aid his memory,” on which he had noted each plant’s curative virtues. The Dutch commander expected that this collection would form the basis for their project, though more accurate and detailed drawings would be required. The Italian physician-​priest quickly set about improving these illustrations, and as van Rheede marveled, “relying solely on memory [Fr. Matteo] turned out the natural forms of the plants in a wonderful way from the rough sketches.”26 These drawings and the associated descriptions of their medical virtues initially seemed a perfect basis for van Rheede’s project. But as the project progressed and the Commander worked to improve and refine the material that Fr. Matteo provided, the limitations of his work began to emerge. Despite Fr. Matteo’s expertise and willingness to assist in the project, it soon became apparent that it would be difficult for him to share the experiential knowledge that he had gathered over his lifetime. As van Rheede lamented, Because he delineated everything with a pen, and that only in outline … the pictures were not very much like living plants … if you compared the drawings with the plants themselves, you would hardly have said the pictures had been made from them, so poorly did they accord therewith. As to the description, this often cohered so little through perfunctory and fleeting attention that it might have referred to several plants even if they were quite different.27 Nor were the problems simply the result of Fr. Matteo’s poor artistic training; as van Rheede complained, “many plants [could not be identified] either because he had not noted down the names accurately, or the venerable old man had received them from men who did not know the common names.”28 The problems that van Rheede described are evident in the surviving excerpts of Fr. Matteo’s notes. Describing the virtues of an Indian tree, the Italian priest recorded only that The root is called the ‘mother of God,’ it has white flowers and tripartite solid leaves … and a scaly fruit with the shape of a fish inside, which when pulverized and mixed with water is said to be an excellent remedy for fever.29

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Recentering centers of calculation 305 Nor does the image of a stylized tree that accompanies the description make the plant’s identity any clearer (Figure 11.1). Though the caption identifies it as a tree, the image is devoid of any sense of scale, making it difficult to discern whether it is a small plant, shrub, or tree. Moreover, the relation of the central figure to the surrounding leaves, fruits, and flowers that surround it is unclear. The text and main image describe a plant with tripartite leaves, yet the illustration also includes single leaves in the lower left and right. More confusing still is the image of a bull’s head which appears above a cluster of leaves or flowers on the left of the image. The meaning of this symbol, which is not referenced in the text, is entirely opaque. Without a clear name or description of the plant, these ambiguities and representational oddities cannot be resolved. Indeed, even when Fr. Matteo did know the names of the plants he described, there were no standard spellings or transliteration strategies which would allow

Figure 11.1 Archam Arbore Indiano from Giacomo Zanoni, Istoria Botanica (Bologna, 1675). Credit: Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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306  Matthew Sargent him to reliably pass on his knowledge. Without standardized names for indigenous plants, speakers of different European languages tried to transliterate the Indian words into their own languages, and these words often took on very different forms in the process. The fruit known in Malayalam as “chakka pazham” (ചക്കപ്പഴം) was referred to as “giacca” by the Italian speaking Fr. Matteo, “tsjakka” or “tsjaka” in the Dutch transcriptions of the Hortus Malabaricus, “jaca” in Portuguese sources, and “jack [fruit]” in contemporary English ones. Even when information about the local names of these botanical specimens was available, linguistic barriers within collaboration networks hampered the exchange of knowledge. Thus, while Fr. Matteo was an undisputed expert on the subject of medicinal botany, his knowledge was intensely personal. He could easily practice medicine himself without needing to draw the plants he used or provide their names. As van Rheede explained, the excellent old man had not imagined that it would be necessary to [go to] greater and more accurate pains in depicting and describing those plants, because he himself with the aid of his memory was indisputably acquainted thoroughly with [them].30 To frame the problem in the sociological terms described above, Matteo’s knowledge of medical botany was highly tacit. While his personal acquaintance with Indian medicinal herbs was sufficient for his own purposes, he was unable to articulate his knowledge to share it with others. While this personal knowledge of Indian botany was sufficient for a traveling monk, the personal skill of a single individual did not satisfy the needs of a geographically dispersed company. Van Rheede needed more than a single expert; he needed to record and articulate the tacit knowledge that individuals like Fr. Matteo had developed. Van Rheede’s goal was to render this information stable, depersonalized, and easily transmissible so that it could circulate within the Company and become a permanent resource rather than depending on the skills and abilities of a single expert. The story of Fr. Matteo’s research efforts does not end with van Rheede’s frustrations, however. While van Rheede opted not to use these drawings, Fr. Matteo’s records were sought after by European naturalists who were eager for whatever reports they could collect from experts in the East. Several years earlier, in 1664, Fr. Matteo’s expertise had drawn the attention of Jacob van Gool (1596–​1 667), a Dutch naturalist in Leiden, who had attempted to secure Fr. Matteo’s drawings for publication in the Netherlands. Van Gool petitioned the governors of the VOC to help secure the priest’s botanical manuscripts, but Matteo had departed for Persia days before the request to secure his botanical papers arrived. These documents made their way to Europe through other channels, however. After the Company failed to secure them, Matteo sent a collection of botanical sketches and notes to Italy with the hope of having them printed there, and 56 of these were published by Giacomo Zanoni (1615–​1 682), the head of the botanical garden

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Recentering centers of calculation 307 at the University of Bologna, in his Istoria Botanica (1675).31 Meanwhile, one of Matteo’s superiors in the East, Coelestinus of St. Liduina (Petrus Golius) (1597–​1672), had returned to Italy to take a position as a professor of oriental languages in Rome. He took a collection of Matteo’s notes and drawings with him, and prepared a collection of 600 drawings for publication, but due to his death in 1672, they were never published. Coelestinus had, however, given a set of pictures and commentary to Jacques Barrelier (1602–​1673), a French Dominican friar and noted botanist, for editing and advice. Barrelier made a copy of Matteo’s plant descriptions accompanied by scaled-​down images of Matteo’s drawings. These too were never published, but survive in Paris at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, MS 1764. Thus “the venerable old man” that van Rheede partnered with was slowly becoming a recognized authority on Asian medical botany whose research was being circulated in Europe at the same time van Rheede was collaborating with him.32 But how did European scholars make use of Fr. Matteo’s notes if the images and descriptions included in them were considered unusable by van Rheede when he reviewed them in India? The problems that van Rheede described  –​ inexact illustrations and ambiguous names  –​were not easily overcome. When European compilers like Zanoni incorporated Fr. Matteo’s work into larger botanical compilations, it proved difficult to correct these deficiencies. Fr. Matteo had not followed the emerging conventions of naming and classification. Instead he relied on a handful of botanical terms, but often described his specimens by noting their similarities to European species. Moreover, this idiosyncratic source material was often incomplete. When editing Matteo’s materials for publication, Zanoni noted that he often had only sketches of plants with no associated descriptions.33 Without access to Fr. Matteo, his Indian informants, or (in most cases) the plants themselves, botanists in Europe had limited ability to correct or clarify Matteo’s reports and it often proved difficult to incorporate them into existing bodies of knowledge. Just as with the examples from Monardes’s work described above, the ephemeral, unidirectional networks connecting Fr. Matteo, his informants, and his European collaborators made iterative improvement of his observations nearly impossible. Indeed, as van Rheede’s frustrations with Fr. Matteo as a source illustrate, the inability to definitively identify the plants that Fr. Matteo described, either by picture or name, meant that his personal knowledge resisted aggregation with other sources of knowledge. While the deficiencies of Matteo’s notes were an inconvenience to European botanists, these concerns were apparently outweighed by the value of the descriptions of new plants and their associated medical properties that the texts and illustrations provided. With limited access to the plants themselves or native informants who could provide higher-​quality information, Fr. Matteo’s notes provided a rare insight into the medicinal botany of Asia despite their imperfections. From the perspective of a European scholar, distance rendered any information important.

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Constructing new centers of calculation: van Rheede and Hortus Malabaricus Though Zanoni and Coelestinus had to make do with Fr. Matteo’s incomplete descriptions and ambiguous illustrations because they provided an otherwise inaccessible insight into the medicinal botany of Asia, van Rheede had other options available to him. From his base in India, van Rheede judged the value of Fr. Matteo’s research with a different set of considerations in mind. The Dutch commander assessed Fr. Matteo’s manuscript knowing that he could access botanical specimens and indigenous informants directly. While naturalists based in Europe had to rely on long-​distance networks to deliver reports and specimens to them, van Rheede was able to forge whatever local connections he needed to advance his project. Using his political power to draw together resources from the Company and the surrounding community, van Rheede made use of his physical location in India to construct a cross-​cultural network of botanical experts that would directly address his needs. By developing a research infrastructure within Asia, he also minimized the reliance on long-​distance communication networks. Rather than following the more traditional model of sending specimens and reports to experts in Europe –​the botanical garden at Leiden, for e­ xample –​van Rheede assembled a diverse group of European experts from among the expatriate community in Malabar including European-​trained doctors, a chemist, and a number of translators, draftsmen, and illustrators.34 These Europeans were joined by a committee of local experts who were asked to identify potentially useful local plants. As van Rheede explained, “Some physicians, both Brahmins and others, by my orders made in their own language lists of the best known and most frequently occurring plants.”35 These lists of names, compiled in several Indian languages, were “then given to certain men who were experts in plants who were entrusted with collecting for us from everywhere the plants with leaves, flowers, and fruit.” As the requested specimens were acquired, a team of draftsmen made detailed drawings of each of the specimens.36 While identifying potentially interesting plants and gathering specimens of them was a bottleneck for individual naturalists, van Rheede had the institutional power to overcome these obstacles. As the commander of the VOC in India, he literally had a small army of men at his disposal and was closely involved with the political and economic transactions between the Company and the neighboring Indian kingdoms. To speed the process of collecting specimens, and to broaden the reach of this research project, he took advantage of all of the contacts and resources that he could muster. As he recounted, he courteously asked all the princes of Malabar kindly to inform us of plants which were … well known by their form and their use. Thus it happened that … plants were brought to us from a distance of fifty or sixty leagues and

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Recentering centers of calculation 309 that there was not one among these kings and princes but had cultivated some flowers in our Hortus.37 Company business also demanded that he travel throughout southern India, and on such occasions, when he “observed the luxurious forests and delightful plains,” van Rheede “ordered his whole party to leave the ship.” The ships’ crews, the soldiers, diplomats, traders, and botanists –​in all more than 200 people –​would then spend several hours wandering in groups through the forests, some of them in order to find booty, some of them because I delighted very much in it, [and] many of them to satisfy their curiosity about new things … ravaged all sorts of plants, especially those which we saw adorned with fruits and flowers.38 They returned to their warships, where artists drew and described the plants that had not previously been gathered. Later, when Company business had been concluded at the courts of Indian princes, van Rheede raised the topic of his botanical research with them. As he described, the Indian rulers were “so inquisitive … [that they] even themselves came to our tents to see … with great delight our unremitting labor and the pictures of the plants.”39 The Indian rulers were very kind, van Rheede wrote, and “provided us plentifully through their men with all sorts of plants,” no doubt in the hope that their contributions to the project would help them remain in the good graces of the VOC.40 At the Company headquarters in Malabar, the assembled plant specimens were examined by his board of experts. As van Rheede recorded, “[This board] which consisted of fifteen or sixteen scholars, … by means of an interpreter were asked whether they knew those plants and their names and curative virtues. The answers were recorded in a commentarium.”41 This panel of experts included three Brahmin doctors, Renga Batt, Appu Batt, and Vinayak Pandit, who also acted as the interpreter from Sanskrit or Konkani into Portuguese. In a signed statement, these scholars explained that they shared information from the Manhaningattnam, a medical text describing the curative properties of Indian herbs, as well as knowledge gained from their own experience.42 In addition to these high-​caste Brahmins, van Rheede also called upon the services of Itti Achudem and Coladda, both physicians from the coastal district to the south. Achudem belonged to the low-​caste Chogans, who were involved with the profitable coconut industry, and who were referred to by the Dutch as “tree climbers” and revered for their expert botanical knowledge despite their low station in Indian society.43 Van Rheede did not assemble this group haphazardly. As he explained, his board of experts had purposely been assembled from various parts of Malabar so that, “because they did not know each other, they were moved by ambition, sense of honor, and suspicion” to compete with one another to prove their expertise.44 At the end of this process, van Rheede had gathered as much information as possible from the informants available to him. In addition to the extensive

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310  Matthew Sargent commentaries that his committee of experts had compiled, his illustrations produced by professional artists depicted each plant specimen described, including detailed studies of its leaves, bark, flowers, and fruit. Rather than relying on long-​ distance reports and ephemeral networks available to researchers in Europe, van Rheede was able to gather information through a local network of durable, two-​way relationships. His physical presence in the East enabled him to gather, record, and refine his botanical knowledge within Asia where access to botanical specimens and indigenous experts was most easily facilitated. Rather than transmitting data and observations back to Europe for analysis by established scholars and institutions, van Rheede used the resources of the Company to create a center of calculation in India. By bringing specimens, indigenous experts, European scholars, illustrators, and translators together, he was able to gather, synthesize, and stabilize his research on Indian economic botany so that it could be transported back to Europe for publication. Europe was still vital for the completion of van Rheede’s project, however, but its value was in its advanced printing technology rather than its scientific experts. While European-​run presses in Asia published numerous booklets on Asian medical botany, they were unable to print the large illustrations that van Rheede desired. To print these images, engravers, working from the ink drawings produced by van Rheede’s illustrators, cut the image into large metal plates that were used to print the images that would accompany the text. No such engraving facilities existed in the East, so van Rheede’s work was transported to Europe for the final stages of production. However straightforward this strategy may have been, the task of assembling and publishing the materials he had produced in India was not without incident and interruption. In 1677, van Rheede was appointed to the Council of India, which controlled all of the Dutch operations in Asia, and left India for the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. During his stay there, he continued to work on his botanical project, and his collection of botanical descriptions and illustrations were edited and commented on by two botanical experts –​Wilhelm ten Rhijne (1647–​1700) and Christiaan Herman van Donep (dates unknown) –​ who were stationed in Batavia. At this point, or perhaps earlier, van Rheede sent a collection of material to Europe to be prepared for publication. After only six months in Batavia, however, political circumstances forced van Rheede to return to Europe, and he took his still incomplete collection of text and illustrations with him. In Europe, a Dutch botanist, Arnold Syen (1640–​ 1678), had begun the work of completing the botanical commentaries in the text, working from botanical specimens in the Leiden botanical garden as well as with dried plants sent from the East to aid his work. The first volume appeared in print in 1678, shortly before van Rheede’s return. When he saw the first volume of text, he was disappointed with the results. The publishing house had misunderstood the scope of the text and had reclassified some of the plants, moving them between the sections –​trees, shrubs, and herbs –​to make the parts of more equal size. Moreover, as Syen noted in his preface to the text, the Indian plants presented in the Hortus Malabaricus were not his specialty and, to van Rheede’s

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Recentering centers of calculation 311 dismay, he had described them by comparison to European plants. Before work could begin on the next section of the manuscript, Syen died, and van Rheede put the project on hold until 1681.45 When he began his work anew, he recruited an amateur botanist, Jan Commelin (1629–​1692), to expand the botanical commentaries and to help him assemble the material into publishable form. Some of the illustrations that van Rheede brought from India were only pencil sketches rather than finished drawings and the comments that he had received from ten Rhijne and van Donep in Batavia needed to be incorporated into the plant descriptions. Lastly, because van Rheede was composing the descriptions in Dutch, he hired a professor from the University of Utrecht to translate them into Latin. In 1681, he signed a contact with new publishers, Pieter van Someren, Hendrik Boom, and the widow of Dirk Boom, in which they agreed to publish the third and fourth volumes of the series. The publishers took on the vast expense of the illustration and publication themselves, though they did so with tacit Company support since the Board of Governors (the Heren XVII) had previously agreed to purchase 12 copies of the finished work.46 Driven forward by van Rheede’s personal involvement and oversight, the remaining volumes of the manuscript were prepared and published over the course of the next decade. As a result of his efforts, a 12-​volume botanical magnum opus called Hortus Malabaricus (The Garden of Malabar) was published in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693. The scope and detail of the work was stunning; the treatise contained lavish, two-​page spread illustrations of 729 Indian plants accompanied by descriptions of their medicinal and practical qualities and labeled with inscriptions giving the names of each plant in Latin, Malayam, Arabic, and Sanskrit. The contents ranged from cultivated fruits and flowers to local weeds, and all were scrutinized in great detail. One local shrub was identified in the manuscript as “chunda” or “schunda” (Solanum lasiocarpum). As its common name, Indian nightshade, suggests, it is a relative of two toxic European weeds, bittersweet nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) and black nightshade (Solanum nigrum). Despite these inauspicious relations, the Hortus lavished the same attention on this plant as it did the other specimens included in the volumes. Its leaves, stem, root, flowers, fruit, and seeds were described in Latin and accompanied by a naturalistic illustration in which the names in local languages are inscribed at the upper right, enabling its unambiguous identification abroad (Figure 11.2). Accompanying these descriptions of the plant’s appearance and physical characteristics was a list of the medical properties gathered by van Rheede’s committee of experts: Its virtues:  Promotes digestion, a decoction in honey drunk is also useful for cough and heaviness of the chest, a plain decoction is used in fevers occasioned by phlegm and rheum, for which can also be used a decoction of the root, when ground in wine it is given to stop vomiting, and, taken in the amount of two ounces, is a purgative of rheumy humors, evacuating them by the nether route.47

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312  Matthew Sargent

Figure 11.2 Schunda (Indian nightshade, Solanum lasiocarpum), from Hendrik van Rheede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1679). Credit: Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

In contrast to Fr. Matteo’s ambiguous drawings, the detailed rendering in the Hortus created a timeless and depersonalized record of the specimen that van Rheede’s multi-​ethnic committee of experts had collected. In fact, writing in 1825, the British botanist Francis Hamilton observed that only he and one other botanist had observed the plant since the time of van Rheede, yet despite the century-​and-​a-​half that had elapsed, the “chunda” of the Hortus Malabaricus could still be identified.48 Stabilized in text and print, van Rheede’s accumulated knowledge was rendered depersonalized and mobile. Van Rheede’s book circulated both within Europe (where it was studied by Linnaeus during his stay in the Netherlands) and through other areas of Asia, where it was sent as a resource for VOC doctors and naturalists stationed in Ceylon, Batavia, and the Spice Islands of Indonesia.49 As Commelin remarked, “These plants now with their exact sketches and drawings are spreading all over the world.”50

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Recentering centers of calculation 313

Conclusion Returning to the imagined thread-​map described in the introduction above, we can visualize this final product  –​the published text  –​traveling outward from the presses in Amsterdam. Having followed the production of this text, however, we are able to see that this was only one stage of its production. Stepping back to view the larger structure of the network that produced it, we would see a thick web of threads being woven together in Malabar, where van Rheede and his associates plaited them into a thick rope that then stretched to Batavia and finally onward to Amsterdam, having been refined and tightened at each step of its journey. Though the most prominent product of this web was the text published in Europe, the bulk of its production occurred abroad. The aggregation of knowledge mirrored the structure of the commercial operations of the Company itself. Its most visible part was the auctions of exotic Asian merchandise that occurred in Amsterdam, but this was made possible by a vast, largely unseen web of trade that occurred within Asia. While the scale of van Rheede’s endeavors was perhaps unique, the creation of a center of calculation abroad was not. Throughout the world, European naturalists were aggregating knowledge and preparing texts abroad. Whether they had traveled overseas as botanists, doctors, merchants, or military men, European expatriates were able to rely on local organizational and technical machinery to develop their research projects abroad. Working in Ambon, at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, another VOC employee, Georg Rumph (Rumphius) (1627–​1702), who had enlisted in the Dutch Company as a soldier, spent decades collecting shells and researching the botany and natural history of the archipelago. Like van Rheede, Rumphius researched, wrote, and illustrated his research abroad, before finally sending it to Europe for publication.51 When high-​quality illustrations were not required, Europe could be removed from the knowledge-​ production process entirely. Hermann Grimm (1641–​ 1711), a Swedish doctor and naturalist employed by the Dutch in Asia, regularly submitted reports and essays for publication in Europe by a German scientific society called the Academy for the Curious of Nature, but in 1677, he chose to publish his treatise on Indian botanical medicines at the Company presses in Batavia.52 Nor was this behavior unique to the VOC; knowledge aggregation abroad was an expedient strategy for many researchers working overseas for large colonial and commercial interests. The first treatise on Asian botanical medicine, for example, had been researched and prepared within India by the Portuguese doctor, Garcia da Orta (1501–​1568). His landmark text, Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (Conversations on the Simples, Drugs and Medicinal Substances of India) was published in Goa (1563) based on research conducted during his 25-​year residence in India. Europe’s importance to these endeavors was as a site of publication and redistribution, not as the sole locus of knowledge production. From this perspective, it was not the geographic scope of the Company’s network that mattered to

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314  Matthew Sargent van Rheede’s endeavor, nor the capacity of vast commercial networks to carry countless specimens back to Europe. Rather, it was the ability to deploy experts and specialists locally, throughout the world, to enable the development and stabilization of knowledge abroad. Before technologies and classification systems were developed which could streamline the process of knowledge transmission, it proved easier to bring the experts to the data rather than the other way around. The ability to relocate sites of knowledge production to new geographic (and network) locations enabled the centers of calculation to be positioned where repeated contacts with informants and iterative refinement of knowledge was most efficient.

Notes 1 Edwin S.  Hunt, The Medieval Super-​Companies:  A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Allen Evans, “Introduction,” in Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), xv; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost:  England before the Industrial Age (New  York:  Scribner, 1973); Femme S. Gaastra, De geschiedenis van de VOC (Amsterdam: Walberg Pers, 2002), 80–​81. 2 Dennis O.  Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’:  The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6 (1995): 201–​221. 3 Quoting E.  M. Beekman, “Introduction:  Rumphius’ Life and Work,” in Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, ed. and trans. E. M. Beekman (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1999), lx; see also Jan de Vries and A. M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 The ability to develop and share knowledge within an organization is, from an economic perspective, one of the defining characteristics of a firm that renders it more efficient than smaller entities bound together by contracts. Kogut and Zander observed this phenomenon and proposed a knowledge-​based theory of the firm which proposed that firms “be understood as a social community specializing in the speed and efficiency in the creation and transfer of knowledge.” Bruce Kogut and Udo Zander, “What Firms Do? [sic] Coordination, Identity, and Learning,” Organization Science (October 1996): 502–​528, 503. For a discussion of organizational evolution and new managerial strategies, see Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). 5 De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, 386. 6 Steven J. Harris, “Long-​Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6 (Spring 1998): 269–​304; on botany as a “big science,” see Harold J. Cook, “Natural History and Seventeenth-​Century Dutch and English Medicine,” in The Task of Healing, ed. H. Marland and M. Pelling (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996), 254–​270. 7 Harris, “Long-​Distance Corporations,” 273. 8 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. 215–​257. 9 De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, 386. 10 Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields:  Sixteenth-​ Century Transatlantic Encounters with New World Materia Medica,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce,

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Recentering centers of calculation 315 and Politics, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 83–​99, 85–​87; Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014), 114; Antonio Barrera-​ Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-​Century Spanish Atlantic World,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–​1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2008), 219–​232. 11 Nicolás Monardes, Dos libros, el uno que trata de todas las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1569), 53v, translated in Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde … (London, 1577), 27r–​v. 12 Monardes, Joyfull newes, 27r; Monardes, Dos libros, 53v. 13 See Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005) on the development of a systematic and standardized botanical nomenclature. 14 Monardes, Joyfull newes, 67v; Nicolás Monardes, Segunda parte del libro des las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1571), 83r–​v. 15 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New  York:  Anchor Books, 1967); Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 16 Morten T. Hansen, “The Search-​Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge across Organization Subunits,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44 (March 1999): 82–​111. 17 Paula de Vos, “An Herbal El Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire,” Endeavour 27 (2003): 117–​121. 18 A.  C.  J. Vermeulen, “The People on Board,” in The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in European Expansion, 1450–​1800, ed. Pieter Emmer and Femme Gaastra (New York: Variorum, 1996), 143–​172, ­tables 30 and 31; Dr. D. Schoute, Occidental Therapeutics in the Netherlands East Indies during Three Centuries of Netherlands Settlement (1600–​1900) (Batavia: Netherlands Indies Public Health Service, 1937), esp. ch. 6. 19 Adriaan van Rheede, Van Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus, trans. K.  S. Manilal (Thiruvananthapuram, India: University of Kerala, 2003), vol. 3, xiii. 20 Similar complaints are presented in Anon. [H. Krijtenburgh], Een kort ontwerp, rakende de verkeerde Leerweg van de Indiaanse Apotheecq … (Amsterdam, 1693). 21 Van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xiii, xii. 22 Ibid., vol. 3, xiii. 23 Gaetano Monti, Jacobi Zanonii Rarum Stirpium Historia … (Bonoiae, 1742), xl–​xlvi; Anon. [H. G. J. Chick], A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVVIIIth Centuries (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1939), vol. 2, 960–​963; van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xiii–​xiv. 24 Quoted in Chick, Chronicle of the Carmelites, 962. 25 National Archief, The Hague. VOC [shelfmark 1.04.02] 1308, 818–​819; translated in Johannes Heniger, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein (1636–​1691) and Hortus Malabaricus: A Contribution to the History of Dutch Colonial Botany (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1986), 44. 26 Van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xiv. 27 Ibid., vol. 3, xiv–​xv. 28 Ibid., vol. 3, xiv. 29 Giacomo Zanoni, Istoria Botanica (Bologna, 1675), 23. The publication of Fr. Matteo’s notes are discussed at greater length below. This description is quoted in Latin and set apart from the surrounding Italian text, suggesting that the

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316  Matthew Sargent quotation came directly from Fr. Matteo’s manuscript. When republished in a later edition, the compiler added that the illustration had been drawn by Fr. Matteo with a writing pen; see Cajetanus [Gaetano] Monti, Jacobi Zanonii Rariorum Stirpum Historia (Bonoiae, 1742), 20. 30 Van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xiv. See Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 220–​221, for a related example. 31 Heniger, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, 106. 32 Ibid., 105–​119. 33 Zanoni, Istoria Botanica, 40 [incorrect pagination, printed as 26]. 34 By the 1680s, the Leiden botanical garden was cultivating nearly 3,000 species of plants. See Cook, Matters of Exchange, 320. 35 Van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xvi. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., vol. 3, xxi. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., vol. 3, xvi. 42 Ibid., 1: Introductory statement; ibid., 1, Certificate signed by Renga Batt, Appu Batt, and Vinayak Pandit. 43 Ibid., 1: Certificate signed by Emmanuel Carneiro; ibid., 1: Certificate signed by Itty Achudem. 44 Ibid., vol. 3, xvi. 45 Heniger, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, 62, 153. 46 Ibid., 42–​44, 59–​64, 134. The contract was later expanded to cover the remaining volumes. 47 Hendrik van Rheede, Horti Indici Malabarici Pars Secunda de Fruicibus (Amsterdam, 1679), 67–​68. 48 Francis Hamilton, “A Commentary on the Second Part of the Hortus Malabaricus,” Transactions of the Linnean Society 14, no. 2 (1825): 171–​312, 264. 49 VOC 320, n.p., August 31, 1678, Heren XVII to Governor General and Council of India; VOC 108, Resolutions of the Heren XVII, n.p., meetings of March 17 and 18, 1679. 50 Jan Commelin, “To the Benevolent Reader,” in van Rheede, Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 3, xxxii. 51 Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, Het Amboinsche Kruidboek (Amsterdam, 1741). E. M. Beekman, “Introduction,” in Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, The Ambonese Herbal, ed. and trans. E.  M. Beekman (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2011), vol. 1, 1–​172; W.  Buijze, Leven en werk van Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–​1702): een natuurhistoricus in dienst van de VOC (The Hague: Boekhandel Couvée, 2006). 52 Hermann Grimm, Laboratorium chymicum:  gehouden op het voortreffelycke Eylandt Ceylon, soo in’t Animalische, Vegetabilische, als Mineralische Ryck. Wordende de liefhebberen niet  alleen de praeparatien der selve trouwelyck op-​geteyckent, maer oock desselver gebruyck, en hoedanigh sy moeten geadhibeert worden (Batavia, 1677). His correspondence was regularly published in:  Miscellanea curiosa sive ephemeridum medico-​ physicarum Germanicarum Academiae Caesareo-​ Leopoldinae Naturae Curiosorum.

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12  The Atlantic World medical complex Londa Schiebinger

These Observations determined me to try some Experiments … A. J. Alexander, planter, Bacolet, Grenada, 1773

An extraordinary set of experiments pitted purported slave cures against European treatments in Grenada, a small island south of Barbados, just off the coast of South America. Alexander J.  Alexander’s experiment with his “Negro Dr’s” “Materia Medica,” as he styled it, reveals how Europeans tested and evaluated what they deemed slave cures.1 It also sheds light on the circulation of knowledge in what I call the Atlantic World medical complex. Here I borrow from Philip Curtin’s “plantation complex.” For Curtin, the plantation complex  –​stretching from Bahia, Brazil, to Charleston, South Carolina –​was an “economic and political order centering on slave plantations in the New World tropics.”2 The Atlantic World medical complex refers to medical knowledge and practices that emerged from the mixing and melding of people, plants, and their knowledges across the whole of the Atlantic World. Europe dominated the medical complex as it did the plantation complex  economically, politically, and militarily; yet people, goods, labor, food, timber, and, we will add, certain diseases, knowledges, and medical remedies moved promiscuously between continents, masters and slaves, and imperial monopolies. The West Indies is a fascinating setting for this study because in the eighteenth century there was still a robust mix of and competition between the knowledge traditions of Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans  –​and increasingly, their Creole descendants. Where and when did these knowledge networks intersect? Who served as intellectual brokers or conduits of knowledge? Whose knowledge traveled along these networks? And knowledge intended for whom? The circulation of knowledge is a robust theme in the history of science.3 This chapter examines “empires of knowledge” that include peoples who did not write and hence left no documents for historians to access. Finally, our knowledge empire includes the “republic of plants.” When documents fail to provide answers, what can plants tell us? The plant in question is the “bois fer.” It is not a heroic plant of the stature of chocolate or quinine, nutmeg, or tea. Nor is it a plant, such as the flos pavonis,

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318  Londa Schiebinger caught in agnotological fissures that blocked knowledge from transferring between the New and Old Worlds.4 Yet, when written documents fail, bois fer may illuminate potential knowledge pathways. I build my notion of a republic of plants on Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff’s fascinating In the Shadow of Slavery:  Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, which documents how the African diaspora is one of plants as well as people.5 Plants, in this verdant republic, travel along their own networks, pushed by winds and pulled by currents. Plants also travel –​sometimes by intent, often by accident –​along voyagers’ circuits, and merchant trade and slave routes. Finally, plants enter human networks of knowledge making. It is this third instance that we explore here.

The mixing and melding of knowledge Alexander J.  Alexander’s experiment with his “Negro Dr’s” “Materia Medica” in 1773 reveals how Europeans tested and evaluated what they deemed slave cures.6 Much has been written on slave medicine in the plantation complex. It is important to understand, however, that no “pure” African medical regime was transplanted to Caribbean plantations. As anthropologist Paul Brodwin has emphasized, slaves in the New World rarely shared a common language or healing practices.7 Africans from vastly different parts of the continent were mixed first in Africa through chaotic capture, transport, and sale, and second in the Caribbean through planters’ strategies to prevent rebellion by separating kith and kin. As a result, medicine practiced by enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations drew from a variety of medical, religious, and cultural traditions. Yet, West Africans made vital contributions to plantation materia medica. Carney and Rosomoff have documented the “Africanization” of food systems on Caribbean plantations. Shifting attention from European commodity crops (sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco) and plantation economies of scale, they examine African subsistence crops and the knowledge systems embedded in them. Using shipping records, historical linguistics, and written documents, Carney and Rosomoff describe how African slaves naturalized their food staples in the American tropics –​especially the Caribbean, where 40 percent of slaves were shipped. Successful middle passages required two meals per day for several hundred slaves. Ships provisioned on the Guinea coast in Africa were often filled with unhusked, unmilled grains that were pounded and prepared as foods along the way. Unused grains, however, arrived as seed when ships docked in Caribbean ports. Plantations thus had all the ingredients needed for successful acclimatization of African crops in the Americas: seeds, people skilled in their cultivation, and people often facing starvation who knew and enjoyed these foods. These grains and other crops were planted in gardens or provision grounds that slaves worked in the few hours allotted to them on Sundays and holidays.8 The same may be true for medicinal plants. Slaving captains may have –​wittingly or unwittingly  –​shipped African medicinal plants to the Caribbean in their cargos of humans, animals, and foodstuffs (seeds could be carried in the hold

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The Atlantic World medical complex 319 of the ship, and also in hair, fur, or soils). Enslaved Africans may have cultivated these familiar plants in their kitchen gardens and provision grounds. A first source of West Indian colonial medicine was African. A second source was Amerindian –​Arawak, Taino, Carib, and Galibi. Although by the end of the eighteenth century, in the northern Caribbean, Amerindians themselves had been decimated or exiled to specific islands, many of their plant cures lived on, often as part of the Atlantic World medical complex. French physician Pierre Barrère, in Cayenne from 1722 to 1727, learned the use of simarouba, for example, from indigenes, whom he called “Sauvages,” to cure dysentery. This he tested many times.9 Similarly, royal physician Jean-​Baptiste-​René Pouppé-​Desportes, in Cap-​ Français from 1732 until his death in 1748, presented an “American pharmacopoeia” in the third volume of his Histoire des maladies de S. Domingue that offered an extensive list of “Caraïb” remedies (see below).10 Carney and Rosomoff have also made the important point that the West Indies saw the fusion of two tropical farming systems: African and Amerindian.11 Evidence for this abounds in eighteenth-​century sources. James Grainger, a poet and West Indian physician, noted, for example, that masters of an estate permitted slaves to clear as much ground as needed for building their huts and “planting Indian provisions.”12 It is likely that slaves planted seeds they brought from Africa and also experimented with plants indigenous to the Americas. This fusion of African and Amerindian knowledge systems is also evident in plant-​based cures. Plantation hospitals devoted to the care of slaves, for example, stocked “Indian arrowroot” (Maranta arundinaceae, L.) as a staple. British physician Hans Sloane, working in Jamaica from 1687 to 1689, remarked that Colonel James Walker carried that plant from Dominica (with its relatively robust Amerindian populations) to Barbados and planted it there.13 From Barbados it was sent to Jamaica, where it was cultivated in gardens and provision grounds. Sloane and others emphasized the use of arrowroot as an antidote for poison arrow wounds, wasp stings, spider bites, and the like. John Williamson, working in Jamaica a century later, noted that the starchy flour of this root was “mixed up with the neatness peculiar to the nurses in that country” to provide a nourishing diet for convalescents. It was deemed an “excellent article for the sickroom.”14 Although a staple of slave hospitals, arrowroot is a plant of American origins, long cultivated by Amerindians as an easily digestible food and topical medicine.15 One could provide numerous examples of cures considered slave medicine that had American and, most likely, Amerindian origins. Richard Shannon, for instance, reported that for “obstinate head-​aches” slaves applied a leaf of tobacco steeped in palm wine, lime juice, or spirits to the temples. He also noted that “wild tobacco chopped up green” applied to the soles of the feet served the same purpose. Tobacco is, of course, indigenous to the Americas. Slaves either learned its medicinal virtues from Amerindians or experimented with it on their own.16 This would be true of any plantation medicine that featured indigenous American plants, such as ipecacuanha or jalap, tolu balsam, or cinchona. Sometimes Africans curated Amerindian cures; sometimes they combined Amerindian techniques with their own to create something new. At other times,

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320  Londa Schiebinger Africans found indigenous American plants and devised cures necessary for their own survival. As Brodwin has emphasized, slave treatments were devised through a process of “reinvention and ad hoc improvisation” in new environments.17 The contours of the circulation of knowledge in the Atlantic World medical complex is evident in Thomas Heney’s “numberless” experiments with Zanthoxylum (prickly yellow wood), an American plant whose medicinal virtues he learned from a slave woman. Heney, working in St. David’s parish in Jamaica, bathed the putrid ulcers that afflict the “unhappy children of Africa,” as he called them, with an experimental decoction of zanthoxylon bark. To this external treatment he added a drink of zanthoxylon boiled with sarsaparilla (another American plant). Heney was an enthusiastic experimenter who, in his words, instituted his trials “with as unprejudiced and candid a mind as ever a son of Hippocrates did.” He confirmed his good results with nothing less than “repeated autopsia.”18 Heney soon encountered a slave who suffered from dry bellyache. Despite his efforts employing “emollient fomentations, anodyne, … cathartic glisters, mild and drastic purges, castor oil, and ultimately, blisters to the abdomen,” the woman began to sink; he “banished every ray of hope” for her recovery. The slave woman asked that her sister be called. Upon seeing her sibling’s deplorable condition, the woman administered a cure “communicated to her by their mother” and “employed … in Africa.” Here, Heney portrayed African medicine as traditional, passed from mother to daughter and so on. We do not know, however, how the mother learned of the treatments –​whether by experiment or tradition. After several spoonfuls of her sister’s nostrum and much sleep, the slave woman recovered fully.19 Heney, wishing to know the cure, asked the sister, but “no reward or menace” could persuade her to reveal her secret. At this point, Heney and his team “induced” (by what means we do not know) another slave to pretend to fall victim to dry bellyache. The sister was prevailed upon to prepare the same cure. When she left the plantation, Heney and co. spied on her (in his words, she was “narrowly watched”) to discover that she gathered young and delicate zanthoxylon root along with the flowers of wild sage. (Subsequent testing revealed that sage contributed nothing to the cure.) A  dutiful experimenter, Heney tested the expressed “juice” of the zanthoxylon root –​according to protocol –​first on himself. Once he was satisfied with its results, he began administering it to his patients for bowel complaints –​so frequent, he wrote, “among the African race and their progeny.” Heney added that “negro information” had yielded other “vegetable” cures that he used with “much satisfaction.”20 It is important to point out, however, that zanthoxylon bark, the use of which Heney learned from the slave woman, is indigenous to the Americas. Heney baldly stated that because the slave woman had learned the cure in Africa (if, indeed, she was born there and not in the islands), the prickly yellow wood was “not … a native of Jamaica” or, more broadly, the Americas.21 Zanthoxylon, however, is not native to Africa, and the cure, in this case, either passed from

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The Atlantic World medical complex 321 Amerindians to slaves or was discovered and developed independently by slaves in the Americas. It is worth noting that the knowledge of remedies often traveled via women to European men practitioners. The knowledge of a fig remedy for worms tested by Bertrand Bajon, former surgeon to the royal hospital in Cayenne, was provided by a “negress” from the coast of Africa and transmitted to Bajon by a Madame Rousseau in Cayenne. Rousseau supplied Bajon with the figs required for his experiments (expériences); she also repeated his many experiments over again.22 This “fig of Cayenne” Bajon described as native to the Americas.23 West Indian plantation medicine mixed and melded West African and Amerindian healing traditions. A  third source of plantation medicine was European.24 West Indian plantations were regularly outfitted with medicines sent from Europe. Military and plantation medical protocols were first and foremost European. Numerous slaves served as assistants to European-​trained doctors. Europeans learned from slaves, and vice versa. Slaves even adopted European modes of observation and experimentation. In a rare (because it was recorded) example, a slave named Capcua discovered a hot spring and experimented with its healing powers on two slaves before making his finding public. According to the account, the 25-​year-​old Capcua was corralling his master’s animals on the plains near Gros-​Morne, Saint-​Domingue, when suddenly his horse became mired in mud. As he pulled the animal out, the horse’s hoofprints filled with hot water. Capcua immediately recalled his master’s stories about the healing powers of hot baths in Europe. Hoping that these waters had similar powers, the slave “secretly” (we are told) tested the effects of the water on a slave lame with rheumatism. Capcua fashioned a small tub above the spring and bathed the slave in the waters twice a day. After 12 baths the poor cripple was greatly relieved and in a month “perfectly healed.” The success of this first trial convinced Capcua to devise a second. Capcua carried a patient, an abandoned slave who had lost the use of his arms and legs, in a hammock to the source. After three weeks the patient began to stir and in three months was “radically healed.” After these two trials, the reputation of the thermal baths at Port-​à-​Piment grew, and patients flocked to its healing waters.25 The Atlantic World medical complex fused Amerindian, African, and European traditions. Yet, there were important asymmetries. In all instances, reports of West Indian cures –​whether those developed by slaves, Amerindians, or Europeans –​were authored by Europeans. As we gave seen, European witnesses often reported cures as African in origin even when they had American roots. Late-​eighteenth-​century reports of indigenous cures generally came from the Guianas (along the north coast of South America) where Amerindians still flourished. But even in the Guianas, Amerindians rarely served as physicians, nurses, or medical assistants, and by the late eighteenth century (in contrast to earlier periods), medical texts seldom mentioned them. It is possible that Africans perpetuated Amerindian plant usages even after the peoples themselves were destroyed.

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322  Londa Schiebinger By contrast to Amerindians, European plantation doctors often worked closely with slave medical assistants –​men and women –​who served on estates or rode with them to make calls. John Quier, who practiced medicine 56 years in Jamaica, had several black medical assistants. He noted that his “negro nurses” were in the habit of bathing slaves’ swollen feet in urine (not a cure unique to Africans). Seeing no harm in the practice, he did not stop them.26 James Thomson, also in Jamaica, reported that “expert negroes” did surgery to secure the breasts of slave women stricken with yaws (because European medical men would not).27 John Williamson, also working in Jamaica, praised the skill with which a “negro doctor” extracted Guinea worms. These worms, sometimes many yards long, were wound around a small piece of wood until removed.28 Africans’ medical knowledge was considered of such value that European physicians in the West Indies often recommended that an “intelligent” slave  –​man or woman  –​be put in charge of a plantation’s hospital to dispense medicines, fix dressings, and the like. Williamson noted that these slave practitioners form “very important acquisitions to every estate.”29 Europeans readily collected and recorded West Indian cures –​whatever their provenance. And, increasingly, they employed European-​style trials to test their efficacy. Testing, recording, and publishing cures were carried out in a similar fashion throughout European territories by European-​trained physicians.

Bois fer and the circulation of knowledge To further investigate the making of knowledge in the Atlantic World medical complex, we examine A. J. Alexander’s experiments with his Negro Dr’s cure for yaws carried out in the 1770s. We learn of these experiments from Alexander’s letters to Joseph Black, Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh from 1766 to 1797. These letters were subsequently published in the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries.30 A. J. Alexander, a Scottish planter, arrived in Grenada ready to experiment. As he wrote to Black, his former teacher at Edinburgh and family friend, he “drew up a sett of 400 & odd experiments” to determine the best way to manufacture sugar and rum.31 The son of a wealthy merchant and banking family (William, his father, re-​exported tobacco from Glasgow to France), Alexander purchased estates in Grenada and Tobago in the 1760s and 1770s.32 His experiments were designed to enhance the efficiency of his plantation and his enslaved workforce. Alexander brought with him to the New World not only the physical equipment, but also the protocols for effective experimentation. By the standards of the day, his trials were well-​conceived and well-​executed. The experiment we examine here had to do with yaws. Alexander detailed how, in 1773, he returned to his extensive properties, after a considerable absence, to find 32 slaves afflicted with yaws and confined to his plantation hospital. Some of them had been there for years. And those who had been sent away cured, he lamented, generally returned again soon with a new outbreak of the foul disorder. Because yaws was assumed to be a venereal disease, his surgeon employed

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The Atlantic World medical complex 323 standard mercurial treatment which, when taken over several years, Alexander complained, left slaves’ health “broken.”33 Dissatisfied, Alexander resolved to take matters into his own hands and to “try some Experiments.” He sought out a “Negro who understood the Method of treatment in their [sic] own Country” and vowed to “let him have his Way.” Though Alexander never explicitly stated that the man was a slave, he wrote that the man had “lived upon the Estate many years,” and we can infer his status. Whether the unnamed “Negro’s” cure was reliable or not, Alexander felt he had nothing to lose by running his experiment. He put two yawey slaves under the care of the slave and four under the care of his surgeon. As reported in Alexander’s letter, the Negro man sweated his patients “powerfully” twice a day by standing them “in a Cask where there is a little fire in a pot.” He increased the sweat by giving them decoctions of two woods that Alexander identified as bois royale and bois fer. In addition, the unnamed man applied to their sores an ointment of iron rust and lime juice.34 The European plantation surgeon treated his four patients with drugs to induce sweats. To their sores he applied a number of noxious caustics: sacharum saturni (sugar of lead), green vitriol, antimony, and corrosive sublimate  –​all standard European treatments at the time. The surgeon’s treatment made Alexander “very angry” because it caused the slaves much pain.35 The outcome:  the slave’s patients were cured within a fortnight; the surgeon’s patients were not. Alexander, a man of science, consequently gave the man of African origin four more patients, who were also quickly cured. Thereafter he put the slave in charge of all yaws patients in his plantation hospital, and at the end of two months, all but about ten of the original 32 had been cured. Alexander’s confidence in the enslaved man grew. After the man’s “astonishing” success curing yaws, Alexander turned to him for the cure of ulcers more generally. Though not as effective as the yaws cure, Alexander judged the man’s treatment more useful than those of the European surgeon. In a second letter to Black concerning these experiments, Alexander elevated the man to the status of “Negro Dr.”36 What can Alexander’s experiment tell us about the Atlantic World medical complex? Alexander specifically called the slave’s methods “Negro Materia Medica” and set them in stark contrast to those of the European surgeon. But the matter is not as straightforward as we might think. Was the slave’s cure for yaws of African origin, Amerindian origin, European origin, or something newly created in the West Indies? What actual data points do we have? How did knowledge circulate –​across space, time, and cultures? Who learned from whom? Here we consider several hypotheses:  that the cure was, indeed, of African origin, that the cure was of Amerindian origin and learned in some fashion by Alexander’s slave, that the cure was discovered by the slave independently bioprospecting in the Americas, or that the cure was of Amerindian or African origin, curated by Europeans in the Atlantic World medical complex, and ultimately passed along to the slave.

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The African hypothesis Alexander’s unnamed slave “understood the method of treatment in [his] own country,” which we take to be Africa.37 Eighteenth-​century doctors and surgeons considered yaws an African disease, and often assumed that Africans had cures –​to be discovered or stolen. William Hillary, a physician working in nearby Barbados, asserted that Africans had by “long Observation and Experience” found a cure for yaws, which he identified as “the caustic juices of certain escharotic plants” applied externally, and decoctions of other plants taken internally. These, he bemoaned, “they keep as a secret from the white people.”38 Alexander’s experiment sought to cure yaws (Treponema pallidum pertenue), a form of the highly contagious treponemal infections that include pinta and syphilis and, like those diseases, can today be treated with penicillin. Europeans commonly confused yaws with venereal disease until John Hume’s lengthy 1747 article in the Edinburgh Medical Essays and Observations.39 A non-​venereal disease, yaws produces disfiguring ulcers and lesions, and in advanced stages, agonizing pain, especially in the joints, bones, the palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. Yaws occurs primarily in tropical areas where overcrowding and poor sanitation prevail. Needless to say, slaves throughout the West Indies were plagued by the disease. Jamaican physician James Thomson wrote, “any proprietor of negroes is well aware of the loss he sustains from the yaws … The finest looking slave will … in a few months become a burden to himself and his master.”40 “Yaws” is believed to derive from the Carib yáya, meaning sore.41 “Pian,” the French term for the disease, is thought to be a Galibi word.42 In 1763, François Boissier de la Croix de Sauvages coined a Latin name for the disease in his nosology: framboesia, for its raspberry-​like appearance.43 In the late nineteenth century, the London College of Physicians overthrew Sauvages’ framboesia for morula (from morus or mulberry).44 Others invoked strawberries.45 Indeed, the desire to describe this grotesque disease through fruit names is remarkable. Physician Thomas Winterbottom, who worked in Sierra Leone in the 1790s, recorded African names for yaws, called by the Bulloms bihl, by the Timmanees tirree or catirree, by the Mandingos mansera, by the Soosoos dokkettee or kota, by the Portuguese boba, and by the French pian.46 “Yaws” is also a sailor’s term: a ship was said to “make yaws” when it did not steer steady in a stiff gale.47 The origins of yaws was as hotly disputed in the eighteenth century as that of its close relative, syphilis.48 Europeans saw it as a disease alternatively of African or American origins –​both continents host large tropical areas. Sauvages even distinguished yaws into two species  –​Framboesia Guineensis and Framboesia Americana.49 Savvy West Indian physicians complained that nosologists, such as Sauvages, had never seen the disease and that these distinctions only served to “puzzle the practitioner.”50 Examination of ancient remains today suggests that yaws has affected hominids for 1.5 million years and plagued both Africa and the Americas long before Columbus landed in the New World.51

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The Atlantic World medical complex 325 Some European commentators went further to postulate bestial origins for yaws. The physician Thomas Trapham, writing in 1679, imagined that yaws originated in the “unhappy” coupling of humans with beasts. Indignantly, he denounced males  –​both Native American and African  –​who allowed their “humane seminals” to be wickedly and wantonly “suckt” into and caressed by the “vastly unsuitable matrices” of female malmasets, baboons, and drills. Such couplings –​egregious sins against both God and nature –​wrought this “plague of morbid pollutions” known as yaws upon humankind.52 Benjamin Moseley, surgeon-​general in Jamaica, agreed that yaws was of a “bestial origin” and an African disease.53 Although by the 1790s most physicians took issue with such notions, Alexander Anderson, botanist and chief gardener in Saint Vincent’s, persisted in the belief that yaws arose from the carnal “connections” of “Indians and Negroes” with “some species of monkeys.”54 Within the Atlantic World medical complex yaws was considered a disease of Africans.55 Few Amerindians came under the care of plantation doctors, and primarily slaves, not Europeans, suffered from yaws. The prejudice against the malady was so strong that it was seen as carried by “dirtily disposed good-​for-​ nothing Negroes.”56 Europeans were concerned to distance themselves from the scourge; even a man as learned as plantation owner and physician William Wright taught (incorrectly) that yaws was unknown to Europeans before commerce with natives of Guinea. He added that no traces of the disease were to be found in the writings of the ancients, “sacred or profane,” unless it were the affliction of Job (thought to be leprosy).57 Europeans feared yaws and remained uncertain about whether the disease was transmitted via “miasmata floating in the air,” touch, venereal contact, or “salty sea vapors.” The young physician Edward Bancroft in Guiana from 1763 to 1766 emphasized the susceptibility of slaves to infection, noting that “none ever receive this disorder, whose skins are whole” and for this reason whites were rarely infected. But the backs of “negroes,” being often “raw by whipping,” scarcely ever escaped it.58 Malnourishment, poor housing, and fatiguing labor all contributed to slave disease. Given the view that yaws was a slave malady, great shame attached to whites who contracted the disease. Succumbing to the yaws infection might reveal European men’s otherwise surreptitious affairs with slave women. Yawey whites were banned from elite society until completely cured, but even after all traces of the disease had disappeared, the lingering stigma “blasted away” any prospects for social advancement.59 Marriage to respectable women was out of the question. James Thomson noted that genteel young men accidentally infected were known to commit suicide.60 One of physicians’ first concerns was to teach planters how to detect the disease and to stop its spread. Jamaican physician Thomas Dancer taught whites how to recognize the first signs of yaws among their domestic negroes so that the infected persons could be banished –​in the same way that “Jewish law” banished lepers. He warned that slave wet nurses often tried to hide their disease to avoid being discharged. Though physicians often treated infants at the

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326  Londa Schiebinger breast for various disorders by treating their mothers, in this instance Dancer assured distraught parents that a child could not be infected through a nurse’s milk, and that the child was safe until the nurse broke out with pustules.61 The French were less sanguine about the safety of yawey nurses suckling white children. They printed and reprinted the case reported by the physician Valentin in Martinique to M. Helyes of the “négresse” who communicated the disease to the white infant under her care. The child’s mother caught it and the disease spread to the entire family.62 The standard treatment for slaves suffering from yaws was banishment to a yaws hut built in some remote corner of the estate. Here the patient might be cared for by an old slave woman, too infirm to work in the fields, who was employed to keep the sores clean. Or, more likely, the patient was sent away to the seaside, a plantain walk, or a provision ground in the mountains to act as a guard while fending for him-​or herself. The whole operation was calculated to transpire “without any expence to the estate.” Moseley painted a bleak picture of a slave’s prospects for recovery: “A cold, damp, smoky hut for his habitation; snakes and lizards his companions; crude, viscid food, and bad water, his only support; and shunned as a leper; –​he usually sunk from the land of the living.”63 Bertrand Bajon, surgeon at Cayenne, noted that such abandonment did not serve planters’ interests: slaves were often rendered incapable of any service for at least two years.64 European practitioners were horrified when called to attend a yaws patient. Fearful of catching the disease, they viewed patients from afar and offered their opinions in a hurried and perfunctory manner. Those who dared visit the yaws house were advised to cover their faces and hands as protection against infection.65 William Wright emphasized that, “should a medical man contract this filthy disease, his fortune and future prospects are ruined.”66 European doctors’ fear of yaws is reflected in their fees. In Saint-​Domingue, physicians charged 10 livres per year per slave for medical services; they charged 150 livres for each yaws treatment.67 Despite the dangers, practitioners gradually became interested in yaws and its cure. Because yaws was seen as an African disease, experiments were done primarily on slaves. One of the most interesting trials was Alexander’s experiment to test the relative efficacy of African and European treatments for yaws, as described above. Alexander acted upon a reasonable hypothesis of where to find a cure when he turned to a man of African origin. Yet, if the slave’s cure was of African origin, from what part of Africa? Who used the cure? Who developed it? We know the slave was a man; Alexander refers to him as “he.” We know that Alexander purchased the Grand Bacolet Estate in Grenada for £43,750 in 1771, and that this purchase price included 140 slaves. Alexander’s “Negro doctor” may have been part of that purchase.68 But here is where documents fail. Because the man is unnamed in Alexander’s report, it is difficult to conjecture about his origins. Further, although we know the man was of African origin, we do not know if he was born in Africa or in the islands  –​he is identified merely as a “Negro.” Although Europeans recognized that slaves born in the West Indies had

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The Atlantic World medical complex 327 a higher likelihood of survival, they most often simply considered them “Negro” or “black” without attention to finer detail. As a second strategy, we can look at shipping records to determine from what part of Africa the majority of the slaves on the east coast of Grenada came. Both French and British records must be searched, given that the man had lived on the estate for “many years.”69 The British took Grenada from the French in 1763, just a decade before Alexander’s experiment (Alexander was to lose his estate to the French again in 1779).70 Because Alexander reported the two woods using French names, bois royale and bois fer, we infer that the enslaved man was held first by the French. From the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database we learn that of the 42,257 slaves transported to Grenada between 1750 and 1773 (there are few records for Grenada before 1750), 14,257 came from the Bight of Biafra and Gulf of Guinea Islands, 9,224 from the Gold Coast, and 6,931 from the Windward Coast.71 The rest came from various other West African ports. Together this information suggests a general point of origin for the cure. But there are complications. First, we do not know what part of the treatment the slave might have adopted from Africa –​the sweating technique or the use of the two woods involved. “Sweating” in the eighteenth century was a common cure (based in Galenic medicine) and well-​known to Europeans. Already in 1747, John Hume, surgeon to the Naval Hospital in Jamaica, included as part of his cure for yaws sweating “in a Frame or Chair” with a “spirit of wine.” Hume followed this with an “electuary,” or sweetened medical concoction, that included Aethiops mineral (a black mercury sulfide), guaiacum, and sassafras.72 The infamous overseer Thomas Thistlewood in western Jamaica also included sweating as part of a treatment for yaws reported in his 10,000-​plus page diary. Thistlewood, who doctored the slaves under his watch, learned from a nearby plantation owner, a Colonel Barclay, that he cured “crab-​yaws” by boiling “hog-​ plum tree bark in a pot” and soaking slaves’ feet in it “as hot as can be bore” for nine days and nights.73 William Wright identified the hog-​plum as Spondias myrobalanus, L. He noted that the bark is astringent and that the tree so named because wild hogs feed on the ripe fruit.74 If we leave aside the enslaved African man’s sweating technique (which was fairly common) and bois royale (a name so vague it could be anything), what can we learn about the origins of his cure by tracing bois fer, one of the woods employed in his cure? It is interesting that Alexander, a Scot, conveyed the French term for this medicine. As noted above, the slave may previously have served French masters and certainly still identified his medicines in the French way (a French patois continues to be spoken in the island today). Despite the French names, Alexander considered the woods distinctive to the Negro man (whether African or Creole), identifying them as part of the “Negro Materia Medica.” Alexander promised to send Joseph Black samples of the two “medicines used by a Negro here in curing yaws.”75 Specimens were often lost at sea; there is no evidence that the woods reached Black.76 Alexander’s slave doctor may well have learned his cure in Africa, as Alexander claimed. Thomas Winterbottom, working in Sierra Leone from 1792

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328  Londa Schiebinger to 1796, described in detail how West Africans destroyed the “mother yaw” by heating an iron bar red hot and rubbing it with lime juice, which, when boiling, was dropped onto the open sore. Sometimes iron rust along with black ants or Malagueta pepper were added to the juice and applied hot to the sore.77 In the absence of good documents, historians need to seek other ways of approaching a problem. The question becomes:  is bois fer an African or American cure? Is this tree indigenous to Africa, America, or both? Did the slave find African flora he was familiar with again in America? Did he, through trial and error, devise a new cure using an American tree, or did he learn the medicinal uses of bois fer from the Amerindians or, perhaps, even from the French?78

The European hypothesis Our data points for the bois fer are persistently French. In Saint-​Domingue, bois de fer was already well-​known to “very experienced” French surgeons in the 1730s and 1740s as part of a treatment for gonorrhea.79 Bois de fer was also an ingredient in what Pouppé-​Desportes pronounced “the best treatment” for yaws. Surprisingly similar to the slave’s cure, a patient was closed in a well-​heated chamber, bathed as his or her temperament demanded, and administered a “tisane sudorifique,” a tea that consisted of guaiac, sarsaparilla, and bois de fer. This was followed by a “flower of sulfur,” also taken internally. Leaving no stone unturned, Pouppé-​ Desportes combined this treatment with bleeding and purging, which slaves objected to, and mercury, which by Alexander’s time was considered extremely harmful.80 Bois fer, then, was an established part of the French medical complex. Linguistic evidence suggests that the slave may have learned medicinal uses of bois fer from his French masters. But knowledge of the use of the plant may have come originally from Amerindians. Knowledge exchange in this period was promiscuous and multi-​directional, and the French may have served merely as a conduit for that knowledge into the Atlantic World medical complex.

The American hypothesis The unnamed slave may well have learned about this wood from the French; we cannot rule out the European hypothesis. It is possible, however, that the unnamed slave learned of bois fer directly from Amerindian peoples. Pouppé-​ Desportes published, posthumously in 1770, an American pharmacopoeia of Caraïb materia medica. Here he provided an indigenous name for “bois de fer”:  iberaputerana (Figure  12.1).81 Bois fer translates literally as “ironwood”  –​a name derived from its hard, incorruptible wood. There is, however, no evidence that bois fer is what is known in English as ironwood; William Wright identified ironwood as Erythorxylon areolatum, L., a different plant from bois fer.82 Nor is this plant guaiacum (a popular treatment for syphilis); Pouppé-​Desportes provided a separate entry for guaiac in his pharmacopeia.83

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Figure 12.1 Jean-​ Baptiste Pouppé-​ Desportes’s entry for “bois de fer” in his American pharmacopoeia. Note the Latin description (left), French name, Bois de fer (middle), and Carib name, Iberaputerana (right). Image created from Pouppé-​ Desportes’s “Catalogue des plantes de S.  Domingue, avec leurs noms tant François, Caraïbes que Latins, & leurs propriétiés & usages,” in Histoire des maladies de S. Domingue, 3 vols. (Paris, 1770), vol. 3, 181–​183, 186–​187. Credit: By courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Pouppé-​Desportes’s Carib name for bois fer does not appear in Father Raymond Breton’s 1665 Dictionnaire caraïbe-​français, although Breton noted that the Caribs cured yaws easily by virtue of the favorable climate and also with powerful local remedies. These cures were complex and included the sap of a bitter, Chipíou, which was blackened with the sap of Génipa and mibi (a liana), along with burnt reed leaves and other substances, and applied externally to yaws ulcers. When the yaws pustules burst, filaments of cotton were applied to diminish scarring.84 Other writers, such as Jean Nicolson, a Dominican priest, recorded Pouppé-​Desportes’s

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330  Londa Schiebinger Carib name for bois fer, but rendered it Ibera puterana, thus assimilating it to Latin.85 Although Pouppé-​Desportes purports to have recorded an Amerindian name for bois fer, it was most likely not a Carib name. The people we identify today as “Caribs,” the war-​like indigenous peoples who long resisted European occupation, inhabited the Lesser Antilles and were not typically present in Saint-​Domingue, where Pouppé-​Desportes lived and worked. While Europeans tended to call all natives of the West Indies “Caribs,” the peoples of this area were culturally and linguistically diverse. In 1775, Jean-​ Baptiste-​ Christophe Fusée-​ Aublet, the learned naturalist, published his magnificent Histoire des plantes de la Guiane Françoise, where he provided a Galibi name for the tree in question:  Anacoco (Figure  12.2). Significantly, Aublet employed Galibi guides and assistants when herborizing in French Guiana at about the same time that Alexander was doing his experiments in Grenada.86 Proximity and porous borders made commerce –​in people, plants, and knowledge –​between Grenada, Trinidad, and the Guianas fluid in this period.87 Aublet identified the plant scientifically as panacoco, thus incorporating the Galibi into the specific name. The French naturalist Michel Descourtilz confirmed some years later that bois fer grew in Saint-​Domingue, in two varieties –​white and red –​and produced a magnificent color image.88 Importantly, Pouppé-​Desportes, Aublet, and Descourtilz all noted that the grated bark of this tree was used in drinks to promote sweating. Further, all three suggested that bois fer is native to the West Indies. Given this history, it is likely that Alexander’s enslaved African doctor adopted an Amerindian cure  –​directly from Amerindians themselves or indirectly via the French medical complex. Modern-​day Caribbean ethnobotanists identify a number of plants as bois fer, but in the late eighteenth century, it was consistently related as the Robinia panacoco. We can say with a high degree of probability that this is the plant used by Alexander’s slave. As was common, bois fer or bois de fer had many uses in this period and, in addition to its medical virtues, it was prized for its hardness. Used in commerce for building, it was “exported from America to France in large pieces.” It “took a fine polish,” we are told. Descourtilz added that the “English negroes” made dangerous clubs from it, which in their hands become “terrible weapons.”89 While Amerindians had disappeared for the most part in Jamaica and Saint-​ Domingue, many continued to populate the southern Caribbean (Grenada’s neighborhood) in the 1760s and 1770s.90 Carib knowledge was considered of such importance that, in Guadeloupe, a 1767 government ordinance warned against Caribs (Caraïbes) providing slaves with knowledge of plants, roots, etc.91 Bertrand Bajon witnessed that an “Indian named Raimond,” who served for a long time as Bajon’s personal hunter, had many antidotes for snake bite. These cures, Bajon claimed, were “discovered” and “named” by the Indians or Sauvages, whom he praised as an industrious people. Raimond was so sure of his cures, Bajon remarked, that he never went hunting without them.92

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Figure 12.2 Robinia panacoco, known in the vernacular as “bois de fer.” “Robinia” celebrated the royal French gardener Jean Robin. “Panacoco” incorporated the Amerindian “anacoco.” From Jean-​Baptiste-​Christophe Fusée-​Aublet, Histoire des plantes de la Guiane Françoise, rangées suivant la méthode sexuelle, 4 vols. (London and Paris, 1775), vol. 4, plate 307. Credit: By courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Greater Atlantic hypothesis It is, of course, possible that the enslaved African found a local wood in the West Indies that substituted for woods he employed on the west coast of Africa. Both West Africa and the greater Caribbean are tropical, and some 85 floral families are common to both. These plants shared a common origin in West Gondwana (a southern supercontinent of the Pangaea) prior to the separation of the land masses that subsequently formed Africa and South America (Figure  12.3).93 Winterbottom in Sierra Leone reported that to cure yaws the Bullom people used the bark of the yuffo, boiled in water and taken with rice in the morning as a purgative. Further, they used a decoction of the bark as well as an infusion of bullanta to wash the ulcers. The juice from the nintee was also administered internally and

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332  Londa Schiebinger externally.94 Of course, Winterbottom, writing in 1803, may have been recording the cures of former African Americans now living in Sierra Leone (displaced blacks from London and the Americas settled in Sierra Leone in the 1780s and 1790s). While used in similar ways to the bois fer, there is no evidence that any of these plants are what Alexander referred to as the bois fer. A final possibility is that seeds of this tree came directly from Africa. Nicolas-​ Louis Bourgeois in Saint-​ Domingue noted that there were many “doctors” among the Africans, who “brought their treatments from their own countries,” but he did not discuss this in detail.95 As noted above, Carney and Rosomoff have examined shipping records and pictorial documents to reveal how African slaves naturalized their food staples in the American tropics –​especially in the Caribbean.96 The same may be true for medicines. Slave ships, provisioned with foodstuffs and medicines, potentially carried seeds or shoots that could be planted in the Americas. I  think, however, that if the African man had used a wood brought directly from Africa, or if he recognized a local wood in the West Indies that substituted for woods he employed on the west coast of Africa, he likely would have called it by an African name. European documents suggest that both Africans and Amerindians had cures for yaws. In 1794 Richard Shannon recorded that “African negroes” in

Figure 12.3 West Gondwana, a southern supercontinent of the Pangaea.

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The Atlantic World medical complex 333 the West Indies cured both yaws and venereal disease with a treatment that included sea-​bathing (salt would be salubrious in this instance) and drinking a decoction of camwood sharpened with sour palm wine, or lime or lemon juice to promote perspiration. Camwood is interesting here because it is a shrubby, hard-​wooded tree that grows in West Africa and may represent a good example of an African cure transferred to the New World. Although Shannon recorded African nomenclatures for specific diseases and cures, he noted that he learned of these particular treatments for yaws from French authors, Jean Barbot and Jean-​ Baptiste Labat.97 By the 1780s, cures for yaws circulated within the Atlantic World. They were compiled with frantic urgency and piled one on top of the other –​without concern for provenance. The “Negro doctor’s” cure spread to other parts of the Caribbean. Plantation physicians Thomas Dancer and James Thomson, both in Jamaica, adopted it. Dancer pointed directly to Alexander’s slave’s sweating techniques (but ignored his use of woods), writing that “A negro at Grenada is said to have been very successful in curing the yaws, by placing the patient in a cask, with a pan of burning coals; and thus sweating him, twice in the day.”98 Thomson found that the “use of woods employed by the natives” (by which he meant persons of African origin), coupled with good nutrition from a “generous diet,” alleviated the symptoms of yaws more effectively than the standard European mercurial treatments.99 And, Thomson noted, slaves felt strongly about the use of their traditional medicines. “To refuse the gratification of their inclinations,” Thomson wrote, “would only produce discontent without advantage.”100 Dancer and Thomson may have learned of the cure from slaves they treated or from reading its account in the Medical and Philosophical Commentaries; Thomson may also have learned about it from Joseph Black in Edinburgh, where he studied. Apart from sweating, bathing, or decoctions used to cure yaws, physicians in both the British and French West Indies recommended plentiful food and warm clothing as the best cure. Dancer recommended “supporting the powers of the constitution” by allowing a “nourishing” diet with plenty of vegetables and “good soups of fresh meat.”101

Atlantic World medical complex Nothing about the case of the bois fer is easy. The Robinia panacoco is indigenous to the Americas, and the French data suggests that Pouppé-​Desportes collected knowledge of the plant’s use from the “Caribs” in Saint-​Domingue, and Aublet and Descourtilz collected similar information directly from the Galibis in French Guiana. If the cure is indeed Amerindian in origin, how did this knowledge circulate to Alexander’s enslaved doctor? The slave may have learned the cure directly from the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Given, however, that the man used a French (and not an Arawakan, Galibi, Carib, or African) name, we might presume that both the Amerindian and the slave spoke some French –​the language of the masters.

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334  Londa Schiebinger More likely, knowledge of the Amerindian cure transferred to the slave via the French medical complex. Although Pouppé-​Desportes’s great work was not published until 1770, the cure was an established part of French colonial medicine already in the 1730s. What is interesting is that the knowledge passed from the French to the British via a “Negro doctor.” In other words, a slave, serving successive European regimes, served as a knowledge broker between European empires (Figure 12.4). Enslaved healers, especially those recognized for their skill, were essential to the Atlantic World medical complex. Alexander no doubt purchased this slave along with his estate, and the man continued to treat his fellow slaves no matter who the master. This proposed pathway  –​from Amerindians to French physicians and naturalists to slave doctors and, subsequently, to British plantation owners and physicians –​suggests that the French served as a conduit for Amerindian knowledge into the Atlantic World medical complex. Curiously, within the British world, the cure remained a “folk” art, in this case part of slave doctors’ materia

Figure 12.4 “Negro Dr” as knowledge broker. A.  J. Alexander’s enslaved African seemingly brokered knowledge between the French and British empires. Evidence suggests that knowledge of the bois fer passed from Amerindians to French physicians to slave doctors and, subsequently, to British plantation owners and physicians. Credit: Image created by Schiebinger and Steiner.

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The Atlantic World medical complex 335 medica. Even in the early nineteenth century, British plantation physicians cited the slave as the source of this knowledge, and not learned French treatises. It is important to analyze the circulation of knowledge not only across time, space, peoples, and continents, but across (or, in this case, not across) certain belief, educational, and emotional domains. Figure 12.5 zooms out to show the Atlantic World medical complex in motion, a topic I treat in greater detail in future work.102 This figure highlights three dominant nexuses in efforts to map how people, plants, diseases, and knowledges circulated. The first is the well-​defined colonial nexus linking Europe and the Americas. Physicians, educated in Europe, carried their knowledge, experimental techniques, instruments, and intellectual networks with them to the West Indies. Queries, letters, manuscripts, publications, plant specimens, and diseases moved

Figure 12.5 The circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth-​century Atlantic World medical complex. Three major nexuses characterized the multi-​directional trade in people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The European colonial nexus linked Europe and the Americas. The African slave-​trade nexus joined Africa and the Americas. The Amerindian conquest nexus brought Amerindian knowledge into plantation complexes. The Atlantic World medical complex arose from a fusion of African, Amerindian, and European knowledge traditions. Credit: Image created by Schiebinger and Steiner.

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336  Londa Schiebinger back and forth along and across these nexuses. The second is the slave-​trade nexus joining Africa and the Americas. Plants, people, diseases, and knowledges moved from Africa into the West Indies, trafficked wittingly or unwittingly aboard slaving vessels. Persons of African origin sold or born into captivity in the Caribbean often served on the front lines of healing for plantation populations –​black, white, and mixed. Africans’ knowledge about tropical diseases traveled from the Americas into Europe and beyond, often trans-​shipping on to wherever Europe had colonies. The third nexus of note is the Amerindian conquest nexus tracing the interplay of indigenous peoples and local plantation complexes. The flow of knowledge in the Atlantic World was multi-​directional, but it did not always move freely. Amerindians and enslaved Africans strategically held much knowledge secret from imperial colonists. For their part, Europeans often did not recognize some practices, such as spiritual aspects of a cure, as “knowledge.” Moreover, our access to Amerindian and African slave practices is filtered through European texts since these people left no written documents in the eighteenth century detailing their use of plants and medicines. While we can glean much from these sources, the many African and Amerindian naturalists active in these areas often remain faceless and nameless –​often referred to as a “slave doctor,” or a “Negro doctor.” Alexander and the Negro doctor’s brave experiment is intriguing, as it opens new doors onto the Atlantic World medical complex. We must keep in mind, however, that knowledge circulated within a plantation complex characterized by war, slavery, and violence. Alexander had charge of this slave through conquest. Alexander was, indeed, lucky to learn of the slave’s cure. Bajon, working in Cayenne, noted that “negroes have an infinity of cures” that they keep secret. Bajon pleaded that trials be made of these “astonishing” remedies –​by, he wrote, “persons more educated than are the negroes.” He noted that a particular “negro,” owned by the former governor of Cayenne, M. Dorviliers, practiced a successful cure for tetanus made from local plants. But, alas, Bajon could not discover it. Bajon pleaded that “for the good of humanity” the slave be obliged to “communicate the plants he used and the manner in which they are employed” to some physicians (gens de l’art) of “impartial” judgment. In return the slave should be offered his freedom –​but he should not be offered his liberty until after “a great number of experiments (expériences) had been done to confirm the cure’s virtue.”103 We must also keep in mind that the history of human experimentation is not a happy one. In Alexander’s account of his experiment, slaves were not mistreated. Alexander showed restraint by trying the new cure first in only two subjects, and his first two subjects were precisely those who had the most to benefit from the treatment. But this was not always the case. Plantation physicians, such as John Quier and James Thomson, exploited slaves in their experiments. These physicians took risks beyond what was reasonable to cure the individual patient; they took unusual liberties with human bodies.

Acknowledgments My thanks to the National Science Foundation (grant no. 0723597) and to the National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health (application no.  1

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The Atlantic World medical complex 337 G13 LM011470-​01) for supporting portions of this work. Any conclusions are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or NLM. My thanks to the Stanford Humanities Center for a stimulating sabbatical year and to my many colleagues for their thoughtful comments. A special thanks to Paula Findlen for her leadership and intellectual effervescence.

Notes 1 A. J. Alexander to Joseph Black, Bacolet, Grenada, July 26, 1773, in The Correspondence of Joseph Black, ed. Robert Anderson and Jean Jones, 2  vols. (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2012), vol. 1, 288. 2 Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3 See, among others, Steven Harris, “Long-​Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6 (1998): 269–​304; Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007); James Delbourgo and Nicolas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-​Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009); 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); Bernard Lightman, Gordon McQuat, and Larry Stewart, eds., The Circulation of Knowledge between Britain, India, and China (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2013); and Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–​1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 4 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire:  Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 5 Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery:  Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 6 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 288. 7 Paul Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti:  The Contest for Healing Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40–​41. 8 Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, 1–​5. See also Robert Voeks and John Rashford, eds., African Ethnobotany in the Americas (New York: Springer, 2013). 9 Pierre Barrère, Essai sur l’histoire naturelle de la France Equinoxiale (Paris, 1741), 50. 10 Jean-​Baptiste-​René Pouppé-​Desportes, Histoire des maladies de S.  Domingue, 3  vols. (Paris, 1770), vol. 3, 59. See also Bernard Weniger et al., “La médecine populaire dans le Plateau Central d’Haïti,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 17 (1986): 1–​30. 11 Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery. 12 [James Grainger], An Essay on the More Common West-​ India Diseases (London, 1764), 12. 13 Hans Sloane, Catalogus Plantarum quae in Insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt … (London, 1696), 122; Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers, and Jamaica; with Natural History, etc., 2 vols. (London, 1707–​1725), vol. 2, 253–​254. Also see Henry Barham, Hortus Americanus (Kingston, 1794), 6. 14 John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations Relative to the West India Islands, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1817), vol. 1, 133. See also Colin Chisholm, An Essay on the Malignant Pestilential Fever (Philadelphia, 1799), 193.

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338  Londa Schiebinger 15 William Sturtevant, “History and Ethnography of Some West Indian Starches,” in The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, ed. Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969), 177–​199, esp. pp. 184–​189; Jerome Handler, “The History of Arrowroot and the Origin of Peasantries in the British West Indies,” The Journal of Caribbean History 2 (1971): 46–​93. 16 Richard Shannon, Practical Observations on the Operation and Effects of Certain Medicines in the Prevention and Cure of Diseases to Which Europeans Are Subject in Hot Climates, and in These Kingdoms (London, 1794), 380. 17 Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti, 40. 18 Thomas Heney, “On the Efficacy of the Zanthoxylon,” Memoirs of the Medical Society of London 5 (1799): 44–​52, esp. p. 45. James Thomson also experimented with prickly yellow wood (A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes, as They Occur in the Island of Jamaica; with Observations on the Country Remedies (Jamaica, 1820), 151–​156). 19 Heney, “On the Efficacy of the Zanthoxylon,” 49–​50. 20 Ibid., 45, 50–​51. 21 Ibid., 49, 52. 22 Bertrand Bajon, “Observations sur quelques bon remèdes contre les vers de l’isle de Cayenne,” Journal de médecine, chirurgie, et pharmacie 34 (1770): 60–​74, esp. pp. 60, 64. 23 Bertrand Bajon, “Du Figuier de Cayenne,” Journal de médecine, chirurgie, et pharmacie 36 (1771): 241–​247. 24 Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–​1834 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1985); Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti, 41. 25 “Histoire et analyse des eaux thermales du Port-​à-​Piment,” Mémoires du Cercle des Philadelphes 1 (1788): 70–​71. 26 [Donald Monro, ed.], Letters and Essays … by Different Practitioners (London, 1778), 60. 27 Thomson, Treatise, 86. 28 Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, vol. 1, 57. 29 Ibid., vol. 2, 19. 30 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 282–​284, 288; “Medical News,” Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, by a Society in Edinburgh 2 (1774): 90–​92. See also Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves. I touched on this experiment in Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-​Century Atlantic World,” in Soundings in Atlantic History:  Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–​1825, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 294–​328. 31 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 283. 32 Anderson and Jones, eds., Correspondence, Appendix 1: Biographies, vol. 2, 1395–​1396. 33 “Medical News,” 90–​92. 34 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 283. 35 Ibid., 284; the editors of “Medical News” expanded on the surgeon’s caustics (91). 36 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 288. 37 “Medical News,” 90. 38 William Hillary, Observations on the Changes of the Air and the Concomitant Epidemical Diseases in the Island of Barbados (London, 1766), 341. Richard Shannon also noted African cures for yaws; see Practical Observations, 382–​383. 39 [John Hume], “A Description of the African Distemper Called Yaws, with the True Method of Cure,” Medical Essays and Observations 5, part II (1747):  272–​286. Many British medical encyclopedias repeat aspects of Hume’s description. Hume is

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The Atlantic World medical complex 339 identified as the author in [William Wright], Memoir of the Late William Wright, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1828), 400. 40 James Thomson, “Observations and Experiments on the Nature of the Morbid Poison Called Yaws, with Coloured Engraving of the Eruption,” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 15 (1819): 321–​328, esp. p. 326. 41 F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), s.v. “yaws.” Hillary claimed that the word “yaws” is an African word (Observations, 339). 42 Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872–​1877), s.v., supplement au dictionnaire, pian.-​étym.; it is also claimed that “pian” is a “Carib word conserved in all languages” to designate this disease (Dictionnaire des sciences médicales par une société de médecins et de chirurgiens, s.v. “pian”). 43 François Boissier de la Croix de Sauvages, Nosologia methodica sistens morborum classes, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1768), vol. 2, 554–​557. 44 Thomas Stedman, ed., Twentieth Century Practice:  An International Encyclopedia, 20 vols. (New York, 1899), vol. 16, s.v. “yaws.” 45 Hillary, Observations, 346. 46 Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, 2 vols. (London, 1803), vol. 1, 139. 47 A New Universal History of Arts and Sciences, Shewing Their Origin, Progress, Theory, Use, and Practice, 2 vols. (London, 1759), vol. 2, s.v. “yaws.” 48 A robust literature treats the origins of syphilis. See, for example, Kristin Harper, Molly Zuckerman, Megan Harper, John Kingston, and George Armelagos, “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis Revisited: An Appraisal of Old World Pre-​Columbian Evidence for Treponemal Infection,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 146 (2011): 99–​ 133. See also Katherine Paugh, “Yaws, Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 225–​252. 49 Sauvages, Nosologia, vol. 2, 555. Wright claimed that sivvens in Scotland and Ireland is akin to yaws: “As this disorder was first brought to the Highland of Scotland by the Protector’s soldiers,” he wrote, “I beg leave to denominate it Frambaesia Cromwelliana” (Memoir, 404). 50 [Wright], Memoir, 404. 51 Andrea Rinaldi, “Yaws: A Second (and Maybe Last?) Chance for Eradication,” Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases 2 (2008): 1–​6. 52 Thomas Trapham, A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica (London, 1679), 113–​114. See also Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 87–​88. 53 Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Sugar with Miscellaneous Medical Observations, 2nd ed. (London, 1800), 184–​189, esp. p. 184. 54 Alexander Anderson, archives, Linnean Society of London, MMS Drawer 30, MS no. 616. 55 Views on this differed. Thomas Dancer considered yaws a “disease endemial to Africa; and negroes, independent of the circumstances of their being more exposed to it from contact with others, seem to have a disposition to receive it more readily than white persons, who, though they are susceptible of it, have generally a much milder disease” (The Medical Assistant; or Jamaica Practice of Physic (Kingston, 1801), 221). Jean-​Barthélemy Dazille emphasized that pian attacked both Negroes and whites (Observations sur les maladies des nègres (Paris, 1776), 255–​261). Dazille provided a longer treatment of yaws in the 1792 edition of this work.

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340  Londa Schiebinger 56 Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, vol. 2, 146. 57 [Wright], Memoir, 400. 58 Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America (London 1769), 386. 59 Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, vol. 2, 143. 60 James Thomson, “Remarks on Tropical Diseases,” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 18 (1822): 31–​48, esp. p. 33. Thomson, Treatise, 88. See also James Maxwell, Observations on Yaws (Edinburgh, 1839). 61 Dancer, Medical Assistant, 221. 62 Encyclopédie méthodique 12 (1827), s.v. “pian.” 63 Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 187–​188. 64 Bertrand Bajon, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Cayenne et de la Guiane françoise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1777–​1778), vol. 1, 287–​288. 65 Thomson, “Observations and Experiments,” 321. 66 [Wright], Memoir, 411. 67 Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti, 31. 68 Anderson and Jones, eds., Correspondence, vol. 1, 286 n2. 69 “Medical News,” 90–​92. Anderson and Jones, eds., Correspondence, vol. 1, 283. 70 Anderson and Jones, eds., Correspondence, Appendix 1: Biographies, vol. 2, 1395. 71 Trans-​ Atlantic Slave Trade Database:  www.slavevoyages.org (accessed April 15, 2015). On the French slave trade, see David Geggus, “The French Slave Trade: An Overview,” The William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 118–​138. 72 [Hume], “A Description of the African Distemper Called Yaws,” 276. 73 Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery:  Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–​ 1786 (London:  Macmillan, 1989), 38. See also Richard Sheridan, “Slave Medicine in Jamaica: Thomas Thistlewood’s ‘Receipts for a Physick,’ 1750–​1786,” The Jamaican Historical Review 17 (1991): 1–​18, esp. p. 11; and Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire:  Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-​Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 74 [Wright], Memoir, 272. 75 Alexander to Black, in Correspondence, ed. Anderson and Jones, vol. 1, 288. 76 See Christopher Parsons and Kathleen Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail:  Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-​Century French and British Atlantics,” Early American Studies 10 (2012): 503–​529. 77 Winterbottom, An Account, vol. 2, 157. 78 Ethnobotanist Tinde van Andel, for example, has argued that slaves tested plants by “trial and error,” as reported by Daniel Rolander in Suriname in the 1750s. Tinde van Andel, Paul Maas, and James Dobreff, “Ethnobotanical Notes from Daniel Rolander’s Diarium Surinamicum (1754–​ 1756):  Are These Plants Still Used in Suriname Today?” Taxon 61 (2012): 852–​863, esp. pp. 857–​858. See also Tinde van Andel, “The Reinvention of Household Medicine by Enslaved Africans in Suriname,” Social History of Medicine 29 (2015):  1–​19; and Kathleen Murphy, “Translating the Vernacular:  Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-​Century British Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 8 (2011): 29–​48. 79 Pouppé-​Desportes, Histoire des maladies, vol. 2, 80–​85, esp. p. 81. 80 Ibid., vol. 3, 105–​107; vol. 2, 85–​95. 81 Ibid., vol. 3, 186–​187 (see also 107). 82 Ibid., vol. 3, 291. Wright recorded no medicinal use of this plant (Memoir, 257). 83 Pouppé-​Desportes, Historie des maladies, vol. 3, 193.

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The Atlantic World medical complex 341 84 Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire caraïbe-​français (Auxerre, 1665), s.v. “yaya”; “chipíou”; “mibi.” 85 Jean-​Barthélémi-​Maximilien Nicolson, Essai sur l’histoire naturelle de l’isle de Saint-​ Domingue (Paris, 1776), 174–​175. 86 Jean-​Baptiste-​Christophe Fusée-​Aublet, Histoire des plantes de la Guiane Françoise, rangées suivant la méthode sexuelle, 4 vols. (London and Paris, 1775), vol. 2, 768–​770; vol. 4, plate 307. Fusée-​Aublet wrote an interesting “Observations sur les Galibis,” Histoire des plantes, vol. 2, 105–​109, esp. p. 108. 87 Kit Candlin, The Last Frontier, 1795–​1815 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 88 Michel Étienne Descourtilz, Flore pittoresque et medicale des Antilles, ou histoire naturelle des Plantes usuelles des colonies Francaises, Anglaises, Espagnoles et Portugaises, 8 vols. (Paris, 1821–​1829), vol. 7, 9–​13, plate 454. 89 Ibid., vol. 7, 10. 90 Richard Ligon reported one Indian property owner still living in Barbados –​a man named Salymingoe who lived on Canoe Hill. He was known for his 35-​foot canoe that would have required 15–​20 paddlers. See P. F. Campbell, “Richard Ligon,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 37 (1985): 215–​238, esp. p. 236. The Spanish had destroyed the Amerindians on Jamaica; Nicolas-​Louis Bourgeois noted that native populations no longer existed on Saint-​Domingue (Voyages intéressans dans différentes colonies Françaises, Espagnoles, Anglaises (London, 1788), 67). See also Irving Rouse, The Taino: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 91 Lucien Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789 (Paris:  Hachette, 1897), 321–​322. See also Christiane Bougerol, La Médecine populaire à la Guadeloupe (Paris: Karthala, 1983). 92 Bajon, Mémoires, vol. 1, 352–​353. 93 Peter Goldblatt, ed. Biological Relationships between Africa and South America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 8. 94 Winterbottom, An Account, vol. 2, 156–​157. 95 [Bourgeois], Voyages intéressans, 470. 96 Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery. 97 Shannon, Practical Observations, 380. 98 Dancer, Medical Assistant, 223. Dancer also recommended bathing yaws patients in warm water and railed against the “general practice of negroes … of washing in the cold rivers” (A Short Dissertation on the Jamaica Bath Waters (Kingston, 1784), 81–​82). 99 Thomson, “Observations and Experiments,” 322. 100 Thomson, Treatise, 93. 101 Dancer, Medical Assistant, 223. See also Dazille, Observations sur les maladies des nègres (1792); Thomson, Treatise. 102 Londa Schiebinger, Human Experimentation in the Eighteenth-​Century Atlantic World, in progress. 103 Bajon, Mémoires, vol. 1, 196–​197. On this point of slavery secrecy, see also Hillary, Observations, 341, 347–​352.

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13  Semedo’s sixteen secrets Tracing pharmaceutical networks in the Portuguese tropics Benjamin Breen

João Curvo Semedo (1635–​1719), a Portuguese physician with a prosperous sideline as a seller of exotic drugs, was not one to suffer fools gladly. “If this service that I have done for the common good is not seen to merit thanks, it also does not deserve rebuke,” he wrote in the prologue to his popular medical compendium Polyanthea Medicinal. “Though I  know full well that there exist men of such depraved spirits that they do out of malice what babies do out of innocence, suckling their mother’s milk, yet biting the very breast that feeds them.”1 Semedo had good reason to be defensive. He was, after all, among the most active disseminators of what he called “the experience of the moderns” (a experiencia dos modernos) and of non-​European knowledge in a baroque Iberian world that historians have typically portrayed as opposed to medical or scientific novelty. Semedo himself had legitimate bona fides as a licensed physician in the traditional, Galenic mold. A graduate of the University of Coimbra, Semedo’s mental universe turned on the writings of Hippocrates, Celsus, Galen, and other eminent Greeks and Romans, as well as Persian and Arab scholars like Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). Mentions of Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna account for over a quarter of all citations in Polyanthea Medicinal, despite the fact that Semedo’s lengthy tome referenced an astonishing range of authorities, some 527 in all.2 However, when we read Semedo’s drug recipes (receitas) more closely, we find that he was also an ardent advocate of tropical medicines that would have been utterly unfamiliar to his forebears. These included not only Amerindian remedies like guaiacum, copaiba, and the famous Peruvian bark which had been popularized earlier in the seventeenth century, but also far less well-​known cures such as Zambian mutututu root, wildebeest hooves from Mozambique (nhumbo), and powdered cobra spines from Angola (zuchi).3 As these recipes suggest, Portuguese warehouses and medical chests –​no less than Portuguese bodies –​abounded with what Semedo’s contemporary, the Franco-​Portuguese apothecary João Vigier, called drogas modernas: “modern drugs” that had no entries in classical texts and no grounding in traditional European practice.4 Not coincidentally, these drogas played an important role in the medical experimentation of emerging natural philosophical organizations like the Royal Society. Yet key actors involved in this trade  –​not only Iberian physicians and merchants, but also the African,

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 343 Amerindian, and Asian informants they relied upon –​became largely invisible in the decades and centuries that succeeded them.5 João Curvo Semedo and his Secretos Curvianos (“Curvian Secrets”) serve here as an embarkation point for an examination of the networks of the tropical drug trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.6 Works like Semedo’s Polyanthea Medicinal connected apothecary shops in Lisbon to the shores of the Maldives and the Moluccas, towns from Bahia and Bengal, and experts in Amboina and Angola. Semedo was thus not wrong when he compared his work to a roteiro, or rutter, the collection of portolan charts used by early modern mariners to navigate unfamiliar coastlines.7 His profession was equally reliant on long-​ distance travel, and almost as fraught with danger. Semedo’s information about African, American, and Asian drugs was highly unreliable, depending as it did upon second-​hand sources, flawed translations, and knowledge that was all too often gained from behind the point of a sword.8 Yet even these misunderstandings and epistemological gaps would prove to be highly significant with the advent of industrialized pharmaceutical manufacture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By applying a long-​standing European culture of medical secrecy to non-​European remedies and natural knowledge, figures like Semedo helped initiate the global pharmaceutical trade –​even as they simultaneously nurtured a persistent set of anxieties surrounding the commerce in and consumption of drogas modernas that could not be fully integrated into Western medical practice.

Semedo’s secrets Despite the wide compass of his interests, the cures that João Curvo Semedo mentioned most frequently in his own works could be found at a place closer to home: Semedo’s front door. His eponymous “Bezoartico Curviano,” Semedo wrote, “is for sale at my residence, because I am the Author who invented it.” Evidently the demand for this artificial version of the famed poison-​neutralizing bezoar stone was substantial.9 Already by the first edition of Polyanthea in 1697, Semedo had extended distribution rights to two business associates, the apothecary at the São Domingos monastery and Antonio Thomas de Almeyda, who lives in front of Burlap Alley [Beco da Estopa, a street in Lisbon], for these apothecaries have the true Bezoartico truly made by myself, which they come to buy at my house.10 Semedo remained coy about the precise composition of this fever-​and poison-​ fighting remedy, for, as he explained, “I can not publish all the ways of preparing my segredos … because in truth I  am not obliged to reveal the composition of segredos which cost me great effort and which give me credit.”11 By 1706, Semedo was boasting in another pamphlet that his bezoartico had grown popular enough to be “sold throughout the kingdom,” but still refrained from detailing its contents except to state that it “consists of sixteen ingredients” which had “effects that were practically miracles.”12 However, versions of the recipe seem to have

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344 Benjamin Breen circulated through correspondence networks. A 1735 Spanish text purporting to make public “the sixteen secrets of Curvo” included what it called “a genuine and true recipe for the Bezoartico of Curvo” that was supposedly communicated from Semedo to the eminent Spanish Paracelsan physician Suárez de Rivera, and from him to the text’s author, José Diez de Medina.13 The recipe was highly eclectic, relying on a mixture of materia medica from both the East and West Indies, from land and sea, and spanning the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms.14 The recipe’s mingling of precious stones like white amber with exotica like “sea unicorn” was not as idiosyncratic as it may appear to modern eyes. The compound drugs of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries built upon a long tradition of blending dozens of exotic ingredients to create expensive substances such as the remedies known as mithridatium and theriac (Venetian treacle).15 Combining gold and coral with animal products like “the talons of a hare” and then relabeling it as a secret preparation would not have been unusual to an apothecary of Semedo’s time –​or, indeed, of his great-​grandfather’s time. The key difference was the mixing of New World remedies that had only recently become accepted as appropriate for European bodies (like quina) with the traditional exotica of the medieval compound remedies. Even Semedo’s reference to the location of his house –​“facing the riverside of the Junto do Comercio” –​ spoke to his close participation in the Indies trade. This address in Lisbon’s docklands ensured that Semedo was as close as possible to the ships of the Junto, which maintained exclusive trading rights with Brazil.16 Another difference lay in Semedo’s approach to branding: whereas the names of medieval remedies often referenced classical antiquity, Semedo coined a new De Quinaquina muy buena ℥ßj De jacintos preparados, de margaritas orientales preparadas, de coral rojo preparado, de cuerno de ciervo preparado, y de tierra sellada, anà. ʒvj De saphiros orientales preparados ʒij De esmeraldas orientales preparadas, de succino blanco, y de unicornio marino verdadero, anà. ʒj De huesso de corazon de ciervo, de ojos de cangrejo preparados, de los talons de liebre, y del ojo de los lucio, anà. ʒj De cedoaria, ʒj De hojas de oro num. xv Mezclese todo, y hagase polvo subtilissimo, y con zumo de escordio se formen trociscos, los que despues de bien secos se guarden.

Very good quina: 1 ½ ounces Prepared hyacinths, oriental pearls, red coral, deer horn, and medicinal clay, mixed: 6 drachms Prepared oriental sapphires, 2 drachms Prepared oriental emeralds, white amber, and “true sea unicorn” [narwhal?], mixed: 1 drachm Bone of the heart of a deer, prepared crab eyes, the talons of a hare, and the eyes of the pike, mixed: 1 drachm White turmeric (Curcuma zedoaria), 1 drachm Gold foil, 15 leafs Mix all, and pound into a fine powder, and form into lozenges using escordio juice, then store it after it is fully dry.

Figure 13.1 Recipe for Bezoartico Curviano according to José Diez de Medina, Declaracion de los verdaderos diez y siete secretos de Curvo, de la incertidumbre de los publicados por el Doctor Rivera (Madrid: Antonio Denferzan, 1735).

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 345 word (Bezoartico) and proudly combined it with his own name (Curvo). Just as avowedly “modern” apothecaries like Semedo mingled both temperate and tropical remedies, medicine and pharmacy, and products of land and sea, they also merged medieval tradition with seventeenth-​century materials and modes of self-​fashioning.17 Moreover, although he shrouded the details of his cures in mystery, Semedo’s works also abounded in empirical observations grounded in public demonstrations.18 These included dozens of case studies involving Semedo’s testing of experimental remedies on real patients whom he identified by name, as well as references to animal trials and extensive descriptions of the function of remedies within specific geographic regions, climates, and astrological configurations that Semedo based upon interviews with long-​distance travelers whom he deemed trustworthy.19 Semedo was ideally positioned to perform this balancing act between the traditional rhetorical modes of the early modern European medical establishment and what Júnia Ferreira Furtado has called the “tropical empiricism” of the Portuguese colonies.20 His many printed works appear to have won substantial audiences, with the Polyanthea running into at least five editions between 1697 and 1741 and appearing in a partial Spanish translation in 1735.21 Semedo’s repeated textual references to his sale of drugs from his house in Lisbon’s docklands suggest that he maintained a thriving sideline as an apothecary in addition to his official position as “Medico da Caza Real,” or physician to the household of King Alphonso VI. Whereas the earliest surviving frontispiece portrait of Semedo identified him simply as a physician, in later portraits Semedo broadcast his worldly success not only with his lavish wig but also via encircling laurel wreaths and a caption that declared the author to be a Royal Physician, a Knight of the Order of Christ and a familiar (lay member) of the Inquisition. As Timothy Walker has shown, joining the Inquisition was a common strategy for professional advancement among early modern Portugal’s medical elite.22 In some ways, membership in the Inquisition and in the Order of Christ functioned as a Catholic, Iberian analog to the tenacious guild-​based ladder-​climbing and legal wrangling of the London physicians studied by Harold Cook.23 Semedo was also careful to note the intellectual debts he owed to foreign (estrangeiro) physicians, particularly those in the medical centers of Bologna, Padua, and Montpellier. Strikingly, however, Semedo’s citations also included abundant references to Protestant proponents of chemical medicine and Cartesian theories. The intellectual network that emerges from an analysis of the citations in Polyanthea Medicinal is exceptionally eclectic. Semedo’s citations reveal his indebtedness to English, Dutch, and French physicians of his own generation who were pursuing experiments that explicitly conflicted with the tenets of Galen, Dioscorides, and Hippocrates –​not to mention Catholic censors. Indeed, it was only via his status as a familiar of the Inquisition that Semedo would have been permitted access to banned authors like Francis Bacon and Descartes, both of whom he cited approvingly. Surprisingly, the tenth-​most-​cited authority in Semedo’s work  –​Jan van Helmont –​is conspicuously absent from the “Index of authorities” that occupies

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Figure 13.2 The title page of Semedo’s Polyanthea Medicinal in its third edition (Lisbon, 1716). Engraving by M. Dossier. Credit: Wellcome Images.

the front matter of Polyanthea. It is difficult to imagine that the tenth-​most-​ cited author (out of a total of 527) could have been left off this list by accident. Rather, it seems likely that either Semedo or his publisher thought it wise to omit any mention of van Helmont in the index of the book. Van Helmont was famous throughout Europe as an alchemist and follower of Paracelsus, and perhaps Semedo or his collaborator, the royal printer Miguel Deslandes, feared that listing such a figure would push the book too far into heretical territory. Yet buried in its nearly 1,000 pages are citations not only of censored alchemists, but also of African and South Asian healers. In Polyanthea, Semedo negotiated a dangerous balance between outward obeisance to the norms of acceptable medical practice and an eclectic approach to drug preparation that was aggressively cosmopolitan in outlook. Much of Semedo’s success in this role depended on minimizing any explicit references to non-​European influences even as he hinted at his secret knowledge of foreign medicaments. He relied upon a local network of apothecaries and printers to sell his books and drugs in Lisbon, but even more on go-​betweens in Portugal’s tropical colonies. Out of the 61 drugs that Semedo singled out as worthy of attention in his Memorial de Varios Simplices, fully 52 hailed from

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 347 outside Europe, and the majority were from the Portuguese tropical colonies in Brazil and Amazonia, Angola, Mozambique, and Goa. Semedo claimed that Polyanthea’s drug recipes were partially based on interviews with “certain persons who have travelled in the Indies and other regions of the earth,” and boasted that he had “discovered various manuscripts which have informed me of the virtues of the aforesaid stones, powders, roots, and fruits.”24 Other references in the text to non-​European experts like African healers and Indian pandits makes it clear that not all of these manuscripts and informants were Portuguese. “The experience of the Moors and Gentiles [i.e., Hindus] of Asia was the teacher which gave us knowledge of the use of such remedies,” he wrote. In other words, mapping the origins of Semedo’s drugs highlights a disconnect between his citations of European authorities (who dealt almost exclusively with medicines known to Greco-​Roman authorities) and the actual remedies he prescribed. Similarly, Semedo was also an advocate for experimental remedies involving chemicals, animal parts, and minerals. The current scholarly emphasis on colonial botany tends to obscure the fact that a substantial proportion of early modern “exotic” remedies relied on materials derived from non-​ botanical sources.25 A majority (32 out of 61) of Semedo’s medicinal “simples” were derived from the hoofs, bones, eyes, and teeth of animals or from mineral sources rather than from plants. The works of Semedo show how the transplantation of information depended upon material movements of both human beings (such as African slaves) and of creatures and substances that are all but invisible in most early modern medical and scientific texts.26 This Portuguese trade in both tropical drugs and in human beings highlights how material networks of global exchange shaped Enlightenment thought.27

Drug networks in an age of Portuguese imperial decline The trade in tropical drogas drove the Portuguese Empire’s commercial success in the sixteenth century, but it also led to disastrous defeats at the hands of the Dutch in the seventeenth. The remarkable scale of Dutch aggression (which included the establishment of Dutch Brazil in a newly conquered Pernambuco, the capture of Sri Lanka, Luanda, and Malacca, and a lengthy blockade of Goa) was a strategic response to the Portuguese monopoly on Indies drugs and spices that had prevailed in the sixteenth century, capitalizing on a period of Portuguese weakness immediately before and after the dissolution of the Hapsburg “joint monarchy” that had united Portugal and Spain between 1580 and 1640. Leaders of the Dutch trading companies were quick to understand the commercial implications of these events. The Groot Desseyn (“Grand Design”) formulated in the 1620s by the directors of the newly formed Dutch West India Company hinged on a confluence of imperial, commercial, and ecological ambitions: by seizing Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia, and the West Indies, Dutch merchants hoped to establish commercial dominance over a range of tropical commodities including brazilwood, nutmeg, and guiacum bark.28

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Figure 13.3 Geographic origins and characteristics of the 61 “simples” (medicinal drugs) described by Semedo in his Memorial de Varios Simplices. Credit: Map by the author.

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 349 Given this geopolitical context, it has long been taken for granted that the Portuguese Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a state in decline, and that the intellectual networks it sheltered were as moribund as the empire’s armies.29 Yet closer attention to the tropical drug trade casts a different light on the supposed intellectual conservatism that prevailed in Portugal and its empire. It was precisely during this era of imperial political decline that healers, surgeons, and apothecaries in colonial Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and Goa emerged as alternatives to European physicians. The transatlantic careers of figures like the West African-​born healer Domingos Álvares were shaped by a host of factors, from the dynamics of the slave trade to the devastation wrought by newly global pandemics.30 Yet it seems clear that they also benefited from a rising demand both inside and outside Europe for what Vigier called “modern drugs … from both the Indies and Brazil.”31 During the same timeframe, local experts in Amazonia, Africa, and South Asia became informants for bioprospectors and natural philosophers working across imperial and linguistic boundaries, like the members of London’s Royal Society. These participants in an emerging global drug trade were much more than purveyors of knowledge and materials: they helped constitute the modern notion of drugs as a societal, commercial, and scientific category, bringing colonial debates about purity, adulteration, bodily degeneration, addiction, and non-​Christian spirituality into the salons of Europe.32 Yet what precisely did it mean to debate drugs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Early modern writers frequently employed the words drug, drogue, and droga to describe the raw materials, or “simples,” that apothecaries prepared and combined to create medicines. The term “drug” thus encompassed a vast range of substances, from celery root and syrup of violets to “unicorn” horn, pulverized pearls, and moss scraped from the skulls of executed criminals –​ not to mention opium, cannabis, and alcohol.33 The most popular of these  –​ such as cinchona, ipecacuanha, guaiacum, bezoar stones, tea, cacao, tobacco, rhubarb, china root, and opium –​were more than materia medica.34 They were objects of alchemical experimentation, prized commodities, ornaments of curiosity cabinets, icons of sociability and status, and in some cases, even religious sacraments. Furthermore, as James Sweet has pointed out, an early modern drug could double as a poison depending on context and dosage.35 These overlapping valences make the historical trajectories of drugs difficult to track, but also hugely important for understanding how pharmaceutical knowledge shifted to suit new social and cultural contexts as it passed between early modern Europeans, indigenous Americans, African, and Asians. Pharmaceutical networks also played an important environmental role. The drug trade was both a biological and a human system, and efforts to transplant drugs and knowledge about them could transform landscapes as well as economies. The regions that Europeans called “the Indies” –​largely coterminous with the tropical belt –​emerged as especially important sites in the global drug trade.36 This was due not only to the inherent biodiversity of tropical ecosystems, but also because climatic similarities between far-​flung points along the equator prompted

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350 Benjamin Breen new theories and experiments regarding the long-​distance transplantation of plants, animals, and peoples.37 Many of the most valuable drugs that came from tropical plants and animals, it was found, could be established in new ecosystems along the equatorial belt.38 For instance, the sugarcane and indigo that Dutch planters nourished in Pernambuco found new homes in the Dutch West Indies and in the sophisticated botanical garden at the Cape Colony, which had been established as a way station for transplantation schemes in the 1650s.39 These transplantations allowed Dutch planters to wage economic war on their Luso-​Brazilian rivals long after the demise of Dutch Brazil in 1654.40 To control the trade in a medicinal plant, one needed to control not only its current growing regions, but also the flow of cuttings, seeds, roots, and knowledge about how to transplant it to new regions.41 Although such transplantations of materials and knowledge about drugs occurred with increasing frequency, they were far from frictionless. One striking example reaches us from the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the Mughal emperor Akbar received a gift of a jeweled pipe and a pouch filled with an unfamiliar herb from a courtier and collector of curiosities named Asad Beg.42 “This is tobacco, which is well known in Mecca and Medina,” Akbar was informed. The emperor summoned his apothecary, who could find “no mention of it in his books, but that it was a new invention.” A debate ensued over the safety of the new drug: Asad Beg pointed to china root (which “has been newly discovered”) as an example of a novel drug with proven value, whereas Akbar’s chief physician protested against the unthinking adoption of an untested European custom.43 Although the emperor refrained from taking up the habit after a trial puff or two, Asad Beg claimed that “the custom of smoking spread rapidly” throughout Akbar’s realm from that point onward. Akbar’s son Jahangir attempted to ban the drug in 1617 “in consequence of the disturbance that tobacco brings about in most temperaments and constitutions.”44 (Interestingly, Jahangir felt no such qualms about his own heavy use of opium, despite witnessing a close friend die from an overdose of the drug.)45 The emperor’s attempt to ban tobacco was unsuccessful. Similar efforts by the Ottoman sultan Murad IV (1633) and the Russian tsar Michael I (1634) also failed.46 By around 1630, a Portuguese friar named Sebastian Manrique observed tobacco being cultivated in Bengal for the Southeast Asian market, and Portuguese trade networks had likely carried seeds from Bahia in Brazil to India even earlier, since an English East India Company clerk named William Methwold claimed that tobacco was being grown around Golkonda “a few years” prior to his arrival in the kingdom in 1618.47 By the mid seventeenth century, the drug had become widely adopted throughout India. Indeed, tobacco cultivation has become so common in India that even today it is sometimes erroneously claimed that the plant is native to South Asia rather than the New World.48 These early attempts at drug regulation highlight the profound societal disruption that the introduction of a novel intoxicant like tobacco could induce –​as well as the improvisational nature of the early modern drug trade, which relied far

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 351 more on local contingency, hearsay, and unexpected exchanges than on strategic planning of any sort. Within a century, the Portuguese in the East Indies had begun combining Indian-​grown tobacco with opium and importing it to China, initiating a vastly profitable trade that would culminate with the First Opium War (1839–​1842).49 A  drug exchange also played an unexpectedly important role in Portugal’s foreign policy closer to home. Queen Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of the reigning monarch of Portugal and the bride of Charles II of England, carried a chest of an obscure Chinese herb called cha to England as part of her royal dowry. The example set by Catherine and her courtiers helped create a fad for the exotic stimulant among the wine-​sodden English aristocracy. Anglophones today know the plant as “tea.”50 In some cases, novel drugs traded by the Portuguese reached non-​European peoples in advance of Europeans themselves. Tobacco, for instance, appears to have been cultivated in the African interior by the early decades of the sixteenth century, moving along river valleys at the hands first of Portuguese pombeiros (hinterlands merchants) and then of native African merchants and cultivators.51 In a case such as this, an Amerindian substance could become widely adopted without substantial cultural input from the European intermediaries who trafficked in it, creating unexpected cultural and medical hybridizations.

Integrating tropical drugs into the history of science and medicine How, then, were figures like Semedo able to pay obeisance to classical authorities and Catholic censors, while simultaneously advocating for the widespread adoption of untested tropical drugs? The case for drogas modernas typically relied upon two factors: first, that patients consuming a novel drug had seen positive and even “miraculous” results relative to a more traditional remedy, and second, that these highly public proofs of efficacy relied upon the apothecary’s privileged access to secret information about the proper method by which the drugs were to be collected, prepared, and applied. A typical example is the case of Senhora Aranjo and her treatment with African Butua root in Semedo’s Polyanthea Medicinal: This root takes the name from the Kingdom of Butua were it grows; they call it the same along the Rivers of Sena among the Gentiles; among the Portuguese it is called Wild Pepper [Parreyra Brava] or Butua root … The powder of the said root, mixed with vinegar in such a way as to make a paste, resolves abscesses when applied on them and relieves any such condition when applied for six to eight days in succession. This I  observed many times, principally in the wife of Manoel de Aranjo, living near the Church of the Annunciation [Igreja de Annunciada]. The said woman had a leg swollen to such a state of deformity that all believed it impossible for her to escape death. And when I applied this root in the form of a paste, she was saved within six days without the need for any other remedy.52

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352 Benjamin Breen The Kingdom of Butua bordered the Zambezi river in present-​day Zimbabwe.53 Yet Semedo’s second case study of Butua root’s miraculous powers reached him via a fellow physician in India: Doctor Francisco Roballo Freyre, knight of the Order of Santiago and Chief Physician in the Estado da India, certifies that he gave a powder of this root for three days in a row to a woman, who had in her womb [na região de madre] a phlegmatic swelling, which he had not been able to cure for some time, and only with the decoction of the Butua root did he resolve the abscess, which broke and released many humours.54 Buttressed by these two specific examples, Semedo listed numerous other diseases that the Butua root supposedly cured: everything from “pain of the teeth” (when cooked with poppies), pleurisy, sore throat, and “all the suppressions of urine,” to strokes and tumors.55 Here, the traditional forms of medieval and early modern European medical writing remain intact  –​the close attention to humoural balance, the unlikely profusion of diseases cured by a single substance. Yet this scholarly apparatus has here been repurposed to celebrate the virtues of a sub-​ Saharan African herb that reached Lisbon via the networks of the Atlantic slave trade, and which was now being used to treat patients simultaneously in Europe and India. Throughout Semedo’s Memorial, as well as similar works like João Vigier’s list of “the virtues of modern drugs from both Indies and Brazil,” the emphasis is not simply on tropical drugs, but on the proper use of tropical drugs.56 Only via the proprietary knowledge of a medical authority like Semedo or Vigier –​a medical authority who just so happens to be generously sharing his hard-​won knowledge with a vernacular reading public  –​do these remedies gain their true potency. Even a remedy “experimented” and “tested” by “curious men,” might still “miss its target” (as Semedo phrased it) if it failed to be accompanied by intimate first-​ hand knowledge of dose, diet, climate, and constitution. In short, physicians and apothecaries like Semedo who advocated for the adoption of non-​European remedies tended to advocate not for a wholesale adoption of non-​European medical practices, but for their own specific way of integrating novel cures into an existing epistemological context. Without expert knowledge, even the most potent drugs (like the bezoar stones that Semedo complained were being improperly prescribed by “barber-​surgeons, who are the Physicians of the ordinary folk”) would become “infamous for killing patients –​and for money ill spent.”57 Early modern pharmaceutical networks thus proceeded from a specific form of information asymmetry. While long-​ distance shipping allowed a material movement from places like the banks of the Zambezi and the Amazon to places like Paris and Lisbon, the intellectual contexts surrounding these materials were often lost. Thus we find Semedo prescribing Batua root for headaches when mixed with traditional European remedies like borage or rosewater. The only hint that the drug is in fact an African remedy is his initial remark that “it is named Batua after the Kingdom of Batua from whence it comes.”58 Despite the fact that

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 353 a significant proportion of Semedo’s list of simples came from sub-​Saharan Africa and the Neotropics, the theoretical underpinnings for these cures –​and many of the other drugs blended together with them –​remained grounded in pre-​colonial European practices. Although essentially forgotten today, Polyanthea Medicinal remained influential and popular after Semedo’s death: we find it being cited by Portuguese authors (as well as the Victorian adventurer Richard Burton) well into the nineteenth century.59 In 1760s Lisbon, the long-​dead Semedo appears to have remained famous enough to merit extended discussion in a series of pamphlets regarding the role of apothecaries in daily life.60 And when an anonymous Portuguese Jesuit sought in 1766 to catalog the “various receipts and particular secrets … composed and experimented by the best Physicians and most celebrated Apothecaries … of Portugal India, Macao, and Brazil,” he documented a total of 14 receipts by Curvo Semedo (complete with citations to specific page numbers in Polyanthea) as well as two additional “Curvian” receipts that had been adapted by the Jesuit apothecaries in Recife and Macau –​thus, perhaps not coincidentally, bringing the total of “segredos” to Semedo’s favorite number, 16.61 Yet it is not the direct influence of Semedo’s writings that is most relevant here –​it is the submerged pharmaceuticals networks which we glimpse in his works. The information asymmetry evident in the works of apothecaries like Semedo is not, in itself, a new finding: thanks to work by scholars like Londa Schiebinger, Neil Safier, and Susan Scott Parish, we know that it was typical for indigenous knowledge to be reconfigured (and oftentimes erased) as it crossed cultural and geographic boundaries.62 The Portuguese context explored in this chapter adds a further dimension to this body of scholarship. It also, I hope, suggests certain new questions that can inform future research. One of the most prominent lacunae in the history of science and medicine in the Iberian empires –​and in the historiography of the Atlantic world in general, I would argue –​concerns the epistemological role of African informants. Semedo’s list of drugs contains at least 16 references to African medicaments, including several (like the roots that Semedo calls Nhumbo, Minhaminha, and Mutututu) that directly employ Bantu names.63 Nor was Semedo exceptional in this regard. The National Library of Portugal houses a manuscript apparently written in 1731 by a Portuguese cavalry officer stationed in Angola for the previous two decades, one Francisco de Buytrago.64 In this unusual text, Buytrago writes at length about the “miraculous effects” of a healing bark which he calls casca da vida and which he learned about from “the blacks of this land [of Angola].” Buytrago openly acknowledged his debt to traditional African healing techniques, writing that “there are no people with a greater faculty for creating extraordinary and miraculous cures than the folk of this land,” and boasting that “the secrets of experience that exist in this Kingdom are passed to others in lands outside it only infrequently.”65 For Buytrago, the anti-​demonic and “alexipharmic” (anti-​poison) properties of the bark arose not only from its inherent biological qualities, but from the complex experiential knowledge surrounding its use  –​knowledge which he claimed to have acquired through discussion with African healers. Meanwhile,

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354 Benjamin Breen other travelers, like the Portuguese Jesuit and Africa missionary Jeronimo Lobo, offered private communications about African nature to the natural philosophers of London’s Royal Society, who used lusophone merchants and missionaries to establish secret contacts and send “inquiries” about non-​European natural knowledge to informants in the Iberian colonies.66 Yet the very act of integrating African (or Amazonian) pharmaceutical knowledge into European medical practice depended in part upon effacing the contexts in which “modern” drugs originated. A  case in point is the calumba root. Calumba root is native to Mozambique and has long been used by medical practitioners in East Africa. But because it was routed through the Portuguese Estado da India, based in Goa, it became known to Europeans as an Indian medicine. The name morphed to Columbo root, and it was associated with the city of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Similarly, Amazonian quina, rebranded as “English water” (Agua de Inglaterra), became a popular proprietary medicine in Portugal. The drug’s name likely derived from the English doctor Robert Talbor, who famously used quina to treat the malaria of kings Charles II and Louis XIV.67 It was not the first, and certainly would not be the last, time that the origins of a controversial drug were intentionally obfuscated to suit the sensibilities of drug-​buyers in European urban centers.

Conclusion Harold Cook has written of the rise of the concept of the “specific” in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as demonstrating a new sense among European medical professionals that human bodies, regardless of sex or geographic origin, could be treated using the same set of cures and the same theoretical understandings of disease.68 This belief privileged the universal application of a single remedy (like quina) rather than its careful mixing with other remedies designed to regulate individual constitutions and humors. Simultaneously, as Alix Cooper has noted, many physicians and apothecaries in Europe began to advocate for the rejection of all tropical remedies and a return to homegrown herbal cures that could be found in local cottage gardens and backwoods rather than in fever-​ridden tropical ports.69 In his 1745 pamphlet Antitherica, Essay on Mithridatium and Theriac, for instance, William Heberden attacked the “ostenation and wantonness” of apothecaries who offered up a “heap of drugs,” arguing that the ill-​considered mixing of so many exotic drugs results in a “medley of discordant simples … a dissonent crowd collected from many countries, mighty in appearance, but in reality, an ineffective multitude that only hinder one another.”70 Those who advocated for tropical drugs confronted controversy at every turn. The Republic of Letters that linked Iberian, British, Dutch, and French physicians encouraged the spread of new knowledge about tropical phenomena, but also reinforced differences in the ways that this knowledge was presented, framed, and used. Semedo’s drug recipes were highly eclectic and cosmopolitan, but it is worth noting that most of the substances he advocated were not, it would

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 355 seem, widely adopted by European consumers. For instance, comparing the drugs prescribed by Semedo to the actual records of drug imports studied by Patrick Wallis reveals that very few of Semedo’s remedies became popular in the English medical marketplace.71 Yet it was entirely possible for a colonial drug that found few adherents in Europe to win new ones in a different colonial setting, after it had been passed through metropolitan networks. Júnia Ferreira Furtado writes of a “boomerang effect” in the history of early modern science and medicine, wherein the “practical knowledge” of healing plants and herbs native to the Americas and Indies became restructured by elite medical authors in Portugal, whose works were then shipped out to the colonies to serve as guidebooks and references.72 This boomerang effect was at work not only on an epistemological level, but on a material one as well. Strikingly, seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century Brazilians appear to have imported tropical medicinal drugs like cinchona from Peru via Lisbon rather than directly across Amazonia –​despite the fact that cinchona’s native range actually crossed over into Portuguese America.73 It is also evident that even if Portuguese-​traded drugs failed to win mass popularity in regions like Britain or the Low Countries, pharmaceutical knowledge from the Portuguese Empire played a key role in shaping European understandings of tropical nature. In his Museum Regalis Societatis of 1681, Royal Society member Nathaniel Grew attached an appendix to the main body of his text solely in order to describe a set of items associated with a group he called “the Portugal Negros.” All of these items appear to have been materia medica: “Sagu”; “the Mallaca gum”; Poco Sempie, “a Golden Moss … accounted a great Cordial”; Rizagon, a “root brought from Bengala, of good use,” and others.74 The Royal Society also sent letters of inquiry to Jesuits with experience in Brazil and Portuguese Africa in this period, like the inquiries for Brazil sent by Henry Oldenburg to an anonymous Jesuit in Bahia, Brazil which ask “whether the native Brazilians are excellent botanists” and inquire specifically about the medicinal uses of a number of new world drugs like tobacco, guaiacum bark, copaiba balsam, and ipecacuanha. Why did the Portuguese fail to profit from their early leads in pharmacological knowledge? The Portuguese Empire was, in truth, little more a thin scrim of underpaid and understaffed fortresses overlaid on a vast expanse of tropical ecosystems, which remained almost completely independent from royal control in Lisbon. In such a situation, information did not equal power. Thus, while Portuguese physicians, apothecaries, and traders like Semedo were central to the networks of the global drug trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it fell to the British, the Dutch, and the French to realize their ambitions. For instance, letters sent by the Portuguese ambassador to Paris, Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo, and the influential Jesuit Antonio de Vieira point to a fairly well-​established plan to secretly smuggle the most prized plants of the Dutch East Indies spice monopoly  –​cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and ginger  –​to Brazil.75 At the same time, Jesuits in Brazil were experimenting with cacao plantations both there and on the island of Sao Tome off the coast of Angola. But the full-​fledged transplantation of tropical plants like these became economically viable only in the nineteenth-​ century British and French empires.

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356 Benjamin Breen As Gabriel Paquette has pointed out, Portuguese intellectual networks “represented a fusion of two worlds.”76 In the European context, Portugal was indeed “a minor player on the periphery,” with a relatively small population, a minuscule industrial base, and a conservative intellectual culture centered on the Inquisition and the University of Coimbra. Yet if we restrict our analysis to Europe alone, we miss a far richer picture, one in which Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro are the twin capitals of a cosmopolitan collection of tropical territories and spheres of influence. It was largely in this tropical zone that something resembling a “modern” trade in medicinal pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs emerged. Although Portugal had become a marginal player in European politics by the eighteenth century, individuals in a wider Portuguese tropical world played pivotal roles in shaping how consumers, merchants, and natural philosophers thought about novel drugs. This influence, however, was not one directed from centers of power in Lisbon, and it rarely worked to further Portuguese imperial interests. The figures who shaped the emergence of a global trade in tropical drugs, from Semedo in his Lisbon study to sertanejos (prospectors) in the backlands of the Amazon, did so for their own reasons: personal enrichment, social capital, professional advancement, or the attainment of spiritual power. Not to mention the most basic of human needs, the pursuit of health and the desire to escape imminent death from poison or disease. The importance of these pharmaceutical networks is belied by their improvisational and disaggregated nature –​and, consequently, by the difficulty of tracing them through time and space. The improvised quality of pharmaceutical networks is in many ways still with us. Contemporary lexical and legal distinctions between legal and illegal drugs give an illusion of permanence and legitimacy. In reality, the line between what is a legal pharmaceutical and what is an illegal drug is redrawn anew with each passing year. And, although the way societies draw this line can reflect biological realities, it also reflects a historical inheritance of cultural practices, folk beliefs, and economic forces that have accrued around drugs in the past five centuries. In early modern medical texts, opium, cannabis, and coca leaves occupied the same category (“Indies drugs”) as substances like coral, musk, and ambergris. In the twenty-​first century, our conceptual boundaries continue to shift as cannabis becomes legal in certain parts of the United States, and “gray market” pharmaceuticals produced in Chinese labs for sale online cause societal upheavals like the wave of press attention devoted to so-​called “bath salts” (typically the stimulants MDPV and mephedrone) in 2012–​2013.77 Psychoactivity and the biological action of drugs on mind and body played a role in shaping how this mélange of early modern exotica became scientifically cataloged, lexically divided, and eventually codified in law. But the networks and relationships that carried these substances around the globe did too. Drugs that were more readily counterfeited, easily mislabeled, or which originated in the theologically suspect realm of non-​European spiritual practice became subject to increased scrutiny. They still are.

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Notes 1 João Curvo Semedo, Memorial de Varios Simples (Lisbon, n.d. [1716?]), 1. This 34-​page octavo pamphlet appears to have been printed Lisbon in at least two editions between 1704 and 1716 and to have been frequently bound with later editions of Semedo’s longer work, the first edition of which was João Curvo Semedo, Polyanthea Medicinal. Noticias Galenicas e Chymicas (Lisbon: Miguel Deslandes, 1697). All copies of the third (1716) and fourth (1727) printings of Polyanthea that I have been able to consult contain the pamphlet as a tipped-​in addition. 2 João Curvo Semedo, Polyanthea Medicinal. Noticias Galenicas e Chymicas (Lisbon: Antonio Pedrozo Galram, 1727). All citations of Polyanthea that follow are of the 1727 printed edition. In this edition, Semedo cited Galen 254 times, Hippocrates 190 times, and Avicenna 84 times. The total number of marginal citations in the 1727 edition of Polyanthea is 2,054 by my count, although I do not claim complete accuracy. See note 21 below for more information on Polyanthea’s print history. 3 On the growing range of mutututu (Apodytes dimidiata), see John Eric Burrows and Christopher K. Willis, Plants of the Nyika Plateau: An Account of the Vegetation of the Nyika National Parks of Malawi and Zambia (Pretoria:  Southern African Botanical Diversity Network (SABONET), 2005), 183. 4 João Vigier, “Tratado das virtudes e descrições de diversas plantas e partes de animais do Brasil e das mais partes da América ou Índia Ocidental,” a pamphlet bound with Vigier’s Pharmacopea Ulyssiponense, Galenica e Chymica (Lisbon:  Pascoal de Sylva, 1716), 391–​402. 5 One notable exception is the work of Timothy Walker, especially his “Acquisition and Circulation of Medical Knowledge within the Early Modern Portuguese Colonial Empire,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–​1800, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Paula de Vos (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2009). Also notable is the late A. J. R. Russell-​Wood’s pioneering chapter on Portuguese biological and scientific networks in his A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia and America, 1415–​1808 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 5. 6 Although Semedo appears to have been quite well known in his own lifetime and in the decades after his death, he has not attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention, excepting José Pedro Sousa Dias, “Terapéutica química y polifarmacia en Portugal: La contribución de João Curvo Semedo (1635–​1719),” in Construyendo las Ciencias Químicas y Biológicas, ed. P.  A. Pastrana (Mexico City:  Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1998), 67–​88. This may be changing, however, with the recent work of Tania Souza Lourenço, “O Médico Entre a Tradição e a Inovação: João Curvo Semedo,” Master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2016; and Hugh Cagle, Assembling the Tropics:  Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450–​1700 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2018). On the legacy of Semedo’s cures in colonial Brazil, see Danielle Sanches de Almeida, “Entre lojas e boticas: O comércio de remédios entre o Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais (1750–​1808),” Master’s thesis, University of São Paulo, 2008. 7 Semedo, Memorial, 2.  On seventeenth-​ century Iberian roteiros, see Brian Jones, “Making the Ocean: Global Space, Sailor Practice, and Bureaucratic Archives in the Sixteenth-​Century Spanish Maritime Empire,” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2014. 8 Antonio Barrera-​Osorio’s Experiencing Nature:  The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX:  University of Texas Press, 2006), and Neil

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358 Benjamin Breen Safier’s Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2008)  similarly explore the asymmetrical relationship between Europeans seeking new knowledge and their colonial subjects. What makes the history of the tropical drug trade different is not only that it shifts scholarly emphasis from astronomy, cosmography, and mensuration to the life sciences and medicine, but that it connects not only indigenous informants and European natural philosophers, but also the consumers around the world who purchased and consumed experimental remedies. 9 On bezoars and their “oriental” and “occidental” variants, see Marcia Stephenson, “From Marvelous Antidote to the Poison of Idolatry:  The Transatlantic Role of Andean Bezoar Stones during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90: 1 (2010). 10 Semedo, Polyanthea (Lisbon, 1696), 239. 11 Ibid., 756. 12 João Curvo Semedo, “Manifesto que o Doutor Joam Curvo Semmedo, Medico, morado em Lisboa, faz aos amantes de saude, & attentos as suas consciencias,” a pamphlet apparently printed in Lisbon in 1706 and later bound with the 1718 edition of Semedo’s Observationes Aegritudinum feré incurabilium (Lisbon: Pascoal da Sylva, 1718). 13 José Díez de Medina, Declaracion de los verdaderos diez y siete secretos de Curvo, de la incertidumbre de los publicados por el Doctor Rivera (Madrid: Antonio Denferzan, 1735), 32. On Rivera, see Allen G.  Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate:  Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2001), 173–​174. 14 Curvo claimed to possess 16 distinct secret recipes, while also noting that his bezoartico recipe consisted of 16 individual ingredients or “simples.” The version printed in Medina’s Declaracion also contains 16 ingredients (see Figure 13.1). 15 On theriac and its history, see J. P. Griffin, “Venetian Treacle and the Foundation of Medicines Regulation,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 58, no.  3 (September 2004):  317–​325; and Giuseppe Olmi, “Farmacopea antica e medicina moderna:  la disputa sulla Teriaca nel Cinquecento bolognese,” Physis 19 (1977). Although the original formula for mithridatium promulgated by Galen contained “only” 41 ingredients, by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some apothecaries were blending literally hundreds of different substances into panaceas sold under the names of mithridate, mithridatium, or theriacum. 16 Semedo, “Manifesto,” 1 (“Morador a S.  Paulo defronte da Ribeira da Junta do Commercio”). For more on the Junto (known formally as the Junta da Companhia Geral do Commercio da Estado do Brazil), see Esteves Pereira, Portugal: Diccionario Historico, Biographico, Bibliographico (Lisbon, 1907), vol. 3, 1075. 17 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1980); Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Group Identity in the Renaissance World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18 Portuguese drug manuals can be remarkably obscure from a literary standpoint. One of Semedo’s peers, the Franco-​Portuguese apothecary João Vigier, quite unhelpfully described his métier as the study of “an infinite syncategorematical number of diverse entities.” Vigier, Pharmacopea Ulyssiponense (1727), “Prologo,” n.p. 19 See, for instance, Semedo’s references to experiments involving horses and the “transplantation” of diseases in Polyanthea, 78. 20 Junia Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 127–​151.

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 359 21 The first edition of the Polyanthea Medicinal was issued by the well-​known Lisbon printer Miguel Deslandes in 1697, and a second in 1704 by Antonio Pedroso Galram. A third “augmented” edition appeared in 1716, and a fourth in 1727, both printed by Galram. The 1704 edition was dedicated to the future Pope Innocent XIII, who was at that time resident in Lisbon as the papal nuncio to the king of Portugal. The other imprints are dedicated to Luis de Sousa, the archbishop of Lisbon and Portuguese Councillor of State, although by the third this has become a posthumous dedication (he died in 1701). In the first edition, Semedo is described simply as a “physician,” whereas by the second he is “physician to the royal family,” and by the fourth edition he is himself deceased, the reprint being seen into print by his son, the Rev. Ignacio Curvo Semmedo. Some (but not all) of the copies I  have consulted also include a separately printed folio page of “Advertencias” to the reader that complain of quacks “in Paris and in other lands who know some singular remedy and affix various papers in public roads,” but which then proceeds to list Semedo’s own remedies “which I prepare at my house.” The same notice (“Advertencias Dignas de Serem Sabidas”) was also bound with Semedo’s Latin treatise Observationes Aegritudinum. 22 Timothy Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment (London: Brill, 2005). 23 Harold Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 24 Semedo, Memorial, 1–​2. 25 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany:  Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 26 On the “transplantation” of domesticated animals, see Benjamin Breen, “ ‘The Elks Are Our Horses’: Animals and Domestication in the New France Borderlands,” The Journal of Early American History 3 (December 2013): 188–​205. 27 On natural knowledge across cultures, see Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire:  Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2004); Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World:  Go-​ Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). 28 On Dutch ambitions in the West Indies, see Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the ecological and commercial ambitions of the Dutch mercantile companies in the seventeenth-​ century, see Siegfried Huigen, Jan L.  De Jong, and Elmer Kolfin, eds., The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Brill, 2010); and Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange. 29 Charles Boxer described eighteenth-​century Portugal as “more priest ridden than any other country in the world with the possible exception of Tibet,” while Charles Withers writes of a Portuguese Enlightenment “characterized less by its nationals working without and more by foreign intellectuals acting within.” See Charles W.  J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment:  Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 2007), 36 and Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–​1825 (New  York:  Alfred A.  Knopf, 1969), 189. Lusophone historians of science and medicine have similarly portrayed the

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360 Benjamin Breen late-​seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century Portuguese world as spaces that the “new learning” flowed to rather than from. See, for instance, Joaquim de Carvalho, Jacob de Castro Sarmento et l’introduction des conceptions de Newton em Portugal (Lisbon, 1935); Ana Simões et al., “The Scientific Revolution in Eighteenth-​Century Portugal: The Role of the Estrangeirados,” Social Studies of Science 30, no.  4 (August 2000):  591–​ 619; and Rómulo de Carvalho, Portugal nas Philosophical Transactions no séculos XVII e XVIII (Coimbra: Tipografia Atlântida, 1956). In the Brazilian context, see Nancy Leys Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890–​1920 (New  York:  Science History Publications, 1976); and Simone Petraglia Kropf and Gilberto Hochman, “From the Beginnings:  Debates on the History of Science in Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (2011): 391–​408. 30 James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 31 Vigier, “Tratado das virtudes e descrições de diversas plantas e partes de animais do Brasil e das mais partes da América ou Índia Ocidental,” a pamphlet bound with Vigier’s Pharmacopea Ulyssiponense (1716), 391–​402. For quantitative evidence of the rising demand for “exotic” drugs in the seventeenth century, see Patrick Wallis, “Exotic Drugs and English Medicine: England’s Drug Trade, c. 1550–​c. 1800,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 1 (2012). 32 On the formation of drugs as a social and intellectual category, see David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1, and Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2019). Timothy Walker’s “The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World:  Dissemination of Plant Remedies and Healing Knowledge from Brazil, c. 1580–​1830,” in Mobilising Medicine: Trade & Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World, a special issue of The Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013), offers an excellent overview of the drug trade in an early modern Portuguese context. 33 These examples are taken from John Jacob Berlu’s The Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d (London:  John Harris, 1690). Despite the enormous range of items described as drugs in early modern usage, the underlying meaning of the word was tied up with the idea of medical utility:  as Rafael Bluteau put it in his Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino (Coimbra: Real College das Artas da Companhia de Jesu, 1713), vol. 3, 207, a droga was “any ingredient that enters into the composition of a medicament, or other similar thing.” The terms “simple” and “drug” were often used interchangeably in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century accounts; for instance, in the first edition (1755) of his Dictionary of the English Language Johnson defined “drug” as “an ingredient used in physick; a medicinal simple,” while he defined “simple” as “A single ingredient in a medicine: a drug.” Likewise, one of Bluteau’s definitions for the early modern Portuguese word simplez was “to mix one drug with another” [misturar hua droga cõ outra] (Bluteau, Vocabulario, vol. 7, 650). 34 This is a subjective list of the most popular early modern drugs, informed both by my own database of drugs mentioned in early modern medical texts and the quantitative work of the economic historian Patrick Wallis, particularly Wallis’s table of drugs imported to early modern London ranked by value in his “Exotic Drugs and English Medicine,” 38. 35 Just as Paracelsus wrote that “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison” (all medicines are poisonous depending on dosage), Sweet describes a West African epistemology of healing in which “Medicines and poisons are really one and the

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 361 same.” For instance, the same Fon word for powder (atin) can be translated as both “medicine” and as “poison.” See Sweet, Domingos Alvares, 124; and Paracelsus, Four Treatises, trans. and ed. Henry E. Sigerist (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 22. 36 My thinking here has been influenced by conversations with Ashley Cohen about the notion of a “global Indies” and the nebulous boundaries of the Indies in the eighteenth-​century British (and, I would argue, the Portuguese) imperial imagination. Ashley L. Cohen, “The Global Indies: Reading the Imaginative Geography of British Empire, 1763–​1871,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013. 37 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–​ 1900, 3rd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1987); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism:  Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–​1860 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lucille Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 38 On “pan-​tropical networks of circulation” and transplantation, see Paul S. Sutter, “The Tropics:  A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). “People from outside the region constructed the tropics in countless acts of consumption” that obscured the labor which produced tropical commodities, Sutter writes, encouraging the belief that “tropical commodities were the products of a fecund nature and could be had with little or no labor” (ibid., 185). 39 Alette Fleischer, “Exchanging Knowledge and Nature at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652–​1700,” in Huigen et al., eds., Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks. 40 As Stuart Schwartz documents, competition from new sugar plantations in the Dutch, French, and British West Indies fragmented the global sugar market and caused a period of economic instability in mid-​seventeenth-​century Brazil; Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society:  Bahia, 1550–​1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 41 Christopher Parsons and Kathleen S.  Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail:  Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-​Century French and British Atlantics,” Early American Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 503–​529. 42 Asad Beg of Kazwin, “Wikaya-​i Asad Beg” (1605), in The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, trans. and ed. Sir Henry Miers Elliot (London: Trübner and Company, 1875), 165–​166. 43 Ibid., 166. On debates over china root, see Anna Winterbottom, “Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica,” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 1(2015): 22–​44. 44 Jahangir, The Jahangirnama:  Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 217. 45 Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals (London:  Reaktion, 2004), 195. 46 Matthew P.  Romaniello, “Muscovy’s Extraordinary Ban on Tobacco,” in Tobacco in Russian History and Culture:  the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Matthew Romaniello (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 12–​15. 47 W.  H. Moreland, ed., Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 36; C. Eckford Luard, trans. and ed., Travels of Fray

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362 Benjamin Breen Sebastian Manrique, 1629–​43 (London:  Hakluyt Society, 1927), vol. 1, 380. B.  G. Gokhale attributes the initial introduction of tobacco to Portuguese merchants in “Tobacco in Seventeenth-​Century India,” Agricultural History 48, no.  4 (October 1974): 484–​492, although it is impossible to know with any certainty. 48 See, for instance, the claim that tobacco smoking is attested in India by the seventh century C E in Kalayya Krishnamurthy, Pioneers in Scientific Discoveries (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2002), 52. 49 Carol Benedict, Golden-​ Silk Smoke:  A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–​ 2010 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 50 Benjamin Breen, “Empires on Drugs: The Early Modern Drug Trade and the Anglo-​ Portuguese Alliance,” in Entangled Empires: The Anglo-​Iberian Atlantic, 1500–​1830, ed. Jorge Cañizares-​Esguerra (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 51 On pombeiros in the African interior, see Mariana Candido, An African Slaving Port in the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 3. 52 Semedo, Polyanthea, 15. 53 See Francisco de Sousa, Oriente Conquistado a Jesu Christo Pelos Padres de Companhia de Jesus (Lisbon, 1710), 835, which describes the Reyno da Butua as lying alongside the Zambeze and being “much known for its medicinal root.” 54 Semedo, Polyanthea, 16. Francisco Roballo Freyre was named fisico-​mor (Chief Physician) of India in 1646 and returned to Portugal to live in Coimbra, where he received his medical degree. We can assume that Semedo spoke with him about Indian medicines around this time. He is also mentioned in Semedo’s entry for Pedra de Cobra de Dio (Cobra Stone of Dio): the unfortunate doctor’s child, according to Semdeo, was killed by “a beast of such venemous quality, that in less than an hour the arm had been deformed” and it was necessary to amputate (Memorial, 9). 55 Semedo, Polyanthea, 15–​16. 56 Vigier, Pharmacopea Ulyssiponense (1716), “Prologo.” 57 Semedo, Memorial, 2. 58 Semedo, Polyanthea, 15. 59 Richard F. Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (London, 1876), vol. 2, 329. 60 Joaquim de Santa Rita, Academia dos humildes, e ignorantes (Lisbon, 1770), a compilation of writings from the 1750s and 1760s. Pedro F. Catarino Luís, “A Academia dos Humildes e Ignorantes (1758–​1770): as letras e as luzes para o homem comum,” Master’s thesis, University of Coimbra, 2009, discusses the historical context for these writings. 61 Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome, Opp. Nn. 17, “Collecção de varias receitas” (Rome, 1764). 62 Schiebinger, Plants and Empire; Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity:  Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 63 Semedo, Memorial, 29–​30. “[The Angolans] call it Minhaminha, because in the language of Angola ‘Minhaminha’ means ‘swallows’ for it swallows up the virtues of the other medicines.” 64 Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, F.R. 437 (microfilm), Francisco de Buytrago, “Arvore da Vida e Thesouro descuberto” (Lisbon, 1731). 65 Ibid., fol. 5r.

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Semedo’s sixteen secrets 363 66 Royal Society Archives, Journal Book of the Royal Society 3 (April 25, 1667): 70. For a fuller discussion, see Breen, “Empires on Drugs.” 67 Robert Tabor, Πυρετολογία, a Rational Account of the Cause and Cure of Agues; Whereunto Is Added a Short Account of the Cause and Cure of Feavers (London, 1672). Mendes claimed to have carried the remedy to England in 1661, as the personal physician of Catherine of Braganza. In 1936 a scholar named Augusto d’Esaguy noted that the drug “can be found in all Pharmacopoeiae published between the years 1681 and 1821” and speculated that Agua de Inglaterra was “the most widely prescribed drug of its time.” “Agua de Inglaterra,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 4 (1936): 404–​408. However, beyond mentions in the work of the historian of pharmacy, Jose Pedro Sousa Dias, the drug has attracted scant scholarly attention. 68 Harold J. Cook, “Markets and Cultures: Medical Specifics and the Reconfiguration of the Body in Early Modern Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (6th series) 21 (2011): 123–​145. 69 Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous:  Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 70 William Heberden, Antitherica, Essay on Mithridatium and Theriac (London, 1745). 71 Wallis, “Exotic Drugs and English Medicine,” table 1. Unfortunately, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake destroyed many of the parallel commercial records in Lisbon, so no direct correlate to Wallis’s economic work on the early modern drug trade is possible for Portugal. 72 Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Barbeiros, cirurgiões e médicos na Minas colonial,” Revista do Arquivo Publico Mineiro (2005): 92. 73 This claim is based on an apothecary’s workbook that survives in the Portuguese national archives, listing the drugs sent from the apothecary Manuel Ferreira de Castro to the Brazilian surgeon Antonio de Lima Gomes in 1738: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Lisbon, Portugal), Livros dos Feitos Findos no.  85, “Livro de Carregações de Productos de Botica de Manuel Ferreira de Castro.” 74 Nathaniel Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis (London, 1681), 385. Grew records that these were donated by Dr. Christopher Merrett and Sir Robert Southwell. 75 Antonio Vieira, Cartas do Padre Antonio Vieyra da Companhia de Jesus a Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo (Lisbon: Eugenio Augusto, 1827), 211–​212. 76 Gabriel Paquette, “Political Economy, Local Knowledge, and the Reform of the Portuguese Empire, c. 1750–​1810,” in L’économie politique et la sphère publique dans le débat des Lumières, ed. Jesús Astigarraga and Javier Usoz (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2013), 245–​258. 77 Jane M. Prosser and Lewis S. Nelson, “The Toxicology of Bath Salts: A Review of Synthetic Cathinones,” Journal of Medical Toxicology 8, no. 1 (2012): 33–​42.

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Epilogue Scientific networks reconsidered

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14  Following ghosts Skinning science in early modern Eurasia Carla Nappi

Movement makes things. Knowledge, objects, relations, experiences, agency:  all of these are made in motion, and in the encounters that movement makes possible. In a number of important ways, they do not pre-​exist their movement:  they emerge from movement and encounter. The spaces we are looking at are created by that movement. We know this. And we have seen it happening in the context of a number of the chapters in this volume. In Robert Morrison’s chapter, we see astronomical theory being made through encounter in the Veneto. Carol Pal and Marcelo Aranda illuminate different forms of networks  –​an “information factory,” an Ignatian Tree –​as loci of knowledge production. Elise Lipkowitz and Ivano dal Prete show us the power of things that moved –​here, letters –​to create and circulate knowledge, and to trace formal and informal networks of exchange and correspondence. Matthew Sargent, Benjamin Breen, and Londa Schiebinger demonstrate the creation and management of botanical and pharmaceutical knowledge –​sometimes successful, sometimes not. Lydia Barnett’s chapter shows the power of bones and stones to generate and sustain Transatlantic networks of communication, and to reveal gaps and asymmetries within them. In many of the wonderful essays collected in this volume, individual objects and agents serve as centers, conduits, and brokers managing the circulation of information and the production of knowledge. We often need to hold something stable, however temporarily, in order to tell these sorts of stories about movement and circulation: a node in a network, a space of encounter, a constant throughout circulation. However, I  want to offer a brief thinkpiece not on stability, but movement itself and its generative power. Movement makes things. This is a relatively uncontroversial claim. More controversial, perhaps, is the claim that things are made of movement. It is much more difficult to recenter our craft as historians on this second position and adopt it as historical practice. My own work seeks to bring questions from “process philosophy” (or something like it) into dialogue with the history of materials and materiality.1 What could archival or documentary work look like if we embraced the idea that historical objects do not pre-​exist our encounters with them? What happens if we do not presuppose the existence of objects and knowledge prior to our archival or documentary encounters? How could this change the appearance

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368 Carla Nappi of early modern science? How might we reframe our histories as histories of movement? I  can offer no answers, here. (Answers are less interesting than questions, anyway.) But what I can do is make space to dwell in these questions, if only for a little while. First things first: what happens if we don’t take the existence of objects and knowledge as stable, as already given, as existing prior to our archival encounters? Imagine with me that things are composed of movement. A  patch of skin on your hand, for example, becomes activated when it is set in motion and encounters other things. A breeze blows over it, your eye glances at it, you lick it to taste if it is salty, you use your hand to pick up a glass, you flex it, you plunge it into water and then dry it off: whether you are experiencing them in situ or reading about them or imagining them or watching them after the fact, these are the moments when the patch of skin on your hand becomes an active storied thing in the world.2 Imagine that, like the patch of skin on your hand, the objects of history are also processes, encounters, and loci of motion.3 Where would we look for moments and sources for a history of that patch of skin? We might look for traces of moments when that patch of skin was rendered into word, sound, image, or material, and make our archive from those traces. We would need to figure out where to look. And then how to look. (Neither of these is a simple matter.) We would need to limit our archive: how distant is too distant from that patch of skin, how many steps removed? Where would we stop looking? When does a document or object stop being relevant? All of these are questions that historians typically wrestle with:  this is normally a suite of issues that we have to contend with regardless of the stories that we are attempting to tell. The process becomes even more complicated, however, when what we are looking for is not a series of moments of representation or rendering of that patch of skin, but instead is a collection of moments of encounter. (And I don’t mean encounters between objects and entities: I mean looking for encounter as constitutive of the object. I don’t mean movements of objects and entities: I mean movement as constitutive of the object. Prepositions are important, here.) The skin then becomes a catalyst for encounter between ways of moving in the world (or, forms of movement): blowing (like a breeze), feeling cold, looking and being looked upon, tasting, being inside (water), being under (a towel).4 How would we constitute an archive of documentary traces of these forms of movement and of ephemeral comings-​together among them? If we understood that patch of skin to be a process or collection of processes –​not a stable thing at all –​and if we understood that skin to be constantly in motion –​ to be motion itself –​then what would an archive of that motion look like? How would we access it? What would a story about that patch of skin look like –​what kinds of work could it do? What kinds of stories about the world could we tell if we didn’t approach worlds as collections of stabilities (things, objects, states, stuff-​that-​can-​be-​labeled) but instead as collections of processes and events? How could this change how we trace histories of early modern science? By doing this, how might we begin to refashion what early modern history looks like?

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Following ghosts 369 I want to suggest here that it is possible to do this, and by doing this to reframe our histories of early modern science as histories of forms of movement. In creating a history of forms of movement, we need an archive that lets us identify those forms. And we can do that by identifying points (like our patch of skin) when different forms of movement meet. We create an archive out of those points, and that archive lets us use those moments of rupture to identify the relevant forms of movement and proceed to follow along with them. So, in short, it becomes a different kind of history that proceeds from a different way of producing an archive. And it opens up a way not just of thinking about, but also of practicing what it might look like to do a history of early modern movements.5 Let us say instead that it is a patch of skin on the hand of an eighteenth-​ century man. Perhaps the skin attached to a man who worked at the court of the Kangxi emperor during the Qing dynasty, and who read and wrote Manchu texts. Let us imagine what an archive of points of encounter (interruptions, hiatuses) between different forms of movement that engage and activate that skin might look like. For me, one place to locate those interruptions is in moments of tension in translation. So, we might ask:  how might eighteenth-​century skin have been translated? There was much interest in skin –​its generation, its decomposition, its role in simultaneously carving boundaries between self and world and allowing translations and movements across those boundaries. In the early eighteenth century, two French Jesuits (Joachim Bouvet and Dominique Parennin) at the court of the Kangxi emperor –​likely aided by their language tutors, and by the emperor himself –​translated ideas about skin (among other bodily structures and phenomena) from their Latin and French anatomical texts into the Manchu language and a Qing context.6 Their Dergici toktobuha Ge ti ciowan lu bithe –​or more simply put, Manchu Anatomy –​records these translations, especially in two major sections of the text that dealt directly with body covering: one on the covering of the head, and another on the covering of the belly and abdomen.7 This is not the place to go into this text and its discussions of skin in any detail. But, briefly put, the discourse on skin in this text has a common theme: movement and translation across insides and outsides, across boundaries and membranes, across surfaces and environments. If we treat the text itself as an archive of encounters forming a notion of skin, we can see a number of places where skin mediates relationships. The text discusses air bladders, blankets, jewelry, garments, and other objects made of fish, deer, antelope, cow, sheep, and other skins. It discusses specific kinds of skin that cover animal and human limbs, and infectious ailments: growths, boils, pustules, pox, sores, and calluses. It mentions skin-​related actions  –​flaying, molting, piercing, burning, rubbing, growing –​and associated objects and materials. Throughout this archive, we can see that relationships that both produce and are produced by skin are consistently a part of the discourse about body covering: relations among animal and human, normal and abnormal, instrument and goal, among others. The archive of skin is an archive of relations and encounters which define the object of study.

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370 Carla Nappi There are moments of tension in this archive. Rupture, interruption, and error –​of some sort of botched encounter or translation –​signify the contact of different forms of movement and being. These tensions can help us to identify and follow forms of movement. In the discourse of Manchu skin, there are multiple moments where something is unclear, where the text seems to reveal concerns with the reader’s understanding of what is being conveyed. These (potential) ruptures generate a need to translate or explain. At these moments, the discussion often invokes an analogy or comparative example. The text explains the genesis of human skin in terms of animal bodies: human skin is compared with the skin, feathers, and hair of birds and wild animals, while blistering from heat is compared to the molting of snakes. The discussion of skin formation also reflects the transformations of household materials (for example, by analogy to what happens to hot milk in cold air) and to other forms of birth, growth, and generation (including pregnancy and the concomitant changes in observable qualities of newborn and mother). Skin accomplishes similar work to clothing by protecting the wearer against hot and cold. Skin is also, occasionally, a kind of mind or brain: the language of cognition (intelligence, thought, and reason) is used to describe sensation in the layers of skin. In some of these cases, understanding skin entails drawing connections between anatomical and domestic modes of existence. Comprehending Manchu skin involves perceiving the body as a microcosm of the processes and material cultures of kitchen, household, garden, and field. In other cases, describing the work skin does  –​to protect, or to transmit sensation  –​requires drawing connections between the labor of the body covering and the labors of other parts of the body. In each case, the text attempts to translate something potentially jarring for the reader in terms of familiar movement –​working, coming into existence, being used, transforming. Moments of rupture then turn into moments of encounter. As the historians of the text, identifying analogies, euphemisms, and mistakes would be the first step, and creating a record the second. We might do this by looking at the documentary technologies that create likeness, including terms in Manchu like adali and grammatical technologies of comparison. In doing this we actually begin to transform the nature of our archive: instead of an archive of Manchu skin, it becomes an archive of likeness. Rather than trying to understand the history of skin as an object, we might study the technologies that activate skin as a site of encounter, such as discursive and documentary tools of likeness, and follow them to other sites. Once we understand this about skin, in other words, we can treat skin as a momentary concretion (or, a ghost) in a larger archive of likeness that strays well beyond just discussions of skin. This was an extremely abbreviated introduction to one example of what it might look like to write a history of an object as movement. Once the object itself has served as a tool for identifying movement, it drops out of the story, and/​or becomes an ephemeral center of gravity or a changing map of constraints. From here, we might use this archive to consider how kinds of likeness changed over time, or the connections between ways of being the same and other contemporary

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Following ghosts 371 social, cultural, scientific, or medical phenomena. We might take this archive of likeness, create a comparable archive of likeness connected with other aspects of the eighteenth-​century Manchu man we discussed above, and relate the two to tell a larger story. Whatever we do with this archive, it allows us to ask different kinds of questions and tell different sorts of stories than we might otherwise be able to. What I am advocating here is just as much a history of coming-​apart as it is a history of coming-​together. It is a history of processes and relationships that stem from rupture, error, and breaking. This is helpful to imagine, for me, as I  attempt to imagine what it could look like to write global history from here on out. Recent critiques have called the future of global history into question in the context of our contemporary moment, urging that historians rethink popular and lauded approaches to connected, networked histories with their “contacts” and “linkages” and suggesting a reorientation toward a history that equally emphasizes “separation, disintegration and fragility.”8 Many of the chapters in this volume begin to do just that. I share in the call for more histories of the ephemeral and the disintegrating; histories that move from stories about connection and wholeness and toward stories that grow from rot and ruins and broken things and acts of breaking. Perhaps our stories of empires and networks –​stories, that is, of objects at massive scales –​will increasingly give way to stories of gesture and process –​stories, in other words, of ephemeral objects made of movement that do not persist but instead resist. They will be stories written by following ghosts, attending to where they lead us, and then letting them pass on.

Notes 1 Along these lines, I  have found two particular works formative for how I  approach these issues: Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of Transindividuation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); and Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 2 Another time, we can think together about the connection between existence and storytelling, between being and being storied. 3 “Objects” here are broadly defined not as material stuff, but instead as that which we study, including “knowledge” and “information.” 4 Roughly speaking, “movement” for me is a way of existing in and attempting to understand and make knowledge about the world. It is not necessarily spatial. This is analogous to, but not the equivalent of, what Bruno Latour has recently called “Modes of Existence.” See Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) and the companion website http://​modesofexistence.org. 5 The title of this chapter, “Following Ghosts,” is a way to get at two aspects of what I’m suggesting here: “following” signals the project of critically considering “movement” in early modern scientific networks, and “ghosts” signals the ephemerality of what is emerging from these movements in early modernity. But, remember:  ghosts have power.

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372 Carla Nappi 6 Manchu texts (including those on anatomy, materia medica and drug use, medical treatments and conditions, and natural history) from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are full of terms for, and discussions of, the coverings of bodies. And in this sense, the Manchu Anatomy is representative of this archive. 7 Dergici toktobuha Ge ti ciowan lu bithe (Bibliothèque Nationale de France manuscript Mandchou 289). 8 See Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” Aeon (March 2, 2017), available at:  https://​aeon.co/​essays/​is-​global-​history-​still-​possible-​or-​has-​it-​had-​its-​moment (accessed March 15, 2017).

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15  Conceptualizing knowledge networks Agents and patterns of “flow” Rachel Midura

To most twenty-​first-​century humanists, the most familiar network is the social network. In both our research and day-​to-​day existence, we experience how individual relationships guide the exchange of powers, goods, and ideas. Individual interactions weave a complex web over time and space, providing long-​standing patterns that guide future agents in their decisions. Patronage, kinship, and trade networks provide a ready means of placing an individual within a greater social historical trajectory, and allow us a basis for connective and comparative history on an unprecedented scale. In short, network models have much to offer the humanist as both a narrative technique and analytical lens. Yet any semi-​autonomous existence of the network must be qualified by the knowledge that not all individuals, or interactions, are equal. From birth to maturity and death the network’s life cycle is bound by practices guiding interaction and structuring privilege and repression. Despite our frequent resort to water metaphors, there is no universal gravitational principle leading to equal “flow” across the network.1 Our closest approximation of historical networks remain structural models, which embody modern interpretation and struggle to overcome the lacunae of the historical record. “Spotting” the early modern network creates an illusory omniscience, much like evaluating early modern cartography using modern GPS. Why, then, use network models at all in history? The benefits are multifold, and well-​embodied by the chapters of this volume. First, as indicated, networks have a deep structuring effect on the twenty-​first-​century worldview. The recognition and problematizing of their application helps the ever-​tricky evaluation of foreign and familiar aspects of the past. Second, while perhaps uniquely important in our own day, networks were actively and consciously constructed, modified, questioned, and navigated by early modern actors. The very concept of “empire” signifies structured social, political, and cultural relations, all of which lay at the heart of rich contemporary debate. Third, network theory provides the basis for both the type of “connective” history enjoined by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and a wider interdisciplinary endeavor.2 In this, like the early modern actors who populate this volume, we face a new frontier demanding some of the old knowledge, some of the new, and plenty of inquiry and experimentation. STEM fields and the social sciences have provided

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374 Rachel Midura many quantitative methods for evaluating networks that can benefit from greater emphasis on traditional humanistic concerns, such as concern for preserving the role of individual agency and contingency, and the dynamism of structures over time. In return, historians can borrow new metrics and descriptors for interaction that benefit from trials and evidence from outside the archive. The models and metrics are new, but the questions are not; Carlo Ginzburg traces how historians from the Enlightenment have struggled with just such a conundrum of reconciling human “data” to structures. The solution appears to be a middle road, which recognizes, even embraces, the experimental quality of the research (or, as Ginzburg indicates, “the idea of historical research as inquiry (historia)”) balancing the intrinsic emic and applied etic. The act of historical “re-​enactment” creates an artificial model, but is lent authenticity by the historian’s deep, even empathetic understanding.3 The chapters in this volume demonstrate just such a balance, answering the question of what role the network plays in the development of human endeavors over time and space, and what role society, or even the individual, plays in the development of the network in turn.4 Finally, as I hope to illustrate here, network models offer a solution to one of the most pressing issues in early modern historiography: defining “knowledge.” From the early modern period onward, knowledge has been a collaborative project. Whether premising a single Truth or plurality of opinions, knowledge symbolizes the thorny path as much as the destination. Left with this ambiguous definition, we face similar questions to those of early modern knowledge-​makers: what are the units, actors, and measures of “knowledge”? How and why does it travel, and how is it transformed in the process? The network model offers us a means of relating origin to destination, much like a map. Yet this is not a straightforward itinerary:  the network represents a range of possibilities, including paths-​not-​ traveled, allowing us to glimpse the logic of the journey. Soon the spatial metaphor stretches thin, because the journey begins to guide itself. Recent research into networks in everything from physics to biochemistry demonstrates that networks actively structure change, from facilitating “flow” across connections, to possessing an organic life cycle of death and new growth: or, to put it another way, networks are, but networks also do.5 The challenge for humanists is therefore not merely to prove the existence of networks, the factors influencing their creation, but to demonstrate and evaluate their agency as structures. In this, network theory is uniquely capable of grappling with the bewildering diversity of individuals, texts, goods, and cultures that somehow compose “knowledge.” The chapters of this volume represent innovative reflections on the characteristics and applications of networks, particularly their adaptability for considering a number of forms of interaction –​social networks, but also material, semantic, and intellectual networks. The structuring components of networks, commonly referred to as “nodes” (also actors or vertices) and “edges” (also relations, ties, and arcs), have the virtue of representing many possible objects of historical inquiry; first, social networks composed of people and interpersonal relations, such as the national communities formed by language and common

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Conceptualizing knowledge networks 375 culture in Londa Schiebinger’s study of the Atlantic World medical complex. Second, material and spatial networks demonstrating the movement of goods across geography, such as Benjamin Breen’s consideration of pharmaceuticals traveling from Portugal, Angola, and Brazil. Third, semantic networks demonstrating the relationship of words and ideas to one another in a text, such as Robert Morrison’s consideration of the translation of homocentric astronomical theory, or across a corpus, such as Alex Statman’s analysis of the epistolary and text-​exchange of a small group of ex-​Jesuits and French philosophes. In approaching knowledge as guided, shaped, and even defined by networks of exchange, the authors are able to pursue similar questions across a staggering breadth of sources. However, as each of these works demonstrate, while the component parts might be part of a certain genre of objects, the overall professional network is informed by a sum of interactions that often defies easy categorization. Knowledge relies upon the transmission of ideas that may or may not be embodied in the people, objects, texts, or spaces that seek to convey them. And as several of the authors indicate, important asymmetry results from power differentials, the difficulties of transmission, deliberate intervention, and historical contingency. Given these highly contextual experiences, it can be difficult to put case studies of interaction in dialogue with one another, but once again, network theory offers several characteristics that hold true across models, and underlie many of the treatments here. First, we might consider the properties of individual edges within the network, which may carry both directionality and weight.6 In qualitative terms, all interactions are not made equal: they might be positive or negative, unilateral or multi-​directional, singular or repeated, influential or weak. Matthew Sargent finds a key difference between the “weak” connections formed by physician Nicolas Monardes, and the “strong” connections of Dutch Governor Hendrik van Rheede, who established long-​term collaborations. Meanwhile, Lydia Barnett finds different weighting at work in the interpretation of New World fossils; in this case, the creole attribute of the original informant rendered his interpretation less influential in spite of his more direct experience. Despite the potential strength of the connection, British scholars chose not to engage with some of their Atlantic counterparts. A  scientific network exists within human society, and that element may raise limitations as significant as those of technology and distance. Second, we might consider metrics related to the overall structure of a network, such as density (or cohesion) and cliques (or clusters). Density is a measurement of the number of links across the network, which relate to its stability and facilitation of information flow. Cliques represent segments of the networks that are more tightly knit in their connections to one another, and more limited in their connections to other components of the network. Work in fields such as archaeology and sociology demonstrate that these characteristics may relate to the overall stability of the network.7 The chapters in this volume demonstrate that similar structural effects may be seen in early modern intellectual networks. Take, for example, the dense network of Ivano Dal Prete’s naturalist and professor Antonio Vallisneri, whose

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376 Rachel Midura correspondence network served to filter and mediate outside knowledge, as well as disguise Vallisneri’s own heterodoxy among a chorus of voices. Frequent correspondence among a largely closed group of northern Italian naturalists created a particularly strong network. On the other hand, Elise Lipkowitz illustrates the effects of contingency upon network stability, as the correspondence network between England and France suffered a crucial decline in density due to the Napoleonic Wars. In this case, each nationality increasingly became its own self-​regulating clique, and each attempt at bridging the gap, as demonstrated by the vilification of Sir Joseph Banks, were rendered increasingly difficult. In fact, many network models, including the famous “small world” of Duncan Watts, suggest that information transmits faster through a network with a key equilibrium of density, in which certain nodes are able to exert disproportionate influence and achieve exponential change.8 We could perhaps interpret Marcelo Aranda’s Jesuits in just such a manner, where the crux of Rome meant that Athanasius Kircher was uniquely able to tie together the threads of a dispersed system, thereby more easily influencing the system as a whole. Not only could he collect information from around the known world, he could then assemble and transmit the baroque illustration to great effect. It is no coincidence that in describing the networks within this volume, historians are drawn to those commonly referred to as “ego networks,” defined by their construction around a single individual. A key tenet of historical network theory is that networks depend upon the actions of key networkers. These individuals frequently represent the perfect entry point for the historian of knowledge networks, as they seamlessly combine the emic and etic: individuals such as Athanasius Kircher or Antonio Vallisneri self-​consciously enacted their network. However, the majority of historical actors do not possess the gravity of these information magnates, and are more likely to constitute what data scientists like to refer to as “the long tail” –​namely, the vast majority of data points that individually represent little in the way of meaningful findings. Historians, like data scientists, are inclined to evaluate the anomalous, but the use of network theory can help to reintroduce the otherwise absent majority.9 The “center-​periphery” model of world system analysis runs throughout this volume, applicable at times, but viewed by these authors on the whole as in need of problematization, particularly due to the historical overemphasis of Europe as the “center” of early modern scientific knowledge.10 A network, by contrast, does not presume a single center, but rather allows for the measure of “centrality.” There can be many different forms of centrality, such as “degree” centrality, determined by the number of connections passing through a certain node, or “betweenness” (also “brokerage”) centrality determined by the likelihood of individual connection passing through a given node. While intellectual “outsiders,” in Carol Pal’s work, Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Jan Amos Comenius exerted just such key centrality. Their particular strength lay in their ability to aggregate information as a form of “information factory.” The occasionally grudging collaboration of certain authors seems to suggest contemporary recognition of their unique status as channels to a wider audience.

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Conceptualizing knowledge networks 377 However, significantly, Indian mediators occupy a similar centrality in Kapil Raj’s depiction of cartographical and linguistic knowledge collaboration in late-​eighteenth-​century India, not elevated in social status, or even the traditional historical narrative, but central nonetheless by virtue of their unique bridging capacity between British knowledge-​makers and the culture and terrain of their native India. In summary, the chapters of this volume demonstrate just how network theory might help to advance the cause of historical inquiry, particularly in broadening and recentering our understanding of early modern science. Yet the collaborators also shed important light on networks in turn, demonstrating how relative abstract metrics translate into human experience. Early modern scientific networks provided individuals with key opportunities and limitations within a greater knowledge structure. In order to truly reconstruct an early modern science, we must look to goods and people in addition to ideas, and the asymmetries of exchange that develop in empires. Each interaction, shaped as it was by mistranslations, spoiled goods, and strong personalities, played an important role in contributing to the shape of the network as a whole. That network in turn provided the conditions for exchange, information flow, and community growth.

Notes 1 See a similar critique of models of cultural influence by Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). 2 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories:  Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–​762. 3 Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory and World History,” in The Cambridge World History, ed. Jerry H.  Bentlet, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E.  Wiesner-​Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 446–​473. 4 For many further examples, see the excellent bibliography maintained by Marten Düring, “Bibliography,” Historical Network Research (January 27, 2013), available at: http://​historicalnetworkresearch.org/​resources/​bibliography. 5 See, for example, John F.  Padgett and Walter W.  Powell, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:  Princeton University Press, 2012); and Albert-​László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002). 6 I have based my definition of network properties on the dictionary provided as a part of Anna Collar et al., “Networks in Archaeology: Phenomena, Abstraction, Representation,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22, no. 1 (January 30, 2015): 1–​25. 7 Mark S.  Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Foundations of Social Capital (2003): 85–​105. 8 Duncan J.  Watts, Small Worlds:  The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 9 See L. F. Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings,” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2014): 661–​688. 10 Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, World-​Systems Analysis:  An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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16  Afterword Harold J. Cook

One of the most intriguing attributes of the collection of activities usually termed “science” is its apparent universality.1 Ideally, a formula expressed in common signs (such as mathematical symbols, chemical or molecular designations, standard weights and measures, etc.) would be comprehensible anywhere, and a complex construction such as a bridge could be represented in a set of blueprints composed in an urban center that would not fail when materialized on site. Whether one considers phenomena such as putting humans in space for prolonged periods, robotics or artificial intelligence, building skyscrapers or stealthy fighter-​bombers, practicing field ecology or clinical medicine, or examining the latest theories about the nature of dark matter or the Anthropocene, people from any geographical place, culture, language, gender, or national origin are (in principle) involved throughout the world, both competitively and collaboratively. When it comes to the shared ideals of science, personal difference is elided in favor of impersonal rules and truths. In other words, the natural sciences often appear to have a “value-​free” independence from human opinion, taking their cues not from history but from “nature.” Put another way, Gaia may be a living presence on earth, but it does not favor human beings over other life forms. Even in an age of post-​ truth politics that includes vicious and superstitious attacks on scientific knowledge, natural reality continues to do its work, whether we attend to it or not. Seen from outer space the blue earth hangs invitingly just out of reach, but the real world looks different from the ground. For decades, deeply held beliefs about the ideals of science have been examined and qualified by practitioners engaged with science, as well as historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and many others. Although the analysts have sometimes been accused of promulgating anti-​scientific views –​and even of not knowing their subjects –​they have mainly been trying to understand how the sausage gets made, which is a different business than demonstrating the value of the finished product. Among the most important interventions of recent years have been studies motivated by the methods of sociology and anthropology, which examine the emergence of scientific knowledge from complex face-​to-​face interactions among local communities of practitioners.2 And yet, one of the leading exponents of that approach, Steven Shapin, in reiterating that “science is undeniably made in specific sites,” also noted that the “localist thrust” of his work (among others) raised the question of

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Afterword 379 “how does it travel with what seems to be unique efficiency?”3 Or, as he and Adi Ophir wrote in 1991, “How is it, if knowledge is indeed local, that certain forms of it appear global in domain of application? Is the global –​or even the widely distributed –​character of, for example, much scientific and mathematical knowledge an illusion?”4 A powerful assumption answers that the phenomenon of traveling scientific knowledge is simply due to its correspondence to reality:  stones fall to earth everywhere because they are all subject to gravity. Once reality is described correctly, the truth of any proposition seems self-​evident, at least to those capable of understanding the language in which it is conveyed. Any problems about communicating scientific knowledge between places would therefore seem to lie merely in signaling the truth in ways that are as clear and precise as possible. Eliminate the noise and error in the signal, and voila, the message is received accurately. That process is often described as the “diffusion” of scientific ideas, where statements of truth simply move through space like molecules in a liquid (as long as they are not blocked), until they are present throughout the medium. Yet even in the 1960s, George Basalla, one of the chief advocates of classic diffusionist models, added a note of caution: In emphasizing the international nature of scientific inquiry we have forgotten that science exists in a local social setting. If that setting does not decisively mold the conceptual growth of science, it can at least affect the number and types of individuals who are free to participate in the internal development of science.5 For at least half a century, therefore, the question of how the “local social setting” of scientific practice and knowledge production interacts with processes of mobility has been an open question even among advocates of diffusionism. In fields of science studies, practitioners associated with what came to be called Actor Network Theory, whose best-​known advocate has been Bruno Latour, have often focused their attention on what moves to and from sites of knowledge production.6 From another line of inquiry, historians concerned with the period between about 1500 and 1800, the Republic of Letters has also been much studied, most recently supplemented by digital visualization tools such as Palladio, hosted at Stanford University.7 Hence, it was at Stanford that the conference was held that has resulted in the chapters in this volume, whose subtitle includes the phrase “scientific networks.” Attention to networks does not in itself resolve questions about the movements associated with scientific language and practices, however. The networks themselves are often imagined to be like telegraph or telephone lines, or gas pipelines, or the internet. But Bruno Latour once wrote that his idea of a network was, at times, not best put in terms of electrical pulses moving along wires but in terms of termites building extended galleries, outside of which “they cannot survive one minute.”8 The word of warning is apt. In exploring historical periods before the presence of electricity and pipelines, when a regular postal service linked

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380  Harold J. Cook only some of the major European cities, one needs to imagine a world in which the termite galleries were quite limited in extension, and often broken into by predators. Questions need to be asked about the intellectual, financial, and political resources that were being invested in the construction of a multitude of not always interconnected networks, whether the termite colonies living within them existed durably or only momentarily, and whether they engaged with one another diplomatically or militarily. Moreover, we need to note what boundaries needed to be crossed when the galleries were extended: geographical boundaries, surely, but also cultural, national, social, and even monetary ones could make mobility and circulation difficult despite the best of wills. Once we observe the early formation of networks, when the first steps might only be the making of single links in potential chains, many other questions arise. What was moving, or meant to move? People, surely. Perhaps also their ideas or concepts? Written or printed on paper or other media? In what language? Openly or encoded? (Letters sometimes noted that the bearer would have further things to communicate in person, for tout le monde knew that spies were everywhere; such situations also encouraged the use of cyphers as well as ingenious paper seals that if broken would reveal that the letter had been opened.9) Could words be supplemented or even replaced by symbols, or by pictorial representations using perspective drawing? Were the representations meant for simple visual inspection, or did they need to be accompanied by one or more rules or numerical scales in order to allow accurate sizing or transposition from, say, a map to a place on the ground? Was it possible, or even necessary, to send along specimens, either living or dead, such as examples of human material culture, or plants, or shells, or even animals? How could such things be put in motion, and within what protected galleries? Ships in service to the Dutch East India Company, or the Kingdom of France, or a private merchant’s launch, or an intercity carriage that shook and sometimes bruised its passengers for hours at a time (if they were not held up by highway robbery)? Did you have to trust the sender or recipient, or the intermediary? Did the sender pay for the transport, or did the recipient? Was trust between correspondents established only on the basis of a face-​to-​face meeting or could someone be added to a communication chain on the basis of a recommendation from someone already present in the network, or even enter as a stranger? Could titles or formal positions in public or private institutions substitute for personal trust? Or would allegiance to a common party or ideology, or simply old school ties, do the work of connecting people and places? Did social rank trump expertise in deciding truth claims? In other words, scientific ideas and practices are meant to examine important aspects of the real world and to stand up to scrutiny, but simply stating a proposition gives it neither veracity nor mobility. Making science mobile takes work, and work is process-​related, occurring in time. Examinations of the making of the networked galleries is therefore a work for historians. How do the ones present in this volume go about their business? The most common form of investigation attends to words and symbols on paper, and the shared interpretive processes that lie between author and reader. This

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Afterword 381 process might be called translatio, which moves things, status, or words from place to place. It seldom results in the same thing appearing on both sides of the act of moving, but a great deal can nevertheless be conveyed by the movement of signs and symbols, a process at work not only among the historical subjects themselves but between them and the historian. Marcelo Aranda’s study of the Ignatian Tree, Paula Findlen’s examination of the Republic of Letters, Iordan Avramov’s reading of the Oldenburg correspondence, and Elise Lipkowitz’s consideration of Anglo-​ French scientific communication after a period of warfare might all be said to be very thoughtful investigations of the process of translation. The related process of how texts might prompt creative understanding (or misunderstanding) rather than authentic translation is also worth comment. Alex Statman, for instance, finds that scholars in France looked to China to “articulate an alternative to the emerging view of progress,” deciding that out there, somewhere in the distant past, was “an advanced ancestor civilization spread throughout Eurasia.” Theirs was an imagined world of ideal, shared values, cherry-​picked from the writings of Jesuit missionaries in East Asia. Their tangential relationship to a robust long-​ distance network emerged only from reading printed words on paper, but it had effects nevertheless. In all these studies of translation, then, the active imagination of scholars and readers is always present, and sometimes more important to the recipients than the conveyance of accurate information. Another type of examination focuses on how material objects and descriptions of them became mobile. If enough effort was put into the finding and transportation of such objects they could be exchanged and handled in many places. If the work were done less well, the objects might turn out to be singular, or not transportable, or even deliberately made to misrepresent or counterfeit the materials of nature.10 Lydia Barnett, for example, shows how “the long-​distance exchange of news, ideas, and illustrations surrounding the bones and the stone forged connections across the Protestant Atlantic world even as it revealed divisions between local communities.” The communities who handled large ancient bones held “conflicting fantasies about what America had been in the past, and would, in the future, become,” and yet despite such differences they were linked by exchanges of things themselves. Matthew Sargent and Benjamin Breen find something similar in medical and pharmaceutical exchanges: a variety of cultural groups with their own ambitions and outlooks participated in “improvisational and disaggregated” networks (to use Breen’s phrase) that were built upon the collection and exchange of commercial items, such as drugs. On the basis of such material exchanges across many kinds of social and geographical borders Londa Schiebinger writes of the “mixing and melding” in the racialized and violent Atlantic World even as particular physicians “took unusual liberties with human bodies.” Here we have historians who consider the possibilities for “empires of things” to invoke impersonal kinds of agency, where personal intentions cannot always account for outcomes. A similar but distinct historical concern examines the transmission of particular “facts” or “concepts.” Such information units do not have material forms like bones or botanical substances, or even bodies, but they have stable forms

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382  Harold J. Cook of notation and utterance. In their making, facts and concepts are often laboriously excavated and constructed, but afterward they are recognizable entities that have a kind of consistent expression that allow them to be identified even when employed within larger discourses. One might think of them as similar to scientific instruments, which are built from the skill and (often elaborate) knowledge of the maker but which can be used by others who are ignorant of the thought that goes into them, allowing complex functions to be performed simply.11 Consequently, even though facts and concepts are immaterial, their particularities can be identified in documents, allowing chains of transmission to be inferred. The method of transmission is often necessarily face-​to-​face and oral, with brokers, intermediaries, multilingual and multicultural creoles, and other kinds of go-​betweens making the passages possible. On the basis of being able to recognize such, Robert Morrison’s account of Moses Galeano, who wrote in Arabic under the name Mūsā Jālīnūs, shows that he might have been a key go-​ between in transmitting scientific information between the Ottoman Empire and Venetian lands around 1500, perhaps being the connecting link between some key concepts present in Arabic astronomy and the writings of Copernicus. As Morrison says, in such cases there is “a complex interplay between individuals’ insights and networks of transmission,” but the hard work of exploring the connections between persons that made possible the transmissions of particular concepts certainly illuminates the methods of mobility. Finally, yet a different version of interpersonal interaction is evident in the essays of Carol Pal, Ivano Dal Prete, and Kapil Raj, all of whom stress personal attributes associated with shared social values. For Pal, Samuel Hartlib’s “intellectual brand” linked the “Baconian dream of reliable empirical knowledge of the natural world” with considerations of “how this knowledge fit with God’s plan.” Since others held similar values, the resulting “product of Hartlib’s information factory,” she argues, was a widespread “trust” in “the products that came branded ‘ex bibliotheca S.H.’ ” For his part, Dal Prete emphasizes the social and cultural diversity within eighteenth-​century Europe. When Antonio Vallisneri constructed his network in Italy, then, he had to work with all kinds of “indigenous mediators,” some of whom he held to be beneath him socially and others whom he held to be his scientific peers, but all of whom under his aegis produced “original knowledge.” That was possible because, Dal Prete argues, like other aspects of philosophy, natural history was a subject aimed at demonstrating one’s personal virtue, making it open to contributions from the “virtuous plebeian” as long as learned gentlemen like Vallisneri mediated. Raj in turn examines the activities of I’tesam ud-​Din, an agent of the British East India Company who was of Persian origin, a member of the Bengali literati, and clearly possessed of great diplomatic skill. But for Raj, too, ud-​Din is not so important as an individual as for what he represents about the “shared education, ideals, norms and canons of civility” of his social group. That group and the group of British gentlemen who came with the East India Company shared many norms as well. In other words, the study of shared values and interests allows the historian to explore what Raj calls “a continuum of relations, rather than building individual linkages.”12

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Afterword 383 Taken together, the case studies in this volume certainly illustrate the fundamental relationship between an increasingly networked world for conveying ideas and objects from place to place, across various kinds of borders. But there are some productive frictions as well, not simply in choice of approach and subject matter but in outlining the nature of science itself. Dal Prete, for instance, writes about “knowledge production,” of which natural history was a part. Such formulations can be noted in early-​twentieth-​century authors such as Alfred North Whitehead or Edwin Burtt, or Alexandre Koyré, who thought of science as rooted in natural philosophy or metaphysics, thus being best associated with the history of ideas. The powerful analyses of Michel Foucault famously probed the connections between knowledge and power, but continued to treat science as a subset of knowledge and episteme more generally. The famous “paradigm shifts” that indicate scientific revolutions in Thomas Kuhn’s work brought a kind of sociology of scientific communities into the picture but continued to treat science as a set of ideas. The project of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge was to explore the local social values, such as gentlemanly status, that determined how the validity of knowledge claims were decided. Dal Prete’s analysis is therefore in a long and distinguished line, looking for something to replace the claim that “status could guarantee the credibility of the observer,” finding it in “the practice of virtue.” The advantage of such an approach is in how it allows the historian to draw on what is known of the cultural values of actors and the groups in which they participate in order to situate science within the larger society of the moment. Some of the most exciting literature in the history and philosophy of science has been along such lines, seeing the tentacles of shared values touching many people at once, and Dal Prete’s study is an excellent example of it. Treating science as a subset of culture, however, runs the risk of not specifying what people thought was particular about the practices or claims of different kinds of knowledge. Schiebinger’s study takes a different tack, seeing the foundation of the study of the plant “bois fer” not in local social or cultural groupings but in violence and conflict. Knowledge of the plant was produced in a world of imperial violence, slavery, and disease. “Amerindians and enslaved Africans strategically held much knowledge secret from imperial colonists. For their part, Europeans often did not recognize some practices, such as spiritual aspects of a cure, as ‘knowledge’,” while they also frequently held their interlocutors in contempt, or cold-​bloodedly experimented on their bodies. There was not much social trust evident between the actors here. And yet, nevertheless, durable facts were excavated and inserted into networks that carried them from the Caribbean to Europe. Or perhaps the presence of the networks not only made the conveyance of scientific information possible, but stimulated its extraction in the first place? Physicians of European origin could seek private advantage by producing durable information units that could be shipped onward together with examples of the material objects and specimens to which they referred. A conversion of impersonal but regularizable phenomena into natural knowledge (with the aim of material “improvement”) was enabled by imperial formation even as the persons within were divided; this was certainly not the same kind of conversion as, say,

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384  Harold J. Cook a form of religious knowledge forced on unbelievers, which was going on at the same time. In other words, the study of networks is capacious, bringing together a variety of kinds of historical methods and aims. Some authors are more concerned with what was going on in the minds of their subjects, others with the possibilities for communication at a distance, still others with attending to the sometimes unexpected consequences arising from connectivity itself. Certainly it would be ridiculous to overlook what was happening in the conscious minds of those who, for at least a part of their lives, were engaged in investigating the workings of (material) nature. Subsequent translatio was never perfect but happened all the time despite differences. But equally, larger empires –​whether of things or persons, in Europe or anywhere else –​had real presences in multiple lives, deriving power not simply from information, ideas, and ideologies but from organizational methods, hardware, and infrastructures as well. Book history, for example, has shown how printers were dependent on the commercial, political, and institutional-​religious structures of their time. And yet, the quotidian processes of printing astrological almanacs or forms on which indulgences could be entered also provided an emergent set of methods from which great books could appear, too.13 Similarly, the Republic of Letters at first depended on sailors, merchants, and missionaries on the move, as well as diplomatic and business pouches, only later counting on the regular postal trunk lines established by diplomacy between powerful commercial cities. While communication by letter was not a method created by or for intellectuals, the participants in the Republic of Letters took advantage of the developing infrastructure to communicate innovatively about information, concepts, and values, both real and imagined.14 The flood of private letters being entered into the system once regular deliveries were enabled must in turn have encouraged further development and extension of the postal routes. If, therefore, one is not to fall back into the trap of thinking in terms of base and superstructure, with science simply becoming a set of eternal truths floating on top of material life, or the trap of considering all forms of knowledge and fakery to be the same, we need to continue to sharpen our historical tools. Explorations of what gets shared despite difference, as well as the co-​production of enabling possibilities and material constraints, without forgetting self-​conscious expression of means and aims, all require our attention. Not even the galleries of termites were built in a day. The fine historians brought together in this volume know that well, and are looking into fundamental processes. But as always, much remains to be done.

Notes 1 I will use the term science not as a clearly defined category but as a shorthand for a range of investigations, including but not limited to the subjects usually found in university natural science faculties as well as engineering and medicine.

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Afterword 385 2 For a helpful overview of late-​twentieth-​century developments, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3 Steven Shapin, “Here and Everywhere:  Sociology of Science Knowledge,” Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 306–​307. 4 Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 15. 5 George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156, no. 3775 (1967): 622. 6 For his recent thoughts, see Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence:  An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 7 http://​palladio.designhumanities.org/​#/​. 8 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 248. 9 www.livescience.com/​52871-​sealed-​17th-​century-​letters-​photos.html (accessed February 14, 2017). 10 For example, see Marco Beretta and Maria Conforti, eds., Fakes!?:  Hoaxes, Counterfeits, and Deception in Early Modern Science (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2014). 11 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 12 For a similar set of concerns, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 13 A recent example is Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 14 For example, Maarten Schneider, De Nederlandse Krant 1618–​ 1978:  Van “Nieuwstydinghe” tot Dagblad (Baarn: Het Weredvenster, 1979; 1st ed. 1943); Saskia Stegeman, Patronage and Services in the Republic of Letters: The Network of Theodorus Janssonius van Almeloveen (1657–​1712) (Amsterdam:  APA  –​Holland University Press, 2005).

386

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to tables and in italics to figures. For Arabic names, filing order ignores al-​. Abu al-​Fazl ibn Mubarak 283, 285 Academy of Mathematicians 63 Accademia dei Lincei see Lincean Academy Acosta, José 57, 60, 61–​63, 72 Actor-​Network Theory (ANT) 8, 273–​274, 299, 379 “Africanization” of food systems, Caribbean 318 Ahmet III, Sultan 27 Akbar, Mughal emperor 280, 350 Alam, Muzaffar 279 alchemy 128, 142, 261, 349 Aleni, Giulio 66–​67, 72, 89, 93 Aleppo 65, 66, 89 Alexander, Alexander J. 317–​318, 322–​327, 330, 334, 336 Alexander, James Edward 270 Algazi, Abraham 43, 44 Algonkian petroglyphs 235 Allacci, Leone 83 Almagest (Ptolemy) 28, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39 Alsted, Johann Heinrich 135 Alvares, Domingos 349 Amerindians: Claverack fossils and Taunton stone 235–​237, 239; linguistics 281; Mather and 231–​232; medical knowledge 319, 321, 325, 328, 330, 332, 334–​336, 351, 383 Amico, Giovanni Battista 26, 38, 40, 41 Amiot, Joseph-​Marie 246–​248, 251, 253–​254, 256, 260–​263 Anatoli, Jacob 32 Andel, Tinde van 340n78 Anderson, Alexander 325 Annales School 8, 9 Annual Letters (Society of Jesus) 60 ANT see Actor-​Network  Theory

Anville, Jean Baptiste d’ 286 Aristotle 31, 42 Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Kircher) 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 117, 118 Arzu’ see Siraj al-​Din ‘Ali Khan ‘Arzu 280 Asad Beg 350 Ashkenazi, Moses Kohen 43 Ashkenazi, Saul b. Moses ha-​Kohen 42 Asiatic Society of Bengal 278, 279, 280 astrology 28, 43, 61 astronomy: Acosta and 63; Bailly and 257–​259, 261; Calvius and 60; comets 61, 74–​77; eclipses 63, 64, 67, 68, 77, 81–​88, 92, 113; Galeano and 28–​33, 42–​44; geocentric 25, 29; heliocentric 25, 29, 74; homocentric 26–​27, 30, 32, 33–​42; Jesuits and 34–​35, 61, 63–​64, 67, 73–​78, 81, 82–​83, 92, 260; Ottoman Empire and Europe 25–​45 Aublet, Jean-​Baptiste-​Christophe Fusée 330, 331, 333 Averroes see Ibn Rushd Averroism 34, 42 Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) 342, 357n2 Bacon, Sir Francis 1–​4, 128–​130, 131, 135, 148n2; Intellectual Globe 3 Bailly, Jean-​Sylvain 247, 249, 256–​260, 261, 262–​263 Bajon, Bertrand 321, 326, 330, 336 Bancroft, Edward 325 Banks, Sir Joseph 9–​11, 205, 206, 207, 208, 286–​287; correspondence 209, 210–​218 Barberini, Francesco 80–​86, 88 Bardi Company 297 Barker, Peter 34

 387

Index 387 Barnes, Geraldine 176n27 Barrelier, Jacques 307 Barrère, Pierre 319 Barros, João de 77 Bartholin, Erasmus 169 Bartoli, Daniello 93–​94 Bartolocci, Giulio 40 Basalla, George 379 Bassi, Ferdinando 192 Bayezit II, Sultan 27 Bayly, Christopher 11 Beckman, Johann Christoph 166 Behringer, Wolfgang 6 Bell, David 206 Bengal province, India 269, 276, 277, 285–​286, 350 Benoist, Michel 248 Berthollet, Claude 213 Berti, Gasparo 83 Bertin, Henri-​Léonard 247, 250–​255, 256, 259, 260 Bhattacharya, Kashinath 278 Bihar province, India 269, 285 al-​Biṭrūjī 25, 30, 31, 32, 34 bibliometrics 12 Bignon, Jérôme-​Frédéric  250 Birch, Thomas 163 Blagden, Charles 207, 209–​210, 211–​213, 215–​217 Bland, Kalman 56n113 Bluteau, Rafael 360n33 bois fer 317–​318, 322–​333, 334; African origin hypothesis 324–​328; American origin hypothesis 328–​330; European origin hypothesis 328; Greater Atlantic origin hypothesis 331–​333 bois royale 323, 327 Boissier de la Croix de Sauvages, François 324 Bolca, Italy 192, 193 Bolivar, Gregorio de 80 Bombini, Paolo 82 Bono, Bernardino 184–​187, 192, 197 Borri, Cristoforo 74, 81–​82, 86, 87, 91, 94 Borromeo, Clelia Grillo 204n100 Borromeo, Federico 74 Boston News-​Letter 229 botany, medicinal 298, 300–​312 Boughton Rouse, Charles 285 Boulliau, Ismaël 127 Bourgeois, Nicolas-​Louis 332, 341n90 Bourguet, Louis 186, 188, 190, 193–​194, 235, 236–​239 Bouvet, Joachim 369

Boxer, Charles 359n29 Boyle, Sir Robert 15, 138, 162, 163, 167, 170, 171 Bréquigny, Louis-​George de 250, 257 Brahe, Tycho 63, 64, 77, 78 Braudel, Fernand 4, 6, 8 Brazil: colonization 347, 349, 350; Jesuit missionaries 57, 60, 111; trading 344 Breton, Raymond 328 Britain: Anglo-​French scientific communication 205–​218; Bourguet and 190; Claverack fossils and 227–​229, 232, 240; and India 269–​288; Protestant International and 238; Taunton stone and 232, 240 Brockey, Liam 106 Brodwin, Paul 318, 320 Brouncker, William 155n58 Browne, Sir Thomas 176n28 Bryant, Jacob 281 Burke, Peter 8 Burton, Sir Richard 273, 353 bussola 65–​66 Buytrago, Francisco de 353 Calcutta, Supreme Court of Judicature 277 Callon, Michel 273 Candia see Crete Canup, John 245n59 Cape Colony 350 Capsali, Elijah 27, 42 Capuano, Francesco 34 Capuchins 82, 84, 85, 86 Cardim, Fernão 57, 58, 60 Carey, Daniel 163 Caribbean, medical knowledge 318–​322, 330–​333, 336 Carletti, Francesco 113 Carney, Judith 318, 319 Cartesian Coordinate system 115 cartography, India 282–​287 Cassuto, Umberto 44 Castells, Manuel 11, 12 Castiglione, Baldassare 198 Catherine of Braganza 351 Catholicism 80, 93, 145, 193, 226, 238; see also Ignatian tree; Society of Jesus Cavalieri, Bonaventura 93 Cesi, Federico 69, 74, 77, 80, 81 Cestoni, Diacinto 190–​192, 197–​198 Chezaud, Aimé 89 Childrey, Joshua 167–​168 China 246–​263; civilization 258–​259; early culture 260–​262; Jesuit missions

388

388 Index 64, 67, 72–​74, 78, 89; language 258; origins 248; Qing dynasty 14, 247, 253, 261 Chinese medicine 72, 73 Chioniades, Gregory 25 Clavius, Christopher 60, 63–​64, 113, 114 Clossey, Luke 111 Clusius, Carolus 80 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 215 Codex Vyssegradensis 115 Coelestinus of St. Liduina (Petrus Golius) 307 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 299 Coimbra, Jesuit college 58, 64, 81 Colonna, Fabio 69, 78 Comenius, Jan Amos 127, 131, 134–​135, 137, 146–​147 comets 61, 74–​77 Commelin, Jan 311, 312 Comtino, Mordechai 28 Condorcet, Marquis de 249, 257, 258 Confucianism 258 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith 81 Constantinople 26, 165 Conti, Antonio 188 Cook, Captain James 9, 10 Cook, Francis 57 Cook, Harold 345, 354 Copernicus, Nicholas 25–​27, 29–​30, 39, 41, 42, 43 Court de Gébelin, Antoine 246, 247, 248–​251, 254–​256, 258 court physicians 27 Crete (Candia) 35, 36, 42–​43 Curtin, Philip 317 Curtz, Albert 77 al-​Daftarī, ‘Abd al-​Salām see al-​Yahūdī, Ilyās ibn Ibrāhīm dal Pozzo, Cassiano 85 Dalrymple, Alexander 284, 286 Dancer, Thomas 325–​326, 333, 339n55 Danforth, John 235 de la Rue, Gervais 205 de Ursis, Sabatino 64, 66, 72 Debes, Lucas 169, 170 Delabarre, Edmund 233, 244n44 Delbourgo, James 11 della Valle, Pietro 80–​81 Delmedigo, Elijah 35–​36, 41, 42, 43 Descourtilz, Michel 330, 333 di Bono, Mario 41, 42 Dias, Manuel 74

diffusionism 288n6, 379 Dighton Rock/​Dighton Writing Rock see Taunton stone diluvialism 193, 194, 196, 227, 230–​232, 236, 262 Dioscorides 345 Dircks, Henry 144 Dolomieu, Déodat de 209 Donati, Vitaliano 193 Donep, Christiaan Herman van 310, 311 double-​circle devices, astronomical 38–​39, 40, 41 Dow, Alexander 275 Dudley, Joseph 229, 230 Dupré, Sven 11 Dury, John 127, 131, 134, 135–​142, 145, 148, 153n45 Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) (VOC) 5, 84, 297, 299–​300, 303, 308–​309, 313–​313 Dutch East Indies 355 Dutch West India Company (WIC) 5, 347 Dutch West Indies 350 East India Company 269, 271–​273, 276–​277 East Indies 75, 76, 77, 164, 284, 351, 355 Easter 111, 113 eclipses 63, 64, 67, 68, 77, 81–​88, 92, 113 education, female 138–​139 Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia 136 Emeneau, Murray B. 291n39 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 131 Enju, Hosayn 271 The Enlightenment 226, 246–​251, 253, 256–​258, 261, 263, 347 Esaguy, Augusto d’ 363n67 Eudoxus 54n90 Faber, Johan 69, 72–​73, 78, 80 al-​Fājī, Eliyahu 31, 33 Fantasti, Girolamo Cesare 189 al-​Farghānī 31 Farhang-​e Jahangiri 271 Fehr, Johann 170–​171 Finch, Sir John 165 Findlen, Paula 108 First Opium War 351 Flood, biblical see diluvialism flow of knowledge, patterns 373–​381 fossils 192–​196; Claverack 225–​232, 240; Italy 182 Foucault, Michel 383 Fourcroy, Antoine 213, 214

 389

Index 389 Fracastoro, Girolamo 26, 39 France: Anglo-​French scientific relations 205–​218; Capuchins 82, 84, 85, 86; Enlightenment 246–​251, 253, 256–​258, 261, 263 Frank, Zephyr 108 French Guiana 330 French Revolution 205–​206, 207, 209, 217–​218 Friedrich, Markus 106 Fugger, Ernst 72 Fugger, Johann Jakob 42 Fugger, Ulrich 42 Fugger family 42–​44 Furtado, Júnia Ferreira 345, 355 Galeano, Moses (Mūsā Jālīnūs) 26–​33, 39–​44 Galen 342, 345, 357n2 Galenic medicine 327 Galileo Galilei 65–​66, 69, 73–​75, 77–​78, 81–​82 Games, Alison 8 Garelli, Pio Nicolò 188 Gassendi, Pierre 82, 83–​85, 87, 88, 89, 92 Generali, Dario 184 geocentric astronomy 25, 29 George III, King of Britain 206, 212, 269 Gersonides 29, 31–​33, 54n94 Gilbert, William 89 Gingerich, Owen 25 Gingras, Yves 12 Ginzburg, Carlo 374 Glanvill, Joseph 164, 171–​174 Goa 58, 66, 67, 72, 75, 81, 286 Góngora, Carlos de Sigüenza y 109 Gool, Jacob van 306 Gorman, Michael John 116 Grainger, James 319 Greaves, John 89 Greenwood, Isaac 240–​241 Grenada, West Indies 317, 322, 326–​327, 330, 333 Grew, Nathaniel 231, 355 Grienberger, Christoph 64, 84, 87, 93 Grimm, Hermann 313 Groot Desseyn (“Grand Design”) 347 Guignes, Joseph de 248 Hamilton, Francis 312 Harris, Steven 65, 106, 298 Hartlib, Samuel 126–​148; Ephemerides 126, 130–​131, 132–​133 Hastings, Warren 277

Heberden, William 354 Hebrew texts 27–​32, 36, 37–​38, 42, 44 heliocentric astronomy 25, 29, 74 Helmont, Jan van 345–​346 Heney, Thomas 320 Henshaw, Thomas 168–​169, 170, 171, 173 Hensius 170 Hernández, Francisco 69, 71, 78, 80 Hevelius, Johannes 162, 170–​171, 173 Hillary, William 324 Hinduism 278–​280 Hippocrates 342, 345, 357n2 Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Monardes) 300 homocentric astronomy 26–​27, 30, 32, 33–​42 Hongwu, Prince 253, 260, 261 Hooke, Robert 175n15 Horoscopium Catholicum Societatis Iesus see Ignatian Tree Hortus Malabaricus (The Garden of Malabar) (Van Rheede) 310, 311–​312 Hotson, Howard 151n21 hourglass (horivolo con polvere) 81 Hume, John 324, 327 Hunt, Lynn 5 Hunt, Thomas 269 Hunter, Michael 163 Hyde, Edward, Lord Cornbury 230 Hyde, Thomas 15 Hyperborean people 257, 259 Ibn Aflah￱, Jābir 32 Ibn al-​Shāṭir, ‘Alā ’al-​Dīn 25, 29–​31, 41, 44, 45 Ibn Nah￱mias, Joseph 29–​34, 36–​42 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 32, 36, 42 Ibn Sīnā see Avicenna Ignatian Tree 106–​119; as baroque visualization 114–​115; as mathematical instrument 111, 113–​114; revision 115–​119; tree imagery 114–​115 Ignatius of Loyola 58–​59 Inchofer, Melchior 83 India: English cartography 269–​287; Jesuit missions 60, 64, 66, 68, 74, 111; indigenous surveying skills 286; local literati 275 Indian Ocean, trade networks 272–​273 Infelise, Mario 5 Ingoli, Francesco 81 Ingolstadt, Germany 77 Isfahani, Mir Muhammad Hussain 278

390

390 Index Istanbul 27, 44 Italy: Barberini and 80–​86, 88; condizione civile 183; Delmedigo and 35–​36, 41, 42, 43; Jewish communities 35; language 183; naturalists 181–​198; Peiresc and 7, 82–​88, 92, 127; postal network 7; Riccioli and 92 I’tesam ud-​Din, Mirza Shaikh 269–​271, 275, 278 Jackson, William 172 Jacob ben Immanuel (Bonet da Lattes) 27–​28 Jahangir (son of Akbar) 350 Japan 14, 60, 61, 63, 93, 111 Jiang Fan 262 Jones, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh 138 Jones, William 269, 271, 272, 276–​282, 287 Jungius, Joachim 143 Jurin, James 240 Kalonymus b. Kalonymus 42 Kepler, Johannes 77–​78, 94 al-​Khayr, Isaac ben Samuel Abū 31–​32, 33 Kircher, Athanasius: Ars magna lucis et umbrae 106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 117, 118; on China 248; Jesuit network 87–​94; and Peiresc 83–​87; on Schreck 73; table of magnetic declination 90; see also Ignatian Tree Kirwitzer, Wenceslas Pantaleon 74–​77, 89 Kogut, Bruce 314n4 Koran 280, 281 Kusukawa, Sachiko 11 La Croze, Mathurin Veyssière 234–​235, 237–​241 Lana Terzi, Francesco 184 land bridge theory 235–​236 Langermann, Tzvi 28, 30 Laplace, Pierre-​Simon  213 Latour, Bruno 8, 9, 11, 299, 302, 371n4, 379 “learned commerce” (commercium litterarium) 7 Leblond, Gaspard Michel 211 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 184, 186, 187 Leghorn, Italy 187, 190–​191 Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried 94, 188, 246 Lelková, Iva 108 Levy, Evonne 120n10 Ligon, Richard 341n90

Lincean Academy (Accademia dei Lincei) 69–​82; Mexican Treasury 69, 71, 73, 78, 80 linguistics 269–​288; as imperial political theory 276–​282 Lisbon, Portugal 60, 64, 75, 343, 344, 352–​353, 356 Lister, Martin 187, 191 literacy 193 Lobo, Jeronimo 354 La Loge des Neuf Soeurs 249 Love, Harold 128, 150n15 Lunéville, Treaty of 219n9 Macao 60, 67–​69, 72, 73, 113 Macedo, Duarte Ribeiro de 355 Madam, Although My Former Freedom (pamphlet) 139, 141 Maffei, Scipione 183, 192–​194 Magini, Giovanni Antonio 64, 67, 78, 93 Mai (Omai) 9–​11 Malpighi, Marcello 184 Manchu 14, 253, 261 Mannevillette, Jean-​Baptiste-​Nicolas-​ Denis d’Après de 286 Manrique, Sebastian 350 Mao Huijian 253 Marāgha Observatory, Iran 25, 29, 30 Markovits, Claude 289n20 Martini, Bartolomeo 194–​195 Martini, Martino 87–​89, 91, 94 mathematics 60, 63–​64, 69, 74–​78, 82–​84, 87, 260 Mather, Cotton 225, 226–​235, 239, 240–​241 Matteo di San Giuseppe, Father 303–​307 Mayhew, Robert 12 Méchain, André 213 Medical and Philosophical Commentaries 322 medicine as career 183–​184 Medina, José Diez de 344 Mehmet the Conqueror, Sultan 27 Mercator 4 Mercure Suisse 235 Mercury 83 Merret, Christopher 169 Mersenne, Father Marin 87, 89, 134, 138, 145 Metacom 231 Mexican Treasury 69, 71, 73, 78, 80 Michael I, tsar of Russia 350 Micheli, Pier Antonio 194 microscopy 184–​188, 192 Miller, Peter 6 Mills, Kenneth 120n10

 391

Index 391 Mizrah￱i, Elijah 27, 28, 32–​33 Molina, Michelle 111 Molyneux, Thomas 229, 230 Monardes, Nicolás 300–​302 Le Moniteur 206, 215 Monte Baldo 193, 194 Monti, Maria Teresa 188 Moore, Dorothy 138–​142 Moravian Brethren 134 Moray, Sir Robert 167 Morieux, Renaud 218n4 Morris, Amy 231 Moseley, Benjamin 325, 326 Mount Etna 84, 88 Mughal Empire 14, 116, 269, 271, 276, 279–​280, 283 Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan 283 Münster, Sebastian 28 Murad IV, Sultan 350 Mūsā Jālīnūs see Galeano, Moses Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris 307 al-​Muhtadī, ‘Abd al-​Salām see al-​Yahūdī, Ilyās ibn Ibrāhīm Nadir Shah 276 Nagasaki, Japan 67, 68, 93 Napoléon Bonaparte 206, 212, 214, 216 Napoleonic Wars 206, 210 Nappi, Carla 12–​13 National Library of Portugal 353 Native Americans see Amerindians natural magic 114 Naudé, Gabriel 83, 84 nephelim 227, 228, 230–​232 Nestorian stele 235 Netherlands 299, 347; see also Dutch East India Company network theory 8, 11–​13, 273–​274, 373–​377, 379 Neugebauer, Otto 25 New Almagest (Riccioli) 92–​93 New Atlantis (Bacon) 1–​4, 129–​130 New Spain 60, 111, 118 New World: Jesuits in 111, 238; link to Old World 225; medicinal botany 73, 300–​302, 317, 318, 344; Protestants and 239 Newburgh, Sir John 168 Newman, William 157n87 Newton, Isaac 11, 14, 186, 188, 240, 281 Newtonianism 240, 275, 276 Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio 78, 80

Office of Address 136 Ogborn, Miles 5 Oldenburg, Henry 15, 127, 145, 148, 161, 355; The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg 163–​174 Omai see Mai Ophir, Adi 379 opium 284, 350–​351, 356 oral transmission 40, 235, 382 orientalism 246, 269, 273 Orissa province, India 269, 285 Orta, Garcia da 72, 313 Ottoman Empire 25–​45, 116, 382; Galeano and 26–​34, 39–​44 Padua 27, 32, 42 Padua, University of 26–​27, 30, 33–​42, 44, 196, 198 Pal, Carol 181 Pansophia (universal knowledge) (Comenius) 135, 136, 137, 146–​147 Pantoja, Diego de 89 Paquette, Gabriel 356 Parennin, Dominique 369 Paris Academy of Sciences 67, 94 Parry, William, Sir Joseph Banks with Omai, the Otaheitan Chief, and Doctor Daniel Charles Solander 9–​11 Pasha, Yacub 27 Passeron, Irène 222n49 Peace of Amiens 205–​207, 209–​218 Pearl, Jason 163 Peiresc, Nicolas-​Claude Fabri de 7, 82–​88, 92, 127 Pell, John 136, 137–​138 Penman, Leigh 150n11 Persia 271, 275, 276, 279–​280 Peru 61, 63 Petiver, James 228 Peurbach, Georg 34 Philip II, King of Spain 57 Philip IV, King of Spain 81 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 35, 36, 42, 43 plantation complexes 317 Plato 129, 257 Plot, Robert 170 Polanco, Juan de 58 Pope Alexander VI 27 Pope Urban VIII 87 Popkin, Richard 151n22 Port-​à-​Piment, Haiti  321 Portugal 81, 113, 272

392

392 Index Portuguese Empire 13–​14, 57, 64, 67, 110–​111, 273, 302; pharmaceutical networks 342–​356 postal networks 6–​7, 72, 379, 384 Postel, Guillaume 25 Pouppé-​Desportes, Jean-​Baptiste-​René 319, 328–​330, 333–​334 Principe, Lawrence 157n87 printing 26, 150n12, 310, 384 prisca scientia (ancient knowledge) 246, 247, 261, 263 Protestant International 238–​240 Ptolemy 29, 31–​34, 36, 38, 39, 52n67, 67 Purchas, Samuel 57 Qabbalah 43 Qing dynasty, China 14, 247, 253, 261 Quier, John 322 Qushjī, ‘Alī 25 Ragep, F. J. 25, 47n11 Raj, Kapil 11, 181, 197 Ramlochan 279 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 59 Ray, John 143 Recchi, Nardo Antonio 69 reciprocation mechanism, astronomical 34, 35, 37, 39, 53n75 Redi, Francesco 190, 198 Regiomontanus 25, 34–​35, 37–​38 Regulating Act 1773 277 Renaissance Europe 25–​45; Galeano and 26–​34, 39–​44 Renaudot, Théophraste 154n51 Rennell, James 276, 283–​287 The Restoration 134 Reuchlin, Johann 28 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 238 Rheede, Hendrik Adriaan van 303–​304, 306–​313 Rho, Giacomo 74 Riccardi, Niccolò 86 Ricci, Matteo 64, 69 Riccioli, Giambattista 67, 81, 92–​94, 95 The Right Teaching of Useful Knowledg (pamphlet) 126 Rivera, Suárez de 344 Roberts, Lissa 11 Roberts, Victor 50n35 Roe, Sir Thomas 136 Roman College 63–​64, 82, 87, 88, 89, 92 Rome: Ignatian Tree and 106, 113, 118; Society of Jesus 58, 59, 72, 80–​81, 83–​85, 87–​89, 94

Rosomoff, Richard 318, 319 Rotari, Sebastiano 195, 196 Roy, William 287 Royal Society 161–​174; Claverack fossils and 225–​232; Histories 163; origins of 94, 134; Philosophical Transactions 161, 163, 165, 170–​174, 228, 229, 233–​235, 240; Taunton stone and 232–​241 Royal Society Classified Papers 19 163 Ruan Yuan 260 Rubens, Peter Paul, Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume 70 Rubino, Giovanni Antonio 64–​65, 66, 67–​69, 74–​75 Rudolphine Tables 77, 78 Rumford, Count 210, 212–​213 Rumphius, Georgius Everhardus 313 Sagredo, Gianfrancesco 65–​66, 72, 74, 94 Saliba, George 25 Sánchez, Father Alonso 61 Sanskrit language 278–​279 Santa Cruz, Alonso de 113 Sarpi, Paolo 65 Schaffer, Simon 11, 12, 197 Schall von Bell, Johann Adam 74 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob 235 Schiavonetti, Niccolo 208 Schreck, Johann 69–​74, 77–​80, 89 Schreckenfuchs, Oswald 28 Schwartz, Stuart 361n40 Séguier, François 193–​194 Semedo, João Curvo 342–​356; Memorial de Varios Simplices 346, 348, 352; Polyanthea Medicinal 342–​343, 345–​346, 351–​353; Secretos Curvianos 343 Sephardic community, Leghorn 191 Seven Years War 269, 277, 283 Seville, Spain 60, 300, 301 Shah Alam I 283 Shah Alam II 269 Shank, Michael 34 Shannon, Richard 319, 332–​333 Shapin, Steven 197, 378–​379 Shen Fuzong, Michael 15 al-​Shīrāzī, Quṭb al-​Din  29 Shujing (Classic of Documents) 261 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de 109, 118 Siraj al-​Din ‘Ali Khan ‘Arzu 280 Siraj-​ud-​Daula, Nawab of Bengal 276 Siyiguan (Translation Bureau) 261–​262 Siyiguan kao (Investigations of the Translation Bureau) 261 Sloane, Hans 228, 229–​230, 319

 393

Index 393 Snell, George 126–​127 Société Appolonienne (later Musée de Paris) 249 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 238 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 238 Society of Jesus 57–​96, 112; Annual Letters 60; archives 82; astronomy 34–​35, 61, 63–​64, 67, 73–​78, 81, 82–​83, 92, 260; centennial 109; Constitutions 58; expulsion from Spain 26; importance of friendship 70; increase in 58; Jubilee 80; and natural world 61–​69; and Ottoman Empire 28; overseas missions 58–​60, 64, 67, 72–​74, 78, 89; papal court 27; scientific knowledge 57–​96; suppression of 247 Solander, Daniel 9–​11 Soncino, Gerson 28 Spain: expulsions from 26, 31; and Portugal 347; relaciones geográficas 109, 114, 119 Spanish Americas 60, 80, 82, 111, 297 Spanish Empire 110 Spinola, Carlo 93 Sprat, Thomas 163 St. Ignatius of Loyola 106, 109 Starkey, George 142–​143 Stele of Yu 246, 251–​256 Stelluti, Francesco 80–​81 Sterpin, John 170 Suarez, Francisco 58 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 2, 373 Sutherland, Suzanne 108 Sutter, Paul S. 361n38 Sweet, James 349 Swerdlow, Noel 25, 34, 37, 40, 46n7 Syen, Arnold 310–​311 Taba’tabai, Ghulam Hussain Khan 278 Talbor, Robert 354 Tangut language 234, 235, 236, 237 Ta’rikh-​i Nadiri 278 tarot cards 246–​247, 254–​256 Taunton stone (Dighton Rock/​Dighton Writing Rock) 225–​226, 232–​241 tea 351 telescopes 68–​69, 74, 78, 83–​84, 86, 108, 269 ten Rhijne, Wilhelm 310, 311 Terrall, Mary 203n96 Thirty Years War 15, 110 Thistlewood, Thomas 327 Thomason, George 148n3

Thomson, James 322, 324, 325, 333 Tihon, Anne 51n57 tobacco 319, 350–​351 Tordesillas, Treaty of 113 Traitorous Correspondence Act 209, 210 Trapham, Thomas 325 Tree of Jesse 115 Trigault, Nicolas 69, 70, 73, 74, 75 Trivellato, Francesca 8 tropical medicine 72, 343, 355 Tufte, Edward 115 al-​T￴ūsī, Naṣīr al-​Dīn 25, 29, 38, 42 Unacaze people 115 al-​‘Urdī, Mu’ayyad al-​Dīn 25, 29, 38, 42 Valignano, Alessandro 60 Vallisneri, Antonio 182–​198, 376; History of Generation 184, 187–​188; History of the African Chameleon 191; On Marine Petrifications Found on Mountains 195 Velasco, Juan López de 113 Veneto 26–​27, 29, 39, 42 Venice, Italy 6, 35, 42, 64, 66, 190–​191 Venice, Republic of 26, 65 Venkata II, Emperor 64 Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) see Dutch East India Company Vernatti, Sir Philiberto 164 Vieira, Antonio de 355 Vigier, João 342, 349, 352, 358n18 Vijayanagara empire, India 64 Villa, John 240 Vitelleschi, Muzio 85–​86, 88, 114 VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) see Dutch East India Company Vogel, Martin 165 Voltaire 246, 248, 249 Vosberg, Gelmer 303–​304 Walker, James 319 Walker, Timothy 345, 357n5 Waller, Richard 228, 229, 233–​234 Wallis, Patrick 355, 360n34 Wampanoag people 235 Wang Chang 252–​254, 260, 261 War of the Cambrai 27 Watts, Duncan 12, 376 Wautier, Michaelina, Portrait of Martino Martini 91 Webster, Charles 157n91 West Indies, medical knowledge 317–​336; African hypothesis 324–​328; American hypothesis 328–​330; European

394

394 Index hypothesis 328; Greater Atlantic hypothesis 331–​333 Westman, Robert 43, 46n8 WIC see Dutch West India Company Williamson, John 319, 322 Winterbottom, Thomas 324, 327–​328, 331–​332 Withers, Charles 359n29 women 133, 134, 138–​139, 197, 279, 321, 325 Woodward, John 227–​229 Worthington, John 156n82 Wremann, Jan 67, 89 Wright, William 325, 326, 327, 328 Xavier, Francis 58, 60, 61 Ximenes, Francisco 80

al-​Yahūdī, Ilyās ibn Ibrāhīm (‘Abd al-​Salām al-​Muhtadī /​‘Abd al-​Salām al-​Daftarī) 27 yaws (Treponema pallidum pertenue) 322–​329, 331–​333 Yijing (Classic of Changes) 259 Yongle Emperor, China 262 Young, J. T. 142 Yu the Great 251–​256 Zacut, Abraham 29 Zander, Udo 314n4 Zannichelli, Girolamo 184, 188 Zanoni, Giacomo 305, 306–​307 Zaragoza, José 118 Zaragoza, Treaty of 113