Download - New Worlds, Ancient Texts
Gra$on, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradi8on
and the Shock of Discovery. With April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1992.
Context of producJon
v 1492: Quincentenary commemoraJon of the Conquest of America. v Anthony Gra0on: Andrew Mellon Professor of History at Princeton
University and a Renaissance scholar. v The New York Public Library: Organize an exhibiJon and write a book
using it archives on sixteenth and seventeenth century European thought.
v Objec@ve of the book: To “…trace the transforming effects of the
voyages of exploraJon upon European scholarship, learning, and culture from 1450 to 1700.” (“Foreword” vii)
Waldseemüller's 1507 Map of the World.
IntroducJon
Ø 1550-‐1650: “Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.” (1)
ü “Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid
Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise.” José de Acosta. Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590).
Ø “The age of a system of thought became a sign not of authority but of
obsolescence, and many of those who insisted on the aestheJc superiority of classical literature admieed the substanJve supremacy of modern science.” (5)
Ø “The discoveries gradually stripped the books of their aura of
completeness as repositories of informaJon and their appearance of uJlity as tool for interpretaJon.” (5)
New Knowledge, Established System of Thought
IntroducJon
Ø “…John Ellioe, Giuliano Gliozzi, and Michael Ryan have argued that in fact the discoveries had very liele impact on European thought.” (6)
Ø “This is a story of Europeans, told from a European point of view.
We seek to understand the experiences and visions of European intellectuals and explorers, not to recover the ways in which the peoples they conquered understood the West –much less what suffering those people certainly endured or what benefits they possibly drew from the encounters.” (7)
Ø “In the case of relaJons between the West and the Rest, these polemics have had a powerful tendency to sterilize thought and research.” (9)
A Story of Europeans
Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. Ibero-‐Amerikanisches InsJtut, Staatliche Museen zu Ber l in. B i ldarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
Chapter 1. A Bound World: The Scholar’s Cosmos
“But all them [books] embodied the assumpJon that a basically complete and accurate body of knowledge already existed.” (13) “The tradiJonal arts and sciences appear as finished, perfect enJJes that invite study rather than improvement.” (16) “Many books, prints, and painJngs defined learning as reading…” (22)
Learning as reading
Humanism Vs. (ScholasJcs) UniversiJes
Humanists: “these men founded schools where young men and a few young women could gain access not to the formal, regulated, licensed skills of the university theologians and doctors but the more general, moral and literary lesson of the ancient Greeks and Romans.” (29) “By the late 1490s, Europe had not one but two canons, each of which served a parJcular set of purposes, gave access to a parJcular set of occupaJons, and had its own powerful defenders.” (29)
1500’
Chapter 1. A Bound World: The Scholar’s Cosmos
“By the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, in short, the world of the book was not coherent but chaoJc, not solid but riven; and the fissures represented not only the quarrels of individuals who disagreed on specific points of detail but also fundamental debates about intellectual standards and knowledge itself.” (35)
The ChaoJc World of the Book
1620-‐1630
Barsta Agnese's 1544 world map
Chapter 2. Navigators and Conquerors: The Universe of the PracJcal Man
“A$er all, the world of cra$ and trade, not that of books, produced the forces that really revoluJonized the European and then the enJre world.” (61)
Columbus and Vespucci reporJng the discovery
“As Columbus observed and reported on the New World, he naturally turned to his reading –and extended it-‐ as he looked for a framework in which to insert what he saw. SomeJmes the confronta@on between eye and text refuted the books; he found none of the monstrosiJes, he announced in his first leeer, that many had expected to exist in the far places of the world.” (77, 79)
Carlo Verardi. “De insulis nuper in Mari Indico reperJs [and] de insulis nuper invenJs” [1494]
Chapter 2. Navigators and Conquerors: The Universe of the PracJcal Man
Vespucci: A Man of the Book
“…Vespucci proved to be a man of the book. His own achievements as a sailor did nothing to merit the naming of the Americas a$er him. But the brilliant pamphlets that circulated about his adventures in the West made him the reputa@on that his voyaging could not. Even more vividly than Columbus, the texts aeributed to Vespucci reveal the weight and impact of tradiJons.” (83)
“Columbus Discovering America”, plate 2 from Nova Reperta New Discoveries, engraved by Theodor Galle (1571-‐1633) c.1600. By (a$er) Straet, Jan van der (Giovanni Stradano) (1523-‐1605).
“As reports proliferated, so did interpretaJons, and tradiJons o f l e a r n i n g a n d n e w experiences intersected. The canon underwent new stresses and performed new services as s cho l a r s i n Eu rope and elsewhere tried to fit masses of difficult data to the inherited shapes of learning.” (93)
Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone
SebasJan Münster. Cosmographia (1550)
“Like Ptolemy’s map of the world, on which it was based, Münter’s made no effort to assert European superiority or power by its ordering of the data. The center of the map lay not in ChrisJan territory but near Mecca, Europe sJll appeared as a spit of land of the west of Asia, and was now dwarfed by Africa as well. But the convenJons also imprisoned him. He could portray the inhabitants of the New World only as naked Europeans, their naughty bits aestheJcally concealed by draped cloths, or as cannibals energeJcally sawing another human into loin chops. He could imagine strange races only in terms of the ancient opposiJons between gentleness, nudity, and the Golden Age and savagery, monstrosity, and murder.” (107-‐111)
“A map of Asia from Münster’s 1542 Basel ediJon of Ptolemy’s Geography. The mpnstruos races occupy the map’s edges, cannibals, who had always according to legend inhabited Scythia, are shown top center.” (104)
Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone
“The discovery of the non-‐European world and the discovery that the ancients were not wiser than the moderns seem indissolubly linked (…) Surely the discovery of real savages in a real wilderness inspired the drama and pathos of his vision of Ancient Europeans living a savage life…” (126) “The intellectuals of the Hispanic world were of course the first ones to confront the necessity of describing and explaining new socieJes, flora, and fauna. But their problem was not simply an intellectual one (…) From the first, church and government worried about the vast human cost of the new system and tried to regulate it.” (132)
A Brief Account of the Destruc8on of the Indies, by Bartolome de las Casas (Italian translaJon, 1643).
The PercepJon of Ancient and non-‐European, by Modern
Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone
“Individual ancient texts and theories proved surprisingly resilient, yielding soluJons to agonizing historical, ethical, and religious problems. The discovery of human beings in the Americas, a$er all, posed a hard quesJon to scholars who believed that the world had a seamless and coherent history: were did they come from? Neither the Greeks, the Romans, nor the Jews had known of their existence. How, then, could Greco-‐Roman and Hebrew texts be complete and authoritaJve? (148-‐149) “The authority of ancient texts –of books themselves-‐ was clearly shaken. But their own proliferaJon and combat did more of the damage than their conflict with an extratextual world of inexplicable data (…) The discoveries provided a clinching piece of evidence to those who wished to argue for a new vision of history, for the superiority of modern to ancient culture.” (157)
“[E]xtratextual world of inexplicable data”
Benito Arias Montano. An8quitatum iudaicarum libri ix (Leiden, 1593) (150).
Chapter 4. Drugs and Diseases: New World Biology and Old World Learning
PLANTS: “… Nicolas Monardes, the Spanish physician who authored Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde (1577), judged the discovery of America far more valuable for its plants than for its mineral wealth because health was ulJmately more precious than riches.” (162) TOBACCO: “In a pithy couplet he [Joshua Sylvester] grasps how, in tobacco’s transportaJon from one cultural context to another, it passed from use to abuse, a paeern that would be repeated as other nonnaJve drugs came to Europe: ‘For, what to them [the naJve Americans] is Meat and Med’cinable, / Is turned to us a Plague intolerable.’” (176) DISEASES: “…the effects of contact on the health of the peoples of the Old World and the New were far more devastaJng for the laeer, with uncounted deaths resulJng from conquest, forced labor, and epidemics of diseases brought Europe.” (179)
Chapter 5. A New World of Learning
“Both the New World and ancient texts played key roles in Bacon’s dramas of scien@fic discovery, but their parts contrasted as radically as those of HoraJo and Iago. From the start, he took the discovery of the New World by Europeans as the model for all intelligent efforts to obtain new knowledge. The Jtle page of the Great Instaura8on [Instaura8o magna] shows a ship sailing past classical columns that represent the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient limits of naviga@on and knowledge. The scene deliberately reuses – and subverts-‐ tradiJonal images and values. The emperor Charles V had taken the pillars as his symbol, glossing them with the cauJous humanist moeo Ne plus ultra, “Do not go too far.” Bacon kept the pillars but sent his ship past them and lopped a vital word from the accompanying LaJn tag. Plus ultra, he urged his readers: “Too far is not enough.” Discovery, not reading, has become the central mode of obtaining important knowledge.” (198)
“Across Europe, intellectuals moved into new habitats. In courts and ciJes from Prague to Copenhagen, monarchs, scienJsts, and amateurs were studying in an environment as remarkable for its lack of books as the tradiJonal scholar’s study had been defined by their presence. Variously called the museum, the cabinet of curiosiJes, the Kunst-‐und Wunderkammer, the new locale was furnished not with texts but with exactly the sort of natural objects that Bacon had demanded that scholars study.” (217)
Discovery, Reading and Knowledge
Chapter 5. A New World of Learning
“The a$erlife of the ancients certainly did not end in the mid-‐seventeenth century. The educaJon of European aristocrats and state officials conJnued to be classical for centuries to come. The ancient text conJnued to be read, translated, and admired, to provide the model genres for ambiJous modern writers: epic, history, tragedy. And belief in progress would not become universal in the West for a very long Jme, not even in the Enlightenment would it find universal assent.” (248)
“Rhetorically, the New World had replaced the ancient texts. It had become the prime metaphor for the right way to discover new facts about the world and the prime source for new theories about human society.” (252)
New World Vs. Ancient Texts
Personal Conclusions and Discussion