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Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Perspectives on Science,

The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in ªelds such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientiªc Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difªcult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of "modernity." The roots of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians ªrst created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese and the Spanish conªdently saw themselves as the ªrst "moderns," superseding the ancients. The English