New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery

by Grafton, April Shelford (Primary Contributor), Nancy Siraisi (Primary Contributor)

Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. What Anthony Grafton recounts is a war of ideas fought by mariners, scientists, publishers, and rulers over a period of 150 years. In colorful vignettes, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional notions of the world beyond Europe.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, European History, History Of Science, World History, Geography

296 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between 1550 and 1650, Europeans came into contact with a new world for which they were ill prepared by ancient texts. Encountering a temperate instead of torrid zone, the Jesuit Jose de Acosta laughs at Aristotle's characterization (p.1) "In 1492, all educated Europeans knew where knowledge lay. It was contained in authoritative texts, the Bible, the philosophical, historical and literary works of the Greeks and Romans, and a few modern works of unusually high authority." (p.2) The learned men of Medieval Europe were people of "the book". The practical men of the Renaissance went beyond this book knowledge to the experiential. By the mid-17th C, ancient texts became less central to European intellectual life. The world itself was expanding, as new lands were discovered. The 17th C also witnessed the rise of vernacular prose. In the encounter with new lands and new peoples, inconvenient facts burst the bounds of ancient texts and experience replaced book learning as the primary source of knowledge.

Yet the ancient texts maintained their vitality well into the new era. Revisionists have pointed to the persistence of old ideas amidst the discovery of the new. Tilting his hat toward the revisionist position, Grafton points to contradictions and tensions within texts and seeks to portray a complicated and nuanced picture of the encounter of new worlds by cultures steeped in ancient texts. Making no pretense of presenting a narrative of the native peoples, this is a story about Europeans. It is about how they interpreted and re-interpreted their texts in light of the new empiricism. Grafton seeks to show the power of these texts and the contest over their meaning.

"All Coherence Gone" (Chapter 3)

Focusing on the Cosmographia by Thomas Muenster as a "diagnostic tool for cultural analysis." In this Renaissance encyclopedia, Muenster attempted to catalog all of the knowledge of the world. It mixes elements of Enlightenment skepticism with credulity seeming reminiscent of the Medieval scholar. Replete with internal contradictions, Muenster (for instance) drew maps of an American continent distinct from Asia and then proceeded to describe the inhabitants of that new continent as Indians. "Denouncing the tellers of tall tales about monstrous races," he then recounted the tales in great detail. "The book merges a compendium of rigorous and up to date information with a panoply of fabulous stories and popular errors. " (p.102) He portrayed a "zodiac's worth of fantastic monsters as well as neat constellations accurately plotted and recorded." Having translated Ptolemy's Geography, Muenster relied upon the concepts presented therein and extended rather than refuted this ancient text. His analytic structure was timeless, despite the new evidence piling up in front of him. New races of people portrayed in classical Roman poses.

Ancient Authorities and Modern Questions

Copernicus and Vesalius faced the same challenges, extending the frameworks of ancient knowledge (Aristotle and Galen) to include knew empirically-based knowledge. Vesalius, in particular, tried to hold onto anatomical concepts from Galen until it was absolutely impossible to hold them alongside new empirically-derived ideas. Neither Copernicus nor Vesalius was an intellectual radical. "Both Copernicus and Vesalius expected that their innovations could coexist with - and even rest on - the very structures we now see them as attacking." (p. 115) The traditional frameworks of thought were as necessary to the Europeans as they were to the natives. In the welter of new information, the ancient constructs provided conceptual frameworks in which to cast new information. The sense that emerges of trying to make sense of it all is best captured by the image of the book wheel, used in the mid-16th century as a device to examine multiple books at the same time, comparing and contrasting authorities. The shock of the new sent European intellectual life into "confusion and decay." (p. 120)

The Crisis and Its Causes

Search for universal legal principles, as witnessed in the contest between Baudouin and Bodin, took on new life as scholars of the Roman Law became ethnographers in search of universally applicable truths. The bounds of ancient knowledge could not contain new knowledge. Bodin concluded that ancient Europeans had lived a savage life. It was his contact with the fruits of real exploration that allowed this re--conceptualization to take place. Europe too, had lived through its savage age. Mercator, in drawing his new world maps, asserted that Ptolemy was simply wrong. Instead of building on Ptolemy, Mercator consigned him to the dustbin of history (p. 126).

Fielding the New World

Hispanic historians first to describe the new world. In the debate between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan GInes de Sepulvida, we see the canon used to good effect by both sides. Sepulvida drew on Aristotle to justify the treatment of the barbarian races of the new world. Las Casas drew on a wide variety of classic texts within the Aristotelian tradition to show that barbarism was a relative term. Perhaps, he asked, were the Europeans not barbarians compared to the Incas and Aztecs? They often drew on the same texts to prove opposite points.

Las Casas was one of several important mendicant scholars who studied the world of the Incas and Aztecs and wrote detailed histories in which they imposed Western form on native history. Bernardino de Sahagun's work provides illustration of this process. Spending tremendous effort in research in the field, learning native languages, conducting interviews, Sahagun's narrative reveals his traditional orientation as a "man of the book" by imposing categories such as "moral philosophy" and "theology" onto a culture where these concepts were meaningless. (p. 145) Through the very act of capturing in writing an ever changing oral tradition, Sahagun did violence to the culture he was trying to catalog. Writing a History of New Spain, Sahagun sought to provide them with their own canonical text. It is a-historical to criticize these mendicants for this though, since the valuable work they did in cataloguing the native culture was inspired by the same habits of thought that marred the results (p. 147).

Ancient Solutions and Their Virtues

Using the Bible to situate the native populations in the flow of world history. The natives were cast as descendants of the ancient Israelites. (p. 149) The Europeans of the 16th and 17th C labored to make the classics fit with the Bible as well, seeking a unified interpretive whole. Trapped within the interpretive framework of ancient texts, critics of the texts' authority often deployed the texts themselves in the pursuit of discrediting them. Social critics like Montaigne in his On Cannibals, criticized the Europeans for being worse than cannibals, who merely ate their victims.

Epilogue - Grafton returns to the metaphor of the cannon and tool chest.

[Carlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book hinges on a premise that I’m not sure is widely held, that the “discovery” of the new world abruptly changed the intellectual course of the old world. Grafton then seeks to show how Europeans easily, but erroneously, fit the new discoveries into their revival of ancient texts, i.e., reading the new “Indians” as either Atlanteans or members of the lost tribes of Israel. He then goes on to show how it was the same forces that lead to the rediscovery of the ancients that lead to the dethronement of texts in general in favor or empirical research. Overall the book was a curious history of the evolution of European thought between 1450 and 1650, with the incidental occurrence of the discovery of the Americas.

[Özer Y. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The information about the discoveries which happened before the scholastic age around the world is very limited. The author doesn't have enough knowledge about the Byzantine and Asia worlds. i.o. He mentioned the trusted to worth maps only started to construct in the 15th century. First remarkable maps are already drawn in the 7th century during the Muslim civilization movements.

[Haley Durfee]

not your standard narrative of history


(little content note for multiple prints of woodcuts and engravings featuring violence and nudity)

[Recai Bookreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was some kind of surprise for me, since I don't have the necessary basic knowledge about medieval ages for correctly assessing the contribution of this book to the relevant literature, but just rough ideas and some event<->date associations. For that reason, the new information was intriguing for me and I took my bit of trivia stuff from the book, like the origin of the name Peru, general scientific knowledge (fantasies, indeed) of "scientists" then, how Indian people and culture was received in Europe and briefly how the European beliefs and culture crushed the existing ones in America. But I felt that Grafton doesn't succeed in getting hold of (proving) his arguments actually. He is trying to demonstrate the stages of transformation in the ways of mankind "think". In fact, he shows this transformation by citing the books written at those times but he fails (or, doesn't actually bother?) to explain why this transformation happened.

But it was fun for me anyway and I give it 4/5.

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While in some places the language and interpretation seem a little dated, in general this book was a very convincing survey of how Europeans in the early modern period grappled with their rapidly expanding worldview in light of their traditions. The focus is the relationship between new texts and classical tests. The strongest attribute of this book is that it does a deep dive into dozens of authors - describing their literary career and major points, how they were received, and including both excerpts and illustrations.

[Shalee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had a good message. very redundant. Learned a few things :)