Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700. By Jennifer M. Rampling. Synthesis. Edited by Carin Berkowitz et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+408. $35.00 (cloth); $34.99 (e-book).Ralph BauerRalph BauerUniversity of Maryland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 96, Number 1March 2024 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728533 Views: 1Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

García (CSIC) and Fermín del Pino (CSIC), who have extensively worked on Francisco Hernández and José de Acosta’s texts, respectively. By exploring early modern naturalists and missionary nature writing, Caraccioli wants to debunk the widespread misconception that portrays the Spanish empire as a largely marginal feature of modernity. Other historians, notably Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2006) and Irene Silverblatt (2004), have largely insisted on the colonial Iberian roots of Western modernity. However, what modernity means here remains a mystery. How does early modern globalization—what Serge Gruzinski defined as désenclavement planétaire (Paris, 2004)—fit into this imperial legacy?Was this Iberian modernity of the same kind of the Enlightened modernity? I would clearly say no, but when Caraccioli poses that the metanarrative of Scientific Revolution has to do with matters of faith as much as politics, he refers to the writings of Spanish naturalists and missionaries, notably Acosta, as contributing to the Enlightened, capitalist, and industrialized modernity. In my opinion, this book would have benefitted from the reading of the influential Arndt Brendecke’s The empirical empire: Spanish colonial rule and the politics of knowledge (De Gruyter, 2016), which analyzes the relationship between the use of knowledge and colonial domination on the basis of two fundamental premises: on the one hand, that the expansion of European colonialism favored the culture of modern empirical knowledge; and on the other, that the organization and concentration of this same knowledge was indispensable to consolidate the practices of domination and administration that Spain and Portugal put into practice from the sixteenth century onward. Finally, upon unraveling the historiographical prejudice that considers Spain as the opposite side of the Anglo-Saxon, German and French modernity, Caraccioli ironically prioritizes scholarship in English rather than in Spanish, which is shocking in the cases of Fernández de Oviedo and José de Acosta. In addition, this book draws a line of continuity that makes nature not just the setting, as he claims, but the means through which imperial projects developed from the sixteenth century onwards. However, in doing so, he falls into another (Eurocentric) fallacy, which is to make the Enlightenment into the goal of universal history to which all mankind must attain. The problem lies not in neglecting the history of Amerindian peoples who suffered colonial oppression but other forms of historical consciousness. As Caraccioli remarks, Iberian imperialism should be included into a broader conception ofWestern modernity: one that, let us not forget, is based on economic liberalism.

While there has been much scholarly emphasis on the importance of letrados in the early modern Iberian empires, Stuart McManus argues that a culture of orality in general, and the classical rhetorical tradition in particular, was an equally significant factor not only in furthering ideological coherence but also in giving agency to both Iberian and Iberianized non-European orators when navigating the structures of imperial power (p. 3). In developing this argument, McManus adopts what he calls a “meta-geographical” perspective as well as a comparative and “polycentric approach,” focusing on places under the formal political control of Iberian monarchies (such as the Americas), allied states and protectorates (like Genoa and Tuscany), and the Portuguese commercial zones and missionary fields in Africa as well as South and East Asia (pp. 8, 11).Chapter 1 places the humanist rebirth of the classical oratorical tradition during the Renaissance in the context of sixteenth-century European expansionism by focusing on the career of the polymath Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, who emigrated from Spain to Mexico around 1550 to become one of the most important champions of the humanist rhetorical tradition in New Spain. He was able to build on a long Indigenous tradition of oratorical culture nurtured in the pre-Columbian Mexica calmécac, academies for educating the male offspring of the Nahua elite. After the fall of the Mexica empire to the Spanish invaders and their Indigenous allies, this culture was harnessed by the Christian missionaries for their evangelizing efforts, especially by the Franciscans under the leadership of the famous missionary ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún and his Indigenous collaborators, who recorded many Mexica oral traditions in book 6 of the Florentine Codex.Chapter 2 surveys an expansive archive of funeral orations commemorating Philip IV from the Americas, the Iberian Peninsula, Iberian Asia, North Africa, Spanish Italy, and the Spanish Netherlands. Belonging to a subgenre of epideictic oratory—in which the subject is assigned praise or blame—these funeral orations articulated what McManus calls a “virtue politics,” a neo-Stoic and anti-Machiavellian philosophy of “good government” that emphasized the importance of “constancy” in the face of challenges and misfortunes, of which there was no shortage for the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy during the reign of Philip IV. Thus humanist orators such as Justus Lipsius argued that misfortunes provided the monarch with an opportunity to demonstrate the Stoic virtues that distinguish the lineages of true rulers. Taking issue with José Antonio Maravall's and Ángel Rama's seminal accounts of the “top-down” totalitarian streak of a baroque culture of letters, McManus argues that the oratorical tradition also provided a rhetorical platform for a bottom-up colonial critique of imperial abuses (p. 88).Chapter 3 addresses the so-called spiritual conquest by focusing especially on sermons of Jesuit missionaries operating in the Americas, as well as East and South Asia. The chapter's central character is the “Japanese Cicero” Hara Martinho, who was educated in the Jesuit college at Arima before working in the missions at Goa and Macao. Similarly, chapter 4 takes a comparative ethnohistorical approach to the rise of what McManus calls “Indo-humanism” in the Jesuits' missions in Paraguay and western coastal India. In the latter, the Portuguese Jesuit Miguel de Almeida and his Konkani converts from the local Brahman castes of Goa and Salcete fused the European oratorical tradition with a formidable South Asian tradition of learning.Chapter 5 focuses on the well-known eighteenth-century controversy sparked by the Spanish antiquarian Manuel Martí, who had disparaged creole intellectual culture in the New World. Taking issue with scholarship on creole patriotism that has “presum[ed] a binary distinction between ‘metropolitan’ Spain and ‘colonial Mexico’” when approaching this controversy “as an early milestone in the development of Mexican national identity,” McManus argues that Mexican creoles articulated an “ethnically charged sense of belonging in the Hispanic and Catholic branches of the Republic of Letters” that was politically, socially, and legally polycentric (pp. 195–96). Chapter 6 turns to various “post-humanist” and neoclassical strands of the classical rhetorical tradition in the context of imperial disintegration after 1750 across the Pacific, particularly in the orations delivered at the Royal Patriotic Society of Manila and in the context of early nationalist oratory in Mexico.While few scholars who have recently worked on creole patriotism would still subscribe to the protonationalist interpretation that McManus attributes to them in chapter 5, and while some context on the French Enlightenment background of the eighteenth-century “dispute” about creole intellect would have been helpful, there can be no doubt that, overall, this book makes a significant contribution to scholarship by attending to an understudied aspect of early modern imperialism. It impresses in its geographic and linguistic scope, drawing on archives not only in several European languages (including Latin) but also in East and South Asian languages, including Mandarin and Marathi. It will be important reading for intellectual historians of colonial Latin America and the early modern Iberian world.

"A troubled marriage. Indigenous elites of the colonial Americas." Colonial Latin American Review, 30(3), pp. 465–466

Reviewed by: Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America by Michele Currie Navakas Ralph Bauer (bio) michele currie navakas Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 248 pp. Michele Currie Navakas draws on the methods of cultural geography and literary studies in order to investigate early American responses to Florida's "liquid landscape," which challenged European (and especially British American) notions of land, settlement, roots, and ownership. Being distinctive in the North American ecological context of the nineteenth century, Florida has remained marginal in modern American literary scholarship, which has searched for the connections between landscapes and early American national identities in texts concerned with firm land, such as J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letter from an American Farmer. Yet, Navakas shows, Florida's liquid landscape already intrigued Americans [End Page 239] in many other places on the continent at the moment of the founding of the United States and thus should matter more centrally to our own scholarly understanding of early US literature and culture. By combining topographic instability, geographic indeterminacy, and demographic fluidity, she argues, Florida's liquid landscape gave rise to "new and necessary ways to pursue and imagine roots" in early America (10). Chapter 1 focuses on several eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers about Florida who were crucial to the rise of this alternative imaginary about landscape, roots, and settlement involving "detachment and mobility, rather than demarcation and enclosure" (19). Writers such as John James Audubon, William Gerard De Brahm, William Bartram, and Frank Hamilton Cushing transformed early conceptions of Florida as an "uncultivable outpost," evident in eighteenth-century tracts such as American Husbandry (1775), which posited solid and contiguous land as the only feasible basis of a settler empire, according to Enlightenment ideologies of landed possession. In challenging this notion, De Brahm, for instance, was influenced by early nineteenth-century "geotheorists," who, unlike contemporary geologists such as Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell, posited that beneath the apparently chaotic and unpredictable movements of the earth lay a set of mathematically rational and predictable Newtonian mechanical laws. Also, De Brahm drew on a tradition of riparian law derived from English jurists such as Sir Matthew Hale and Sir William Blackstone, who had elaborated theories of possession with regard to watery ground. Synthesizing these ideas, De Brahm found a language that enabled him to "imagine the liquid landscape as property" and, hereby, "Florida as part of North America" (33, 34). Similarly, William Bartram, contemplating the architectural achievements of pre-Columbian Mound Builders, elaborated alternative theories of staking mobile roots in watery ground by imagining the artificially constructed mounds as islands that provided retreats for human habitation in frequently inundated land. Bartram's idea was further elaborated by one of his readers, Frank Hamilton Cushing, who posited mobile roots as a paradigm of settlement distinctive of North America more generally, hereby providing "many early Americans with a way to imagine roots" on shifting grounds that "are no less secure for their lack of fixity" (39). Chapter 2 continues to chart the implications of Florida's fluidity for narratives of North American settlement by focusing on eighteenth-century [End Page 240] European and American maps, whose emphasis on the porosity of the Floridian landscape disrupts narratives of North America as a contiguous, self-enclosed, and sharply defined landmass. Focusing on such publications as Amos Doolittle's Map of the United States of America (1784), Bernard Romans's History of East and West Florida (1775), Thomas Nairne's A Map of South Carolina, and Edward Crips's A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina, Navakas elucidates how maps and other descriptions of Florida confirm early American awareness of the continent's capacity to fragment and disperse. The final section of the chapter focuses on John Howison's "The Florida Pirate" (1821) in order to show how Florida's expansive and indeterminate ground sustained those who profited from their capacity to move US commodities into the hands of independent adventurers and imperial rivals. Chapter 3 turns to James Fenimore Cooper's Jack Tier (1848), as well as to Cooper's History of the Navy...