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SCIENCE IN TRANSLATION: THECOMMERCE OF FACTS AND ARTIFACTSIN THE TRANSATLANTIC SPANISHWORLDMiruna AchimPublished online: 08 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Miruna Achim (2007) SCIENCE IN TRANSLATION: THE COMMERCE OF FACTSAND ARTIFACTS IN THE TRANSATLANTIC SPANISH WORLD , Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 8:2,107-115, DOI: 10.1080/14636200701430943

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636200701430943

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SCIENCE IN TRANSLATION: THE

COMMERCE OF FACTS AND

ARTIFACTS IN THE TRANSATLANTIC

SPANISH WORLD

This collection of essays examines the production, exchange, and consumption ofscientific objects and facts in the transatlantic Spanish world from the sixteenththrough the early nineteenth centuries. Until recently, science in Spain andthroughout its Empire was regarded, by Spaniards and non-Spaniards alike, asslow, backwards, anachronistic, and derivative, when compared to its other WesternEuropean equivalents. Such views, which were popularized, if not originated, by thewritings of the French Encyclopedists, were justified by a number of mythemes:climate, temperament and national types, monarchic absolutism, Catholicism,scholastic philosophy, and censorship have each been blamed at different momentsfor Spain’s supposed scientific backwardness. Most historians of Spanish scienceinternalized the myths of backwardness and responded to them in either apologetic(Spanish science was behind, but this was due to external factors) or defensive ways(Spain could boast of heroes, too long ignored, of Newton’s standing).2

The past two decades have witnessed the radical transformation of this paradigmin tandem with major revisions in the philosophy and historiography of science:instead of pondering whether Spanish science was cutting-edge or sluggish, historianshave begun to focus on specific cases, communities, and contexts, in order tounderstand why and how science was practiced at different moments and locations inthe Spanish-speaking world. Of particular relevance is the displacement of themetanarrative of scientific progress and discovery* a narrative grounded in theparticular history of astronomy* from the center of the general historiography ofscience. The search for mathematical and mechanical models for nature and cosmos,for independent geniuses, and for men at odds with society and religion have beensucceeded by more inclusive definitions of scientists and scientific practice, makingroom for sailors, bureaucrats, travelers, publishers, and merchants, and for activitieslike collecting, trading, legislating, and entertaining. At the same time, rather thantelling the story of a global search for truth, recent studies have been paying attentionto the immanent embedding of scientific truth in societies with their own varied waysof truth-making.

Informed by new questions and historiographic perspectives, historians of Spanishand Spanish American science3 have turned to traditions of scientific knowledge andproduction long ignored by past histories* the wide-spread practices of datagathering, recording, comparing, and collating that were a distinctive characteristic ofSpanish imperial science during more than three centuries of colonial rule. Makingmaps and establishing trade and communication routes; planning cities; collecting andrecording data about plants, animals, minerals, climate and topography; inquiring

Miruna Achim1

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 8, No. 2 July 2007, pp. 107�115ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200701430943

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about the customs of local peoples; and designing new tools and methods for mining,fishing or transporting products were all strategies designed to know, delimit,protect, control, and administer the natural and human particulars of a vast empire. Inthat sense, science became one of the most crucial mechanisms that held together theSpanish Empire and was intimately connected with the Spanish political, commercial,economic, cultural, medical, and religious enterprise from the era of the Conquestonward. It becomes clear, as Antonio Barrera Osorio has pointed out, thatobservation and experimentation, practices traditionally identified as the motors ofthe Scientific Revolution, cannot be separated from Spanish imperial policy. Thus, theresponse to Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’s question, ‘‘Iberian science, how much longerignored?’’ only yields a satisfactory answer when we see science itself as primarily asocial practice. Iberian science, arising in the network of texts, improvisations,negotiations, and customs necessary to bind together the first global empire, producedmodels that have been central in Western culture up through the modern era. In thatsense, it must regain that place in the histories told about Western science.

This issue seeks to complement the scope of current histories of Spanish science toinclude the Spanish Atlantic world, that is, the Spanish-speaking territories whichcommunicated and traded scientific (and other kinds of) information with each otherand with the metropolis.4 While the role of the Spanish-American world in themaking and distribution of scientific knowledge might seem obvious, in practice it hasbeen relegated (with some notable exceptions) to that of provider of raw material tobe processed on the other side of the Atlantic in metropolitan ‘‘centers ofcalculation,’’ to use Bruno Latour’s expression. Although this provider/processormodel of science in the Spanish Empire can accommodate massive enterprises such asscientific expeditions or the work of institutions like the Casa de Contratacion and theJardın Real, it has also proved reductive of the dynamic and multiple ways in whichscientific objects and facts were produced and exchanged in the Spanish-speakingworld. The essays in this collection do not replace the focus on one ‘‘center ofcalculation’’ with the study of many; their aim is to follow the commerce of science inthe transatlantic world, exploring the networks along which it was produced,exchanged, consumed, rejected, or appropriated.

By the same token, the ‘‘translation’’ of this issue’s title does not simply refer tothe process whereby Parisian feet were being converted into Spanish varas , or plantspecies in New Spain were rewritten into the self-proclaimed neutral and universallanguage of Linnean botany, but is intended to pose explicitly the question of howsuch ‘‘translations’’ were possible in the first place. Each article seeks to open the‘‘black box’’ of science and examine the processes of making scientific facts andartifacts as they traveled along channels of exchange and communication. What werethe objects deemed worthy of scientific inquiry at any given time (plants, minerals,meteorological phenomena, indigenous people, prehispanic architecture, etc.)? Howwere animals, plants, instruments, ruins, books, letters, and treatises studied, moved,exchanged, and used? What were the privileged mechanisms (boxes, books, word-of-mouth, maps, plans, drawings) for conveying information not only across geographicspace but also across institutional and professional borders? What rhetorical, visual,commercial, or political strategies made objects of inquiry into the facts and truths ofmedical, chemical, or physical sciences? In what kinds of settings (museums,laboratories, excavation sites, the marketplace, the King’s cabinet)? How were facts

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and artifacts consumed by different publics in different cultural, social, professional,political, or national settings?

The seven essays in this collection answer these questions by narrating thebiographies of various intriguing objects: mining treatises, pharmaceutical prescrip-tions, lizards, quina, classical Roman and pre-Hispanic ruins, thermometers that readaltitude, and color charts of the American body itself, a compound of unruly mixturesof humors and temperaments. They span approximately two and a half centuries ofSpanish rule in the Americas, and take the reader from the Spanish mainland to theViceroyalties of Naples, New Spain, Peru, and New Granada. On smaller, individualscales, they track the activities of naturalists, engineers, merchants, miners, surgeons,pharmacists, bureaucrats, painters, philosophers, inventors, inquisitors, and astron-omers (to mention but a few) at various sites of information gathering, production,and distribution: hospitals, anatomical theaters, apothecary shops and laboratories,harbors, boats loaded with merchandise from the Americas, the Amazonian jungle,the tropical forest of Palenque, the mines of Potosı, natural history cabinets, andbotanical gardens.

The essays follow an approximate chronological order. The collection opens withOrlando Bentancor’s close reading of the Arte de los metales (Madrid 1640) by Alonsode Barba, a Spanish priest and miner who lived in Peru during the first half of theseventeenth century. Bentancor explores the challenge Barba’s text posed tothe metaphysical assumptions behind Western theories of technology, which reston the Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines of the duality between passive matter andactive form. Without dismissing the capacity of form to shape matter, Barba’s Arteopened up a ‘‘zone of indiscernibility’’ in which metals expressed their virtue for self-generation. Bentancor draws the implications of Barba’s views beyond meremetallurgical matters: the Western metaphysics of technology grounded the imperialratio of the Spanish dominion in the New World, where it perceived its task to be thatof ordering, correcting, and improving raw matter. Barba’s objections to Westerntechnological and imperial rationales became the basis for a Creole science of miningand for divergent scientific, technical, and philosophical traditions*Barba’s Arte wasappropriated by, among others, nineteenth-century Amerindian miners who found inthe text a reflection of their own ‘‘germinal’’ philosophies of matter.

By reflecting on the foundations and conditions that enabled the founding of distinctAmerican scientific traditions, Bentancor sets the stage for many of the articles thatfollow. The next three essays (De Vos, Achim, and Crawford) are united by their focuson the connections between natural history and eighteenth-century pharmacology.Paula De Vos documents the shift in Mexican pharmaceutical practices from Galenicmedicine, based on the theory of the equilibrium of the four humors and on simplepreparations of mostly herbal ingredients, to chemical preparations, dependent onmore sophisticated methods and on increasingly diverse components. Her storychallenges prevailing views by historians of chemistry, who deem Spain (and its Empire)a late-comer to chemical medicine, citing as evidence the official banning of the texts ofParacelsus* the alleged father of chemical medicine. De Vos argues, on the contrary,that pharmacists in the Spanish empire could fill out prescriptions of chemical medicineswithout committing themselves to the theologically and scientifically controversialagendas of Paracelsism. Drawing on inventories of apothecaries’ shops and laboratories,on chemical manuals, prescriptions, pharmacopeias, and juridical documents, De Vos

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paints detailed and fascinating scenes of the everyday practices of Mexican pharmacists,taking science history beyond the study of elite practitioners. Her archival work leads tosome important conclusions: on the one hand, that the pharmacist’s laboratory played acrucial role during the eighteenth century (when alchemical practices had fallen intodisrepute) as a kind of missing link in the history of chemistry; and on the other hand,that the Mexican pharmaceutical tradition was not strictly derivative of metropolitanscience, but formed ‘‘part of an integrated system in which medical theories circulatedquickly and in which practitioners could freely decide what to translate into theirpractice.’’

Miruna Achim arrives at a similar conclusion in an article which narrates lateeighteenth-century Mexican discussions on the medical properties of lizards. After aGuatemalan doctor announced that some lizard species helped cure cancer, venerealdisease, and leprosy, Mexican and European (French, Spanish, Italian, and German)doctors, pharmacists, and naturalists began experimenting with therapy based onlizard meat, with an eye to its curative properties and potentially harmful side effects.Yet, Achim suggests that more was at stake in the Mexican lizard debates between1782 and 1784 than ‘‘making lizards into drugs.’’ Drawing on letters, treatises,reports, and clinical diaries, she depicts a dynamic scenario in which the quest fornatural knowledge became an ally and shaper of political and cultural agendas. Achimtraces this uneasy alliance through the organization of massive medical researchprojects by the local government in Mexico City, the carving of new professionalspaces for the study and practice of medicine (and other sciences) against theinterference of conservative institutions, the appraisal and vindication of indigenousknowledge vis-a-vis contemporary Western sciences, and the self-promotion byCreole intellectuals like Antonio de Leon y Gama or Jose Antonio Alzate asauthoritative intermediaries between local realities and wider networks of scientificexchange. Finally, Achim reflects on the role played by these (and similar) publicdebates in fashioning a distinctly Mexican scene of scientific inquiry, built aroundobjects of dual natural and political interest.

While Achim traces the rise and fall of the lizard treatment, Matthew Crawfordfocuses on the immensely popular quina, an effective febrifuge made from the bark ofthe Peruvian Cinchona tree. While quina’s medical virtues rested on solid foundations,its processing and distribution stood on shaky ground. As Crawford meticulouslyshows, quina was exposed to theft, adulteration, and degradation from the moment ofits harvesting to its arrival in Cadiz and final inspection by the Royal Pharmacy inMadrid. As quina constituted a Royal monopoly (the King being thus legallyresponsible for the production and distribution of the bark), substandard quinadirectly reflected on the Crown’s credibility. With sources that include letters,instructions, and reports of various types, Crawford follows the Crown’s many-sidedstrategies to establish and protect the integrity of the product* strategies whichconsisted of commercial regulations, instructions for packaging and unpackaging, theenlisting of pharmacists in Madrid, local experts in Peru, and botanists.

The next two essays also explore issues of trust and reliability, particularly inrelation to technologies and strategies for the recording, interpretation, andtransportation of data. Irina Podgorny examines the archaeological work carriedout by the Spanish Crown during the latter part of the eighteenth century, from thespectacular excavations at Herculaneum, Pompeii and Scabiae, to the studies (with

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little excavation) at Merida (Spain), Ingaparica (Peru) and Palenque (present-dayMexico). The protagonist of Podgorny’s story is the engineer, whose presence atarchaeological sites has been ignored by histories of archaeology, which have groundedthe origins of archaeological science in antiquarian, art historical, and philologicalstudies. Yet, the particular skills of the engineer* the ability to measure and recordaccurately, draw plans and elevations, plot river courses and communication routes,evaluate topography and climate, and organize labor*made the engineer’s role anindispensable element of colonial administration, an element particularly suited tohandle large-scale excavations or detailed studies of archaeological sites. Against thefragility of ruins, threatened by natural forces, vandalism, and ignorance, engineers’records emerged as ‘‘portable antiquities,’’ practical solutions to the problems ofinterpreting, deciphering, and transporting archaeological findings across vastdistances. The thousands of pages of records, drawings, and measurements takenby engineers at the Crown’s behest remained unpublished and, during the nineteenthcentury, were scattered into archives throughout the Western world, where they fellinto oblivion. The missing story of engineers’ archaeological work has contributed tothe image of Bourbon Spain as ignorant and lackadaisical about the archeologicalmarvels in its colonial territories. As a correction, Podgorny proposes a dualgenealogy for the scientific archaeological object, grounded simultaneously in arthistory and engineering.

Mauricio Nieto Olarte tells the story of two instruments invented in the early1800s by New Granada’s representative Enlightenment figures, Francisco Jose deCaldas and Jorge Tadeo Lozano: the hipsometro , a thermometer that measured altitudeand the chromapicilo , a ‘‘color chart that ordered the chromatic spectrum intoquantitative two-dimensionality.’’ The instruments were a measure of their inventors’faith (shared by their contemporaries) that natural order could be classified, arranged,and revealed though the stability and homogeneity of well-calibrated precisioninstruments. At the same time, Nieto paints a solitary landscape in which isolationitself becomes a material and intellectual obstacle: Caldas and Lozano designed theirinstruments to make their findings readable for a wider public than the 200subscribers to their periodic journal. In the face of Caldas’s testy relationship withAlexander von Humboldt (on his way North from South America), his bittercomplaints about the absence of books and journals on new scientific developments,and his grinding doubts as to whether the hipsometro was an original discovery or hadalready been invented (it had), his perseverance and attempts to reach out provide apoignant commentary on the tenuous nature of colonial networks of scientificexchange.

Carlos Lopez Beltran closes this collection with an examination of the episthemesof color and class in Spanish American society that recalls the scope of Bentancor’sanalysis of metallurgy. The topic of Lopez Beltran?s article is the emergence ofclassificatory schemes to describe, explain, and order the unpredictable andcomplicated racial mixtures in the Spanish American colonies, expressed in bodytypes. Schemes of physiological and physiognomic differences were grounded in themoral or mental values of centuries of European theorizing in both high and lowculture: they included the Spanish notions of pureza de sangre , which set Christians apartfrom Moors and Jews, and Hippocratic concepts of temperament (refined over morethan fifteen centuries), which accounted for individual and national temperaments by

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taking into consideration such variables as climate, topography, and astrologicalinfluences. When these varied systems of classification were ‘‘imported’’ into theAmericas and imposed upon the physical, social, cultural, and genealogical diversity ofpeoples there, they did not yield set or obvious categories, even when Europeannaturalists (especially in the eighteenth century) insisted on using simple arithmeticalformulas to reflect the proportions of bloods that went into each mixture. On thecontrary, what emerged over three centuries of American theorizing about bodies,their nature, and their mixture in the New World were not so much physical guides ofthe kind that allowed European medicine to reflect traditional social hierarchies asdistinct colonial political and social agendas, struggles over the inclusion or exclusion ofcertain combinations, and the use of the human body itself to signal social and ethicalpaths towards improvement or degeneration. Above all, this prototype of physicalanthropology created a ‘‘pliant scheme which allowed for the superiority of Americanconditions and for having capable, [American-born] bodies in charge.’’

Despite their wide-ranging diversity of topics and approaches, the essays in thiscollection map out theoretical and historiographic common grounds. The authorsshare a tacit narrative commitment to cull stories through archival quests: thinningclues, thickening plots, convoluted paper trails, unfinished letters, lost manuscripts,conscientious reports, paintings, recipes* such are the materials that shape the factsand artifacts that circulated in the transatlantic world. ‘‘The coming into being ofscientific objects’’* to use an expression coined by Lorraine Daston* as historicizedby these essays, is not an exclusively scientific enterprise, but the effect of manifoldconditions*political, commercial, medical, social, technological, juridical*whichbrought such objects into focus, notoriety, or oblivion. As a result, the objects ofthese studies lead double or multiple lives at the interfaces of medicine and religion,occult philosophy and quantified science, physiology and politics, nature and culture,art and engineering, commerce and pharmacy. They thrive on ambiguity and paradoxand offer new routes for thinking about the nature and origins of scientific disciplinesas we know them today: the engineering side of archaeology, the pharmaceuticalfoundations of experimental chemistry, and the metallurgical basis of SpanishAmerican modernism, for example.

Another common area of reflection by several authors in this issue is the roleplayed by evidence and trust in the making of science, particularly in cases wherescientific data and objects are made and exchanged along vast networks. How tomake fragile plants and animals, perishable chemical compositions, stones, ceramics,and individually-collected data stand the tests of time, distance, theft, adulteration,distortion, and subjectivity? In other words, how to ensure the reliability of facts acrossvarious settings? Rather than one unequivocal answer, these essays examine a widespectrum of solutions and strategies, which include designing scales of credibility fordifferent systems of knowledge, writing instructions for recording and surveying dataand for collecting and packaging specimens, and inventing instruments for precise andstandardized interpretations and representations of nature. As Daston and Galison havesuggested in a foundational essay on the nature of objectivity in Western science,reliable facts in the early modern age were shaped by time and place specific codes,norms, practices and habits, and thus were anything but the products of a ‘‘view fromnowhere.’’

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The grounding of scientific objects and concepts in such arbitrary variables as localcustoms and uses, political agendas, or technological impediments is intimately tiedwith questions implicitly or explicitly posed by most contributors to this issue: Arehistorians of science destined to embrace the relativism of case studies? Or, on theother hand, should individual episodes of scientific knowledge-making be valued andexamined according to criteria of truth and credibility that cut across borders andcultures? Or, as Paula de Vos wonders in her article, how can the fact that all thepharmaceutical manuals used in Mexico were imported from Spain be reconciled withthe realization that Mexican pharmaceutical practice was not just a copy of its Spanishcounterpart? How, in other words, do the ways in which science circulated and wasconsumed in the Spanish Atlantic world call for a serious reflection on how locally-embedded knowledge is distributed along global networks?5 The essays in thiscollection do not subscribe to one exclusive answer; rather, in original and insightfulways, they point in the direction of much-needed archival research and provideevidence for a dynamic and continuously-shifting transatlantic map inhabited byflexible networks of practitioners, readers, and consumers, who produced, translated,and appropriated the facts and artifacts of science in peculiar and idiosyncratic ways.

One narrative is missing from our account of science in translation: the exchangesthat took place beyond Spanish-speaking channels of communication and beyond theAtlantic Ocean. This would have enlarged the frame of our collection to address thetruly global nature of science in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. We couldbegin to explain this lacuna by pointing to a Spanish imperial policy which restrictedthe incursion of foreigners into Spain’s overseas territories, set serious limits on thecommercial ties between different colonies, and fiercely controlled the literature(particularly the scientific literature) that entered and could be read in SpanishAmerica. These explanations are insufficient, however, in the light of ample evidence(some presented in this issue) that foreigners entered Spanish America as pirates,merchants, doctors, and as members of scientific expeditions, that prohibited bookswere smuggled and reproduced in the colonies, that many Creole intellectuals becamecorrespondents of major European science academies, and that the traffic with thePhilippines and other places in the Pacific was constant and considerable. How theseintellectual and commercial routes affected the circulation of science remains largelyunexplored. Such are our challenges.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Georgina Dopico-Black and Ronald Briggs, as well as theanonymous reviewers at the Journal for Spanish Cultural Studies, for their extremelyhelpful comments on previous versions of this introduction.

2 In an insightful essay, Agustı Nieto-Galan examines these myths of backwardnessand their effect on the history of Spanish science. In another excellent study, RuthHill explores the literary and philosophical productions of four late seventeenth- andearly eighteenth-century Spanish and Spanish-American figures, in an effort to mapout the particularities of Spanish science and philosophy at this moment. It was anidiosyncratic blend of tradition and modernity, hermeticism and experimentalism,which would later cause Spanish science to be branded as an anachronism by(particularly, though not exclusively) French philosophers and intellectuals.

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3 The recent scholarship on Spanish imperial science is too vast to list here. Besidesthe studies directly referred to throughout this introduction, the most valuablerepresentatives of Spanish and Spanish-American science history are the three-volume collection of essays edited by Jose Luis Peset, an entire issue of the sciencejournal Osiris , as well as monographs on particular topics by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra (2001, 2006), Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Jose PardoTomas, Juan Pimentel, Mary Louise Pratt, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, andNuria Valverde, to mention just a few.

4 Due to particular commercial, cultural, and political configurations, these includedplaces such as Lima, Potosı, Chile, and New Granada.

5 In a brilliant essay, Steven J. Harris has suggested the importance of ‘‘scalablenarratives’’ which could take the historiography of science beyond its presentdilemma of choosing between ‘‘context-blind’’ microhistories, and discovery-drivenorigin stories. For Harris, the solution lies in the study of spatially and temporallyextended practices, like those of particular corporations (the Casa de Contratacionand the Jesuit Order are two such corporations studied by Harris), which‘‘exemplify both the local and the distributed character of knowledge’’ (272).

Works cited

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: the Spanish American Empire and the EarlyScientific Revolution . Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2006.

Canizares-Esguera, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies,and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World . Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

** . ‘‘Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?’’ Perspectives onScience 12.1 (2004): 86� 124.

** . Nature, Empire and Nation. Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World .Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006.

Daston, Lorraine. ‘‘Introduction: The Coming into being of Scientific Objects.’’ Biographiesof Scientific Objects. Ed. Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. ‘‘The Image of Objectivity.’’ Representations 40(1992): 80� 129.

Harris, Steven J. ‘‘Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography ofKnowledge.’’ Configurations 6.2 (1998): 269� 304.

Hill, Ruth. Scepters and the Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca.1680� 1740) . Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000.

Lafuente, Antonio and Antonio Mazuecos. Los caballeros del punto fijo: Ciencia, polıtica yaventura en la expedicion geodesica hispanofrancesa al virreinato del Peru en el siglo XVIII .Barcelona: CSIC, 1987.

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society .Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

MacLeod, Roy (Ed.), ‘‘Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise’’. Osiris ,2nd ser. 15 (2000).

Nieto-Galan, A. ‘‘The Images of Science in Modern Spain.’’ The Sciences in the EuropeanPeriphery during the Enlightenment . Vol. 2. Ed. K. Gavroglu. Archimedes 2. Boston:Kluwer, 2001. 76�101.

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Pardo Tomas, Jose. Ciencia y censura . La Inquisicion espanola y los libros cientıficos en los siglosXVI y XVII . Madrid: CSIC, 1991.

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