Just back from the Scientiae conference, held this year in Minneapolis. As always, I learned a lot at this conference, from many interconnected quadrants of early-modern intellectual history. But with special reference to my own interests in sixteenth-century millenarianism, and the invention of discovery, here are just three points I am glad to have mapped.
First, from Ralph Bauer‘s paper on “The Alchemy of Conquest.” This was a concise but exceedingly rich account of what motivated Christopher Columbus to sail across the Atlantic in 1492. Zeal for new horizons? Ambition? Greed? A teleological anticipation of modernity? Nope: the apocalyptic visions of Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135-1202), as parsed through 14th-century pseudo-Joachimite alchemical traditions. For Columbus “the Christ-bearer” (Christo-ferens), the Spanish throne was destined to provide a Last World Emperor who would defeat the Turks and reconquer Jerusalem, ushering in the Second Coming. Columbus’s own role, as he saw it, was to provide a shortcut to the “Indian” wealth that would finance the Apocalypse. And out of this profound and paranoid millenarianism emerged the historical phenomenon that we call the New World.
Betcha never saw that on the Discovery Channel.
Next, Vincent Masse on Guillaume Postel (1510-81): the “docte et fol” (learned and crazy) humanist and philosopher who became a cabbalist and self-appointed prophet. Vincent’s survey of Postel’s writings, including those still in MS, has the potential to make this bizarre yet characteristic figure of the sixteenth century newly and broadly accessible to scholars in both French and English. But one point of Vincent’s discussion, in particular, struck me. As scholars of medieval cartography and cosmography know, in High Medieval Europe the sphere that we call the Earth was actually thought to be doubled: a larger sphere of water, and a smaller one of land, the latter floating in the former “like an apple in a bucket”–as David Wootton has put it (and this I learned from him). Among other things, the “two-spheres” model made sailing to longitudinal antipodes of the land-sphere literally impossible, since they would be underwater, and pretty much ruled out the existence of any land masses anywhere on the globe not connected to the single, known world-island (Eurasia and Africa). Now, according to Wootton, this conceptual scheme was immediately and completely destroyed by Columbus’s landfall–the countervailing fact of the New World. But here’s the thing: the very idea of conceptual schemes is that they are highly resistant to destruction by countervailing facts. And it turns out that Postel, himself a two-spheres cosmographer, was impressed, as Vincent showed in his paper, by the troubling evidence of the New World discoveries. But he didn’t conclude that the two-spheres model was over. Rather, he concluded that the world was. If the shape of the world no longer made sense, that simply served as evidence that the world was soon to be dissolved. Perhaps Wootton needs to reconsider the very idea of overcoming conceptual schemes!
Finally, Erin Webster on sacred and universal time in the New Atlantis of Sir Francis Bacon (1560-1626). Among many other wonderful things, Erin pointed out that the discovery-narrative of this late Baconian work precisely is not directed toward the New World of the preceding century. Oh, the Americas certainly get talked about in the NA–but only as a place of such divine disfavour that it can hold no interest for natural philosophers or enlightened travellers. On the other hand, Bensalem, the intellectual utopia actually discovered by Bacon’s fictional seafarers, is little more than an imagined, perfected, Baconian Europe–already Christianized long before the travelers get there, and already Baconian long before that! A traditional narrative (Wootton again) holds that Bacon’s project for reforming natural philosophy (science) was based on the transatlantic discoveries of the late fifteenth centuries. This is about as true as supposing that Marx’s project for re-envisioning macroeconomics was based on the Boston Tea Party. In other words, it is quite seriously not true at all. (I do not suggest that Erin would agree with that analogy; but it is something that her paper made me think about.)
Next year in Belfast!
Libber leeber 