Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World

Abstract

Traditionally, historians of science have regarded Spain as being very backward in the field of scientific development, arguing that the scientific knowledge it derived from the discovery of the New World in the early fifteenth century was not totally absorbed and systematized, and consequently that Spain failed to incorporate the philosophical streams of knowledge coming from the rest of Europe, which for more than a century had been abandoning Renaissance cosmography in favour of the adoption of a more mathematical interpretation of the world. [...]this method soon surpassed the capacity of the Council to process and systematize the information, the accuracy of which could not always be ascertained. [...]the royal cosmographers continued to employ a humanistic orientation towards cosmography, which relied heavily upon, for example, information on the history and religion of the places under scrutiny. The consequential measures taken included establishing two, rather than one, as hitherto,...