The “empirical turn” in the historiography of the Iberian and Atlantic science in the early modern world: from cosmography and navigation to ethnography, natural history, and medicine

Abstract

This essay-review carries out a bibliographic review of the most representative publications in the field of the history of Iberian science and the Atlantic world of the last decade, with special emphasis on cosmography, navigation and cartography, but also in the field of medicine, pharmacopoeia, natural history, and ethnography. To do so, I start examining six of the most recent books published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, without forgetting to refer to some books published in the last two decades that have somehow marked the course of the new history of the Ibero-Atlantic science. As an interpretive contribution, it is suggested that one of the points of convergence of all these studies is what we could call an empirical turn in knowledge, that is, that the diverse scientific cultures that emerged in the Ibero-Atlantic world were eminently practical cultures, and that these cultures were a constituent part of modern Europe and science.