Jesuit scientific activity in the overseas missions, 1540-1773

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 71-79

  Harris, Steven J ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CLERGY; FRANCE; HISTORY; HUMAN; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PORTUGAL; RELIGION; SCIENCE; SPAIN;

CATHOLICISM; COLONIALISM; FRANCE; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HUMANS; MISSIONS AND MISSIONARIES; NATURAL HISTORY; PORTUGAL; SCIENCE; SPAIN;

EID: 26944434866     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/430680     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 1-7.
2. For references to recent scholarship, see the notes to the editor's introduction and individual essays in Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). The Society suffered a general suppression in 1773 and was banned throughout the Catholic world. After its restoration in 1814, there were attempts to regain its scientific reputation. The chief centers of scientific research have been astronomical observatories, which, in several cases, have served as nucleation sites for important work in meteorology and seismology. For one of the very few discussions of Jesuit overseas science in the restored Society,
3. see Lewis Pyenson, Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 10-15,
4. Lewis Pyenson, Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940 157-206 (for China),
5. Lewis Pyenson, Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940 207-239 (for Lebanon).
6. For an exhaustive inventory of Jesuit observatories, both in the old and restored Society, see Agustín Udías, Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). Because of the limited scholarship on Jesuit colonial science after 1814, I will confine my analysis to the old Society.
7. Steven J. Harris, "Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge," in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. John W. O'Malley, S. J. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, T. Frank Kennedy, S.J. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 216-222.
8. For a useful introduction, see Howard E. Aldrich and Peter V. Marsden, "Environments and Organizations," in Handbook of Sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988), pp. 361-392, esp. 383ff.
9. For an analytical overview of recent literature, see Amalya L. Oliver and Mark Ebers, "Networking Network Studies: An Analysis of Conceptual Configurations in the Study of Inter-Organizational Relationships," Organization Studies, 1998, 19:549-583.
10. Jesuit mathematician-missionaries in seventeenth-century China continue to attract considerable scholarly attention. See, e.g., Isaia Ianrraccone, Johann Schreck Terrentius: Le science rinascimentali e lo spirito dell'Accademia de Lincei nella Cina dei Ming (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1998);
11. Franco Demarchi and Riccardo Scartezzini, eds., Martino Martini: A Humanist and Scientist in Seventeenth-Century China (Trent: Università degli studi di Trento, 1996);
12. Noël Golvers, Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623-1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, Its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters (Louvain: Leuven Univ. Press, 2003);
13. and John W. Witek, S.J., ed., Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer, and Diplomat (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994).
14. Donald F. Lach, trans., The Preface to Leibniz' Novissima Sinica (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1957), p. 22.
15. Florence Hsia, "Jesuits, Jupiter's Satellites, and the Académie Royale des Sciences," in O'Malley et al., The Jesuits (cit. n. 3), pp. 241-257. As Hsia notes, the six Jesuit missionaries were trained in observational techniques by Jean-Dominique Cassini (head of the Royal Observatory), given the title Mathématiciens du Roi, and (by special dispensation) became members in the Académie Royale des Sciences - an honor otherwise denied members of religious orders.
16. For a discussion of differences between French and earlier representations of geometry in Beijing, see Catherine Jami, "From Clavius to Pardies: The Geometry Transmitted to China by Jesuits, 1607-1723," in Western Humanistic Culture Presented to China by Jesuit Missionaries (XVII-XVIII Centuries), ed. Federico Masini (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1996), pp. 175-199.
17. Theodore N. Foss, "A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography," in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582-1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie Oh (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 209-251.
18. See also Cheryl A. Semans, "Mapping the Unknown: Jesuit Cartography in China, 1583-1773" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1987), pp. 173-180.
19. Most famously in Jean-Baptiste Du Halde's four-volume work, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'empire de la Chine (Paris, 1735).
20. See also Theodore N. Foss, "A Jesuit Encyclopedia for China" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Chicago, 1979).
21. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 108-121.
22. Nicholas Standaert, "Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese," in O'Malley et al., The Jesuits (cit. n. 3), pp. 359-360.
23. Sabine Anagnostou, "Jesuits in Spanish America and Their Contribution to the Exploration of the American Materia Medica," Pharmacy in History, 2005, 47(1) (in press).
24. See also her "Jesuiten in Spanisch-Amerika als Übermittler von heilkundlichem Wissen" (Ph.D. diss., Marburg Univ., 2000)
25. and her "Das Heilmittelversorgungssystem der Jesuiten in den Missionen Spanisch-Amerikas," Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 2001 4:241-259.
26. John M. de Figueiredo, "Ayurvedic Medicine in Goa According to the European Sources in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Scientific Aspects of European Expansion, ed. William K. Storey (Aldershot: Varorium, 1996), pp. 247-257, esp. 228-231.
27. Allan Greer, "The Exchange of Medical Knowledge between Natives and Jesuits in New France," in El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo, ed. Luis Millones-Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma (Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2005), pp. 135-146.
28. Theodore E. Treutlein, "The Jesuit Missionary in the Role of Physician," in The Jesuit Missions of Northern Mexico, ed. Charles W. Polzer, Thomas H. Naylor, Thomas E. Sheridan, and Diana Hadley (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 518-539.
29. Though not concerned with Jesuit definitions of nature per se, Lorraine Daston's analysis is quite useful: "The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe," Configurations, 1998, 6:149-172.
30. Anon., The Travels of Several Learned Missioners of the Society of Jesus (London: R. Gosling, 1714), unnumbered preface (p. 2).
31. In her study of eighteenth-century medical botany in the West Indies, Londa Schiebinger has uncovered similar patterns in the " bioprospecting" of English, Dutch, and French naturalists - non-Jesuits all - and points to the importance of long-term residency, selective appropriation among European "information brokers," and circulation of botanical information through publications. See Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 51-57, 73-104.
32. Lorraine Daston, "Afterword: The Ethos of Enlightenment," in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 495-505, 502. However, she immediately acknowledges that "historians of the Enlightenment sciences have yet to fill the historiographic gap between the Boyle lectures and the Bridgewater treatises."
33. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 204-265.
34. See Millones-Figueroa and Ledezma, eds., El saber de los jesuitas (cit. n. 15).
35. "Velasco filters indigenous knowledge of Quito's natural world through a lens focused on showcasing his patria's uniqueness and utility, and its Amerindian and criollo inhabitants' intellectual competence." Eileen Willingham, Locating Utopia: Promise and Patria in Juan de Velasco's Historia del Reino de Quito, pp. 251-277, 256.
36. Compare Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (cit. n. 21), pp. 249-253.
37. Kristin Huffine, "Raising Paraguay from Decline: Memory, Ethnography, and Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Accounts of the Jesuit Fathers," in Millones-Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas (cit. n. 15), p. 282.
38. See Domingo Ledezma "Una legitimación imaginativa del Nuevo Mundo: La Historia Naturæ, Maxime Peregrinæ del jesuita Juan Eusebio Nieremberg," in Millones-Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas (cit. n. 15), pp. 53-84,
39. and in his doctoral thesis, "El paraíso en América: Un aporte de los jesuitas en las historias naturales, 1591-1668," (Ph.D. diss., Brown Univ., 2003).
40. Legitimization is also a theme in Margaret R. Ewalt, "Father Gumilla, Crocodile Hunter? The Function of Wonder in El Orinoco ilustrado," in Millones-Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas (cit. n. 15), pp. 303-334.
41. Though never a missionary, Athanasius Kircher is the best-studied representative of this tradition. See Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004).
42. Ewalt, "Father Gumilla," in Millones-Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas (cit. n. 15), p. 304.
43. Elizabeth Rhodes, "Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus," The Jesuits, II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. John W. O'Malley, S.J, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2005).
44. The subsequent export of Canadian ginseng to China created the biggest economic boom - and bust - in eighteenth-century French Canada. See William N. Fenton, "Contacts between Iroquois Herbalism and Colonial Medicine," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institute, 1941, pp. 503-526, esp. 518-520.
45. See Londa Schiebinger, "Gender and Natural History," Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 163-177,
46. and Londa Schiebinger, idem, Nature's Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
47. Sigismund Aperger. Johann Steinhöfer (Esteyneffer), Pedro Montenegro, and Georg Kamel all entered the Society as temporal coadjutors. Collectively, their publications make up the majority of lay-brother publications in the sciences and together number fewer than a score. Professed fathers were the authors of more than 95 percent of the entire Jesuit scientific corpus.
48. Mario Biagioli, "Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociality and the Accademia dei Lincei," Configurations, 1995, 3:139-166.