History of Science Archives

Review of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838, by Sophie Brockmann (2020).

Banner for Review of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America

What is the ‘Enlightenment’? This is a question that has occupied scholars ever since Kant. But historians no longer focus on great white heroes to provide answers. Yet sociologies of knowledge on the ‘Enlightenment’ continue to render the experiences of the north Atlantic normative. These sociologies tell us that the Enlightenment was not about secular radicals using reason to topple the religious and feudal hierarchies of the ancien régime. It was rather about new forms of sociability triggered by revolutions in print and communication that made a republic of letters and a public sphere of coffee shops and periodicals possible. These new bottom-up institutions, as this narrative has it, allowed for new mercantile middle classes to challenge top-down hierarchies of knowledge and politics.

As common as it is, this model, however, does not fit most global experiences of the ‘Enlightenment’. In a 2020 study, Brockmann investigates the case of turn-of-nineteenth-century Central America to challenge the norm.

Brockmann brings to life a coterie of religious and lay Spanish American bureaucracies that for some forty years were obsessed with ‘bringing light’ onto everyone, from Chiapas to Costa Rica. Engineers, military officers, architects, bishops, field justices, priests, high court judges, doctors, lawyers, landowners, among many others, organized themselves in patriotic societies to produce a newspaper to network and to circulate only ‘useful’ knowledge aimed at transforming local landscapes. One could argue that this community was a ‘public sphere’ created by print culture. Yet Brockmann demonstrates that these were colonial bureaucracies who were prompted by top-down crown initiatives to create patriotic societies and newspapers to communicate and innovate. Moreover, in the kingdom of Guatemala, landscapes were constantly threatened by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, locust, anthrax, typhus, smallpox, and falling prices of indigo, the main staple.

An Indian gathers cochineal with a deer tail. Painting. — *An Indian gathers cochineal with a deer tail José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez 1777. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

How to produce indigo, flax, silk? How to avoid tropical miasmas caused by rotten, humid tropical trees? How to reorganize settlement patterns and prompt populations to settle in both Pacific and Atlantic new ports? How to reengineer mercantile circuits opening new roads? These bureaucracies had long drafted reports on local demography, production, roads, landscapes. Bishops, field justices, court magistrates, and municipal authorities of the various administrative units of the kingdom of Guatemala, a territory that covered dozens of cities and towns from southern Mexico to northern Panama, had long crisscrossed the lands and produced paperwork to mete out justice and enact reform.

They embodied the Enlightenment as much as the late eighteenth-century engineers and judges Brockmann has chosen to study. All lay and religious colonial bureaucracies, Habsburg and Bourbon, used archives to develop a sense of the changing nature of territories bewildered by contingency, disaster, and environmental change. Guatemala’s capital, alone, was twice obliterated, relocated, and rebuilt after eruptions and earthquakes. Theirs was an enlightenment of ever-changing landscapes and bureaucratic archives.

Brockmann demonstrates that these bureaucratic networks held together by new patriotic societies and print embraced new languages of utility and political economy but not necessarily new practices of paperwork and administering knowledge and land reform. Transfixed by the idea of Enlightenment progress and innovation, Brockmann artificially separates these late eighteenth-century bureaucracies from their robust predecessors, neglecting some two hundred years of bureaucratic audits, reports, and endless horizontal and vertical communication with peers, and local and peninsular authorities.

*Códice Dehesa. Source: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH)*

The assumption to see bureaucracies of engineers, architects, bishops, and priests as the product of Bourbon reforms, leads Brockmann to eliminate all bottom-up communication. These bureaucracies communicated constantly with ‘Indians” and Blacks through myriad mechanisms of tribunals and audits. Indigenous communities had their own paperwork bureaucracies. It is therefore strange that Indian and Black voices are almost absent in Brockmann’s study. Either these populations did not get to participate in the new networks of print and sociability (patriotic societies and merchant tribunals) or Brockmann assumes that in the Spanish Empire these populations rarely talked, particularly after the Enlightenment reforms. That their voices dimmed with the Bourbon reforms might well be true, but this is something that requires detailed research rather than vague assumptions.

Brockmann interpretation of Enlightenment is unquestionably important. It shows that something peculiar happened in the Spanish empire as the language of light, patriotism, and utility replaced religious discourses of service among both lay and religious bureaucracies. Utility meant a rejection of abstraction. The Gazeta of Guatemala, the newspaper of the reformers, privileged articles that had demonstrable utility at the very local level, privileging empirical local knowledge over theory. Linnaeus was rejected, indigenous plant taxonomies were embraced.

In this world, the pursuit of utility was a language of commitment for both empire and local community. Brockmann avoids any discussion of “creole” identities leading to friction with peninsular outsiders, the alleged culture of resentment that prefigures the conflict of the wars of independence. The Science of Useful Nature in Central America takes issue with my own work on “science” and creole patriotism (albeit mine is rather on patriotic epistemologies, not science) because the members of these patriotic networks saw themselves as neither ‘Spaniards” nor ‘Creoles’. Since the author focuses on networks of local lay and religious bureaucrats one could argue that patriotism was simply a manifestation of love of service to king, empire, and community to be compensated by grace privileges.

Cover of The Science of Useful Nature in Central America

Brockmann shows that with Independence, these bureaucracies continued serving a Federal Republic, no longer a global monarchy. Yet their concerns and modus operandi remained the same. These bureaucracies started to develop networks of all kinds with the British empire, political, economic, and particularly scientific. Brockmann demonstrates that many of the new republican bureaucracies began to transfer colonial archives of maps and reports to the British state as they sought to secure loans, support, or simply old-fashion patronage. Enlightenment came to mean plunder.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

The New World and Beyond: A Review of New World Nature

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

Focusing on the development of early modern nature and science, New World Nature is a delightful online resource for anyone interested in the Spanish Americas, the history of science, and an innovative comparative approach to history that connects the Spanish Americas from Europe to China. Website creator Dr. Mackenzie Cooley at Hamilton College intends for New World Nature to be a platform to highlight her multiple projects and collaborations. This website demonstrates how scholars in the humanities can maintain an organic online presence and a shared space for research.

New World Nature makes several significant contributions. The first is creating a research tool for the Relaciones Geográficas, a corpus of responses collected for the 50-question survey sent to Spanish Americas in the 1570s during the reign of Spanish King Philip II.[1] Various Relaciones Geográficas in the Spanish empire are known, originating from Peru and the Caribbean to even Spain. The section “Searching the Relaciones Geográficas” offers René Acuña’s magisterial critical editions from Mexico, Guatemala, Tlaxcala, Michoacan, Antequera, and Nueva Galicia. As a result of collaboration with student researchers on translation and data management, this tool not only assisted Cooley’s students in their research but is also helpful for others who are interested in these documents.

The second contribution is its organic approach. Rather than an end product of a particular project, the website highlights Cooley’s ongoing scholarship. After introducing the Lesser Antilles archives at Hamilton College and the Relaciones Geográficas, New World Nature spotlights Cooley’s body of work which includes her book, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance, her current research on sex, medicine, and empire this academic year, as well as Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World co-edited by Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yildirim. This edited work has resulted from the project Natural Things/Ad Fontes Naturae, an ongoing endeavor in global natural history that the aforementioned trio of scholars co-founded during Cooley’s graduate training at Stanford University.

*A digital archive on the Relaciones Geográficas*

The third main contribution of New World Nature is its comparative approach that will appeal to audiences in various geographical fields. Beyond the Atlantic connection between the Americas and Europe, the comparison between the early modern Spanish and Chinese empires brings forth an innovative – and previously overlooked – perspective in the scholarship of the early modern world. In addition to the works mentioned above, Cooley has also co-edited another volume, Knowing
an Empire: Imperial Science in the Chinese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800 (under review). Through a pioneering comparison between the Relaciones Geográficas and local gazetteers (difangzhi), a centuries-long Chinese genre, this work connects early modern Spain and China via the broad themes of empire, science, and local epistemologies.[2] This work argues for the striking parallels between these two seemingly unrelated genres, offering a model of comparability and emphasizing the polycentricity of power. It also challenges the linear progression to modernity by seeking to understand the development of early modern Spanish and Chinese knowledge production that differed from the European experience. This work is a powerful intervention in the scholarship of the early modern world that connects two of the biggest empires of the time.

The team behind this website further speaks to the collaborative and global nature of this project. Through the efforts of the Australian designer Katie Dean, New World Nature features great images from the Relaciones Geográficas that immediately grasp the readers’ attention.[3] Cooley has also been working with a team of student researchers with various academic interests at Hamilton College, including Latin American history, history of medicine, race, human rights, and archaeology. Cooley and her team have traveled to Europe and Latin America for research and co-published their works.

While an exciting series of works, two minor suggestions for the website might be helpful. The first is to feature an introduction that provides a road map highlighting the resources and multiple projects mentioned above. A quick orientation of the website content would help readers (especially first-time visitors to the website) more easily understand the rich resources available. Related to that, reframing and expanding the “About” section would help reflect the website’s growth and scholarship over the years. The second suggestion would be to highlight Cooley’s manuscript-in-progress more explicitly on the website.

New World Nature has created a visually appealing platform that not only aids in the research on the Relaciones Geográficas but also introduces multiple exciting works that help interested readers to further understand the dynamic nature of the early modern world.

Shery Chanis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UT Austin. She researches Ming China (1368-1644) and its connection with the early modern world. Chanis focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current project analyzes the Chinese elites’ ordering and descriptions of the southernmost maritime province of Guangdong that were attentive to the people both inside and outside of its physical boundaries. She has presented her research at UT Austin, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the AHA Annual Meeting (poster session), and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. She has also published on H-Net and Not Even Past.

Mackenzie Cooley is an Assistant Professor at Hamilton College and is a historian of science and ideas in early modern empires. Her research focuses on the natural world and the Columbian Exchange. In 2021-2022, she was a Deborah Loeb Brice Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. At the Lozano Long Conference, Dr. Cooley participated in a panel entitled “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives: The Case of the Relaciones Geográficas y Topográficas.”

I wish to thank Dr. Mackenzie Cooley for the wonderful email exchange and for her thoughtful and enthusiastic input for this piece.

[1] The Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin houses part of Joaquín García Icazbalceta’s Collection of Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala from 1578 to 1586. See https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1fcabf740a844d9d80d5bf0248416f47. For more on Relaciones Geográficas, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For additional analyses and bibliographical references on the Relaciones Geográficas and a more personal story, see Rafael Nieto-Bello’s recent piece on Not Even Past (https://notevenpast.org/bringing-together-the-relaciones-geograficas-and-topograficas-of-the-spanish-empire/).

[2] Co-edited by Cooley and Huiyi Wu, Knowing the Empire in Early Modern China and Spain (under review) features essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars including Maria Portuondo, Barbara Mundy, sinologist Joe Dennis, digital scholar Shih-Pei Chen, Mario Cams, He Bian, Marcella Hayes, and Stewart McManus. This volume follows the “Knowing the Empire” Conference in November 2019 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, sponsored by the MPIWG’s Department III under the leadership of Dagmar Schäffer. (https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/event/knowing-empire-imperial-science-early-modern-chinese-and-spanish-empires). The conference was inspired by Shih Pei Chen’s work on early modern Chinese local gazetteers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343605827_Local_Gazetteers_Research_Tools_Overview_and_Research_Application) and Huiyi Wu’s research on the appearance of Jesuits and the partial transmission of their European knowledge in these sources.

[3] Dean is also a design collaborator in Cooley’s co-edited Natural Things: Ecologies of Nature in the Early Modern World, which includes twelve essays that explore the relationships among natural philosophy, science, medicine, and European colonialism to chart the expansion of natural science from 1500 to the early 1900s.

Review of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World (2020)

Most of us prefer to avoid insects. A bee, a cockroach, or a fat yellowish worm confront us with nature’s “ugliness” and present a disconcerting threat to our modern, comfortable being. Perhaps even less appealing than meeting these weirdly shaped creatures is the thought of reading about them. And yet, despite this instinctive response, Edward Melillo’s The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World demonstrates that the same very creatures that we try so hard to avoid are the ones that enabled this comfort to begin with.

book cover for The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World

The book accounts for the shared history of people and insects in the last three millennia and is divided into two parts. Part one, made of five chapters, explores the interactions of people with insects through three main perspectives. The first chapter covers some main preconceptions and prejudices about bugs, and how these became a part of contemporary culture. Chapters two to four follow three main insect-related commodities – shellac, silk, and cochineal. These are, in my opinion, the best sections of Melillo’s current project, as they exemplify the capacity of transnational history to help understand the modern world. Chapter five covers the rise of “the synthetic age,” and focuses mainly on the environmental impact of the post-WWII synthetic boom. Part two contains two chapters about the centrality of insects to the scientific discoveries of (to name a few) Thomas Hunt Morgan, Charles Henry Turner, and Karl von Frisch. The final chapter stands as a delicacy of its own and covers the history and future of eating insects.

Melillo’s book is an example of an academic work worth reading for both its substance and style. Students of commodity history, history of science and technology, environmental historians, and curious readers alike will find this work both helpful and inspiring. Through the narrow prism of a bug’s viewpoint, Melillo tackles important questions about the biases of contemporary culture, the inherent contradictions of modernity, tensions between scientific and local knowledge systems, and the future of our decaying plant. Especially impressive are his arguments about the centrality of non-humans to the history of our species. He is careful enough not to call the symbiotic relations between humans and insects coevolution – as our shared history modified neither our nor our six-legged cousins’ genetics. Instead, Melillo proves once and again how the things we take for granted as the result of human ingenuity owe, in reality, a great debt to these creatures.

Melillo’s style appeals to both the academic and the general readership. His previous book – Strangers on Familiar Soil – explored how California and Chile coevolved through mutual displacement, exchange, and influence of people, commodities, and plants since the 18^th century. Melillo’s model of shifting back and forth between these two locations inspired scholars to think about cross-regional histories that, until then, remained obscured.

His current book project raises a new challenge – how to write about people and insects, two hyper-globalized creatures that are not bound to a specific location? Melillo’s solution is taken from the rich literature on commodities that might be summarized in one phrase: follow the thing itself. He refuses to bound himself to a specific place and time and takes the readers on a fascinating journey that benefits from an impressive array of historical cases. And so, we get to learn about insects as symbols of beauty in Chinese folklore, their importance to American parachute-making before WWII, and how they are used as social analogies in French literature. Such rich source material and methodological imagination will certainly inspire students and scholars to pursue global and trans-regional history. At the same time, Melillo’s elegant style and clear writing create a smooth narrative from what could have been a dreadful and disorienting collection of various histories. Furthermore, Melillo cleverly avoids convoluted language, historiographical debates, and exhausting footnotes, making the book an accessible read for non-academic curious readers.

“One striking characteristic of commodity history…” Bruce Robbins notes, “is a certain overkill in their subtitles.” And indeed Melillo cleverly never argues that insects were the ones who “made the modern world.” Rather, he confronts his readers with a strong statement – that what we think of as fundamentally modern, and therefore inherently human-centric, is the result of millennia-long inspiration from, cooperation with, and fight against insects. Our music, art, clothes, food, and science were never always exclusively ours, for we owe nature and its tiny beings a huge debt. The book concludes with a critique of another key feature of modernity: rather than accepting the naïve belief that somehow people will find a way to leave nature behind, we should resume one of our longest human traditions – listening to insects.

Atar David is a Ph.D. student in the History department at UT Austin, interested in the social, economic, and environmental history of the modern Middle East, with special attention to agricultural policies, commodities, knowledge production, and food provision policies. He is currently working on the circulation of agricultural commodities and their cultural networks throughout and beyond the eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/

Review of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (1997) by Christopher Sellers

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pioneered the public discussion of the dangers of toxic substances present in the environment as a result of industrial activity. Christopher C. Sellers investigates the type of scientific knowledge about toxic substances that Rachel Carson built upon and popularized in this famous study. The book follows the development of industrial work-related illnesses from the 1890s through the early 1950s. First understood as “bodily idiosyncrasies” (28) that were outside the main concern of employers, or that should be endured by masculine workers, knowledge about occupational disease underwent significant transformations over the course of the early 20^th century.

Cover of Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science

Sellers’ work is tightly woven and tracks multiple factors that contributed to the development of environmental health science. First, his work follows a series of key studies across the American industrial landscape: phosphorus poisoning from match factories, lead poisoning from a number of industries, silicosis from mining, radium poisoning from watch-making, and others. These demonstrate the slow development of the objects of study for this field. His study also traces changes in who had the expertise and authority to comment on the underlying causes of the illnesses, who should bear the brunt of these diseases, and the impact that this kind of medical science had for both industry, the medical profession, the state, and the lives of workers. Among the many scientists that Sellers writes into the history of environmental health science, Alice Hamilton stands out as a key advocate for the social (and political) purpose of the field and its development. Her work is important even if other contemporary physicians (such as David Edsall at the Harvard Division of Industrial Hygiene) overlooked it because it did not meet their standards for depoliticized science.

Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), an expert in occupational health issues, was Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Hamilton did additional research in Germany and then began a lifelong effort to apply bacteriology, pharmacology, and toxicology to public health. Source: Acc. 90-105 – Science Service, Records, 1920s-1970s, Smithsonian Institution Archives

The scope of the book is clearly-defined and the chapter sequence is well-structured. Sellers frames the presentation of his research with a question containing an easy touchstone for anyone interested in environmental humanities and environmentalism: where did Rachel Carson’s knowledge of toxins come from? Sellers starts his narrative with the 1893 Chicago exhibition, by drawing our attention to the lead that was present in much of its white paint. The book is presented with a great deal detail, which makes for a somewhat slower read, but the subject necessitates the slow, methodical weaving he sets out to do.

Sellers is writing about the nature of the production of knowledge, and the implications that it had for industry, American public policy, and medical education. Even if he doesn’t specifically highlight the voices of the workers, Sellers’ work illuminates what the stakes were them. Many industrial workers distrusted the physicians who examined them, for they could be deemed unfit to work, thus hampering their chances to earn a living. When he does return to Carson’s work towards the end of the book, it is easy to understand her work as inheriting this rich history.

Sellers’ work is unique in that it first brought together medical and environmental history. In the wake of Hazards of the Job, a number of other studies of the environmental and health impacts of economic activity have followed, including Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (2006); David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (2004); and Geoffrey Tweedale’s Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2000).

Book cover of Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers by Michelle Murphy

Book cover of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Naguib Pellow

Within the fields of Environmental history and the History of science, Sellers’ book makes another key historiographical intervention. Given that industrial diseases could not be studied only in the laboratory because a) their cause wasn’t always known and b) often it was a combination of environmental factors along with the pollutants themselves which produced the illness, the type of medical and environmental knowledge produced required study in industrial settings. In this regard, the early industrial work-place was neither a “field”, such as we might find in environmental histories of particular geographic regions, nor “the laboratory”, in the case of a specific type of invention or discovery.

Beyond these two fields, Sellers makes wider contributions. By looking at the specific hazards that workers were exposed to, his work contributes to histories of labor, as well as histories of public health as it outlines specific tensions between medical education and industrial activity.

When we eventually meet Rachel Carson’s book, as the book draws to an end, we are able to understand not only the specific historical processes that resulted in increasing knowledge of toxins like DDT, but also the peculiar relationships of research between industry and health professionals. These research activities served to confirm the “benignity” (232) of American commodities in the latter part of the 20^th century. This helps the reader understand, for example why even though knowledge of lead poisoning was common, leaded gasoline boomed in production until its eventual-phase out in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Sellers’ book is a valuable contribution to multiple fields and there is much within it that can be mined depending on one’s interest. It is a a challenging but rewarding read for anyone interested in the history of environmentalism.

IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (2018) Edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Reviewed by David Rooney and Felipe Vilo Muñoz

Modern Fossils: What Objects Tell Us About the Anthropocene / David Rooney

Future Remains is a collection of essays that explore how objects might narrate increasing human dominance over the environment and the lessons we can glean from that shift in perspective. What would a museum of the present look like? What items and memories of our current epoch would make the cut, representing this time of climate change and rapid technological leaps for a future historian? Future Remains attempts to answer these questions, cataloging a series of objects curated by an “Anthropocene Slam” that invited artists and scholars to give a ten-minute pitch defending their item as representative of the Anthropocene.

Cover of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene

“Anthropocene,” from Anthropos (man) and cene (recent), is a term put forth by earth scientists Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen to designate a new geological epoch defined by the unprecedented effect of humanity as a geological agent. The Anthropocene frame has been taken up by a variety of scholars, activists, and techno-optimists in a surge of interdisciplinary scholarship and policy advocacy. Fifteen objects made the cut, playfully entitled a “Cabinet of Curiosities.” The items ranged from the feathers of a goose destroyed by the impact of a jet engine to a jar of layered North Carolina beach sand and a recording of a Māori re-creation of an extinct bird call. Some essays, like Laura Pulido’s on climate and racial sacrifice, offer a broader theoretical perspective on Anthropocene, but the bulk of the works attempt to make sense of the Anthropocene through a specific item selected from the cabinet. Future Remains is divided into four thematic sections, each revealing core aspects of the Anthropocene and charting divergent futures: an anthropocentric acceleration of modernization to geo-engineer nature or a self-reflective, ethically driven “slowing down” of human exceptionalism.

The first section, Hubris, catalogs a set of beliefs about how we might turn the universalism of the Anthropocene in humanity’s favor. Thomas Matz and Nicole Heller’s essay on the history of a jar of North Carolina sand carefully teases out both the futility of geo-engineering beaches and the interests of capital that decide these actions for the many. Examining concrete and the pesticide pump, other essays in this section reveal how little knowledge most observers truly have about the seemingly banal (concrete mixing) or the ecological (the effect of pesticides). Joseph Masco’s chapter on the use of nuclear explosions to exploit the environment is an eye-opening criticism of the hubris of those who believe humanity must become “good gods” to ride out the Anthropocene. Gregg Mitman pleads for readers to not leave the Anthropocene to the seemingly objective analysis of chemistry and geology. Instead, the Anthropocene must become a site of social contestation to establish equitable futures.

The second section deals with life and death in the Anthropocene. Gary Kroll, borrowing heavily from Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, remarks that death cannot be avoided in the Anthropocene. His essay examines the remains of a goose that collided with an airplane’s turbine engine and forced an emergency landing, what became known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Plane-animal collisions have become so common that the term “snarge” was coined to describe the remains of animals killed from human transportation systems. For Kroll, all forms of life (especially geological actors like humans) participate in some form of killing as a result of our inevitable entanglement with other beings. The inclusion of a feather from the goose killed by a jet engine asks observers to ponder how to become more thoughtful and concerned with how industrialized lifestyles produce murders. In this vein, Pulido situates the Anthropocene as a racial world-order, where predominantly white countries are unconcerned with the environmental devastation and premature deaths they hoist onto “darker nations,” a criticism reflected in Julianne Lutz Warren’s description of colonial violence in New Zealand.

Helicopter hovers over the Hudson River as emergency services respond to a crashed flight. — US Airways flight 1549, also called Miracle on the Hudson, made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after the airplane flew into a flock of Canada geese and severely damaged both engines on January 15, 2009. Source: Jim Davidson

The third section focuses on labor. A monkey wrench reminds us of the physical work required to power the industrial machines that pollute the globe, while a Quaker quilt ties together slavery, complicity in violence, and the limits of human agency. The concluding theme, “making,” connects the forms of self-reflection inspired by the Anthropocene, including literal self-reflection in a mirror. Tying these works together, Robert Emmett describes Jared Farmer’s discussion of e-waste in connection to the power of art, re-working the Anthropocene in a more “beautiful” way. The physical objects examined concretize this argument, reflecting the social worlds and emotive connections that inform environmental perspectives.

The book covers a variety of perspectives from different authors, often in agreement but sometimes in explicit contrast with one another. At times this makes for a jarring read. However, this can also be considered a strength. By crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries, the combination of different perspectives unsettles any easy account of our current epoch. Indeed, the function of these objects is not simply to paint an accurate tale of the Anthropocene and its core actors in a way that might satisfy future curiosity. Rather, the power of these objects is that they are curious and strange: they provoke stories and “structures of feelings” that inspire readers to relate differently to the environment and to each other. I would recommend this accessible book to historians, social theorists, and anyone interested in critical scholarship on class or race and the debates over how to situate these within environmental history.

David Rooney is a graduate student in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Anthropocene: Reshaping the Past to Remake the Future / Felipe Vilo Muñoz

A decade ago, I used to go on excursions with my physical geography class. I learned how to recognize different geological periods by examining a hillside terrain’s colors on those trips. One gets an idea of the vast geomorphologic cycles that have shaped the Earth for millions of years by looking at the terrain. Our current existence will become yet another layer of sediment in future strata. For many of us, epochs such as the Miocene or Holocene are little more than a name, but we might start to think about what kind of color our current time will be painted. Will it be a brighter color? Or might it be another murkier layer in our planet’s history?

*Sediment strata at Puerto Tranquilo in Chile. Source: Sergejf*

Stretching the past to recognize our mark on an unwritten future is at the core of the notion of the Anthropocene. This period acknowledges that our species has started to modify the planet as a new dominant geological force. What were the origins of our impact on the earth? And what might our remains mean to historians of the future? Future Remains addresses these questions. In it, twenty-one authors propose fifteen different material objects that could become part of a global natural history museum––a cabinet of curiosities for a future we might not witness. For the moment, we can reflect on this temporality-in-the-making. “The Anthropocene,” Rob Nixon writes in the first chapter, “thus pulls us simultaneously into deep pasts and deep futures that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable terrain for historiography” (5).

Identifying when people started to change nature is not easy. However, the firsts chapters specify some elements that give us a glimpse of how many changes human intervention has brought to our planet. Some chapters center on the past century, such as Joseph Masco’s “Project Plowshare,” a promotional film that explained plans to use nuclear explosions as a geoengineering tool for construction and mineral extraction. This plan never became a reality, but it gives us the first glimpse of our role in taming nature. Another chapter considers a deeper past. In “Anthropocene in a Jar,” Tomas Matza and Nicole Heller detail the historical reconstruction of the Wrightsville beach in North Carolina and its different sediments collected in a kimchi jar. This pot contains different colors and stripes that reflect different periods of the beach’s history. The stripes also show the effects of beach “nourishment”–– the practice of importing sand that has reshaped the coastline since the first decades of the twentieth century. Similarly, the chapter “Concretes Speak: A Play in One Act” addresses this material’s connection to humans, from the footprints of ancient cultures of 6500 BCE to our modern skyscrapers. These three examples reflect an initial step toward understanding the new dynamics of our “hubristic presence” on this planet. Nevertheless, the most significant human impact has occurred in recent centuries with the onset of global warming. For historians of the Anthropocene, this is a breaking point in our planet’s history.

Excavators and construction vehicles perform beach nourishment during nighttime — *Beach nourishment in Duck, North Carolina. Source: Christopher Blunck*

As sea levels and temperatures rise, provoking fires and deforestation, the Anthropocene has reshaped natural conditions. We are left with hard choices to sustain our presence with the rest of planet life forms. Gregg Mitman’s chapter adds to the Anthropocene debate, arguing for a relational approach with the living forms that coexist with us. Here, the vision of the “good Anthropocene” in which technoscience will provide innovative tools to regulate our impact on nature intertwines with the possibility of a dystopic future in which we might follow the fate of other extinct species.

The entanglement of those two positions appears in Josh Woda’s “Artificial Coral Reef,” Nils Hanwahr’s “Marine Animal Satellite Tags,” and Elizabeth Hennessy’s “Cryogenic freezer box.” Together these give us a taste of this imminent future. Here, the fabrication of material devices sustains our combination of demanding resources alongside the regulation of natural habitats. This applies even more so for Hennessy’s chapter which reflects of using cryogenic technologies to bring back extinct species.

Other chapters recognize how our actions impact the lives of non-humans. Gary Kroll’s “Snarge” chapter questions the normalization of animal killing and the destruction of habitats. Julianne Lutz Warren’s chapter, “Huia Echoes,” captivates the reader with recordings of a Maori voice attempting to reconstruct the sounds of an extinct bird. In these examples, we understand the menace that our species presents to endangered life forms. Nevertheless, the history of those extinct or endangered species reminds us that we could share the same misfortune.

Following a wildlife strike (collision), USDA WS personnel or their partners collect evidence and “snarge” from the damaged plane. Snarge is the residue smeared on a plane after a wildlife strike. — Following a wildlife collision, USDA WS personnel or their partners collect evidence and “snarge” from the damaged plane. Snarge is the residue smeared on a plane after a wildlife strike. Source: USDA.

Other essays address how the Anthropocene can also make us rethink our present. In “The Mirror— Testing the Counter-Anthropocene,” Sverker Sörlin questions whether this ecological imbalance is a problem of our current time. He considers that our present can find other answers that could reshape how we construct the Anthropocene. As a result, Sörlin present us how Anthropocene hasn’t determined our fate, on contrary humanity is constantly writing its own present. Thus, the author endorses an “Anthropocene of hope”, which is continually evolving with us from the permanent actions we create about the planet.

In this way, Anthropocene historiography creates a mosaic view in which different images make us think about divergent possibilities for our species. Our actions will continue to reshape the Anthropocene, forever remaking our cabinet of curiosities. The only thing that remains clear is that this new period has given us the responsibility to start writing history. In doing so, we will give color to the sediments that we leave to our descendants in the eons to come. Thus, Future Remains should be reading as an invitation to rethink our responsibility in our historical footprint making. A task that we are still struggling to accept to its full extend.

Felipe Vilo Muñoz is a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy (2019)

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. By Elizabeth Hennessy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xx + 310. 20 illustrations, notes, 4 maps, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Located about 400 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands hold profound cultural importance as symbols of conservation, wild nature, and biodiversity. Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835 and his encounters with the fauna of the Galápagos went on to shape his 1859 work On the Origin of Species. In contemporary times, statues of Charles Darwin await tourists in almost all of the small settlements on the islands. Scientists with UNESCO, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Charles Darwin Research Station on the archipelago, architects of the current conservation project, present conservation as a continuation of Darwin’s legacy. However, in many ways, by seeking to reconstruct a pure “state of nature,” the conservation efforts that started to take shape in the 1930s have led to a contradictory project of stripping the islands of past traces of humanity through far-reaching and sometimes violent intervention.

In On the Backs of Tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy frames the lumbering, armored reptilians of the Galápagos as “boundary objects”—material points of convergence between different spheres of action—that have been encoded with seemingly bottomless layers of meaning over time. First encountered by desperate sailors or pirates in the South Pacific as a live-saving source of food and water, turtles have been transformed by scientists, international mass media, and tourism into conservation icons and the recipients of legal protections. Simultaneously, local fishermen, often demonized by international media, despise the turtles as a metonym of the broader conversation project.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork conducted in the Galápagos working alongside scientists, as well as archival research using a mix of unpublished correspondence and published scientific articles and books, Hennessy weaves together a lively and engaging historical narrative that shines a light on the contradictions inherent in the current discourse of biological conservation. While conservation is often misrepresented as apolitical, Hennessy shows how the movement to establish the islands as nature preserves represented a continuation of imperial power dynamics. The Ecuadorian state had a vested political interest in developing the archipelago, which clashed directly with the interests of American and European scientists who wished to prevent species like the giant tortoises from going extinct. Although the local economy depends on tourism and the conservation industry, living in a nature preserve subjects galapagueños to increased policing and restriction. In fact, many of the leading scientists at the research station openly discuss the very presence of people in the Galápagos as a nuisance.

*Galápagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station, Isla Santa Cruz, the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Source: Elias Rovielo*

In this way, Hennessy’s work inserts itself into well-established historiographical conversations about colonial conservation initiatives in environmental history. Others works along similar lines include Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism or Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Wood. At the same time, the book is also well-grounded in methodologies from the history of science. This shows through particularly well in Hennessy’s fieldwork with the scientists and fishermen of the Galápagos. Bringing these two fields into conversation, combined with interventions drawn from political ecology and animal history, she destabilizes hegemonic assumptions about the difference between “nature” and “culture,” which have informed the development of the conservationist discourse. Though she acknowledges that the consciousness of the tortoise lies beyond human comprehension and biologists know very little about their sensory or cognitive faculties, she nonetheless effectively shows their ability to transform local landscapes and vegetation patterns. More significantly, she demonstrates their semiotic function as a multifaceted “object” deeply embedded in political and cultural discourse. Rather than a tortoise-eye view of history, this remains a history centered on human interactions with and perceptions of tortoises.

A well-written and engaging book on a topic that many students will have at least some cultural knowledge (and likely many misconceptions) about, On the Backs of Tortoises would make excellent reading for any class on the history of science, environmental history, or the history of tourism. Due to the accessible style and the captivating narrative, the book will also appeal to many members of the general public, especially anyone who works in or has an interest in biology or conservation. The questions Hennessy raises about the fraught, entangled relationships among scientists, society, and the non-human world, as well as her treatment of the tortoises as historical actors, will surely help drive interesting and productive discussions. This book deserves praise for so effectively presenting the history of a place popularly constructed to lie outside the domain of human affairs to readers in an accessible, coherent way.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum by James Delbourgo (2017)

by Diana Heredia López

A biography of an English scientist during the early Enlightenment may not seem like cutting edge scholarship.. In Collecting the World, James Delbourgo tells the multifaceted story of Hans Sloane, an Englishman who amassed a collection of nearly eighty thousand natural objects and curiosities through his work in natural history, commerce, and medicine. Before he died in 1753, Sloane laid the foundations for the establishment of the first national and free museum in the world, the British Museum. Sloane is hardly ever remembered as a harbinger of the Enlightenment and much less as a serious scientist because his diverse activities and interests are impossible to capture in a single modern scientific discipline and because the eclectism of Sloane’s collection seems to lack scientific rigor. Still, Sloane’s vast collection was so impressive that it was purchased by the Royal Family to transform it into the first public museum of the world. To understand these contradictory perceptions of Sloane, Delbourgo constructs a biography that links all Sloane’s seemingly disparate activities to his ever-lasting desire to collect the world. Delbourgo is able to merge the social and personal motivations behind collecting objects while also explaining the political and religious frameworks under which natural history was practiced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

For Delbourgo it is equally important to explore both Sloane’s collections — which are now scattered through various English institutions — and the world where he constructed them. He takes the reader from Sloane’s modest origins in Ireland to London where he established his medical practice and then to Jamaica, the island that saw the naturalist and entrepreneur Sloane emerge. Delbourgo goes back to Bloomsbury to explain how Sloane consolidated his reputation as a medical practitioner, became president of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians while amassing a great fortune through the sugar plantations he owned from his wife’s dowry. He continued to expand his burgeoning collection by establishing networks of collectors all over the world who would send him exotic objects and natural curiosities. This of course, would not have been possible without the endorsement of the British Empire.

Sir Hans Sloane (via Wikimedia Commons)

Even though this story might remind us of Carl Linnaeus or other eighteenth-century collectors, Delbourgo is careful to analyze the motives behind Sloane’s desire to collect. His ultimate goal was not necessarily to classify all of the objects in his collection but rather show the vast but finite world that God had laid out for human use. At the same time, Sloane was also interested in collecting the infinite variations that could exist within the same type of object. It is also worth noting that Sloane collected amulets and superstitious paraphernalia to actively demonstrate his antipathy towards magic and idolatry. Delbourgo explains how this vision was connected to a specific form of Christianity that battled against superstition and was perfectly compatible with the mechanical view of the world often associated with modern science.

Overall, Delbourgo is careful to situate Sloane and the importance of his heritage without glorifying him. The clearest example of this, and perhaps one of the most relevant contributions of the book is the emphasis on the role of slavery and Sloane’s contact with black and indigenous populations in shaping his medical and natural history practices. This allowed him not only to establish his medical career back in London but also to begin a collection of people, indeed Sloane’s interest in the study of black bodies persisted for many years. Moreover, his medical contact with slaves and natives in Jamaica also opened the possibility to collect objects from them.

Hans Sloane’s Nautilius Shell housed at the Natural History Museum in London (By Paul Hudson, via Flickr)

Collecting the World is written with vivid detail and includes several color plates of some of the most striking objects of Sloane’s collections such as a carved nautilus shell or a portable Buddhist shrine.. This book will appeal readers who are collectors themselves or museum lovers. It will definitely put the apparently innocuous and romantic activity of collecting and appreciating museum objects into a different perspective.

Also by Diana Heredia López on Not Even Past:

Of Merchants and Nature: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 1)

Giordano Bruno and the Spirit that Moves the Earth

By Alberto A. Martinez

Before Galileo did anything in astronomy, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno argued that the Earth moves around the Sun. Bruno believed that the Earth is a living being, with a soul. These were unusual beliefs for a Christian.

In 1592, Bruno was captured by the Inquisition in Venice and imprisoned. The next year he was transferred to the Inquisition’s prison in Rome. After seven and a half years of interrogations, he was finally condemned to what was widely feared as the worst kind of punishment: he was gagged, taken to a public place, tied to a post, and burned alive. Historians are quick to point out that Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion, but for heretical religious beliefs.

Engraving of Giordano Bruno from ca. 1830 (via Wikimedia Commons)

For years I investigated this story and what I found really surprised me. It turns out that Giordano Bruno’s belief in the moving Earth was directly connected to some of his beliefs that were heretical. To Catholics, heresies were willful departures from Catholic dogma. Heresies were the worst kinds of crimes, even worse than murder. Heresies were crimes against God.

Bruno’s final condemnation by the Inquisition exists only in a partial copy, prepared for the Governor of Rome. Unfortunately, it omits the list of accusations against Bruno, that is, his alleged heresies. But there is some good evidence of what they were.

On February 8, 1600, the Roman Inquisition condemned Bruno at the palace of the supreme Inquisitor, Cardinal Ludovico Madruzzi. On that day, one of the witnesses present was a young German humanist, Gaspar Schoppe, a guest living at Cardinal Madruzzi’s palace. Days later, Schoppe also witnessed Bruno’s execution at a public marketplace, an open intersection of city streets in Rome known as the Campo de’ Fiori: the “Field of Flowers.”

The statue of Giordano Bruno at the Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome. The plaque reads: “9 JUNE 1889. TO BRUNO. THE CENTURY PREDICTED BY HIM. HERE WHERE THE FIRE BURNED” (via author).

The day Bruno was burned, Schoppe wrote a detailed letter to a friend explaining what had just happened. Schoppe complained that ordinary people in Rome were saying that a Lutheran was burned. But Schoppe explained that that was not true at all. Bruno wasn’t a Lutheran, but something far worse—a “monster.”

Schoppe wrote: “Perhaps I too would believe the vulgar rumors that Bruno was burned for Lutheranism, but I was present at the Holy Office of the Inquisition when the sentence against him was pronounced, & so I know what heresy he professed.”

Excerpt of Gaspar Schoppe’s letter from February 1600, published in 1621, stating Bruno’s “horrendous” beliefs and teachings (see below for source).

Schoppe listed twelve of Bruno’s absurdly horrible claims, his “teachings” (quibus horrenda prorsus absurdissima docet). I’ll quote just two of them, the first and fifth:
(1) “Worlds are innumerable,”…
(5) “the Holy Spirit is nothing other than the soul of the world,”…

Schoppe commented: “perhaps you might add: the Lutherans neither teach nor believe such things, and therefore should be treated otherwise. I agree with you, & therefore, precisely no Lutherans do we [Catholics] burn.”

This means that if the Lutherans held these teachings or beliefs, docere neque credere, they would be burned. It also means that Bruno was burned for these teachings and beliefs.

A portrait of Gaspar Schoppe by Peter Paul Rubens, 1606 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The two accusations above recur throughout Bruno’s trial, from its beginning to the end. It turns out that both were directly connected to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. And most importantly, surprisingly, I found that these beliefs were heresies.

First, Bruno had said in nine books that many worlds exist: not just the Earth, but the Moon, the planets and the stars: “innumerably many worlds.” Apparently he didn’t know it was a heresy to claim that “innumerably many worlds exist.” This belief had been denounced as a heresy by many authorities including Saint Philaster, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Pope Gregory XIII.

Catholics were horrified by this idea, because if many worlds exist then Jesus Christ would have to be born and crucified in each of those worlds to offer salvation to the beings in such worlds.

Second, Bruno said that the Earth has a soul. In twelve of his books he repeatedly asserted that the world has a soul, the Earth has a soul, or the universe has a spirit. According to Bruno, the Earth was alive, like an animal. Just as our bodies are made from matter, from bits of the Earth, so too he said that our individual souls come from soul of the Earth.

Yet this belief that heavenly bodies are animated had been declared heretical by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in the year 553. Similarly, in 1277, Bishop Etienne Tempier in Paris had condemned as a heresy the belief that the heavenly bodies are animated, like animals. This was viewed as a belief of ancient pagans, not Christians.

When Bruno was interrogated by Inquisitors, he said that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Apparently he didn’t know that in 1141 the Council of Sens had condemned as heretical the claim that “the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world.”

Relief depicting the trial of Giordano Bruno, from the base of the Ferrari statue in Campo de’ Fiori (via Wikimedia Commons).

Books on heresies echoed this statement. For example, in 1590, Tiberio Deciani published a Criminal Treatise on All Heresies, in Venice, including the heresy that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Yet Bruno said that to the Inquisitors in Venice when he was interrogated in 1592. And Bruno repeated it to the Roman Inquisitors; he “relapsed” into this heresy. Anyone who relapsed into a heresy, after being instructed to abandon it, was a proven to be an obstinate heretic.

So these heresies about many worlds and about the universal soul were linked to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. It moves because it’s a heavenly body. It moves because it has a soul.

Still, is there any direct evidence that the Inquisitors were aware, concerned, or annoyed, specifically, by Bruno’s claim, in three books, that the Earth moves around the Sun?

Yes. By 1597, theologians working for the Roman Inquisition had extracted ten propositions from Bruno’s books. The propositions were censured and Bruno had to recant. Two were about the “world soul” or “universal spirit.” One was about the planets being animated. One was about the existence of many worlds. And yes—Bruno’s fifth censured proposition was: “About the Earth’s motion.”

A line engraving of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) . Copernicus is holding a model of his heliocentric theory (via Wikimedia Commons).

This all means that Bruno’s belief in a moving Earth was part of the heretical worldview that he advocated both in his books and in his trial. His ideas about many worlds and about the soul of the world convinced him that Copernicus was right: the Earth moves. Those same ideas about worlds and souls led Bruno to his death.

Sixteen years later, in 1616, when Galileo first got in trouble with the Inquisition in Rome, four of the same Inquisitors and Consultors from Bruno’s trial also met with Galileo. One of them was now the head of the Inquisition. Another one was now the head of the Index of Forbidden Books. And another was now the Pope.

But Galileo was more cautious than Bruno.

Illustration depicting Galileo Galilei at his trial by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Galileo denied that the Moon was another world, even though he discovered—he saw with a telescope—that the Moon has mountains and valleys. Bruno had actually predicted that, whereas Copernicus had not. Galileo didn’t say that “innumerably many worlds exist,” though he proudly wrote that he had discovered “innumerably many stars.” Bruno, not Copernicus, had predicted that too. Galileo discovered moons around Jupiter. And again, Bruno had predicted that some planets have moons, like the Earth, while Copernicus had not.

Galileo did not tell the Inquisitors about any soul or universal spirit that moves the Earth either. But in two private letters, in 1615, he guardedly admitted that he believed that the Sun can be described as the soul of the world and that it transmits a spirit throughout the universe, a spirit that gives life and movement to all things. Even the Earth?

After meeting with the Inquisitors in Rome, Galileo never again wrote about the universal spirit that vivifies and moves all things. We don’t even know if the Inquisitors knew that, in private, secretly, quietly, Galileo too entertained such ideas.

Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion. But this belief was directly linked to key heresies that led to his execution.

The trial of Bruno was in the background of Galileo’s troubles with the Inquisition. Galileo lived in the haunting shadow of the burning man.

Photo Source: Gaspar Schoppe to Konrad Ritterhausen, 17 February 1600, printed in Gaspari Scioppii, “Epistola, in qua sententiam de Lutheranis tanquam haereticis atram Romae fieri asserit & probat,” in Machiavellizatio (Zaragosa: Didacus Ibarra, 1621), pp. 30-35.

Also by Alberto Martinez on Not Even Past:

Alberto Martínez on Darwin’s Finches & Other Science Myths.

Was Einstein Really Religious?

Dividing by Nothing.

More of Alberto Martinez’s works and writings can be found here.

Modern Fossils: What Objects Tell Us About the Anthropocene / David Rooney

Anthropocene: Reshaping the Past to Remake the Future / Felipe Vilo Muñoz

Recent Posts