Gra$on,

Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradi8on

and the Shock of Discovery. With April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1992.

Context of producJon

Waldseemller's 1507 Map of

the World.

v 1492: Quincentenary commemoraJon of the Conquest of America.

v Anthony Gra0on: Andrew Mellon Professor of History at Princeton
University and a Renaissance scholar.

v The New York Public Library: Organize an exhibiJon and write a book
using it archives on sixteenth and seventeenth century European
thought.

v Objec@ve of the book: To trace the transforming eects of the
voyages of exploraJon upon European scholarship, learning, and culture
from 1450 to 1700. (Foreword vii)

IntroducJon
New Knowledge, Established System of Thought
1550-1650: Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could nd all
important truths in ancient books. (1)

Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid
Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would
not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out
otherwise. Jos de Acosta. Historia natural y moral de las Indias
(1590).

The age of a system of thought became a sign not of authority but of
obsolescence, and many of those who insisted on the aestheJc
superiority of classical literature admieed the substanJve supremacy of
modern science. (5)

The discoveries gradually stripped the books of their aura of
completeness as repositories of informaJon and their appearance of
uJlity as tool for interpretaJon. (5)

IntroducJon
A Story of Europeans

John Ellioe, Giuliano Gliozzi, and Michael Ryan have argued that
in fact the discoveries had very liele impact on European
thought. (6)

This is a story of Europeans, told from a European point of view.
We seek to understand the experiences and visions of European
intellectuals and explorers, not to recover the ways in which the
peoples they conquered understood the West much less what
suering those people certainly endured or what benets they
possibly drew from the encounters. (7)
Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards.
Ibero-Amerikanisches InsJtut, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin. Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource,
NY

In the case of relaJons between the West and the Rest, these
polemics have had a powerful tendency to sterilize thought and
research. (9)

Chapter 1. A Bound World: The Scholars Cosmos

Learning as reading
But all them [books] embodied the assumpJon that a basically complete and accurate body of
knowledge already existed. (13)

The tradiJonal arts and sciences appear as nished, perfect enJJes that invite study rather
than improvement. (16)

Many books, prints, and painJngs dened learning as reading (22)

1500
Humanism Vs. (ScholasJcs) UniversiJes
Humanists: these men founded schools where young men and a few young
women could gain access not to the formal, regulated, licensed skills of the
university theologians and doctors but the more general, moral and literary
lesson of the ancient Greeks and Romans. (29)

By the late 1490s, Europe had not one but two canons, each of which
served a parJcular set of purposes, gave access to a parJcular set of
occupaJons, and had its own powerful defenders. (29)

Chapter 1. A Bound World: The Scholars Cosmos

The ChaoJc World of the Book
By the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, in short, the world of the book was
not coherent but chaoJc, not solid but riven; and the ssures represented not only the quarrels
of individuals who disagreed on specic points of detail but also fundamental debates about
intellectual standards and knowledge itself. (35)

1620-1630

Barsta Agnese's 1544 world map

Chapter 2. Navigators and Conquerors: The Universe of the

PracJcal Man
A$er all, the world of cra$ and trade, not that of books, produced the forces that really
revoluJonized the European and then the enJre world. (61)
Columbus and Vespucci reporJng the discovery
As Columbus observed and reported on
the New World, he naturally turned to his
reading and extended it- as he looked
for a framework in which to insert what
he saw. SomeJmes the confronta@on
between eye and text refuted the books;
he found none of the monstrosiJes, he
announced in his rst leeer, that many
had expected to exist in the far places of
the world. (77, 79)

Carlo Verardi. De insulis nuper in Mari Indico reperJs

[and] de insulis nuper invenJs [1494]

Chapter 2. Navigators and Conquerors: The Universe of the

PracJcal Man
Vespucci: A Man of the Book
Vespucci proved to be a man of the book. His own
achievements as a sailor did nothing to merit the
naming of the Americas a$er him. But the brilliant
pamphlets that circulated about his adventures in
the West made him the reputa@on that his
voyaging could not. Even more vividly than
Columbus, the texts aeributed to Vespucci reveal
the weight and impact of tradiJons. (83)

Columbus Discovering America, plate 2 from Nova Reperta

New Discoveries, engraved by Theodor Galle (1571-1633) c.1600.
By (a$er) Straet, Jan van der (Giovanni Stradano) (1523-1605).

As reports proliferated, so did

interpretaJons, and tradiJons
o f l e a r n i n g a n d n e w
experiences intersected. The
canon underwent new stresses
and performed new services as
s c h o l a r s i n E u r o p e a n d
elsewhere tried to t masses of
dicult data to the inherited
shapes of learning. (93)

Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone

SebasJan Mnster. Cosmographia (1550)
Like Ptolemys map of the world, on which
it was based, Mnters made no eort to
assert European superiority or power by its
ordering of the data. The center of the map
lay not in ChrisJan territory but near
Mecca, Europe sJll appeared as a spit of
land of the west of Asia, and was now
dwarfed by Africa as well. But the
convenJons also imprisoned him. He could
portray the inhabitants of the New World
only as naked Europeans, their naughty bits
aestheJcally concealed by draped cloths, or
as cannibals energeJcally sawing another
human into loin chops. He could imagine
strange races only in terms of the ancient
opposiJons between gentleness, nudity,
and the Golden Age and savagery,
monstrosity, and murder. (107-111)

A map of Asia from Mnsters 1542 Basel ediJon of

Ptolemys Geography. The mpnstruos races occupy
the maps edges, cannibals, who had always according
to legend inhabited Scythia, are shown top
center. (104)

Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone

The PercepJon of Ancient and non-European, by Modern
The discovery of the non-European world and the
discovery that the ancients were not wiser than the
moderns seem indissolubly linked () Surely the
discovery of real savages in a real wilderness inspired
the drama and pathos of his vision of Ancient
Europeans living a savage life (126)

The intellectuals of the Hispanic world were of course
the rst ones to confront the necessity of describing
and explaining new socieJes, ora, and fauna. But
their problem was not simply an intellectual one ()
From the rst, church and government worried about
the vast human cost of the new system and tried to
regulate it. (132)

A Brief Account of the Destruc8on of

the Indies, by Bartolome de las Casas
(Italian translaJon, 1643).

Chapter 3. All Coherence Gone

[E]xtratextual world of inexplicable data
Individual ancient texts and theories proved surprisingly resilient, yielding soluJons to agonizing historical,
ethical, and religious problems. The discovery of human beings in the Americas, a$er all, posed a hard
quesJon to scholars who believed that the world had a seamless and coherent history: were did they come
from? Neither the Greeks, the Romans, nor the Jews had known of their existence. How, then, could Greco-
Roman and Hebrew texts be complete and authoritaJve? (148-149)

The authority of ancient texts of books themselves- was clearly shaken. But their own proliferaJon and
combat did more of the damage than their conict with an extratextual world of inexplicable data () The
discoveries provided a clinching piece of evidence to those who wished to argue for a new vision of history,
for the superiority of modern to ancient culture. (157)

Benito Arias Montano. An8quitatum

iudaicarum libri ix (Leiden, 1593) (150).

Chapter 4. Drugs and Diseases:

New World Biology and Old World Learning
PLANTS: Nicolas Monardes, the Spanish physician who authored Joyfull Newes out of the
Newe Founde Worlde (1577), judged the discovery of America far more valuable for its plants
than for its mineral wealth because health was ulJmately more precious than riches. (162)

TOBACCO: In a pithy couplet he [Joshua Sylvester] grasps how, in tobaccos transportaJon from
one cultural context to another, it passed from use to abuse, a paeern that would be repeated
as other nonnaJve drugs came to Europe: For, what to them [the naJve Americans] is Meat
and Medcinable, / Is turned to us a Plague intolerable. (176)

DISEASES: the eects of contact on the health of the peoples of the Old World and the New
were far more devastaJng for the laeer, with uncounted deaths resulJng from conquest, forced
labor, and epidemics of diseases brought Europe. (179)

Chapter 5. A New World of Learning

Discovery, Reading and Knowledge
Both the New World and ancient texts played key roles in Bacons dramas of scien@c
discovery, but their parts contrasted as radically as those of HoraJo and Iago. From the start,
he took the discovery of the New World by Europeans as the model for all intelligent eorts
to obtain new knowledge. The Jtle page of the Great Instaura8on [Instaura8o magna] shows
a ship sailing past classical columns that represent the Pillars of Hercules, the ancient limits of
naviga@on and knowledge. The scene deliberately reuses and subverts- tradiJonal images
and values. The emperor Charles V had taken the pillars as his symbol, glossing them with the
cauJous humanist moeo Ne plus ultra, Do not go too far. Bacon kept the pillars but sent his
ship past them and lopped a vital word from the accompanying LaJn tag. Plus ultra, he urged
his readers: Too far is not enough. Discovery, not reading, has become the central mode of
obtaining important knowledge. (198)

Across Europe, intellectuals moved into new habitats. In courts and

ciJes from Prague to Copenhagen, monarchs, scienJsts, and
amateurs were studying in an environment as remarkable for its lack
of books as the tradiJonal scholars study had been dened by their
presence. Variously called the museum, the cabinet of curiosiJes, the
Kunst-und Wunderkammer, the new locale was furnished not with
texts but with exactly the sort of natural objects that Bacon had
demanded that scholars study. (217)

Chapter 5. A New World of Learning

New World Vs. Ancient Texts
The a$erlife of the ancients certainly did not end in
the mid-seventeenth century. The educaJon of
European aristocrats and state ocials conJnued to be
classical for centuries to come. The ancient text
conJnued to be read, translated, and admired, to
provide the model genres for ambiJous modern
writers: epic, history, tragedy. And belief in progress
would not become universal in the West for a very long
Jme, not even in the Enlightenment would it nd
universal assent. (248)
Rhetorically, the New World had replaced the ancient
texts. It had become the prime metaphor for the right
way to discover new facts about the world and the
prime source for new theories about human
society. (252)

Personal Conclusions and Discussion