Abstract
Born as a reduced version of a lengthy doctoral thesis, David Barrado Navascués’ Cosmography in the Age of Discovery and the Scientific Revolution is an ambitious work that, while centred on the early modern period, covers a good deal of historical ground beyond that. The account is split into five chapters. The first takes the reader from Mesopotamia as the cradle of cosmographical knowledge through to a focus on Portuguese and Spanish exploration and cartography from the late-medieval period to the circumnavigation of 1519–1522 led (until his death in 1521) by Ferdinand Magellan. That voyage, Barrado Navascués argues, was decisive in reshaping European knowledge of the Earth and its true extent. The second chapter considers the role of humanism in the so-called scientific revolution, while the third describes the ‘new astronomy’ of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Chapter 4 surveys the history of the quest for longitude at sea from ancient Greece through to the 18th century, while the final chapter considers the history of attempts to determine the size and shape of the Earth, including many of the geodetic and surveying expeditions undertaken up to the 19th century. Following the conclusion, there is a colophon that makes a plea for a return to a humanist approach to education. Throughout, Barrado Navascués gives particular emphasis to developments in and around the Iberian peninsula, although the narrative encompasses other territories and actors in order to sustain its overarching narrative.
While the book’s ambition is laudable, it has limitations. As will be clear from the summary above, it covers topics that have been well rehearsed by a host of authors. Since he brings surprisingly few primary sources to bear, and often does so via secondary sources, two important questions arise: has Barrado Navascués successfully engaged with the work of relevant authors; and what genuinely new approaches or analyses does he bring to the topic?
The book’s title presents cosmography as the central subject, which offers as good a way as any of thinking about these questions. While the meaning of cosmography is implicit in the narrative, no formal definition is discussed, nor is there any consideration of whether its meaning might have shifted over time or varied across different territories. This suggests that it is to be considered an unproblematic category the meaning of which will be clear to readers today. This is an oversimplification, as the work of Jim Bennett, Adam Mosley and others have made clear. Bennett’s working definition of cosmography as the mathematical, or part-mathematical, discipline dealing with the geometrical relationships between the heavens and the Earth is a useful starting point and matches what Barrado Navascués discusses. Pursuing the discussion, however, Mosley has argued that cosmography was always a difficult, protean category, particularly in Spain and Portugal, where it had a longer history than elsewhere in Europe. Some acknowledgement of this complexity and interestingly piecemeal history would be worthwhile. Given their treatments of cosmography in the early modern period, moreover, the absence of scholars such as Bennett and Mosley from the sources cited and of a nuanced discussion of cosmography’s evolving nature are problematic. Indeed, several authors who have tackled relevant material in recent decades are equally overlooked. Among others, I would have welcomed significant engagement with the works of Spanish historian Antonio Sánchez, Portuguese historian of science Henrique Leitão and American scholars including Alison Sandman and Antonio Barrera-Osorio, not to mention Maria Portuondo, whose Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (2009) is an impressive account of clearly related material that draws heavily on primary sources to craft a persuasive and original narrative. Bar one work from Sánchez, none of these authors appear.
There are other missed opportunities. One of the works relied upon for the account of the quest for longitude at sea, for example, is a chapter by Lloyd A. Brown from 1956, a work that draws in turn on Rupert Gould’s The Marine Chronometer (1923). This is surprising, given the abundance of material published on various aspects of the longitude story, particularly since the 1990s, not to mention the online availability of a wealth of pertinent primary sources (e.g. Isaac Newton’s papers and the Board of Longitude archive via the Cambridge Digital Library, or of French printed sources on the Gallica website). It suggests gaps in the research and risks the repetition of errors corrected in the almost 70 years since Brown was writing. Recent scholarship could equally have enhanced other sections. To take one example, in discussing Jonathan Swift’s satirical writings relating to 18th-century science, it is Marjorie Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler’s papers from 1937 that are cited, rather than more recent work by Greg Lynall or Pat Rogers.
This book is based on the second doctoral thesis Barrado Navascués has completed. His first was in astrophysics, which may explain some of the historiographic issues. Astrology, for instance, is given short shrift, Barrado Navascués regretting that anyone should have engaged with ‘a pseudoscience without any real foundation’ (154). Such interventions do little to reassure the reader that the author is engaging with the ideas and practices of other eras on their own terms and within their own cultural contexts.
In short, then, this is a work that could have done more to deliver on its promises. Foregrounding Spanish and Portuguese narratives from the early modern period to readers who have not previously engaged with them in any great measure could be a valuable contribution, but more persuasive accounts already exist.