Naturalia, mirabilia & monstrosa en los imperios ibéricos (siglos XV – XIX)

Can representations of curiosities, marvels, and monstrosities shed light on the history of the global early modern period? As new societies emerged in the wake of imperial expansion, new objects and categories of naturalia, mirabilia, and monstrosa came into being as well. By and large, the literature on marvels has remained obsessively Euro-centric. For example, as the baroque predecessor of modern museums, gardens, libraries, and labs, and as a site for the development of new forms of sociability, consumption, epistemological authority, and imperial imagination, the origin of the Kunstkammer in Europe has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. Yet the history of cabinets of curiosities in, say, New Spain and Goa has gone largely untold. The book under review seeks to address this imbalance by focusing on the history of the curious, marvelous, and monstrous in the sprawling Spanish and Portuguese empires.The results are uneven. Most of the collection is devoted to elucidating reactions to New World, African, Asian, and European marvels in Europe in general (Monique Mund-Dopchie, Mathieu Zana Etambala, Renate Pieper, Johan Verberckmoes), Italy (Giulia Boglio Bruna), France (Júnia Ferreira Furtado), and Spain (Louise Bénat, Ana Crespo Solana). There are, to be sure, numerous novel and intriguing contributions in these essays. Pieper, for example, demonstrates that Italians, by and large, got their information on marvels (parrots) through manuscripts, directly from observers, whereas Central Europeans got theirs through books, which usually proved inaccurate and untrustworthy. Bénat, on the other hand, provocatively maintains that Spanish chroniclers sought to expunge all references to marvels and monstrosities from their descriptions of the Mexican and Peruvian economic cores, so as to render these polities perfectly stable and profitable. That Spaniards explained the earthquake and tsunami of Cadiz of 1755 (the same that leveled Lisbon) with a mixture of religious piety and Enlightenment rationality, as Crespo Solana strives to show, seems far less surprising. Verberckmoes’s essay on dwarfs in European courts epitomizes both the virtues and limitations of the Euro-centric approach. Dwarfs were both monsters and marvels to be collected, displayed, and given away; and like pets they enjoyed unparalleled access to monarch and grandees. One Petrus Gonsalvus, doubly monstrous because he was wolflike and a dwarf, arrived in the mid-sixteenth century to the Antwerp court of Marguerite of Parma, after having first learned Latin in France. This unusually rare “specimen” came from the Canary Islands. There is also the case of the spotted albino dwarfs who arrived in the Portuguese court from Brazil in the 1770s. The cases of Gonsalvus and the Brazilian dwarfs beg the question, how did the metropolitan demand for dwarfs shape perceptions at the peripheries of the Iberian empires? Were spotted, wolflike dwarfs in Brazil and the Canaries seen as providential signs, warning wayward communities to behave, or were they simply considered export commodities? More intriguing perhaps is whether petty aristocrats in the plantations of Pernambuco and Tenerife enhanced their prestige by having dwarfs of their own. (A clue as to how the albino and hairy dwarfs from Brazil and the Canary Islands might have wound up in Lisbon and Antwerp can be found in two strange late eighteenth-century Mexican letters by Isidoro Martín y Morales addressed to Charles III and Charles IV, respectively, now at the Archive of the Indies (AGI, México, 3143). Born with a legless torso, Isidoro first begs the king to be compassionate and send him money. Years later a desperate Isidoro volunteers to go to Madrid to entertain the court.)Fortunately, the book has also essays that seek to decenter the study of marvels and curiosities away from Europe: on eighteenth-century antiquarians and miraculous saints in Brazil (Iris Kantor); on providential, patriotic theories by Peruvian creoles on the puzzling origins of Amerindians (Manuel Bustos Rodríguez); on the demystifying attitude toward marvels (more “modern” than that of European scholars) by an “Aztec” historian in New Spain and a Portuguese Creole botanist in Goa (Serge Gruzinski); on hybrid (Nahua and baroque) interpretations of astral (comets, meteors, and eclipses) and telluric (earthquakes, storms, and plagues) phenomena as revealed in the seventeenth-century account of a Tlaxcalan neighborhood in Puebla, Anales de San Juan del Rio (Lidia Gómez); on the creation of a hybrid, global culinary taste in the Portuguese empire out of the mixing of marvelous staples from Brazil, Africa, and India (Eduardo França Paiva); on the Christianization of Nahua preternatural conceptions of clouds (Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo); on the bookish attitude of an Enlightenment Portuguese military officer seeking to explain marvels in his travels through the Amazon (Neil Safier); on eighteenth-century accounts of marvels and monstrosities in Gazeta de Mexico, a New Spanish periodical (Verónica Zárate and Eduardo Flores); on the differences (and also circulation) on the marvelous and monstrous in Indo-Persian and Portuguese early modern accounts (Sanjay Subrahmanyam).The book under review will prove difficult to most readers, for there are essays in French, Portuguese, English, Spanish, and, in the case of the essay by Boglio Bruna, lengthy quotations in Italian. Readers should not expect help from the editors, either. The introduction is so short and analytically shallow that it seems it was included as an afterthought. Yet the thrust and spirit of the volume is most valuable: the study of the early modern culture of collecting marvels ought to provincialize Europe

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Baroque · Humanities · Period (music) · Portuguese · Classics · Historical Art and Architecture Studies · History · Philosophy