This page presents information related to the fourteenth class session of J. B. Owens's fall 2002 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 360/560, The Spanish Empire. This course is part of the core curriculum in comparative and world history of the Department of History, Idaho State University. The sole purpose of this page is to provide an orientation to the reading assignments and class session for those students enrolled in History 360/560. See the source page for the complete Dublin Core standard metadata.

You may return to the course main page or to the reading assignments and lecture topics page.

The "Black Legend" and European science

CONSIDER: "An idea, then, is a denial of alternatives and an answer to a question. What a man really means cannot be gathered solely from what he asserts; what he asks and what other men assert invest his ideas with meaning. In no idea does meaning simply inhere, governed only by its degree of correspondence with some unchanging objective reality, without regard to the problems of its thinker."
-- Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (1968).

Reading: Cañizares-Esguerra, Introduction and chapters 1-3.

  1. Why did some eighteenth-century scholars label as unreliable sixteenth-century Spanish-language books about the Americas?
  2. What was the northern European "new art of reading"?
  3. How would you characterize the figure of the "philosophical traveler"?
  4. How do you account for the transition in the use of surviving indigenous sources in nonalphabetical scripts from their role as sources for reconstructing the American past to evidence about the evolution of the human intellect?
  5. Why was controversy over the Bible's reliability significant for the evaluation of indigenous sources of American history?
  6. Why were eighteenth-century intellectuals in Spain divided over the proper patriotic response to new northern European historiographical attitudes toward sources about the American past?
  7. Why were non-Castilians at the forefront of the creation of a new type of history?
  8. Why have the contributions of Spanish Enlightenment scholars been neglected in favor of later German ones in accounts of the beginnings of "modern" methods of historical research?

IDENTIFY: Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal (1713-1796); Cornelius de Pauw (1734-1799); William Robertson (1721-1793); Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788); Garcilaso de la Vega, "El Inca" (1539-1616); José de Acosta, S.J. (1539-ca. 1600); Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745-1799); Francisco Xavier Clavijero, S.J. (1731-1787); Nahua; Zapotec; Mixtec; Maya; quipus; Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1578-1650); Juan de Torquemada (1557-1664); Diego de Landa (1524-1579); William Warburton (1698-1779); Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651-1725); Antonio de León y Gama (1735-1802); Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci (1702-1755); Pedro Rodríguez, count of Campomanes (1723-1803); Gregorio Mayans y Siscar (1699-1781); Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro (1676-1764); Andrés Marcos Burriel, S.J. (1719-1762); Charles III (r. 1759-1788); José de Gálvez (1720-1787); Juan Nuix, S.J. (1740-1783); Ramón Diosdado Caballero, S.J. (1740-1810?).

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J. B. Owens

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Revised: 18 November 2002




URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/readver5.14.html