Duración: (2020-2021)

Investigador principal:

Sergio Orozco-Echeverri (sergio.orozco@udea.edu.co)

Co-investigador:

Lawrence Dritsas, l.dritsas@ed.ac.uk, (University of Edinburgh)

Sebastián Molina-Betancur, sebastian.molina@unibg.it (Università degli studi di Bergamo)

Resumen:

The last two decades have experienced a rebirth of studies on the emergence and circulation of science and technology in the Iberian-American world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A growing scholarship has challenged the assumption that Spain and Portugal were irrelevant or, at best, marginal to the European renovation of the knowledge of nature that led to modern science. Initially, revisionist scholars attempted to trace aspects central to the so-called scientific revolution, such as the experimental method, in Iberian practices as part of the exploration and control of the “New World”. More recent scholarship has focused on understanding the production and uses of knowledge in the Iberian-American world by contextualising the singular ways in which these societies explained and transformed nature. Along these lines, current studies portray the sixteenth-century Iberian peninsula as a significant place in the production of natural knowledge with global reach. Studies on the cosmographers, university scholars, mathematicians and their networks with institutions such as the Casa de la Contratación and the Consejo de Indias, have provided views on mixed-mathematics, cosmography and navigation different from those traditionally studied under the umbrella of the “scientific revolution”. However, a significant portion of studies, particularly of those concerned with astronomy and cosmography, follow a “top-down” approach, in which knowledge appears as emanating from, or concentrated in, centres of political and colonial power, personified in cosmographers, chief pilots, and mathematicians close to the courts. As illuminating as this approach may be, significant areas still remain unexplored. A manuscript recently re-discovered in the National Library of Colombia (2019) opens paths to understanding the circulation of Renaissance and early modern ideas in the Iberian-American world from a bottom-up perspective. The Tratado de astronomía y la reformaçion del tiempo, a 245-folios manuscript, was composed by the mestizo priest Antonio Sánchez de Cozar y Guanientá in Vélez, New Kingdom of Granada between 1676 and 1696. The manuscript contains three treatises: the first deals with the cosmography and astronomy, articulating in an original way the traditions of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera and the Theoricae planetarum; the second develops a reformation of time, re-calculating the duration of the solar year and establishing new chronologies from a new date of the birth of Jesus. The third put forward a reform to the calendar, correcting the date to celebrate Easter. Although the manuscript is presented as a treatise, its contents and style differ from Renaissance and early modern astronomical treatises. During my research, I discovered a tradition which provides the sources of the Tratado: the Iberian cosmographical repertorios de los tiempos (CRT). The CRT have roots in the Renaissance almanacs and repertories presenting celestial positions, or providing the rudiments to calculate them, with agricultural, calendrical, religious, astrological, medical, and meteorological purposes. These publications were ubiquitous in Renaissance Europe. In the sixteenth-century, when Iberian mathematicians turned to cosmography with geographical and navigational interests, turned almanacs into more ambitious works by including elements of cosmography and astronomy, visually and conceptually synthetising the traditions of Sacrobosco and the Theoricae that were kept separate in university curricula. The introduction of these astronomical and cosmographical elements in repertories ended up articulating a Catholic world-view of the cosmos spatially organised by mathematics and temporally regulated by an astronomy embracing the religious and civil calendars, and the biblical and prophetic eras. 

Objetivos:

• To uncover the networks of production and use of knowledge connected with Antonio Sánchez’s Tratado.
• To track some major Iberian repertorios and their critical reception in South America.
• To explore the possibilities of reinterpreting repertorios as more than compilation of knowledge produced elsewhere.

Palabras clave: astronomy, astrology, cosmography, early modern science, colonial history

Entidades cooperantes / financiadoras

The University of Edinburgh, UK

Università degli studi di Bergamo, Italia 

Instituto de Filosofía, Universidad de Antioquia