New Worlds, Ancient Texts

On encountering what he called "the Indies", the Jesuit Jose de Acosta wrote, "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 to be otherwise...What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle's "Meteorology" and his philosophy?" Acosta's experience echoes that of his fellow travellers to the New World, and it is this experience, with its profound effect on Western culture, that Anthony Grafton charts. Describing an era of exploration that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. The intellectual shift mapped out here, a movement from book learning to empirical knowledge, did not take place easily or quickly, and Grafton presents it in all its drama and complexity. What he recounts is in effect a war of ideas fought, sometimes unwittingly, by mariners, scientists, publishers, scholars and rulers over 150 years.He shows explorers from Cortez and Columbus to Scaliger and Munster, laden with ideas gathered from ancient and medieval texts, in their encounters with the world at large. In vignettes, firsthand accounts, published debates and copious illustrations, he shows these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional images and notions of the world beyond Europe. The cultural revolution that Grafton documents still reverberates in our time. By taking readers into this battle of books versus facts, a conflict that has shaped global views for centuries, Grafton allows readers to re-experience and understand the Renaissance as it continues to this day.