New World Drugs and the Archive of Practice

Abstract

This essay examines European vernacular translations of the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes’s treatises on drugs from the New World. I use the concept of an “archive of practice,” a set of original sources based in practices rather than texts, to examine how translators articulated or disarticulated indigenous Amerindian knowledge in Italian, English, French, Dutch, and German sources. Examining practice as a kind of archive allows us to consider sources captured only peripherally in written texts. This concept is especially important for Amerindian medical practices, which had no written source material. All Monardes sources, including his original publications, functioned as highly mediated translations of indigenous practices, and vernacular translations were even more distant from the primary sources. Nevertheless, I argue, the foundation of New World drugs on an archive of indigenous practice formed an important backdrop to vernacular translations. The empirical, non-European origins of the new knowledge gave translators significant freedom to adapt Monardes’s texts to their specific intellectual, political, professional, and commercial interests.