Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain ed. by Enrique García Santo-Tomás

Abstract

Reviewed by: Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain ed. by Enrique García Santo-Tomás Shifra Armon Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. U OF TORONTO P, 2019. 296 PP. IN ELEVEN ESAYS BY SCHOLARS from North America and Spain, this volume investigates the dynamic interplay between early modern science and comedia. Taken in its entirety, Science on Stage refutes the view that Counter-Reformation Spain spurned the epistemic paradigm shifts loosely referred to as the “Scientific Revolution.” The traditionalist disparagement of Spain’s contributions to science, as García Santo-Tomás recounts in his introduction, derives both from vestiges of anti-Spanish sentiment among Anglo-American historians and from the belief that Spain’s economic and political losses during this period precipitated intellectual decline as well. Science on Stage is divided into three parts comprised of three chapters each. Part 1, “Technologies of Knowledge,” recognizes comedia stagecraft’s debt to Spain’s legacy of Islamic science and to contemporaneous advances in geometry and engineering. Part 2, “Stages of Science,” highlights dramatic works that wove innovations in medicine, pharmacology, and warcraft into their dramatic plots. The third trio of essays, “Performing Numbers,” inquires into the “challenges of uncertainty” (Jeremy Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998) posed by rapidly changing commercial, mechanical, dramatic, and pictorial practices; the common theme here is not numbers per se, but new habits of thought (quantification, skepticism, circumspection, empirical observation, and so forth) required to navigate illusive new topographies of knowledge. To do justice to the diversity of critical approaches that the nine core chapters of Science on Stage represent, it will be useful to offer a synopsis of each. Ryan Szpiech’s essay, “From Mesopotamia to Madrid: The Legacy of Ancient and Medieval Science in Early Modern Spain,” aptly opens part [End Page 149] 1 by exploring myths and frameworks that have encumbered the study of Spain’s scientific past. Szpiech eschews the Western bias implicit in elevating Greek science above its Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian precursors as well as the Enlightenment bias favoring post-Cartesian science above earlier admixtures of physics and metaphysics. Notational systems, both mathematical and alphabetical, or “technolog[ies] of information storage” (31), developed in several ancient civilizations, thereby facilitating the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge. Later, the Baghdad and Andalusian caliphates and the great Library of Alexandria became sites of knowledge translation, transmission, and refinement. This archive nourished Iberian scientia more thoroughly than its non-Arabized neighbors to the north. Szpiech highlights numerous Golden Age comedias that registered the ongoing prestige that Islamic mathematics, medicine, and science enjoyed even in inquisitorial Spain. Following Szpiech’s essay, Alejandro García-Reidy’s contribution on the materiality of staging, “The Technological Environment of the Early Modern Spanish Stage,” provides a helpful update to John Jay Allen and José María Ruano de la Haza’s Los teatros comerciales del siglo XVII y la escenificación de la comedia (Castalia, 1994) and José María Díez Borque’s Teatro cortesano en la España de los Austrias (Cuadernos de teatro clásico, 10, 1998). Rounding out part 1, John Slater discerns the same mathematizing zeal that was breathing new life into Renaissance engineering, gardening, and fencing in both the built space of the corrales and in comedia plotlines that pitted erotic chaos against geometric order. Geometric or “gridded” conceptualization informed many facets of theatrical culture. Slater notes for example that Lope de Vega composed a sonnet for Ginés Rocamora y Torrano’s Sphera del Universo of 1599 that illustrates the dramatist’s keen awareness of contemporary geometric thought (81–82). Part 2 turns to dramatic works that drew upon the poetic power of early modern medical science and technology. Leading off this part, Julio Vélez-Sainz assembles eclogues and plays by Juan del Enzina, Lucas Fernández, and Torres Naharro, all of which approached lovesickness as a physiological condition that demanded specialized medical intervention. Next, Lourdes Albuixech’s chapter focuses on poison, a morbidly fascinating pharmacological subfield, to be sure, but also an ideologically charged signifier associated with...