Philology and Space: The Transformation of Natural History in 17th-Century Spanish America

Seventeenth-century Spanish American scholars like the Peruvian jurist Antonio León Pinelo (1590/1–1660) lamented that most natural and human histories of the Americas written in the sixteenth century remained in manuscript, buried in archives, or worse, lost to oblivion. This archival neglect was most acutely felt in New Granada (modern-day Colombia), a kingdom far from the core viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico. In New Granada writers like Juan Rodríguez Freyle (1566–1642) and Pedro Simón (1581–c.1628) echoed León Pinelo’s concern about ignorance of the Americas’ natural history, a problem compounded by their kingdom’s remoteness. This paper traces a shift in how philological practices created contrasting spatial imaginaries of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on early histories of the Magdalena, the most important river of New Granada. To respond to archival neglect, seventeenth-century scholars experimented with different modes of compilation and philological commentary. They also sought to provide new systems for understanding the Americas’ nature. They embraced textual citation of published works, manuscripts, and archives, eschewing the direct observation and the consultation of Indigenous experts of their predecessors. The decline of oral evidence, perhaps due to the decreasing status of Indigenous informants in Spanish America, led to the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge and the proliferation of static imaginaries of the river based on outdated yet archivally sound information.