“Let others do the inventing!” said Miguel de Unamuno and launched the notion, much affected by historians for most of the twentieth century, that Spaniards were uninterested in participating in modern science. Portuguese historians, by contrast, in the same period, tended to insist that science was their compatriots’ invention, at least in the fields of cartography and navigation, and that their nation contributed enormously to the scientific aspects of the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. On both counts, revision is well under way. Portugal and Spain both now seem unexceptional cases, consistent with the history of western European science in general.
It is no longer possible to assert, with any confidence, that Portuguese navigation was peculiarly scientific at an exceptionally early date. Historians do not now represent the Portuguese prince known as Henry the Navigator as an organizer of scientific seminars or even as a navigator. Scholarship has exploded...
