“The long siesta of the seventeenth century” is a familiar characterization of the colonial era between the Age of Discovery and Conquest and the lengthy period of the so-called Enlightenment preceding the wars of independence. The intermediate Baroque century is generally conceived as a time of stagnation—an assessment now slightly modified, perhaps, by recent studies, but still with a lingering belief that intellectual progress was then at a standstill, if not actually retrogressing. The present work by a brilliant young Mexican scholar clearly disproves this misconception by demonstrating beyond doubt that the remarkable developments of contemporary Europe in pure science had their repercussions in the overseas possessions of Spain, particularly Mexico. There, he makes it clear, the intellectual ferment of the closing decades of that century was absolutely crucial to the subsequent rise of the Enlightenment, for the discoveries in pure science made possible the applied science and technology of the more renowned eighteenth century. The Baroque period, the author therefore affirms, “es el siglo del genio por excelencia. La Ilustración vivirá de lo sembrado en estos años cruciales” (p. 17).
To present his thesis Trabulse selected three symbolic figures, who were almost exact contemporaries, to exemplify the shift from an ecclesiastical cosmology to a modern, secular cosmology by utilizing the polemic to which the Great Comet of 1680 gave rise on both sides of the Atlantic.
The missionary-explorer in northwestern New Spain, Eusebio Francisco Kino (1644-1711), born in the Austrian Tyrol, embodied the orthodox tradition in its purest form; the Mexican savant, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), encarnated the half-unacceptable past and an unknown future; while the French Huguenot, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), compiler of a Historical and Critical Dictionary, was the thoroughgoing sceptic in science and agnostic in religion. The Mexican-born Sigüenza thus was a bridge between the Biblical order of the universe, so fervently embraced by Father Kino, and the mechanistic universe of Bayle, and he is thus a transitional figure of considerable importance. In their different ways, these three individuals were increasingly conscious of the enthronement of the oncoming science and the dethronement of purely imaginative thinking.
Trabulse divides his stimulating study into separate analyses of seventeenth-century science and religion by describing the reactions of each of his representative men to both. He examines first their attitudes towards science, specifically their concepts of the nature and theory of comets, and then their attitudes towards contemporary religious thought. He compares the views of each with respect to science by: a) the prevailing patterns of scientific beliefs; b) the demythologizing of science; and c) the lament for science robbed of its mystery and superstition. Similarly, he contrasts their religious concepts according to: a) the prevailing pattern of orthodoxy; b) the process from orthodoxy to heterodoxy; and c) the legacy of the Baroque Age which, in essence, was the theory of progress that dominated the Enlightenment.
This admirably orchestrated discussion, with its exhaustive documentation in 69 pages of erudite notes and 24 pages of bibliography, provides a remarkable contribution to colonial intellectual history, and it is assuredly a landmark of Spanish American historiography.
