Finding “Science” in the Archives of the Spanish Monarchy

This essay explores the history of several archives that house the early modern records of Spanish imperial science. The modern "archival turn" urges us to think critically about archives and to recognize in the history of these collections an embedded, often implicit, history that--unless properly recognized, acknowledged, and understood--can distort the histories we are trying to tell. This essay uses a curious episode in the history of science to illustrate how Spanish archives relate to each other and shape the collections they house. During the late eighteenth century a young navy officer, Martín Fernández de Navarrete, was dispatched to all the principal archives of the Spanish monarchy with a peculiar mission: he was to search for evidence that the Spanish in fact had a scientific tradition. This essay uses his mission to explain how the original purpose of an archive--the archive's telos--may persist as a strong and potentially deterministic force in the work of historians of science. In the case of the archives discussed, this telos was shaped by issues as wide ranging as defending a nation's reputation against claims of colonial neglect and as idiosyncratic as an archivist's selection criteria.