Hail, Practical Knowledge!

When Cristopher Columbus first saw American land, a New World was gazed and composed. An autoptic re-creation of the sailors who experienced these unknown territories, sixteenth-century European literature allowed its readers to see the globe without their eyes, by reading the travel reports of those who had observed it in person.

With this came a change in the way that knowledge was validated. If intellectual and scholarly knowledge about the Earth had been set in stone for centuries, after these first encounters the experience of those that directly observed a new reality became ever more credible and relevant in the understanding of the natural world. A conflict between scholarly knowledge and practical knowledge thus arose in Iberia, one that can be read in Diálogos (1589), by Portuguese Friar Amador Arrais:

[The Portuguese] revealed to the wise men of the earth many secrets of nature. (...) They found new stars, sailed unknown seas and climates, discovered the ignorance of the ancient Geographers, which the world had as masters of hidden truths. They found the correct measurements of the coastlines, reduced and increased latitude degrees, amended the heights of the Sun, and, without other speculative Letters than those that are practiced on the deck of a ship, they devalued many who in famous universities had wasted their time.

The lived experience of the Earth unveiled the book of nature. Its writers, according to Friar Amador Arrais, are no longer the canonical authors of Ancient Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but people with no scholarly education, such as pilots, sailors, and the artisans who made the instruments that measured this new world. Its source is no longer the Ptolemaic geography that had been taught at the University, but the experiential practical and artisanal knowledge created at sea, on the deck of a ship crossing the ocean. Its pages, a realistic new narrative about the planet we are still eager to read. [Joana Lima]