History of Science and Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (I)

What’s the link between the Rutter project and sustainability? You will find out in this series of three posts.

At our project we draw directly from early modern scientific manuscripts, bringing them to light from half-forgotten shelves, showing their relevance, and making them available worldwide as much as possible.

Touching the sources themselves is key for an honest and fresh look into the past, for a real understanding, instead of a projection of our views, and this work can be exciting and fascinating, but it is hard work indeed, and it imposes limitations as far as open science and accessibility are concerned. Some typical scenarios are:

• Only one or just a few copies exist of a specific manuscript work, physically located in one/few libraries;
• The texts are hard to read unless the reader has a certain degree of expertise in paleography;
• The texts are written in the languages of the 15th-17th centuries;
• Some texts are considerably long, making it difficult to quickly retrieve information on specific topics.

Porllogo (instead of modern “Prólogo”) of the Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, from the oldest manuscript (ca. 1750) kept at the Public Library of Évora (BPE COD. CXV/1-3).

Applying Digital Humanities techniques to Iberian and Arabic maritime works opens new ways to approach these early scientific and technical texts and to bypass most of their limitations at once. The transcription of texts into digital formats (XML), following international standards (TEI), with the modernization of the language, makes them actually available from everywhere and to anyone, regardless of sex, nationality, age or race. More about this in the coming weeks, stay tuned! [S. Munzi and J. Acevedo]

Surprises Awaiting the Visitors to Simancas Archive

Following our previous post “Father Fernão de Oliveira: a globalization agent of Iberian maritime knowledge”, we could not fail to report our recent excitement when finding sixteenth-century originals mentioning the famous Portuguese nautical expert. The Archivo General de Simancas (in Valladolid, Spain) is one of the main Spanish archives, filled with important documents (not just for Spanish history but for European and World History in general) that still need to be fully researched by scholars. When digging into Simancas’s several funds, you are up for unpredictable surprises.

One of the surprises I had when checking the collection Secretarias de Estado, Estado Portugal was a 1567 letter by D. Fernando Carrillo de Mendonza (the Spanish ambassador in Portugal between 1567 and 1569) to King Philip II (r. 1556-1598), mentioning his conversation with father Fernão de Oliveira. This conversation took place, as mentioned in the previous post, after a French attempt to hire and convince father Oliveira to come to France to serve the Valois in 1566. Carrillo stepped in to prevent Oliveira from departing Portugal to serve France, and instead, he tried to enlist Oliveira for Spanish service.

A letter by D. Juan de Austria, very similar to the documents I was studying.

Carrillo valued so much Oliveira’s knowledge that upon previous order from Philip II, he had spoken directly with the highest Portuguese political authorities (at the time Cardinal Henry and Queen-mother Catherine of Austria) concerning Oliveira’s possible exit from Portugal. Although the Cardinal and the Queen declared that they had spoken with father Oliveira previously, they did not appreciate enough the value of his person, work, and knowledge. But Carrillo was writing to Philip II to inform him that after all that had passed, father Oliveira would not leave for Spain, although he had been to prepared to do so. The letter I found proves that Carrillo knew that his news would disappoint Philip II, as they did. The time for the author of the 1555 Arte da Guerra do Mar (The Art of Sea Warfare) had not yet come to serve in Spain.

This famous excerpt has already been published by scholars Léon Bourdon and Avelino Teixeira da Mota. Aside from the wonderful opportunity to work in an ancient castle and meeting incredible people to assist your research, you will get also a good memory for life. Like when you go hunting or to fish and you never know what you will get, this is what happens when you come to Simancas: at any corner, you might find yourself face to face with a documental surprise relevant to Iberian and European maritime and scientific history during the Renaissance. [Nuno Vila-Santa]

From the “leap day before the calends of March” to the 29th of February – I

The traditional Roman calendar consisted of twelve lunar months divided into blocks of Calends (first day of the month), Nones and Ides, with an annual average value of 355 days, and an additional lunar month added according to certain rules. The new year began on the calends of March.

More than 2050 years ago, Julius Caesar decided to reform the Roman calendar to follow more closely the cycle of the seasons; the basis was the best value of the known tropical solar year —365 days and 6 hours— as confirmed by the greek astronomer Sosigenes from Alexandria, then in Rome.

The new Roman annual calendar was about ten days longer than the previous one. The months kept their traditional names, but the number of days in each month was changed, and the beginning of the year moved to the calends of January, the date on which the two consuls elected annually took office. To maintain the average value of the solar year, the new calendar was left with 365 whole days; the six hours missing each year were to be added every four years, forming a whole day. It was also decided that this extra day would be added after the ‘23rd of February’, the 7th day before the calends of March, in the same place where an intercalary lunar month had been traditionally added, before the end of month and year.

Thus, in a leap year, instead of a day ‘24 of February, the 6th day before the calends of March, there were now two ‘24th’ days, or two sixth days, and the additional day was identified by the name ‘second 6th day before the calends of March’ or ante diem bis sextum Kalendas Martias (bis sextum means literally ‘the twice sixth’).

This new calendar, with a cycle of four years and 1461 days (= 365 x 3 + 366 x 1) remained the Roman Empire calendar, was confirmed by Emperor Augustus, and continued in use throughout Europe even after the fall of the Roman Empire.

About 1500 years after Julius Caesar’s reform, Christian calendars followed the same established rules. Note the detail of a calendar in the Ordinary of the Divine Office of the Cistercian Order (BNP, alc. 62, fol. 4v), a 1475 manuscript, with the Christian liturgy inserted in the Julian calendar:

BNP, alc 62 (1475), fol. 4v, detail

The day added every four years (fifth row) had neither a golden number (1st column) nor a Sunday letter (2nd column), nor a row of its own. Graphically, it was just a red note on the side saying: the sixth [before the Calends of March] is inserted twice here (hic bis sextus inseritur). [José Madruga]

The Living Light (O lume vivo)

“I saw and clearly saw, the living Light, / Which sailor-people hold their Patron-saint, / In times of trouble and the winds’ rude fight, / And sable orcan when man’s heart is faint” (“Vi, claramente visto, o lume vivo / Que a marítima gente tem por santo / Em tempo de tormenta e vento esquivo, / De tempestade escura e triste pranto.”) [English translation by Richard Francis Burton, London 1880]

With these four verses Luís de Camões (Os Lusíadas, 1572) mentioned a curious weather phenomenon which took place during a tempest on his ship while sailing to the East. Such an episode was also described several decades later by William Shakespeare in The Tempest, in connection with the character of Ariel, a spirit with special skills capable of causing storms. Our current explanation is that a bright luminous plasma was generated by an electric discharge in an atmospheric electric field. The intensity of the effect, a blue or violet glow around the object, often accompanied by an audible discharge, was proportional to the strength of the electric field and therefore noticeable primarily during storms or volcanic eruptions. This impressive phenomenon gave rise to a wide variety of explanations, and it was discussed also in more technical maritime literature, like the Arte de navegar published by Simão de Oliveira in 1606.

Oliveira devoted an entire chapter to the “light that appears on certain areas of the ships, after great storms” (Chapter 52). He started by naming this light in many ways, such as S. Frei Pedro Gonçalves, Santelmo, or Corpo Santo. The first of these names referred to Pedro Gonçalves Telmo (hence English “St Elmo’s fire”), the patron saint of sailors, a Spanish catholic priest, born in 1190, to whom various miracles were attributed. The most spectacular was that of Baiona’s big storm, when Saint Telmo asked the winds to stop blowing. Oliveira then went on to explain that this strange event also happened to the ancient sailors, even before the saint was born. The ancients called it Castor and Pollux, when two lights appeared, and Helena when it manifested itself in the form of only one light. Helena was a bad sign, but Castor and Pollux meant happiness.

Finally, Oliveira concluded the chapter by stating that these fires were no sign of a saint, or of a miracle, but were the result of antiperistasis, which was a term used to explain various events, where one quality heightened the force of another opposing, quality. He linked the phenomenon to the ship’s rocking. The ship “sent” —as he put it— “viscous excitements”, that generated the light. Although the author emphasized that such a phenomenon could happen in many other places, like prisons, churches, over sweaty horses or even on the head of strangled prisoners, the textual tradition linked it mostly to maritime contexts. Oliveira’s explanation of the phenomenon had its origins in sailors’ experiences and accounts (oral and written, especially rutters, like D. João de Castro’s texts) of long-distance voyages, where “the living lights” were frequent signals for sailors. [Leonor Pedro & Luana Giurgevich]

The chemistry of the Portuguese Empire III: Ascorbic Acid

This is the third post inspired by the book “Napoleon’s Buttons – 17 Molecules that Changed History” by Penny Le Couteur & Jay Burreson. While in the first two posts of the series we talked about piperine and eugenol, two molecules that inspired, so to speak, the Age of Discoveries, here we consider ascorbic acid which, or rather the absence of which, almost prevented it.

The functions that ascorbic acid, commonly known as vitamin C, performs in our body are several and important: it is in fact an antioxidant, the precursor of enzymes involved in the immune system and the production of neurotransmitters, and it is essential in the production of collagen and in tissue healing.

Molecule of ascorbic acid

But how is this related to oceanic navigation? Humans, as many other animals, are incapable of synthesizing vitamin C and can only acquire it from dietary sources, mainly from fresh fruits and vegetables. If sailors’ eating habits on land were not ideal, they became terrifying onboard, already after a few weeks of navigation. Preserving food in reasonable conditions was practically impossible and the crew had to rely on salty, dried meat and on hardtacks, biscuits made of water and flour and baked to become rock hard. Considering that voyages used to last for months, sailors very soon after their departure started to show symptoms of scurvy, a disease that is caused by vitamin C deficiency.

Not at all a pretty sight, since early symptoms are malaise and lethargy (that made some people think that lazy sailors got sick) then progressing to shortness of breath, but later symptoms are bleeding gums, loss of teeth, susceptibility to bruising, hemorrhaging from mouth and noise, poor wound healing, foul breath, and diarrhea, to finally evolve into fever, convulsions and eventual death. The scarce hygiene, the co-occurrence of other diseases and the general poor health conditions of the sailors, mainly recruited among the lowest social classes, were confounding factors that prevented a serious study of scurvy for a long time. The search for a cure lead to a series of proposals, including bloodletting, an ‘elixir of vitriol’ (a mixture of sulphuric acid and alcohol), salty water, and a number of other ineffective, when not harmful, alternatives.

Scurvy represented an issue until the 18th century.

Today we know that any citrus juice would be enough to avoid scurvy, but in the Age of Discoveries more people died of scurvy than those who died of war, other diseases and shipwrecks combined. [Silvana Munzi]

Holy Intersections!

Working on a lengthy transcription project, a rather technical, cosmographical document of 16th-century Spain, it is marvellous at every turn how different subjects of research converge on every page. I wanted to show an example that spans widely and into the history of early Christianity.

In this document, Alonso de Chaves’ Quatri Partitu en cosmografía práctica, also called Espejo de navegantes (ca. 1528), we have at the beginning a calendar which at first sight is simply a Catholic calendar, with the saints, feasts and observances of the day. The relation between nautical and calendrical sciences is very intimate, and especially so when it is a question of oceanic navigation, because our solar calendar is directly related to the daily position of the sun through the ecliptic. Moreover, because life on board was liturgically a continuation of life on land, the saints calendar, the santoral, provided a temporal reference for everyone on board.

When we are transcribing these pages we very often need to refer to not just any Catholic calendar, which has a hugely complicated history, but very specifically to the Catholic calendar of the Church of Seville in the early 16th century—and you don’t find this around the corner! Each day has a saint or feast, and saints have attributes, like “bishop” or “martyr” or “virgin”, and sometimes to identify one or other you need to know something about the life of the saint, so you go looking into early medieval collections like the super-popular Legenda aurea. Some lovely paleographic eureka moments happen when you realise that a certain story of a thousand years early in Capadocia is determining the “colour” of the day in early modern Seville.

Then, as you can see in the picture, they still kept in this calendar, as a neo-Classical feature, a column with the Roman calendar dates, complete with their kalends, nones and ides; so you need to know your Roman calendar to make sense of it. On another column, we have the dominical or Sunday letters, useful to determine the day of the week for each particular dates, and crucial for the determination of moveable feasts, like Easter.

And suddenly, when you least expect it, instead of a saint, one cell will contain an astrological/astronomical piece of information, like the ingress of a planet into a sign. So you need to keep on your toes and refresh your astronomical signs as well.

It is these ever-unexpected conjunctions of apparently disparate fields of knowledge which make working with early sources so much fun and always a new challenge, or rather a constant invitation to go beyond. No page is the same when you are reading an early modern manuscript. You literally do not know what to expect before turning the page—Here be marvels! [J. Acevedo]

François de Dainville S.J. and the Teaching of Early Modern Geography

The French historian François de Dainville S.J. (1909-1971), published in 1940 a book entitled La Géographie des humanistes. This work, despite its age, is still a reference in Jesuit historiography, at least in some aspects. Dainville argued that the vocation of the Society of Jesus, oriented as much to the moral, disciplinary and religious education of European societies as to the missionary enterprises in the distant lands of Asia and America, led to its assigning an important role to geography as a discipline for educating young people. Dainville’s thinking conceived the geographic discipline in a rather broad way. This approach, perhaps objectionable to the modern historian of science, nevertheless allows us a glimpse into the heterogeneity of the practices and contents of geographic knowledge in the early modern age.

What was stated by Dainville remains valid in more than one aspect. The slow rise of geography as an autonomous scholastic discipline from the embers of the medieval Quadrivium, despite the apparent natural vocation of the Society of Jesus to give to it a privileged role, did not experience an immediate acceleration within the Jesuit educational network. During the sixteenth century, this teaching remained hidden in the lessons of physics, mathematics, natural history, and astronomy. The texts that were used, at least until the publication of the Ratio Studiorum, remained mainly the classics of ancient science and erudition: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, Pomponius Mela, to which was added Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, in a variety of commentaries and reprints.

Nevertheless, even through the use of these texts, geographic disciplines were increasingly identified with historical disciplines, and less and less with mathematics. This aspect is important in understanding the epistemological shift that led to modern geography as a subject of study. In this sense, Fr. Dainville’s book remains a classic founder of a strand of study, that of the teaching of geography in Jesuit schools. La Géographie des Humanistes thus deserves to be reread and appreciated by new generations of historians of science, culture, and of the Jesuits. [David Salomoni]