Knowledge in Motion
FOLLOWING ITINERARIES OF MATTER IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
Pamela H. Smith
I BEGIN WITH RED …
RED IS THE COLOR OF BLOOD AND LIFE. Its symbolic power can be glimpsed in the practices of prehistory, when red pigment was used to paint human remains and cinnabar—the red ore of mercury—ornamented tombs from the Near and Middle East in the seventh millennium BCE to the sprawling urbs of Çatal Hüyük in the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE.1 Red is primal, and it appears to have possessed symbolic significance—perhaps universally—across the globe. In early modern Europe, red pigment was produced by grinding red ochre clay or by boiling, drying, and grinding madder root, or through mashing kermes beetles from Poland and Armenia;2 but a much more saturated red could be produced by grinding cinnabar (HgS, or mercury sulfide), mined since Roman times in Almaden, Spain; or, after the 1520s, by drying, compressing, then grinding the red cochineal beetle, which lived on Central and South American cacti.3 Finally, sulfur and mercury were heated together to produce a “synthetic” cinnabar that yielded a bright vermilion pigment.
In this essay, red plays a role in the flow of knowledge back and forth among European vernacular practitioners and text-oriented scholars in their diverse practices of producing and reproducing knowledge about natural things. Red pigments also exemplify the crisscrossing flows of matter, practices, and knowledge across Eurasia. In focusing on red, I introduce a confounding variety of motions and pathways—the exchange of materials, the flows from matter to ideas, from producers to philosophers and back again, between different social groups, language groups, trading partners, and warring empires—that intersect, collide, and meld to produce new configurations that themselves incorporate disaggregating and re-forming parts. The material of red pigment forms my guiding thread in weaving together this multitude of strands. I do not thereby claim that it was the most significant item of trade, nor did it possess precisely the same meanings in the multiplicity of places I pass through in this essay. Other materials, incorporated in entirely distinctive (and non-European) complexes of knowledge and practice, could also have served as such a thread.
I begin with the matter of the red pigment itself and its manipulation by the human hand. Matter possesses certain properties that the human hand employs in transforming matter into objects—material objects of use, of desire, of study, as well as of thought and philosophizing. Only by appreciating this first station of the itinerary of matter, that is, the struggle of the human body with matter and the process of bodily labor and embodied reasoning by which the properties of materials come to be known and material objects emerge, can we understand how human intervention—both bodily and conceptual—in the flows of matter comes to constitute knowledge. I therefore begin with the materials and the bodily processes of making vermilion itself, before moving on to explore the systems of meaning that both informed and were formed by the material and conceptual uses of this object in the early modern world.
VERMILION
Making the red pigment vermilion was a dangerous and spectacular process. Evidence for this comes from a collection of recipes made in the last half of the seventeenth century by the Amsterdam paint seller Willem Pekstok (1635–91) and his wife Katalina Saragon (d. 1681). Among the instructions for sealing waxes, pigments, dyes, borax, eye remedies, fever and bladder stone remedies, brandy wine distillations, and the making of hippocras (spiced wine) is a long and extraordinarily detailed recipe for the large-scale production of vermilion.4 Like other vermilion recipes available in Europe (at least in textual form) since the eighth century, the Pekstoks’ recipe called for twice the amount of quicksilver (i.e., mercury) to every one part refined Italian sulfur.5 The sulfur was melted in an iron pot, taken off the fire, and mixed with half the quicksilver. This mixture was stirred with an iron shovel and allowed to rest until covered with a thin film, at which point the other half of the quicksilver was added and stirred well until the two ingredients combined entirely and began to harden. The contents of the pot were emptied onto a wet iron slab and spread to a thickness of about two fingers. The worker had to be alert with his water and wet brush in case any flame broke out, and, as for safety procedures, he should have eaten a “thick piece of bread and butter” before beginning the mixing process to protect himself from the fumes.6 The mixture eventually turned dark blue on the outside and an even silver color on the inside without any individual drops of quicksilver being visible. When the molten slab of metals had reached this dramatic stage, it was placed in a large wooden bowl and pounded with a pestle, then divided between eight or ten small pots.
A large pot was then hung in the furnace on its trivets, piled all around with bricks, and heated above the flame. The firing had to be even and carefully controlled so that the pot did not burst. When the pot and its surrounding bricks were heated to a glowing red (about five hours), it had to be sounded with an iron bar to ascertain that it had not cracked, and the bricks removed to halfway down the pot. Ash was then laid upon the top layers of bricks to keep the flame from reaching above the midpoint, the fire was stoked, and three of the small pots full of the mercury-sulfur mixture were added to the red-hot vessel. After a short time, a flame about three to four yards high shot out of the pot. When this began to die down, three more pots were added. This was repeated. The fire, which had been kept hot during this stage, was allowed to die down slightly and the pot was covered with an iron lid. The pot had to be watched for any sign of a “greasy mixture” rising to the top, a sign that the sulfur was not sufficiently burned to begin the sublimation process. If this occurred, the fire had to be stoked again until the “greasy inflammability” burned up.
The next stage of the process reached a culmination in the subliming process that produced the pigment:
When a thick clear flame appears out of the bluish fire all full of slate-like glittering, this is the correct flame and indicates that the substance sublimes. Place your lid so that it is lighted up by the subliming flame. Now it is not greasy and goes out immediately. When a smooth dry red is shown on the lid shining out of the brown, and when this flame is present, then the pot has to remain covered because, if it remains open, the vermilion escapes constantly. But one has to take care that the lid remains constantly loose. When the flame comes out forcefully between the pot and the lid one must reduce the fire under the pot. By doing this the flame in the pot also diminishes and slowly starts to burn against the lid.
If the fire was not hot enough, “the flame in the pot reacts accordingly and turns into black smoke.” This signified a complete loss of the quicksilver because it had evaporated without combining with the sulfur. If all was going well, the lid had to be removed in order to watch the process. If the lid became stuck to the top of the pot by the subliming vermilion, one had to “slam the pot so hard” that the lid might fly off, but the instructions admonished, “Do not be afraid, but put it back on again” and “Stoke the fire the right way (because when you allow the lid to bake too fast to the pot, which happened to me once, and when I knocked off the lid, the pot, the vermilion, and the lid flew about my ears in ten thousand pieces; that is why you may not be sleepy, but always be awake and careful).”
The sublimation process took about two hours, at which point the lid was removed and the sublimed cake stirred loose from the sides of the pot with an iron bar. A row of bricks was removed in order that sublimation would continue lower down in the pot. After firing for “seven, eight, or nine hours, depending on the number of little pots, each one taking about an hour, and on how well the fire reacted, one feels inside the pot with a broomstick. If it is empty, another 90 livres of the sulfur-mercury mixture should be added and the whole process repeated at least twice.” If one wanted to make the cake really heavy, one could knock the top of the pot open with a pointed hammer (“rather dangerous,” as the writer notes) and put in a last load of forty to sixty livres of the mixture. At the end of the last burning, the fire was to be put out and the covered pot allowed to cool and then set upside down on a slab. The pot was then chipped away from the cake of vermilion, and the bell-shaped cake of two to three hundred livres was bound with a hoop to prevent it from disintegrating.
This recipe makes clear the strenuous bodily labor,7 the wide-awake attention, the keen and experienced eye, the ability to precisely control the fire and the speed of the chemical reaction, as well as the ability to improvise when materials behaved in unexpected and refractory ways that were all part of vermilion manufacture. But why was this pigment being manufactured in bulk by the seventeenth century?
BLOOD
In medieval and early modern Europe, red substances possessed powerful properties associated with blood and regeneration. Red coral, for example, had a variety of valuable qualities:
And it has been found by experience that it is good against any sort of bleeding. It is even said that, worn around the neck, it is good against epilepsy and the problems of menstruation, and against storms, lightning, and hail. And if it is powdered and sprinkled with water on herbs and trees, it is reported to multiply their fruits. They also say that it speeds the beginning and end of any business.8
Vermilion was often employed by painters to depict deep red blood. In his painting manual The Book of the Art (late fourteenth century), Cennino d’Andrea Cennini seems to have equated vermilion with blood and with the life force that it carried. In “How to Paint Wounds,” Cennino specified that a painter must “take straight vermilion; get it laid in wherever you want to do blood.”9 In a long passage, Cennino describes precisely how one is to lay in the flesh tones of living individuals in a fresco. He specifies that this flesh tone is never to be used on dead faces. Where this living flesh color in fresco is to be made from red ochre pigment, on panel vermilion is used. Cennino called this color incarnazione, and the process of applying it incarnare, drawing an analogy between its use by the painter and the incarnation of life in a body.10 This giving life to (or “incarnating”) an image clearly represented to Cennino a straightforward artisanal technique by which the abstract principle and profound miracle of the incarnation of God and the Word in human flesh could be imitated. Cennino’s simultaneously material and spiritual understanding of the production of materials illustrates one component of the “theory” that underlay artisanal practices, although it was a lived and practiced “theory,” rather than a written and abstracted one.
Vermilion was especially associated with the blood of Christ. Evidence for this can be found in the practice of scribes and illuminators, who marked the places where vermilion was to be used in their manuscripts with a cross.11 Perhaps their use of the cross even referred to the making of vermilion in the crucible; the root of “crucible” in Latin is of course “crucis” (cross), and it was in the crucible that sulfur and mercury underwent their own passion and transformation to produce the blood red pigment.
In vernacular practices and high theology, blood brimmed with overlapping and contradictory meanings. It signified vitality, fertility, the material of conception, and the spirit of life, but at the same time, blood poured out could signify death, and of course that shed by Jesus signified death, life, and redemption, all at the same time.12 Blood was regarded as an extremely powerful agent: it was often listed in recipes as the only means to soften or cut hard gemstones such as diamonds. Most such recipes called for the blood of a male goat or a ram:
If you want to carve a piece of rock crystal, take a two- or three-year-old goat and bind its feet together and cut a hole between its breast and stomach, in the place where the heart is, and put the crystal in there, so that it lies in its blood until it is hot. At once take it out and engrave whatever you want on it, while this heat lasts. When it begins to cool and become hard, put it back in the goat’s blood, take it out again when it is hot, and engrave it. Keep on doing so until you finish the carving. Finally, heat it again, take it out and rub it with a woolen cloth so that you may render it brilliant with the same blood.13
Recipes such as this one for rendering hard substances soft, and for the related processes of turning soft or volatile materials hard, are to be found in overwhelmingly large numbers in recipe collections up through the seventeenth century. Some do cause changes of state, such as dissolution in acid, or heating, or even tempering of steel, but many of them, such as this goat’s blood recipe, are repeated over and over again, despite the fact they could not possibly have functioned as intended. It may be that the origin of this recipe was to crack crystals in order to allow dye penetration. However, it seems more likely that such recipes instead were reiterated because they reinforced the philosophical framework of the Hippocratic-Aristotelian-Galenic view of nature in which opposites must be combined (or “tempered”) in order to bring the four elements/humors/qualities into equilibrium, which denoted good health. In this system, materials we now think of as inanimate were not regarded as such. Minerals and metals grew in the earth and, like living human bodies, they too had to be purged and tempered in order to bring them into a healthy state. Books of techniques often indiscriminately mix medical recipes for human health with instructions for pigment, dye, and metallurgical recipes, but this should not be seen as a necessarily random combination, for all these recipes operate on the basis of the same coordinates of the four humors and qualities and the same principles of tempering in order to bring about balance (and thus health). This is supported by the thirteenth-century cleric Albertus Magnus (1193?–1280) who commented that the diamond can be softened neither with fire nor with iron, but it can be destroyed by the blood and flesh of a goat, “especially if the goat has for a considerable time beforehand drunk wine with wild parsley or eaten mountain fenugreek; for the blood of such a goat is strong enough even to break up a stone in the bladder, in those afflicted with the gravel.” Albertus moves easily from the stones to be worked by an artisan to those to be cured by a physician.
RED GOLD
Blood was the carrier of life heat, and gold was seen to have analogous properties, heating up the body and stimulating rejuvenation when prepared as the medicinal “potable gold” or even when worn on the body as jewelry.14 Red components, such as the pigment vermilion, were often ingredients in recipes to produce gold pigment,15 even when they have no practical effect on the actual chemical reaction. Red seems to have been considered an essential ingredient in processes that sought to generate and transform, especially related to the noble metal gold.16 The materials of vermilion, sulfur and mercury, also often appear in recipes for gold pigments, such as that for mosaic gold (tin or stannic sulfide, SnS2), a sparkling golden pigment that imitated pure gold. Cennino Cennini lists one such recipe, which calls for “sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), tin, sulfur, quicksilver, in equal parts; except less of the quicksilver.”17 Art conservators have determined that the mercury in this recipe is not necessary to produce the gold pigment and instead appears to refer back to the homologies between red and gold.18
This correspondence among blood, red, and gold is also of importance in a puzzling recipe set down by the twelfth-century metalworker Theophilus for what he called “Spanish gold,” concocted from “red copper, basilisk powder, human blood, and vinegar.” In order to produce the basilisk powder, two cocks twelve to fifteen years old were put into a cage, walled like a dungeon with stones all around. These cocks were to be well fed until they copulated and laid eggs, at which point toads should then replace the cocks to hatch the eggs, being fed bread throughout their confinement. Male chickens eventually emerged from the eggs, but after seven days they grew serpent tales. They were to be prevented from burrowing into the floor of their cage by the stones, and, to further reduce the possibility of escape, they were to be put into brass vessels “of great size, perforated all over and with narrow mouths.” These were closed up with copper lids and buried in the ground. The serpent-chickens, or basilisks, feeding on the fine soil that fell through the perforations, were kept for six months, at which time, the vessels were to be uncovered and a fire lit under them to completely burn up the basilisks. Their ashes were finely ground and added to a third part of the dried and ground blood of a red-headed man, which was then tempered with sharp vinegar. Red copper was to be repeatedly smeared with this composition, heated until red hot, then quenched in the same mixture until the composition ate through the copper. It thereby “acquire[d] the weight and color of gold” and was “suitable for all kinds of work.”19
Where Theophilus calls for basilisks, a later set of recipes calls for lizards. In a 1531 text that includes pigment-making and metalworking recipes, titled Rechter Gebrauch der Alchimei, there are several recipes for making noble metals through a process of catching, feeding, and burning lizards. As in the instructions for softening hard stones by means of goat’s blood, this recipe opens with quite precise instructions on how to catch these lizards. It directs the reader to move very quietly in “felt slippers,” to quickly snatch the lizards before they give off their poison, and to immediately plunge them into a pot of human blood. A recipe for making “lizard-rib gold” follows, calling for two pounds of filed brass and a quart of goat’s milk, and it continues,
In a pot wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, with a cover containing air holes, place nine lizards in the milk, put on the cover, and bury it in damp earth. Make sure the lizards have air so they do not die. Let it stand until the seventh day in the afternoon. The lizards will have eaten the brass from hunger, and their strong poison will have compelled the brass to “transform itself to gold.” Heat the pot at a low enough temperature to burn the lizards to ash but not to melt the brass. Cool the mixture, then pour the brass into a vessel, rinse it with water, then put it in a linen cloth and hang it in the smoke of sal ammoniac. Once it is washed and dried again, it will yield a “good calx solis,” or powdered form of gold.20
Lizards were associated with processes of putrefaction and generation more generally, as could be observed in the natural world: lizards appeared seemingly spontaneously from putrefying matter, informing the commonsense principle that generation involved a process of decay. Furthermore, lizards regenerated their tails when severed, and lizards emerged fully grown from their places of hibernation after freezing winters. In other words, lizards were bound up with the mysterious processes of putrefaction, generation, and regeneration.21 An ambivalent attitude to lizards as impure and associated with putrefaction, yet at the same time crucial in processes of transformation and generation seems to have been very ancient. This attitude appears to have continued until recently, when Jewish silversmiths in early-twentieth-century Morocco adorned birth amulets with naturalistic lizards and salamanders.22
KNOWLEDGE IN MOTION?
The foregoing brief survey reveals a kind of “vernacular science”23 of matter and transformation, a relational web of interlinked homologies among red, blood, gold, and lizards that underlay artisanal practices and techniques and that generated meaning in their world. Their knowledge system was not a theory in the sense that it could be formulated as a set of propositions, but rather it was sometimes practiced and lived and sometimes expressed in writing. It related making practices to knowing nature, and it gave access to the powers of nature, transformation, and generation. Productive practices in early modern Europe did not just involve the handling and transformation of inert materials, but rather allowed the artisan to investigate and engage in life forces and in the relationship of matter to spirit, and even to imitate the most profound mysteries such as the incarnation. On the one hand, their practices were mundane and oriented to the production of goods, but, on the other, artisanal techniques gave access to the greater powers of the universe.
What does this vernacular knowledge system of early modern European metalworkers have to do with the movement of knowledge? Vermilion making also interested medieval European scholars, such as Albertus Magnus, because the pigment was produced by the combining of sulfur and mercury. Albertus believed that the “principles” of sulfur and mercury formed the underlying substratum of all metals. What he meant by “principles” was not the everyday material manifestation of sulfur and mercury; instead, the principles embodied the physical characteristics of these metals: In a pure form in nature, sulfur, being heated, turns a dark red color, and then, when cooled rapidly, forms a glassy red substance. Native mercury, on the other hand, is liquid at room temperature and possesses a silver glittering quality. In Albertus’s theory of metals, these essential properties of mercury and sulfur accounted for the behavior of metals. He describes the principle of sulfur as the hot, fiery, and male, incorporating the qualities of fire and air and giving metals their combustibility. Mercury was wet, cold, and female, possessing the qualities of earth and water. Its liquidity conferred on metals the structure that allowed them to move from a solid to a liquid state when heated.24
Albertus’s theory of metals had only just arrived in Europe; indeed, alchemical theory had broken like a storm over medieval scholars in Latin Christendom. Before the eleventh and twelfth centuries, European scholars knew of recipe collections such as the Mappa clavicula (A Small Key of Handiwork) for operations using gold, precious stones, and gems. Although these recipes contained fragments from earlier Greek alchemical writings, these mysterious interpolations had been detached from any sort of conceptual framework. In the twelfth century, however, books of alchemy began to be translated from Arabic into Latin. Alchemical theory, based on Aristotle’s four elements, stretched back to a conglomeration of Greek matter theory and Gnostic spiritual practices found in texts of second- and third-century CE Hellenistic Egypt, but the sulfur-mercury theory of metals was an innovation of Arabic alchemical writers, worked into the older Hellenistic texts and appearing for the first time in the Latin West as an entirely new field of knowledge. One translator, impressed at the novitas of his subject, wrote, “Since the wisest men have sweated on the work of the philosophers, we have decided to treat a domain which the Latin world as a whole has not yet dealt with, like swimmers in the high seas, we have decided to explore alone the open sea.”25 The Arabic texts explicating this new domain of alchemy were translated into Latin helter-skelter,26 often not distinguished from ancient Greek authors, especially Aristotle (indeed, the Arabic alchemical texts listed Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as alchemists). This whole process of translation forms a fascinating case study of knowledge in motion, but one example, explicated by Robert Halleux, will have to suffice: At the end of book III of the Meteorologica, Aristotle promised a detailed exposition about metals and nonmetallic minerals, but he seems never to have written this exposition. Instead, a treatise on an entirely different subject was appended as book IV at some stage by the Greek tradition. The Meteorologica arrived in Western Europe in parts: first book IV was translated from Greek in 1156 by Henry Aristippus, then a few decades later, Gerard of Cremona put into Latin the first three books of the Arabic version of Aristotle’s Meteorologica, using the version translated into Arabic from Greek two centuries before by Yahyā ibn al-Bitrīq (d. ca. 815).27 In about 1200, Alfred of Sarashel, concerned that Aristotle had not fulfilled his promise in book IV, and finding that Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn Sīnā (ca. 980–1037, known to Latin Europe as Avicenna) had in fact authored the matter for this missing fourth book of Aristotle in his Kitab al-Shifā (Book of the Remedy), added three chapters to the Meteorologica’s book IV titled De mineralibus, which comprised a summarized translation of part of ibn Sīnā’s work. These chapters continued to be viewed as the words of Aristotle up until the sixteenth century,28 but they were not even original with ibn Sīnā, for it was Jābir ibn Hayyan (ca. 722–ca. 812, known as Geber) and his experimentally minded student Ab Bakr al-Rāzī (ca. 864–925, known as Rhazes),29 whose work ibn Sīnā himself had made use of in adumbrating the idea that sulfur and mercury formed the basic components of all metals. This confusing situation was only intensified by a tenth-century Arabic Kitāb al-Ahjār (Book of Stones)—also believed to be a genuine work of Aristotle—which contained alchemical accretions as well as much information about stones and metals.30
For Albertus, these Arabic works supplied a theory of metals that he believed must have been contained in an entire lost book on minerals by Aristotle. Albertus was convinced that Aristotle had written such a text; however, when his years-long search failed to turn up anything, Albertus took matters into his own hands, composing his own book of minerals, with the model of Aristotle always before him: “And we shall make additions wherever books are incomplete, and wherever they have gaps in them, or are missing entirely—whether they were left unwritten by Aristotle or, if he did write them, they have not come down to us.”31 In order to remedy this troubling lacuna in Aristotle’s corpus, Albertus made, as he said, “long journeys to mining districts, so that I could learn by observation the nature of metals. And for the same reason I have inquired into the transmutations of metals in alchemy, so as to learn from this, too, something of their nature and accidental properties.”32 He had much opportunity for such observations during his extraordinarily wide travels throughout Europe in various Church administrative positions. One of the practices he observed on his travels was vermilion making: the “manufacturers of minium [by which he means cinnabar] make it by subliming sulfur with quicksilver.”33
Aspects of vermilion production and alchemical theory overlapped: most obviously, of course, in their common bases in the two metals, sulfur and mercury. In addition, a central component of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals was the possibility of transforming a base metal, such as lead, made from impure sulfur and mercury into noble silver or gold by eliminating the impurities from the two elemental metals. Such a process was described as subjecting the metal to a process of putrefaction and regeneration, which brought about a series of color changes not unlike those observed in the making of vermilion. The metal mass was described as black in the putrefaction stage and bright red just before it transformed into gold. Some alchemical writers believed that it might be possible to derive a substance that could effect this purification of base metals instantaneously. This “philosopher’s stone,” which was theoretically capable of transmuting a mass of base metal into shining gold through a dramatic series of color changes, was often described as a red powder, like vermilion. Thus, pigment making and alchemical theory appear to have been intimately related in more ways than one. Not only were the two principles of metals in alchemical theory also the ingredients of vermilion production, but the outward manifestations of both processes of combination involved spectacular transformations that bore strong resemblance to each other.
By the time Albertus avidly took up Arabic alchemical theory in the thirteenth century, craftspeople had already been combining mercury and sulfur to produce a red powder for at least four centuries.34 Indeed, the practice of vermilion production everywhere predated the articulation in texts of a theory of metals. It appears probable that the sulfur-mercury theory of metals emerged from the practices of making vermilion—from the work of craftspeople and their productive activity. In other words, one of the most pervasive and enduring metallurgical theories of matter and its transformation—the alchemical sulfur-mercury theory—flowed from the making of a valuable material. Here is an instance of what can be called the “epistemic motion” of knowledge, in which matter and the practices of craftspeople shaped the theories of text-oriented scholars.
MOTION ACROSS SPACE
Besides suggesting the epistemic movement of knowledge between social groups and knowledge systems, vermilion manufacture also gives insight into the movement of knowledge in the more conventional sense of motion over geographic distance. As we have just seen, early European metalworkers oriented their practices through the red of vermilion and blood, and they believed lizards to be a key to transformative practices. At the same time, Albertus Magnus, relying upon the Arabic alchemical works that had come to him along a tortuous path of translation and compilation, and setting out to observe miners and metal workshops, also regarded red as central to transformation, based on the principles of mercury and sulfur. More evidence for the association of lizards and transformation comes from a book of secrets ascribed to Albertus Magnus, but probably a compilation of material from various sources written no later than the fourteenth century, which contains many “secrets” for lighting a house. One of these calls for cutting off the tail of a lizard and collecting the liquid that bleeds from it, “for it is like Quicksilver,” and when it is put on a wick in a new lamp “the house shall seem bright and white, or gilded with silver.”35
This recipe transports us to the other end of Eurasia, where lizards and red also appear to have had important powers ascribed to them. For, in the early twentieth century, anthropologists recorded recipes using reptiles to produce light in the oral culture of illiterate south Indian villagers.36 In China, too, lizards are very interestingly implicated in transformation, indicated even by the very characters which make them up. Take for example the following passage from the Bo wu zhi (Comprehensive Record of Things) by Zhang Hua (232–300 CE), which illustrates this, while also drawing a direct connection between lizards and red pigment:
Xi yi 蜥蜴 are also called yan yan 蝘蜒. If you keep it in a vessel and feed it cinnabar (zhu sha), its body will turn all red. After it has ingested seven jin of cinnabar, pound it into a pulp by ten thousand smashes with a pestle. Dot it on a woman’s limbs and body and it will glow without extinguishing. If she has sexual intercourse, than it would extinguish. Therefore, it is called 守宮 shou gong (guard chamber).37
The historian of China Dorothy Ko has very kindly glossed this fascinating passage for me, explaining how deeply the concept of transformation is implicated in the Chinese names for lizards. According to the third-century dictionary Shiming (Explanation of Names), xi yi is so-called because its tail could detach (xi 析) (from the body) and its color could change (yi 易). Yi 易 is the word for change or transformation, as in the Yijing/I Ching 易經. The word yi 蜴 that made up the compound lizard is made up by adding the “insect” radical 虫 to 易. The former radical indicates that it is in the insect family, and the latter gives it its sound, yi. Thus, on this level the lizard is related to yi—transformation.38
Such conjunctures of practices and systems of meaning across these tremendous spans of time and space appear remarkable. But what happens if we shift our perspective from the local spectacle of vermilion making and take a more expansive view over the long-term and long-distance flows of the goods, knowledge, texts, practices, and people across the “Afro-Eurasian ecumene,” as Marshall Hodgson called it? These flows seem to have moved with particular alacrity with regard to weapons technology, whether it was the alloying of copper and tin to create the strong but flexible metal of bronze in the fourth millennium BCE for weapons, or the horse chariots that spread throughout Middle Eurasia from about 4000 BCE,39 taking the shape of war chariots from ca. 1600 BCE,40 or the stirrup (widespread in China from the fifth century CE, then found in Persia and throughout the Islamic world by the seventh century and in Europe from the eighth),41 or the gunpowder weaponry that shaped the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mogul “Gunpowder Empires” of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, and influenced the mining of copper and tin throughout Eurasia.42 Like the physical instruments of power and destruction, the trappings, ceremonies, and techniques of staging power, such as the royal hunt carried out with noble animals and raptor birds, also spread very extensively throughout Afro-Eurasia.43
But less destructive objects and techniques also flowed across Africa and Eurasia: food crops probably traveled as swiftly as weapons, although the primary evidence for this comes from the period when New World foods entered into already well-established trade routes at the eastern end of Eurasia. A few examples indicate just how rapidly such crops could spread: the peanut, cultivated in the Chaco region of South America, could already be found growing as a food crop near Shanghai at the latest by the 1560s or 1570s; sweet potatoes arrived in China at least by the 1560s; New World maize was established there in 1555, where it was brought by Turkic frontiersmen, and along the Euphrates by 1574.44 Food plants traveled in advance of recorded contact between peoples, carried by sailors and other anonymous intermediaries, and their cultivation in new soils must have occasioned much experimentation by their growers, both in the field and at the dinner table.
Food and weapons—the means of survival—perhaps traveled most rapidly, but rarities also moved along the same routes, such as the rock crystal vessels from India and the dancing elephants from Khotan, the red parrots and single white cockatoos that all arrived as tribute into eleventh-century Song China,45 all manner of materia medica including the dragon’s blood brought in to treat infantile fits in the Southern Song (1127–1279),46 and the large quantities of sulfur flowing by the ton into Tang China from Indonesia and Japan between the seventh and tenth centuries CE. This sulfur went to concoct fireworks and to temper the constitution, as the minister of state Yuan Cai aimed to do when he “took his hot viands from porcelain utensils floating in cool water, [and] ate and drank cold preparations from sulfur bowls, aiming at the perfect balance between hot and cold influences thought to be necessary for bodily health.”47 All these rarities as well as the staples of silk and cotton textiles, glass ingots, ceramics, tea, salt, spices, aromatics, medicinal herbs, gold, and silver created a pathway along which, as Robert Hartwell noted, [t]echniques, ideas and institutions flowed in a constant stream.”48
Sometimes this stream included organized exchanges of technologies and people, such as the Chinese physicians sent to Koryo in 1072, 1074, and 1103 to educate Korean doctors, and the forced migrations of craftspeople by the Mongols, as well as the ad hoc exchanges such as prisoners of war, apparently always viewed as potential transmitters of techniques. The eleventh-century scholar Tha’ālibī, in his Book of Curious and Entertaining Information, reported that Chinese prisoners passed on the practices of paper making when they were captured by Islamic forces in the Battle of Talas in 751. As Tha’ālibī noted, “[A]mongst the Chinese prisoners-of-war … brought to Samarqand were some artisans who manufactured paper in Samarqand; then it was manufactured on a wide scale and passed into general use, until it became an important export commodity for the people of Samarqand. Its value was universally recognized and people everywhere used it.”49 Another Arabic author feared the potential for technology transfer:
As for the flammable oils, they [the Franks] do not know them, nor do they know the tarsim [fitting gunpowder and explosive devices to weapons], nor do they know the [flying fire] arrows, or the composition of the fuses, so understand this: If one is taken prisoner by them, God forbid, he must not give them any information because they will then ruin everything.50
Chinese institutional forms of the Song dynasty spread widely to Korea, Vietnam, Baghdad, and even Norman Sicily, which all adopted some elements of Chinese institutions such as the examination system, the relay postal system, granaries, famine relief, and techniques for managing fiscal monopolies. Roger II (r. 1132–54) of Norman Sicily gathered information and informants from all parts of the world, and his plan for training members of the court in three stages of education may have been based upon his knowledge of Chinese practices.51
Particularly intense periods of exchange occurred during the Bronze Age (ca. 3500–800 BCE) as societies fiercely competed and exchanged for the tin and copper to produce valued metal. Greater exchange across Eurasia often unfolded concurrently with the emergence of greater differentiation in culture and religion.52 Corpora of texts began to form which would come to constitute the principal bases for remarkably durable linguistic, religious, and cultural identities. Trade, exchange, and competition peaked during the simultaneous expansion of the Roman and Han Empires;53 during the period of the Tang (618–906 CE) as the empire conquered lands to the west; again during the remarkable efflorescence of technological invention during the Song period (960–1279); across the extraordinary reach of the Abbasid Empire and its successor states from the eighth century; during the pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and again in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as Western Europe and the Americas entered into these well-established connective pathways.54 From about 1500 BCE to about 1500 CE, much of the exchange across Eurasia was knit together by the web of land routes, known confusedly since the nineteenth century as the Silk Road, confusing because it was neither a single road, nor was silk by any means the primary good that traveled over it. Such flows continued further east and west around the globe as the Americas were forcibly incorporated within the Afro-Eurasian ecumene, and perhaps even continued on into the industrial revolution when William Kelly brought four “Chinese steel workers” to Kentucky in 1854 and produced what was then patented in 1856 by Henry Bessemer as the Bessemer converter, which made possible the mass production of steel from pig iron. Kelly claimed that Bessemer probably knew of his experiments.55 As was made clear some years ago, high-quality steel had been made in China by Bessemer’s method since the eleventh century.56
C. A. Bayly argues that the framework within which we should understand the global movement in the period before about 1600 is one in which “universal kingship,” “cosmic religion,” and a very widely shared system of humoral and astrological beliefs shaped economies and cultures.57 He sees a shared Eurasian ideal of universal kingship in which rulers in various places claimed universal legitimacy, embarking upon long-distance conquests and bringing large quantities of goods and products into the treasury (often as “tribute” in the name of the ruler). This pattern of consumption emphasized the aggregation of a universal array of goods, with great value placed on the unique, the special, rare, and unusual object that could make real the qualities of distant parts of the realm. The simultaneously social, political, moral, and exchange economy in which such wonders were embedded extended downward and outward through the courts of regional nobles.58
At the same time, the emergence of continent-spanning religious communities, with their similar practices of prayer, sacrifice, and pilgrimage by which devotees pursued the signs and sites of the god scattered throughout the world, had by 1600 brought into existence a large infrastructure of transport, food, credit, and international trade to support their practices of devotion (spice for incense and Brahminical food restrictions, for example, and salted fish for Catholic fasting) and their extensive systems of pilgrimage.59 The individuals traversing these various pilgrimage and trade routes shared both a common view of health and a common range of medicines. Central medical concepts, such as “life-breath,” common to ancient Chinese, Stoic, and South Asian medical writers (qi, pneuma, and prāna), as well as general systems of health, informed care of the body throughout Afro-Eurasia. Both the Greco-Roman-Arabic-European system of the four humors and the Chinese system of qi and yin/yang had their origins in an overarching notion of balance and tempering in order to bring the body to a healthy state.60 Moreover, many of the remedies by which a person’s individual constitution (viewed throughout Eurasia as influenced by the heavenly bodies) could be tempered and balanced were transported over very long distances along the same trade routes by which staples and rarities alike traveled. Spices (wholly integrated into the health framework), medicinal plants (such as dragon’s blood), animal parts (like rhinoceros horn), precious stones (for example, turquoise for eyesight; red coral to stop blood flow), and mineral-based concoctions (sulfur and mercury) all possessed medicinal virtues and commanded high exchange values throughout Afro-Eurasia.
A literature on “wonders,” which began to codify and canonize these objects’ marvelous qualities and simultaneously to stimulate desire for them, grew up around this exchange in rarities and medicines. In this literature, India was identified as the primary location of wonders and marvels, as well as the source of precious stones (which, along with Sri Lanka, it actually was).61 Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, in his tenth-century Kitab ’ajayib al-Hind (The Wonders of India, ca. 960), recounts marvels of all sorts purportedly told to him on board merchant ships, including many involving fearsome snakes,62 future-divining lizards as well as lizards with double sexual organs,63 and especially crayfish—crayfish that detained ships by clasping the anchor between their pincers,64 and crayfish that fell into the Sea of Senf, turned into stones, and were subsequently “carried into Iraq and all over, and used in making an ointment to cure eye complaints.”65 Such travelers’ reports and sailors’ yarns (best known perhaps are those of Sindbad the Sailor) spread exceedingly widely, forming the stuff of “folk tales” across Eurasia,66 and might have generated the reptile stories of both the fourteenth-century European books of secrets and the oral culture of illiterate south Indian villagers in the early twentieth century.67
The foregoing section has done no more than gesture at the dense pathways of exchange that coursed across Eurasia since prehistoric times. The flows of goods and the people who mined, produced, transported, and consumed them helped to constitute the social, cultural, and medical complexes of belief that both structured and fostered this exchange. In this reciprocal process, the mundane production of material things (involving the manipulation of matter and nature) informed and transformed theoretical formulations of knowledge; the transfer of practical techniques across space fostered new ways of controlling both nature and other people; and the motion of goods and their trade gave rise to people telling oral tales, some of which were compiled, written down (only sometimes by identifiable authors), and translated into various vernacular and learned languages in texts that also moved across great distances and themselves stimulated the movement of yet further travelers, objects, and ideas.
One of the most important of these moving medicinal goods in China was cinnabar and its artificially produced substitute vermilion. Cinnabar had been extracted in China from a 100-kilometer-wide strip of deposits stretching “in a southwest-northeast direction some 700 km from northern Yunnan and southeastern Szechwan across Kweichow into western Hunan,”68 from at least the fourth century BCE, and the pigment derived from it had come, on the one hand, to convey the power of the emperor in the bright red ink employed on particularly important documents of state,69 and on the other to symbolize transformation. The Baopuzi (The Master Embracing Simplicity) of 320 CE by Ge Hong, for example, lists recipes for making artificial gold with red substances,70 the same mosaic gold made by Cennino.71 Ge Hong believed that the essence of cinnabar produced gold.72
A hoard of materia medica from between 741 and 756 CE containing cinnabar, red coral, gold powder, and gold leaf was uncovered recently.73 This hoard indicates again the connections between red and gold, but also points to the widespread use in China of cinnabar in medicines and particularly in elixirs concocted to prolong life.74 Cinnabar is listed in tribute texts back to the fifth century BCE, and these texts themselves go back to an oral tradition three hundred years older. The oldest text that definitively places cinnabar within a medical framework is from the second century BCE, and the use of cinnabar in this text is embedded in ritual practices.75 Over time, this literature on the medicinal uses of cinnabar swelled into a veritable flood. In it cinnabar was viewed as far more efficacious for prolonging life than plant substances, but it could also be employed for seemingly contrary uses, such as abortifacients,76 pointing to the ambiguous place of such a powerful transformative substance. Like lizards, cinnabar was implicated in death and putrefaction as well as regeneration.77 For when struck with miners’ tools, cinnabar sheds tears of mercury,78 when heated and refined, cinnabar runs with living “quicksilver,” and this mercury could revert again to cinnabar in the process of vermilion manufacture.79 Much was made of mercury’s quickening qualities in texts of the third century BCE, and, in the same period, channels in tomb chambers were constructed to run with liquid quicksilver. Indeed, one imperial tomb depicted the lands over which the emperor had ruled by means of a relief map, in which the rivers and streams flowed with liquid mercury, just as the emperor’s veins had once flowed with blood.80 The abundant texts of Chinese alchemy that grew up around the uses of cinnabar—one representative title from 712 CE being The Mysterious Teachings on the Alchemical Preparation of Numinous Cinnabar81—focus on the refining of cinnabar to mercury and from mercury back to vermilion powder, prescribing repeated cyclical transformations both to produce the valuable elixirs and at the same time to foster higher spiritual understanding in the adept.82 Like the ninth- and tenth-century Arabic literature (that so confused and excited its first Latin translators), these texts are a combination of careful experimentation, symbolism, and numerological speculation.83 Sufi scholars and Chinese alchemists regarded such productive knowledge not so much as a means to useful materials (although they often produced them), but rather as the way of personal and spiritual enlightenment.84
Although the links between Chinese and Arabic alchemical theories have yet to be explored fully, the search for elixirs—such a prominent feature of Chinese texts—is nowhere present in the late antique Greek alchemical literature of the third through sixth centuries CE. In contrast, Arabic alchemical literature is replete with elixirs, and, even more significantly, Arabic alchemy gives mercury and sulfur—which are absolutely central to Chinese medical and alchemical practice—the foundational role as generators of all metals. Moreover, the mercury trade in Islamic lands during the eighth and ninth centuries stretched from the Almaden mines to Alexandria and on to Fustat (in Egypt) via Tunisia, then through Aden (in Yemen) perhaps as far as India.85 The Arabic alchemical scholars Jābir ibn Hayyan and especially Abū Bakr al-Rāzī both discuss in detail the process of vermilion making and other operations with mercury. Particularly suggestive of the potential links between Chinese and Arabic alchemy is al-Rāzī’s remark, contained in instructions for making red and white mercury sublimate. About the white sublimate, he writes, “the substance will coagulate in the phial like [the metal used to make] a Chinese mirror.”86 Silvering mirrors by means of mercury in China can be traced definitively back to the fifth or sixth century CE, but the process was probably known as far back as the fourth century BCE.87 Al-Rāzī was born and died in Rayy, Persia, and he headed hospitals there and in Baghdad. He also served at the Central Asian Sāmānid court in Bukhara where Chinese mirrors would undoubtedly have been available. All three cities in which he worked were important trading zones between China and Central Asia. The techniques of manufacture for such an object probably traveled with people and goods, but it is not impossible that the mirrors themselves formed the repository of information for their making. Objects like this must have provided both a stimulus to imitation and experimentation as well as information about their manufacture when “reverse engineered” by practiced craftspeople and scholar-experimenters like al-Rāzī.88
Only recently have scholars made serious efforts to study Arabic alchemical texts. Even so, as Robert Halleux notes, “everyone admits today that Latin alchemy from the Middle Ages is all founded on Arabic heritage, [but] the transmission mechanisms have not yet been studied. The translations are not all discovered yet; their Arabic model is not always identified, their manuscript tradition is not known; the translator is only mentioned in a small number of cases.”89 Given this situation, it is perhaps premature to ask that the links between Arabic and Chinese alchemy be spelled out in any detail. From the suggestive work carried out so far, however, it appears that the transmission will not be found in texts, but rather in the movement of materials, such as sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), an important export from Central Asia to China since the first millennium CE, which emerged after the Islamic inroads into this region as an essential material of Arabic alchemical and industrial practices and a central component of the Arabic alchemical theory of salts in the ninth century.90 Materia medica also offer evidence of this flow from matter to ideas, for the remedies recorded in the Arabic and Persian pharmaceutical writings incorporated a hugely expanded range of medicinals from “as far away as China, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Southern India, and Africa.”91 Techniques traveled too, as we can see from an early ninth-century “how-to” manual in Arabic, which includes glue for broken porcelain, instructions on how to construct “Chinese saddles” (apparently an object of interest, as we also know that several were taken at the Battle of Talas River), a “Chinese cream” for polishing mirrors, and so on.92 Such a text offers further evidence that it was by means of the motion of objects and techniques that new complexes of knowledge emerged in the contact zones of China and the lands of Islam.93
We will not be astounded, then, at the similar powers with which the materials cinnabar, quicksilver, vermilion, and lizards were endowed at opposite ends of Eurasia. For, when viewed against the background of the continuous flow of materials, people, technologies, practices, texts, and ideas back and forth across Eurasia, it is entirely plausible that the complex of ideas and practices surrounding lizards, vermilion, metals, and generation spread with the trade in pigments, materia medica, and health practices, and informed both metalworkers’ vernacular beliefs and learned scholars seeking the lost books of Aristotle or the elixir for eternal life. The resulting amalgam of written and tacit knowledge and of theories and practices that made up this particular piece of knowledge about the natural world, I would argue, is characteristic of the making of knowledge,94 including scientific knowledge.
Given this constant movement and exchange across Eurasia, it should perhaps become an automatic reflexive action for historians to look for connections, rather than assuming a trajectory of ideas and techniques confined within the artificial boundaries of “Europe” or “China.”95 An example from the more rarefied realms of the exact sciences is instructive here: Jamil Ragep and George Saliba have given insight into the ways in which the Arabic and Latinate communities of astronomers were all engaged in the same project during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, working with the same sets of textual and mathematical tools. It will not come as a surprise then that Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) could gain insight into the mathematical problems concerning the motions of the planets from the texts of the astronomers at the Maragha observatory (now East Azerbaijan, Iran), in particular that of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274).96
LET US TURN OUR BACKS NOW ON EURASIA AND BRIEFLY CONSIDER MOVEMENT ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC OCEANS
Red in the New World was a color of sacred practice, desire, and trade. In the sixth century BCE, a “deep rusty blood red” dye was being used to color the wrappings of the dead in the high Andes, and, in the 1400s, the Inca depicted Mamahuaco, one of the progenitors of humankind, emerging from the Cave of Origin wearing a red dress.97 With the Spanish destruction of the Inca Empire, the cochineal insect—called nocheztli in Central America and macnu in the Andes—cultivated on cactus to supply these pigments, became a commodity of great value to the Spanish Crown. In 1587, some 144,000 pounds were sent on Spanish ships across the Atlantic and then throughout Afro-Eurasia from their landing docks in Spain: to the Netherlands, France, and Venice and into the Ottoman Empire. With the advent of the Manila galleon trade in 1564, the red dye traveled on Spanish carracks from Acapulco across the Pacific to the Ming Empire, where, as we have seen, red possessed a ready market.98 The dye was especially valuable at this moment in Europe because the Murex shell, which had produced the deep purple dye reserved to kings and cardinals, had reached near extinction due to overharvesting. Indeed, in “1464, Pope Paul II finally officially changed ‘Cardinal’s Purple’ to red, which could be produced from insects rather than shellfish.”99 Spectacular attempts were made to break the Spanish Crown’s monopoly on cochineal, including “scientific” exploratory voyages, like that of Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville, sent on a voyage of industrial espionage in 1776 by the French king to bring live insects and cactus to Saint-Domingue.100 Indeed many eighteenth-century scientific voyages had as their aim the discovery and mapping of commercial shipping routes, the surveying of new colonial lands, as well as the search (or espionage) for new commodities and medicines.101 The generalizing global perspective afforded by such voyages could provide new scientific theories, such as those about global climactic patterns assembled by networks of botanists,102 and it just as surely gave rise to a new science of ethnology employed by colonial administrators that helped establish a notion of “civilization” with its hierarchies of peoples and societies, such as that which resulted in preserving the “agrarian” Maori while fostering the hunting down and annihilation of the more “primitive” nomadic Australian aborigines.103
BUT LET US LEAVE THIS BLOOD RED AND TURN OUR ATTENTION TO GLISTENING BLACK …
When the famous Elizabethan scholar John Dee (1527–1608) wished to contact the spirit world to answer questions (which ranged from politics to natural philosophy to the best remedies for his wife’s illnesses) and foretell the future, he brought an experienced “scryer” to look into a dark stone—his “scrying glass.” With Dee anxiously standing beside him, the scryer saw and heard angels, the utterances of which he reported to Dee, who noted them in a special diary.104 Dee’s show stone, a black disc of stone 18.9 centimeters in diameter by 1.3 to 2.26 centimeters thick, believed until the early twentieth century to be a slab of a hard bituminous rock known as Kennel coal, had actually been shaped from black volcanic obsidian glass by a nameless Aztec artisan. We shall never know how Dee obtained this object (although there are a small number still extant in European museums, three of which form the supports of religious scenes painted in seventeenth-century Europe),105 but its power was such that it has survived to the present, acquired by Horace Walpole and then by the British Museum.106 Dee’s use of this object is very suggestive, for it was a “smoking mirror,” the name of Tezcatlipoca, the all-powerful Central American god of rulers, witches, and warriors, whose attribute, the glistening black obsidian mirror, had long been regarded as an instrument of divination and sorcery among the Aztecs.107
Dee’s mirror launches us into the somewhat different world of exchange with the Americas, where, with the assistance of Eurasian microbes, European centralizing states were able to dominate existing empires very rapidly in a manner they were not able to realize in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea until the nineteenth century. Recent scholars of this exchange have focused on the fact—strangely neglected by generations of historians of science—that European interest in nature in the New World, both natural-philosophical and practical, was always inextricably linked to interest in its commercial exploitation.108 Or, as Richard Drayton has phrased it somewhat more bluntly, their motive for expansion, in common with any expansion into a foreign region, was “asset stripping” and “plunder.”109
The Spaniard Pedro de Osma, wrote from Lima in 1568,
[C]onsider how many more herbs and plants possessing great virtues … our Indies must have. But they are out of our reach and knowledge because the Indians, being bad people and our enemies, will not reveal to us a secret, not a single virtue of a herb, even if they should see us die, or even if they be sawed in pieces. If we know anything of the matters I have treated, and of others, we learned it from the female Indians. Because they get involved with Spaniards, and reveal to them all that they know.
In the essay in which this passage appears, Daniela Bleichmar makes the point that “[t]he circulation of knowledge from the New World to the Old and back to the New was dependent on native knowledge yet unable to access and credit indigenous populations as sources. American natives were at the center of this cycle and at the same time excluded from it.”110 Indeed, Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan’s Colonial Botany, Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire, and Antonio Barrera-Osorio’s Experiencing Nature, as well as the work of other scholars, with only a few exceptions, have demonstrated that local knowledge of the New World was translated, suppressed, ignored, or lost in its transition to Europe and to European scholars, where it went to form the stuff of the newly differentiating scientific disciplines like botany. These historians have argued that natural objects had to be stripped of their local significances and cultures in order to be incorporated into European natural history, medicine, and commerce. In Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, Harold Cook has argued that this dynamic was central in the making of a new approach to nature in the period of European expansion. He contends that Dutch commerce in natural goods in the East and West Indies was central in the creation of new modes of valuing objects of nature and information about nature. By his account, commercial accumulation and exchange led to new ways of describing, measuring, and valuing objects as neutral quantum bits of information, which he views as giving rise to a new “objectivity” about natural things.111
While such accounts as those of Cook and Schiebinger provide important frameworks within which to understand an exchange that has left far fewer textual traces and objects out of which we can tease agglomerations of meaning, we should perhaps be wary of assuming Dee’s ignorance about what he was doing when he called up spirits in the “smoking mirror” of Tezcatlipoca. A narrative at odds with that suggested by historians of science about the stripping of meaning from New World materials is suggested by Marcy Norton’s study of chocolate in the Atlantic world, which instead demonstrates the reciprocal (we might say cathected) nature of this cultural exchange. She argues that the European taste for chocolate was not as simple as it has previously appeared to scholars, who viewed it as having been stripped of its Central American significance and ritual practices in order to be inserted into European medical beliefs, coffee drinking, or sugar consumption. In contrast, she demonstrates that Europeans consumed chocolate from very early on in much the same manner as native Americans, and the medical discourse that grew up around it aimed not to strip it of meaning, but rather to reconcile the meanings that this now firmly entrenched but still suspect taste raised for Europeans. As she elegantly concludes,
In Spain and Spanish America, Europeans’ taste for chocolate did not bolster a normative hierarchy that elevated European colonists over Indian subjects, or Christians over pagans. Instead, it brought unwanted attention to the failures of the colonial civilizing and evangelical project and revealed the civilizers’ vulnerability to cultural metamorphosis and Christians’ potential for internalizing idolatry.
Not quite so abstract as ideas and not so tangible as goods, taste—understood here as embodied habits and aesthetic dispositions—formed part of the “Columbian Exchange.” These embodied habits and aesthetic dispositions have a history that exists in relation to—but is not dependent on—other historical phenomena. In the case of chocolate, particular social conditions, namely Spaniards’ sustained proximity to Indian cultural milieus and the social integration of the Spanish Atlantic world, account for Europeans’ acquisition of a new taste. This taste, rather than bolstering a monolithic imperial ideology, spotlighted its internal contradictions.112
Even in the Atlantic world, where a different dynamic of exchange than that in Eurasia occurred, it may be more fruitful to expect connections and creolizations (perhaps in the subtle ways that seemingly stable objects came to have new meanings or, as with chocolate, new tastes came into being)113 rather than rushing too hastily to assume a blank slate, for, as we saw with Dee, the apparently natural slab of black rock into which he peered so intently was actually the made thing of another place entirely.
THE ITINERARIES OF MATTER, PRACTICES, AND IDEAS
This essay began in a consideration of matter—mercury and sulfur. These substances possess particular properties that enabled the manufacture of certain kinds of materials and objects by means of specialized practices and technologies. At different places and times, humans have assigned meanings to these practices and objects, and these meanings have been both embedded within and helped to extend systems of belief (or “theories) about the matter, practices, and objects they incorporated. This essay sought to illuminate the reciprocal processes by which matter gives rise to practices and objects, which themselves produce systems of belief that in their turn inform specific ideas about materials and practices.
All human societies interact in a variety of ways with their environment for survival, and, out of the experience gained through that interaction, certain skills and knowledge emerge.114 We might consider the Neolithic Revolution by which humans manipulated animal and plant varieties to control nature in a spectacularly successful manner or the advent of bronze and glass making as part of a long, continuing interaction between humans and their environment—a long story of incremental developments at the interface of the human hand with the material world. Sometimes the practices, skills, and the theories that emerge out of this interaction with matter are accumulated and built upon, sometimes lost and rediscovered, and often just lost forever. The present development and accumulation of techniques and knowledge by means of the institutionalized natural sciences might be viewed as one phase of that very long enduring human engagement with the environment. There may be a difference in the volume and speed at which knowledge is accumulated today, as the system of knowledge production we now call “natural science” involves many people generously supported by the taxes of nation-states. Some observers might point to recent discoveries by individual scientists as evidence of new processes of knowledge production occurring since the so-called Scientific Revolution, a view that is reinforced by the institutional structures of modern science such as the Nobel Prize. Such a picture of the modern relationship of the human hand to the environment, however, grows out of a limited perspective on human history, perhaps arising from historians’ overwhelming reliance upon the written word. The existence of a written record for the exceedingly short recent present of human history (only about 7,000 of the approximately 200,000-plus years since Homo sapiens emerged) gives historians the sense that they can pin discoveries and inventions to individuals, but on further investigation, many of these discoveries are found to have been the result of collective and collaborative processes,115 much like those that produced bronze, writing, glass, and moveable type, to name only a few at random. Innovation, intelligence, and “creativity” (sometimes labeled “genius”) have often been thought about as located in and manifested by individual minds, but they are better viewed as occurring within and emerging out of material, social, and cultural fields. Reliance by historians on written records and on identifiable individuals living in the recent human past (whose written works are still extant) has had the effect of misleading us about the collective and distributed nature by which all knowledge, but especially knowledge of our natural environment, is produced.
This essay attempts a kind of deep history of knowledge, one that seeks out “lost sciences”; which brings to the fore the role of that elusive human ability, skill; which follows matter and objects as well as texts along their routes of exchange; and which emphasizes the very gradual and often anonymous processes of amalgamation by which complexes of matter, skill, practices of production, formalized knowledge, and systems of meaning are accreted over time and across distance.