Simon Varey, editor The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernandez.

Palmer, Steven

Simon Varey, editor The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernandez Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, xix + 281, index, illustrations

Simon Varey, Rafael Chabran, and Dora B. Weiner, editors Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernandez Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, xvi + 229, index, illustrations

The conquest of American societies by the Spanish was followed by a great wave of pioneering ethnographic work that sought to capture for European high culture the knowledge and customs of the colonized peoples. Among the most important was that of Francisco Hernandez, royal physician to Philip II, who in 1570 was appointed to undertake the first scientific expedition to the Americas. Hernandez was charged with studying all facets of the natural history of the newly conquered territories. Already in the throes of translating Pliny's Natural History into Spanish, Hernandez was an ideal Renaissance man for the task. He spent six years in New Spain (1571-77) documenting the natural world and the manner in which it had been understood and incorporated by a number of Mesoamerican cultures. Most famously, he studied the botanical knowledge of indigenous Mexican societies and their healers, and his cataloguing of that herbal bounty in a series of manuscripts, though never published in a manner he endorsed, served as the basis for a number of learned volumes on New World plants that became essential reference points in the evolution of the natural sciences through the nineteenth century.

This dual edition was initially sponsored by UCLA's Committee for the Quincentenary. The original project to produce an English edition of Hernandez's writings comes to fruition as The Mexican Treasury. Colloquiums and lecture series to commemorate the quincentenary and focusing on Hernandez's legacy generated papers that are collected in Searching for the Secrets of Nature. The volumes document an intriguing textual archaeology that has complicated readers' access to the work of Hernandez, and they are graced by some first-rate historical research and translation. The writings of Hernandez presented in The Mexican Treasury are historical documents of enormous importance, and a modern edition of them is certainly welcome. A combined reading of the introductory essays in the volume, and of the papers in Searching for the Secrets of Nature, is a good introduction to the life and works of Hernandez, and also to the problems and debates that have propelled Hernandez scholarship and bibliography ever since his very return to a Spanish court much altered from the one that had commissioned his work, a court that now blocked his efforts to see his work into print. Guenter Risse's spectacular reconstruction of the hospital milieu of late-sixteenth-century Mexico in which Hernandez observed Mexican medical knowledge and practice and conducted his own experiments is the jewel of Searching. He reveals an elaborate hospital network that relied heavily on the incorporation of indigenous and hybrid healing practices, and the essay will be especially welcome by those like myself who were disappointed that the Spanish American hospital was all but left out of his brilliant social history of the hospital since antiquity, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls (2000).

Despite many laudable qualities, the value of the two volumes taken together, and each volume taken separately, is diminished by a certain repetitiousness. For example, virtually every essay in Searching reiterates Hernandez's basic biographical information and royal commission. The books also display an excess of antiquarian detail and contextual fill. The baroque delineation of the many Hernandez works that do not actually exist is worthy of Borges, while the elaborate speculation on the formative period of a life that left no documentary trail is stretched to the point of parody. It is also hard to see why Stanford deemed it necessary to publish the books in large-format edition, suggesting a pictorial splendour that the edition does not deliver. Though the surviving 60 Hernandez sketches of New World flora and fauna are usefully reproduced in The Mexican Treasury, and a number of paintings and prints intended to evoke the later influence of Hernandez decorate The Secrets of Nature, the quality of the reproductions is poor and they are very small. Each volume has an index, and they are helpful, but considering the enormous emphasis placed on bibliographical provenance, it is unfortunate and odd that neither volume has a bibliography.

Most of all, though, based on the information presented by the editors and other learned contributors, I cannot help but feel that a great opportunity was missed to present finally a coherent scholarly edition of The Natural History of New Spain, the great work that Hernandez planned, drafted, and amended, but never saw published--and which subsequently appeared in print only in partial, confused, and rewritten fashion over the subsequent two centuries. If we are to believe Chabran and Varey's introduction to the problem of the Hernandez texts, and Jesus Bustamante's admirable summary of the mystery and history of the manuscripts that were to be the basis of The Natural History, what was intended to be the great work does essentially exist in manuscript form, and an intelligently edited and abridged scholarly edition of it would have been possible. Rather than issues of manuscript ownership, time and labour commitments, or academic fashion preventing them from embarking on such a project, the editors maintain that it was their choice to present a broad selection of texts (including Hernandez's letters to the King and his will), and then to highlight the importance of Hernandez to the Western intellectual tradition by publishing portions of his work--and particularly those based on the Natural History manuscript--that made their way into the work of Spanish scientists and those of the Low Countries and England.

But surely those specialists engaged enough by the puzzle of intellectual transmission and mutilated reincarnation of Hernandez's manuscript would be better off reading the editors' version of this and then seeking out the texts themselves for corroboration. Meanwhile the general scholar is frustrated by the piecemeal and once-, twice-, or thrice-removed snippets of Hernandez in the work of such authors as Nardo Antonio Recchi, Johannes de Laet, and James Petiver. Given the institutional, financial, and intellectual resources behind this project, a more lasting, notable, and provocative contribution might have been made by reconstituting a critical edition of the Natural History, and gracing it with a pared-down number of the best introductory essays. Amongst other things, this would have seen into print what the editors allege was the conservation of an Aztec poetic taxonomy in the Hernandez manuscript--one stripped by later re-presenters of parts of the manuscript in their effort to make sense of Hernandez for their own intellectual milieux.

Steven Palmer, University of Windsor