Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk

This article uses pronominal resilience to suggest how we can identify women's contributions to the colonial silk industry. By comparing different editions of silkworm treatises, all of which were published between 1650-1655 and circulated within the Hartlib Circle's circum-Atlantic network of readers (Bermuda, Germany, England, Ireland, Virginia), I find a pattern in the gendered language of the texts. Books that describe worms grown by women use feminine pronouns (she/her) to classify worms throughout the lifecycle, while books that describe worms grown by men begin with masculine pronouns (he/his) and become feminine (she/her) when the worms become reproductive in the third stage of the lifecycle

Women, Men, and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes

Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a mid seventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women’s contributions to the history of colonial silver. It also provides an appendix with one hundred cases of indigenous, creole, and Spanish women miners, refiners, and managers in Alto Perú, 1559–1801, suggesting how women of different socioeconomic and technical backgrounds participated in the silver industry

Gained, Lost, Missed, Ignored: Vernacular Scientific Translations from Agricola’s Germany to Herbert Hoover’s California

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic divergences that produced and reinforced such systems. This article argues for translation as a method to study connection and separation in the making of early modern worlds. It charts the reception of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556), which was translated from Latin into German, Italian, Spanish, and Mandarin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but only appeared in English in 1912, when mining engineer and future US president Herbert Hoover and his wife, geologist Lou Clark Hoover, published their work. By studying local and global contexts of colonialism, power, and scientific racism that influenced the translation and nontranslation of Agricola’s book at different moments in this 350-year period, this article shows how translation both creates and divides global communities of scientific readers and how it can help to rethink historical and literary periodization of the early modern era

Lisa Voigt. Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

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Transatlantic Quechuañol: Reading Race through Colonial Translations

Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how technical writers in the colonial Andes used Quechua terms to form a patois called “Quechuañol” (Quechua plus español) and how this hybrid Andean language was obscured in translations of scientific texts in early modern England, Germany, and France. As translators reinterpreted metallic classifications in Quechuañol, including “Pacos, Mulatos y Negrillos” (“paco, mulato, and negrillo metals”), they chose terms that communicated their own, culturally specific ideas about color and categories. Tracing mistranslations in the Atlantic world allows us to document both the Indigenous intellectual contributions to the technical arts and the development of early modern racial classifications

Popol Wujs: Culture, Complexity, and the Encoding of Maya Cosmovision

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from being destroyed by colonial officials or Inquisitional authorities, the original K’iche’ authors of the Popol Wuj had to embed their ways of knowing in a language and narrative structure that could not be detected by Spanish readers. Each edition of the Popol Wuj therefore helps to uncover different elements of the cosmovisión that is embedded in the text. This article draws from recent collaborative efforts to prepare a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj based on the editorial standards and scholarly conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By comparing and contrasting the advantages and drawbacks of this edition relative to printed works and digital editions, we suggest how methods from the digital humanities can shed new light on texts like the Popol Wuj

The Nature of Metallic Matter: Materials-Based Methods in the Study of Mining

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni en lo de su grado o sin él han dado los indios en estas islas o en la Tierra Firme; porque ese tal oro, ellos lo labran e lo suelen mezclar con cobre o con plata, y lo abajan segund quieren, e así es de diferentes quilates e valores” (lxv). As this example suggests, some 40 years after Colón’s landing, Spanish writers could no longer assume a shared, stable definition of what the most noble, perfect metal meant; there were multiple ways to mine, refine, and evaluate gold in the early Americas. The story of Spain’s golden empire thus looks quite different when it is viewed from the perspective of the metals themselves. To complement this panel’s focus on silver mining in Potosí, this paper will present two anecdotes from gold and copper mining districts in the early Americas (Oviedo 1526, 1535; Gaytán de Torres 1621) to suggest how a materials-focused approach to colonial archives can shed new light on understudied issues in the mining industry, such as indigenous knowledge production and Afro-Latin community life. In so doing, I will analyze the possibilities and limitations of transdisciplinary approaches from literary studies (Bigelow 2016, Bentancor 2017) and new materialisms (Parikka 2015) in the study of colonial mining

Conchos, colores y castas de metales: El lenguaje de la ciencia colonial en la región andina

Basado en el entorno multilingüe del libro Arte de los metales (Madrid, 1640), del célebre padre Álvaro Alonso Barba (Huelva, 1569 – Potosí, 1662) el presente estudio propone una nueva orientación al discurso científico de la literatura minera de la época colonial. Un método linguístico-discursivo que nos permite recuperar los saberes silenciados de los mineros andinos y entender mejor la relación entre el color, la raza y la ciencia colonial. Ya que el lenguaje marca en su gramática, vocabulario y léxico los rasgos e influencias del contacto linguístico-epistemológico podemos precisar las contribuciones intelectuales de los mineros andinos a través de la traducción y mala traducción en las ediciones inglesa (1670), alemana (1676) y francesa (1730) de la obra del padre Barba, tanto en los términos técnicos derivados del quechua y aimara, como conchos (qunchu/sedimento) y paco (ppaqu/bermejo), como en la racialización de los nombres de especies argentíferas, como las “castas de metales”: pacos, mulatos y negrillos