Talk by Antonella Romano, Centre Koyre, France, "Science within the Missionary Enterprise in New Spain: Mobility of Men, Mobility of Knowledge?"

Focusing on the diffusion of the Jesuits in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico, my paper analyzes their unique role as specific international and intercontinental circulators of science and knowledge. I am especially interested in the "missionnaires savants," professors or specialists of science that the Society of Jesus sent from locations such as Alcalá, Messina and the German cities to the Spanish province of New Spain. My goal is to understand how they shaped the circulation of science and knowledge. What aspects of European culture did they mobilize? What were their specific intellectual goals in relationship to the global missionary project? How did the means by which their ideas circulate affect the nature of their knowledge?

The scale of this study, which focuses on the trajectories of individual missionary-scientists, needs to be located within the more general problematic of the "politics of religious mobility". How did the Society of Jesus think about and structure that circulation? What were the goals and meaning of that mobility? How did the politics of science correspondence with political agendas within the Jesuit order as well as in early modern European society?

The more general aim of this talk is to provide a series of reflections about local knowledge and the production of early modern European science, defined as a process of reordering the natural world within a universal framework.