Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution, Valencia: September 21-24, 2005.

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces NM

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal seeks funding for the participation of American scholars in an international conference on Spain and the Scientific Revolution to be held in Valencia, Spain in September 2005. The conference will bring together approximately thirty scholars from five different countries to present recent research on the history of early modern Iberian science and Spain's role in the Scientific Revolution. One of the conference's main objectives is to encourage an international dialogue on a subject that has until recently received little attention from historians outside of the Iberian world. In terms of intellectual merits, the conference will offer new perspectives on the Scientific Revolution. Traditionally, the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been regarded as a major landmark of Western history. For a variety of reasons, however, its history has been written from the perspective of the North Atlantic world. The Iberian world, on the other hand, has been almost completely absent from the dominant narrative, despite the fact that for the past thirty years an immense amount of research has been done on Iberian science. Spain's absence from the dominant narrative is a vestige of a prejudice whose origins go back to the Black Legend, a polemic that since the eighteenth century has depicted Iberia as the antithesis of modernity. The proposed international conference aims to advance our knowledge of the Scientific Revolution and encourage a more balanced assessment of Iberia's role. In addition the conference will test and challenge current interpretations of the Scientific Revolution, and pose the question of whether or not an account of the 'Scientific Revolution' and the origins of modernity that omits Iberian science can have any meaning at all. In terms of broader impacts the conference will encourage an international dialogue among scholars in different parts of the world. It will also provide the opportunity for exchanges among younger and more established scholars. Separated by great distances, many of these scholars will meet for the first time at this conference. The publication of the conference papers through a CD-ROM and a book version in English will insure broad dissemination of the results of the conference, and will have an important impact on the teaching of the history of science. International collaborations are also expected to emerge from the four days of the conference, resulting in a continued dialogue on a subject that is at the cutting edge of the discipline. Finally, the conference aims to advance the participation of women, minority, and younger scholars in the discipline. Of the seven American scholars invited, 3 are Latino/a, 3 are women, and 5 are below the rank of associate professor.