Tracing Things and Knowledge in the Historia Medicinal (1569-74) by Nicolás de Monardes

The Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales written by the Spanish naturalist and physician Nicolás de Monardes was published in three parts in the 1560s and ‘70s. The book dealt mainly with medical products from the New World and was widely distributed throughout Europe and the Spanish Empire. Its success was partly due to the author’s way of gathering information and eyewitness reports from the New World. Furthermore, Monardes did not write in Latin, but in his native Spanish, was open-minded towards the medical use of exotic plants, and experimented with different herbs and remedies like other contemporary authors. The success of the first publication brought him many new informants. Their reports and testimonies served as the basis for the second and third parts of the Historia medicinal. The paper explores the question of how things—medicine, drugs, and other natural products—found their way from the East and West Indies to Europe and what kind of knowledge travelled with them. It asks how knowledge about products with medical uses was produced in the New World with the help of indigenous informants and other local actors and how this knowledge was mediated and transmitted by naturalists such as Monardes who maintained a correspondence network with Spanish colonizers and European scholars alike. Thus, the paper contributes to further understanding of the material entanglements between the New World and Europe in the early modern era and the traces thereof in texts, images, and objects.