How did administrators and priests harness indigenous knowledge? What was the use of instructions vis-à-vis military instruction? Were antiquities included in a broad definition of natural history? And what was the style of a ‘thick’ environmental description? This paper displays these questions, against the background of Spanish America, and with a special concern for religious culture, as seen in the coordination of Jesuit dispatches but also in what has been termed the written empire of Franciscan missionaries. The first part briefly surveys the use of questionnaires, from 16th-century Inquisition memorials to Spanish-crown empirical inquiries; following this, comes another brief section that moves to a later period, by comparing Linnaean expeditions—seen here not in their relation with mercantilism and national discourses of improvement, but as a legacy of physico-theology and Baconian impartiality—with the Ramist methodization of travel. Against this new assessment, the greater part of the paper discusses some texts produced at the intersection of criollo reports and Bourbon centralization in Seville at the Council of the Indies. These texts include Gregorio García’s 1607 Origen de los Indios, Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1693 report on Santa María de Galve, and Luis Diez Navarro’s 1758 surveying of Honduras. The conclusions foreground ideas on geology and biodiversity, and explain what it means for sovereignty to be configured as a network of natural historical knowledge.

Stefano Gulizia is a lecturer at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. He serves as the president of Scientiae and is the editor in chief of the Scientiae Studies book series at Brill. His last essays include “Cartesianism between Northern Europe, Germany, and the Medici Court” (Brepols 2023), “Assembling the Scribal Self,” in Beyond the Learned Academy (Oxford 2024) and “Disputing the Animation of the Heavens in Rome” (Centaurus 2024, with PD Omodeo). His recent book project on Jesuits in China, Older Than Its Gods, is under contract at Brill.

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