Saberes marítimos: ciencia y experiencia en textos de los siglos xvi y xvii en España

My dissertation reconstructs specific aspects of a new type of experience that arose with
oceanic expansion and the development of colonial politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. These aspects include: the significance of experience as a source of knowledge; the
reorganization of disciplines; increased respect for practical knowledge; the diversification of the
centers of production of knowledge and their progressive secularization; and the
reconceptualization of space on a global scale that resulted from the control of the maritime field. It
analyzes writing by authors from the scientific-technical, historiographical, and missionary fields to
show how heavily these authors relied on the scientific-technical knowledge produced in the Casa
de Contratación in their writings about the ocean.
Texts written by royal administrators like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo refer to new
maritime routes, describe techniques and instruments of oceanic navigation, and explain
natural phenomena that were discovered through Atlantic expansion. The arrival of the Jesuits
to America brought another perspective to the maritime experience. Writings by the
missionaries reveal that the survival and growth of the mission required an understanding of
maritime issues like the capacity and frequency of the fleets and the unforeseen consequences
of shipwrecks. These questions affected both the missionaries and their correspondence,
which was crucial to the expansion of the missions. These letters display the missionaries’
broad knowledge of technical and scientific aspects of nautical questions.
This dissertation also focuses on how the Spanish Inquisition, an institution created before the
oceanic expansion by the Catholic Monarchs in 1478 to control religious orthodoxy on the Peninsular territories--, extends its jurisdiction to the maritime realm from
the 16th century onwards. By analyzing documents of Inquisition in the Canary Islands, I aim
to study the tensions regarding an institution that articulates an array of administrative
mechanisms and legal discourses to resist the effects of the spatial revolution, that is, the
result of the changing quality of the maritime space: from frontier to connectivity place.