ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Latitude, Winds, and Prognostication: The Making of a Global Earth in Early Modern Iberian and Iberian-American almanacs

• In Event: Recasting the History of Almanacs 2

English Abstract

This paper uses Iberian and Iberian-American almanacs to reconsider how historians of science might approach environmental knowledge in the early modern period. Rather than treating almanacs as derivative “popularisations” or mere containers of doctrine, I read them as knowledge-in-use: portable sets of astronomical rules and tools that guided everyday practices such as bleeding, sowing, travelling, and weather-watching. Focusing on the evolving treatment of air and winds, I trace how Spanish almanacs turned medical astrology and meteorology into global, latitude-sensitive instruments, increasingly indexed by cosmography and navigation. I then follow these forms into American adaptations, where calendric and cosmographic formats derived from European almanacs were re-embedded in hybrid cosmologies of winds and airs. Taken together, these cases show almanacs as media for negotiating an inhabited, global Earth and as privileged entry points into early modern forms of natural knowledge

Author

• Sergio Orozco-Echeverri, Universidad de Antioquia / I Tatti, Harvard University