Afterword

Twenty-five years ago the eminent historian of the Portuguese in India, Michael Pearson, could locate Garcia de Orta and his book as a unique and merely temporary light of intellectual hope in a Portuguese culture otherwise dominated by a highly restrictive Counter-Reformation Catholic Church:

Among the elite in the sixteenth century there were other influences [than Christian religion] at work … Co-existing with religious bigotry and superstition was a feeble Portuguese version of the Renaissance … the second intellectual strain was the excitement, the vast new knowledge, produced by the explorations and discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries … It seems however that some of this spirit of inquiry, or rebirth, was stifled later in the sixteenth century as the Counter Reformation imposed its shackles. Portugal lay under a strict censorship of books; Garcia d’Orta’s classic inquiry into Asian botany and medicine was neglected by his fellow Portuguese, but not by other Europeans. Portuguese painting concentrated on religious subjects, education was minimal, and dominated again by the church. ¹