ABSTRACT
The discovery of America opened a vast field to the activity of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries. The mendicant orders in New Spain (Franciscans and Dominicans), the Jesuits in Brazil and Peru, the secular clergy who depended on the crown by virtue of the Patronato real or, in Portugal, the Padroado (royal patronage) – all were inextricably linked with the process of colonization and the emergence of the new societies.1 The strict control of the secular clergy by the crown was one side of a coin whose other side was the assumption that the conquest of New World territories was at the same time a Christianizing mission. The root of this idea is to be sought in the militant spirit of the long-fought Reconquista, very much alive in Spain during the sixteenth century. But the belief that the crown was responsible for the Christianization of the lands incorporated under its dominion derived its juridical force from the notion that the Indies were a papal grant.2 The recurring conflicts in Iberian America, between the secular clergy and bishops on the one side and the missionary orders and religious congregations always striving for some kind of independence from royal control on the other, should be understood against this background. The missionaries represented the most intellectually dynamic part of the Catholic Church in America and almost all the books about the social and natural dimensions of the New World were written either by Franciscans, Dominicans or Jesuits. In our account of Acosta (Chapter 3), we have suggested a motive for the intense literary activity of the missionaries. They needed to have some grasp of the peoples among whom they would live and to whom they would preach. The proliferation of Jesuit treatises on the natural world of America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be accounted for on these grounds.3 A working knowledge of the native languages was of primary importance, of course, but the
missionaries should also be informed about the local climate, geography, plants and animals, for they were supposed to find their way into the interior of the land and live among the natives. In several cases they acted as explorers and pioneers treading jungle paths, crossing deserts and navigating uncharted rivers all along and across the continent.4 These friars were among the most educated persons who travelled to the New World. As the cases considered in this chapter will show, their accounts of animals were informed more by what can be loosely described as the worldview of their times than by explicit religious considerations – although, as expected, the latter were never altogether absent from their chronicles.
