The epistemiological break and rise of the new subject of knowledge in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's general and natural history of the indies

Abstract

The Conquest of the New World was at the basis of a highly significant change in the history of knowledge and it anticipated several processes which we will later see as important motivating factors in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this essay, we intend to demonstrate that these processes may already be observed in the writing of the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo; its presence is to be closely related to the experience of American nature. The importance of the New World is thus seen as a major event in the conception of modern science.