Taste and mining culture in early modern Spanish worlds

Abstract

In this article we examine the intertwined relationship between taste and mining culture in early modern Spanish worlds, highlighting descriptions of metals and minerals through which taste appears as an epistemic marker with symbolic dimensions. Drawing on different documents regarding mining practices, mineral vocabulary and metal appreciation in Spain, New Spain, Peru and the New Kingdom of Granada (c.1550–1640), our article contends that knowing minerals through taste in the Spanish worlds was part of a practice engaged with the senses, the body politic and its cosmological order.