Iris Montero Sobrevilla (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
'Le printemps est leur unique saison’: How Raynal got to write about hummingbirds
Raynal’s influential Histoire des Deux Indes (1770) is sprinkled with snippets of natural historical knowledge about the East and West Indies. One such case is the chapter on hummingbirds, a quintessential American creature, in Book XVIII on English settlements in North America. In this chapter, Raynal briefly described one of the more controversial traits attributed to this bird in the early modern period: the notion that it ‘lived’ only as long as honey-bearing flowers lasted. This paper traces back the sources used by Raynal to recount this story. Focusing on how knowledge about nature was constructed and transformed through translation, commentary and abridgement between the sixteenth- and eighteenth centuries, the paper follows an itinerary that takes us from Daubenton’s article ‘Colibri’ in the Encyclopédie (Paris, 1753), to the book Histoire des Yncas (Paris, 1744), Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales (Lisbon, 1609), López de Gómara’s La Conquista de México (Zaragoza, 1552) and, finally, to Motolinía’s Memoriales (Mexico City, ca. 1543).
