Colonizing the Heavens and Earth: Eclecticism, Epistemology, and Evangelism in the Jesuit Valentin Stansel’s Astronomy

Abstract Scholars behind the epistemological turn in Latin American literary and cultural studies have paid scant attention to seventeenth-century science and scientific eclecticism. Yet, the ancient Greek school of philosophy known as eclecticism inspired Baroque philosophers to fuse competing concepts, theories, and methodologies. This article explores Jesuit eclecticism in astronomy and its legacy to the Scientific Revolution in Europe and its colonies. Tethered to ancient Greek geometry, which privileged the imagination as a cognitive faculty, Jesuit eclectics theorized and depicted celestial and earthly spaces. Reticulations of eclecticism, evangelism, and epistemology of space come to the fore in the Jesuit geometer and astronomer Valentin Stansel (1621–1705). Among the works he wrote in Brazil, Legatus Uranicus (1683) and Uranophilus (1685) most stridently portrayed Stansel as an eclectic missionary-scientist. The second work melded observational astronomy, the Iberian Jesuits’ twinned concepts of “imaginary space” and “possible worlds,” and Menippean satire (the ancient Greek impetus of the Baroque picaresque) against the colonial backdrop of Indigenous servitude and African slavery. Coevally, the Protestant eclectic astronomer John Wilkins’s Discovery of a New World in the Moone (1684) integrated Copernicus with the Iberian Jesuits’ epistemology of space. Thus, eclectics comprised an epistemic community that connected disciplines across religious, geographical, and imperial frontiers.