Of Plants and Providence: Assessing Drugs, Difference, and Divine Will in Timothy Bright’s <i>The sufficiencie of English medicines</i>

This article considers how opposing definitions of resources in Timothy Bright’s “The sufficiencie of English medicines” (1580) and Nicolás Monardes’s “Historia medicinal” (1574) reflect the confessionalization of the sixteenth-century Atlantic World. Monardes’s text claimed that American drugs were universally efficacious and ought to be exported broadly. Bright denied this assertion by insisting that God’s providence was particular rather than universal in scope. Yet although Bright rejected the commodification of American medicines, he nonetheless registered their value as resources. Through comparative medical experimentation, Bright argued that foreign drugs might prove that God’s differing provision for differing peoples yielded essential bodily differences.