Bauer's Work on "The Alchemy of Empire" Wins Support from NEH and Mellon Foundation

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have awarded a combined fellowship to Ralph Bauer for research at the John Carter Brown Library.

Thanks to support from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation, Associate Professor of English Ralph Bauer will spend five months at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island researching his current book project, "The Alchemy of Conquest:  Prophecy and the Secrets of Nature in the Early Americas."  

Located at Brown University, the library specializes in books and manuscripts relating to the early Americas, both North and South, before ca. 1825. The fellowship will be used to study the language of the 'occult' sciences in the literatures of discovery and conquest during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In particular, Bauer plans to focus on the imagery and scientific rhetoric of alchemy, astrology, and prophecy in the early literature about the New World. 

The innovative approach of this new project will provide a literary historian's perspective on the "age-old debate about the epistemological 'impact' of the early modern encounters," says Bauer. The debate surrounding the effect of European encounter with the Americas upon the history of Western structures of knowledge" goes back "to the sixteenth century itself in the controversy between the 'Ancients' and 'Moderns'.  Particularly, it is interested in how the occult sciences functioned ideologically and rhetorically by synthesizing mercantile with aristocratic cultural values; empirical with text-bound knowledge; and the unknown (or 'new') with the known in the epistemological space of the 'secret' or the 'hidden'."

Individual chapters will focus on such early modern writers about the New World as Christopher Columbus, Francisco López de Gómara, José de Acosta, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Harriot, as well as Increase and Cotton Mather.